Think of a perfect city. What do you see? An Emerald Oz, Moore’s Utopia? New London, Olympus, Rapture? To modern imaginations it is a neo-glint metropolis, and benevolent Sprawl, with each constituent part working in harmony to make life for its citizens perfect. A smart city, powered by our chorus of computers. 

Why Smart Cities Are a Public Good

The advantages of smart cities are legion. Automated transport, waste removal and services. City wide internet free at all times. Public goods rendered at scale at near-zero overhead made possible by syncing up our ‘internet of things’ and have them work in harmony to protect and serve the polis and every citizen within it. A living organism, with data classified filtered and processed based on real time priorities. Energy data, mobility data, security data, services data. Every piece of infrastructure finely tuned into the city it serves, operating more effectively, more efficiently, and more eco-friendly. It’s not just a super metropolis, but local urban and wild environments. Theme parks, national parks, playgrounds - can be atomised. Think fifteen minute cities governed by digital infrastructure. Cells in a larger superstructure. Tomorrowland. 

Challenges in Building Smart Cities

Yet like Utopia, Oz, and Neo Tokyo, there’s a dark shadow behind the curtain. The fear of outright surveillance. The unimaginable command and control made possible through unfettered access to the sensor data of millions of devices. 

We get ahead of ourselves. Before we even get to that fearful conclusion, we have the practical problems of building a smart city in the first place. There is a vast chasm of standardization and interoperability across devices and the software ecosystems they run on. Each new device added to the network, a threat vector to the stability of the services it offers and to the smart city as a whole. Ensuring watertight data governance across such a vast fleet of devices is difficult even while using centralized infrastructure - especially while using centralized infrastructure. Establishing a regulatory framework across these devices would be a nightmare, with vendor lock resulting in devices competing for monopoly, dramatically hindering the scaling potential, not to mention the operations of any successful smart city. 

Yet we don’t need to embark on state-sponsored capitalism, whereby the government grants one vendor unimaginable power over a single city through provision of an exorbitant contract, in the hopes that one vendor doesn’t make a mistake and renders the whole city interoperable. Global IT outages are becoming the norm. Having the water and sewage services stop working as a result would be catastrophic. People know this, governments know this, and it’s why Smart Cities, despite their obvious utopian advantages, have only been tentatively built by a few national governments around the world - sometimes solely on the surveillance side.

The Need for Decentralized Smart Cities

To unleash the true potential, excitement, and life-changing capability of building smart cities, their construction needs to come from the people. A groundswell community of developers, creators and, yes, vendors, buying into the true advantages of decentralization in creating public good networks, for communities, cities and - halcyonic as it may seem - eventually for the wider world.

Through effective decentralization tools, you can sidestep the three main obstacles to building smart cities - interoperability, data governance/management, and privacy. Tools like Source Network’s DefraDB let any developer build compliant, secure and sovereign applications that play nice with anyone else’s - decentralized or otherwise. It lets developers manage the data flowing through their fleet of edge devices at scale, using P2P syncing, replication, and sharing backed by the SourceHub trust layer to maintain immutable data sanctity across an infinitely scaling number of devices. Compliance guaranteed. Privacy by default.

Authoritarian Fears and the Need for Privacy

That last point is important. The Big Brother implications innate to a smart cities design, with millions of sensors capturing every breath of the living organism - who controls the brain. We want to build better cities. Smart city advantages can be intractable to fully grasp, but think of the capital savings alone and what could be done with that money - let alone public health benefits and global climate protection. Yet the idea that every move and motion of a city could be fed to central surveillance, something far beyond even today's facial capture CCTV. Think Batman’s sonar at the end of The Dark Knight, fed to a government AI. Then imagine that government AI being hacked by an enemy - or a bored teenager. It’s not individuals wanting to hide their insalubrious activities, it's about tyranny and oppression.

Pristine Data Management Makes Smart Cities Work

Devices in the Internet of Things need pristine data management so that public goods can be delivered by computer networks without compromising the rights of every individual in the country doing it. To make this scalable, agile and open - with every sensor only accessing the data it's supposed to. Every database’s access controls must be watertight, automatically, enshrined in cryptographic principles. There should be no central attack vector and no one, not even the Wizard, should be in control. 

Smart cities have always been shown to have dystopian cores - as a society we instinctively know the implications. Yet the narrative is changing. Now that decentralized tools like ours are able to give developers what they need to build public goods without sacrificing privacy, while maintaining governance and utilizing truly agnostic interoperability - they can go forward in confidence, knowing that true utopia may finally be at hand.