How disruptive is the smart cities movement?

摘要

I recently attended a seminar on smart cities in a country house retreat that was organised by the UK Government's Tech City Hub and a cloud computing company called Improbable who see their potential market being the developing of platforms for agent-based simulations of all kinds including city applications. The seminar was focussed on exploring the disruptive effects of new technologies which could potentially make cities smart through changes in our behaviour due to information being available to us almost instantly, in near real-time. The emergence of such data from populating cities and public places with many varieties of sensor will certainly change our patterns of location and social networks and all this is likely to change the city from its mid-20th century form as a rather ordered, perhaps even simple kind of place to something much more diverse, heterogeneous, and complex. Classic disruption, as Christensen (1997) argues, comes from bottom-up, non-established, small initiatives that somehow innovate first under the radar and suddenly pose a threat to established ways of doing things. Invariably, these utilise new technologies that require new business practices in their use, generating much lower costs and/or much more convenience, hence proving irresistible to consumers. The archetypal example at present is the personalised taxi service Uber which breaks the long standing monopolies of organised taxi firms that have dominated the market and in so doing, have increasingly disadvantaged the consumer. It has taken the all-pervasive nature of the internet, and in particular the emergence of smart phones to reach the point where communications between customer and suppliers in cities have become possible without the kind of elaborate organisation that has been developed over many years for such services. Uber is probably in the vanguard of many other such services that will be disrupted in similar ways.