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Politico
31-07-2025
- Business
- Politico
AI powers a new smart-city wave
With help from Mohar Chatterjee and Steven Overly There's a rush to adopt AI in most every American institution — including cities. Mayors across the country are rapidly integrating AI into public services. Los Angeles launched an AI zoning pilot for rebuilding homes lost to the Palisades Fires. Raleigh, North Carolina, is testing AI-enabled trash cans that can determine whether refuse is recyclable. If this sounds more familiar than novel, you're not wrong. The craze for municipal AI harks back to another era, from around 2015 to 2020, when 'smart cities' were supposed to be the next big thing. At the time, there was a notion that a smart city would integrate advanced technologies to fundamentally improve local governance. Plus, they'd have heated sidewalks, automate trash pick-up and offer apps to more efficiently deploy city services. Those visions have largely fizzled. Sidewalk Labs, a former smart city subsidiary of Google's parent Alphabet, had a $900 million initiative to transform a Toronto, Canada, neighborhood that was plagued with public furor over data privacy. The company blamed COVID-19 when it shut down the project in 2020, though that was two weeks before the city officials were to vote on whether to kill the effort themselves. Columbus, Ohio, cited the pandemic as well when it closed out its $50 million smart city initiative in 2021 — and similar privacy battles and bureaucratic hurdles were also at play. To be sure, the idea of a smart city encapsulated more technologies than just AI. Yet its techno-utopian impulses seem to be enjoying a revival in the current buzz over AI-enhanced cities, for better or worse. Will this time actually be different? 'When I hear mayors and city leaders [...] talk about AI, I feel like I'm living in 2016 again,' said Ben Green, a University of Michigan policy professor who authored the book 'The Smart Enough City.' 'There are lots of lessons to be learned.' On Thursday, Bloomberg Philanthropies announced it was adding 15 municipalities to its City Data Alliance, which launched in 2022 with a $60 million investment to provide tech support and training for local governments utilizing AI. Bloomberg connected DFD with mayors of four cities in this new cohort. Their excitement was palpable. 'Generative AI is on top of everyone's mind, so if we could just move from an analog to digital world, that would be helpful for all of City Hall,' said Mayor Phillip Jones of Newport News, Virginia. He suggested that AI could analyze data from automotive collisions with deer to pinpoint where animal crossing signs would be most effective. Mayor Matt Mahan of San Jose, California, said the city has become 'the clearinghouse for use of AI in local government.' San Jose is piloting an AI system to optimize public transit routes using data collected from sensors on buses and traffic lights. Mayor Quinton Lucas of Kansas City, Kansas, also brought up smart cities unprompted as a lesson in hubris. 'Everyone was telling us, 'Smart cities are all the rage, and we have the best smart city,'' he said. 'Ten years on, you're seeing that perhaps that system, while interesting, didn't really change the way things work in the American city.' Lucas pointed to the city's smart kiosks that connect to interactive cellphone apps, which it began installing in 2016 for informational services. He says many are now broken. Lucas often walks by one sitting outside city hall, a cautionary relic that guides his thinking on using AI for more efficiently responding to 311 calls. 'You can't be too fixated on the technology for technology's sake,' he told DFD. James Anderson, who leads Bloomberg's Government Innovation program, says the City Data Alliance learned lessons from the first generation of smart-city experiments. 'The cutting edge of public sector technology adoption now focuses on real needs from real people first—and then figures out if tech can enable a better solution,' he told DFD. 'The smart cities movement got that backwards.' One sobering lesson from the smart-city era is that adding technology can lead to unintended outcomes. In 2017, San Diego made a big show of installing smart streetlights with sensors to collect data for alleviating traffic jams, only to shut them down a few years later due to public backlash over privacy. But they weren't taken down — and in 2023, the city reactivated them for police surveillance. In their enthusiasm, cities can also overlook the limitations or flaws of certain technologies, an issue from the smart-city era that is resurfacing in the age of AI. 'They are always massively oversold by the tech companies,' Green said of systems marketed to cities. New York City released an Microsoft-powered AI chatbot last year to give people information on operating businesses. The chatbot ended up suggesting that bosses could pocket employees' tips and that landlords could discriminate based on a prospective tenant's income One problem for cities, as they're hit with a fresh wave of persuasive tech marketing, is that political cycles are short, and so are institutional memories. 'The people who were around eight, 10 years ago and learned all of these lessons are now off doing different things,' said Green, 'That's pretty typical for turnover in city government.' To their credit, the mayors that DFD interviewed seemed to be cognizant of what to avoid. Privacy and data analytics have matured as public issues in the past decade, and many of the mayors said they were implementing measures like anonymizing data to address the sorts of privacy concerns that bedeviled bygone smart cities. They professed to be clear-eyed about what they were really trying to do. 'We're not gonna be chasing cool stuff just to be chasing cool stuff,' said Tim Kelly of Chattanooga, Tennessee, who's been thinking about using LLMs to make complicated city ordinances more intelligible. 'I don't think it's too lofty to say that this has a potential to really increase, if not restore, faith in government.' Breaking news for our readers: POLITICO's AI & Tech Summit is coming up Sept. 16 — offering in-person access to the insiders and thinkers shaping the next wave of American AI policy. You can attend in person or online. Onstage guests will include FCC Chair Brendan Carr, top White House science advisor Michael Kratsios, Samsung North America CEO Yoonie Joung — and more. Register here. OpenAI's Nordic Playbook OpenAI is planting its flag in Europe with Stargate Norway, the company's first AI infrastructure hub on the continent and a major salvo in its OpenAI for Countries program, the company announced Thursday. The facility, to be built in the northern city of Narvik, will start with 230MW of capacity and aims to expand by an additional 290MW. It will 'target to deliver' 100,000 Nvidia chips by the end of next year. OpenAI is framing it as 'one of the most ambitious AI infrastructure investments in Europe,' tapping into Norway's hydropower, cool climate, and industrial muscle, while serving as a digital onramp for Europe's sovereign AI ambitions. Stargate Norway's partners include Nscale and Aker. This is OpenAI's third Stargate project, in addition to a site in Abilene, Texas, and a second in the United Arab Emirates. It says it signed an MOU with the U.K. and is exploring projects in Estonia and the EU. OpenAI says the number of its weekly ChatGPT users has quadrupled in Norway over the past year, with those under 35 years old leading the charge. SILICON VALLEY ENTERS THE SPACE RACE A growing number of tech companies are chasing commercial and defense opportunities in space — not just Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin — and they're ratcheting up the competition for longtime government contractors. Rob Geckle, the CEO of Airbus U.S. Space & Defense, told the POLITICO Tech podcast he believes these new entrants will be successful given the technological advancements coming out of Silicon Valley. 'I look at these new entrants as really good teammates, because on the software side, on the AI side, they're bringing discriminating capabilities. I'm bringing the industrial know-how to scale manufacturing. And in some cases, you can really create some dream teams,' Geckle said. The increased competition comes at a time when the government is pinching the federal purse. Congress and the White House are wrangling over NASA's budget and the Department of Government Efficiency has forced agencies, including the Pentagon, to scale back. 'The DOGE government efficiency? All for it,' Geckle said. 'If it's just cuts for the sake of cuts, and we're flatlining this thing, I don't think that fits with the national security strategy, and I don't think it fits with the pacing of threats and challenges that I see from our adversaries.' Listen to the full interview on today's episode of POLITICO Tech, and subscribe on Apple, Spotify or your preferred podcast player so you don't miss future episodes. post of the day THE FUTURE IN 5 LINKS Stay in touch with the whole team: Aaron Mak (amak@ Mohar Chatterjee (mchatterjee@ Steve Heuser (sheuser@ Nate Robson (nrobson@ and Daniella Cheslow (dcheslow@
TECHx
24-06-2025
- Business
- TECHx
Why Smart Cities Deserve Our Trust, Not Fear
Home » Smart Cities » Why Smart Cities Deserve Our Trust, Not Fear When your city becomes smart, you expect convenience. But you may not expect to be watched, tracked, analyzed, all the time. That's the uncomfortable paradox behind today's smart cities. Built on data, driven by AI, and powered by sensors, they promise better living. But they also quietly raise the question: how much watching is too much? Globally, smart cities are booming. From Singapore's predictive traffic lights to Seoul's connected waste systems, we're seeing urban innovation at scale. The Middle East is no exception. In fact, it's one of the world's most ambitious players. Projects like Smart Dubai and NEOM in Saudi Arabia are redefining urban futures. But in the rush to digitize and optimize, we're beginning to sideline something fundamental, the rights of the people being watched. The City Is Always Watching Here's the reality: surveillance is no longer something we notice. It's embedded into the infrastructure of modern life. In 2018, a Chinese woman's face was wrongly flashed on a public screen for 'jaywalking.' She hadn't crossed the road, her image was on a bus ad. In San Diego, smart streetlights turned into police surveillance tools without public knowledge. Toronto's Sidewalk Labs project was shut down after residents revolted over unclear data policies. These are not rare cases. They're early signals of a bigger issue: cities are becoming watchers by design. The Middle East Moves Fast, Talks Less In the Middle East, governments are heavily investing in smart cities as a symbol of progress, and rightly so. The region faces challenges that smart infrastructure can solve: urban congestion, water scarcity, energy efficiency, and security. Dubai uses AI to manage traffic and monitor safety. NEOM aims to integrate biometric access and facial recognition into everyday life. On paper, it sounds futuristic. But in practice, it raises critical questions: Who owns this data? How long is it stored? Are citizens informed, or asked? This Isn't an Anti-Tech Argument Let's be clear, smart cities are not the enemy. In fact, they are essential for the future. They reduce traffic, cut emissions, and save lives. They make governments more responsive and cities more livable. During the COVID-19 crisis, smart tools like drones and thermal scanners helped enforce health measures effectively. But smart shouldn't mean secret. And safety shouldn't come at the cost of silent surveillance. What we need isn't fewer cameras. We need clear rules around how those cameras are used. We need transparency about where data goes and who benefits from it. A Smarter Way Forward Some cities are already showing us how to get it right. Barcelona has adopted open data governance, giving people more control over how their information is used. Amsterdam publishes a public registry of every algorithm used in city services. These cities are proving that it's possible to be both smart and ethical. The Middle East can lead too, not just in building cities of the future, but in building trustworthy ones. Governments here have a unique advantage: the ability to act quickly and at scale. That same top-down model can be used to implement strong data privacy policies, set up independent oversight, and involve citizens in tech decisions before deployment. Let's Not Wait for a Backlash The truth is, smart cities have a problem brewing. The more invisible surveillance becomes, the more visible public distrust will be. We can avoid that. But only if we start having the difficult conversations now. What's the balance between convenience and consent? How do we ensure tech serves citizens, not just systems? If smart cities are going to shape our future, we must ask these questions out loud. The Smarter Way Forward Technology moves fast. Trust doesn't. If we want truly smart cities, they can't just watch us. They need to respect us, our privacy, our rights, our role in shaping the urban future. Because the smartest cities won't just be data-driven. They'll be people-powered.
Toronto Star
13-06-2025
- Business
- Toronto Star
Quayside was once going to be Toronto's high-tech neighbourhood of the future — now it's taken another unexpected turn
It was once envisioned as a tech-driven neighbourhood of the future, then a cluster of new lakeside condos. Now, the emerging Quayside redevelopment on Toronto's eastern waterfront is posed to become a renters' playground. Before the pandemic, this 4.9-hectare slice of land near Queens Quay East and Parliament Street was proposed to become a splashy, controversial 'smart neighbourhood' by U.S. firm Sidewalk Labs, a sister firm to Google. After that plan was scrapped, the reins were handed to a team of Toronto-area builders, who mostly planned to build condos, plus a few hundred lower cost rental units. But now, facing a citywide condo market collapse, all but one of the first phase condo sites have been converted to purpose-built rentals.
