'Smart Cities' are just municipal authoritarianism

From the 15-minute city to the ever extending use of surveillance to control out lives, city governments' green agenda is creating a new authoritarianism

I live in a West Yorkshire village, a place the Americans would call an ‘exurb’, filled with people who commute to a variety of locations for work, leisure and the everyday tasks of an ordinary life. At the junction of Keighley Road and Bingley Road just as you leave the village northwards if you look carefully you’ll see, high up on a lamppost at that corner, a little black camera. It’s an ANPR - 'automatic number plate recognition’ - camera. I’m not remotely paranoid but you do have to ask why our government wants such a camera in such a safe, rural place. And the answer, I suppose, lies in the enthusiasm of municipal leaderships for what they call the ‘smart city’.

Back in October I wrote a short piece for the Daily Telegraph about Oxford County Council’s plans for ‘traffic filters’ in Oxford itself. In the weeks since that article was published there have been a collection of ever more spectacular claims about the proposals. At the heart of these claims, often from the join-the-dots world of Covid and climate scepticism, is the belief that the ‘traffic filters’ are part of wider plans to confine us all to our homes so as to save the planet from the terrors of climate change.

“In Oxford, and in a similar scheme in Canterbury, councils will require residents to have a permit to work elsewhere in the city and will limit the number of times they can drive across the boundary of their allocated 15-minute zone. If you don’t comply, the city’s automatic number-plate recognition systems will allow the council to levy a £70 fine.”

As a result the leader of Oxford County Council stood hesitatingly in front of a camera and denied any plans for ‘climate lockdown’ and accused unnamed people “...including the national press” of promoting scare stories that resulted in lots of people contacting the council worried that, as I put it in my piece “...you’ll need a permit to visit your mum a few streets away and can only do this twice a week.”

Various versions of Carlos Moreno’s ‘15 Minute City’ have been drawn up all based on the original Parisian scheme. A scheme that Moreno explicitly linked to climate change and ‘net zero’ and then asserted how the Covid pandemic made introducing his ideas possible - “Were it not for Covid-19, I think that the conditions for deploying the 15-minute city concept would have been very hard to instigate…but the catastrophe of the pandemic has seen us drastically change how we live – it has forced us to reassess the nature and quality of our urban lifestyles.”

In the Oxford County Council video, Duncan Enright who is the lead councillor for the scheme, explained (as if this made it all better) that there won’t be any physical barriers put in place, just cameras reading your car’s number plate and dishing out those £70 fines. In this explanation we begin to see just how authoritarian the urban green agenda has become - not a surprise given that Moreno is an advocate of ‘smart cities’ and literally profits from authoritarian smart city technology:

“His tech consultancy Sinovia, founded in 1998 to focus on intelligent control of complex systems, branched out into drone guidance tech, CCTV, communication and power infrastructures. By 2006, the development of his ‘sustainable digital city’ concept brought him to the attention of French multinational utilities company GDF Suez. It acquired Sinovia in 2010, made him scientific advisor to the CEO and put him in charge of strategy for its Smart Cities programme”

Here we see the marriage of green ideology with controlling ‘smart city’ technology, creating systems of surveillance and control intended to direct the behaviour of residents towards that directed by the city’s bureaucracy. Most of these systems are being introduced without anything that can truly be called consent and, while they are primarily about authoritarian control, small public benefits, in particular a marginal reduction in congestion, are used as wedges to secure public support.

One of the criticisms of ‘smart cities’ lies in the involvement of big technology businesses - as we saw in Toronto with the Quayside project, opponents of ‘smart cities’ are able to get purchase when they focus on the role of Big Tech (in the case of Quayside, Google owner, Alphabet). But they don’t see how this link is only made possible with the agreement of national and city governments. 15-minute cities require the technology from big tech, both hardware and software, but they also require the government to accept the principle of mass surveillance. You haven’t consented to this surveillance:

“The problem isn’t the data is it? The real problem is the surveillance and the assumptions those using it have about the residents of a place. And the core problem isn’t even being watched, it’s that those who don’t want to be watched do not get that option, the premise of the smart city is that by tracking people’s activity we get better (whatever that means) municipal services and a ‘safer’ city. There is no pretence of seeking individual agreement to the surveillance – at least the tech companies pretend to do this by getting us to tick a box saying we’ve read their terms and conditions, government does not feel obliged to do this when it plans surveillance in public places.

You didn’t agree to your local council filming you walking innocently down the high street. You didn’t agree to the local police force tracking and checking your vehicle registration as you went about your legitimate business. And you didn’t agree to your local council putting sensors in your rubbish bin to check what goes on there.”

This surveillance culture raises a host of concerns starting with the lack of accountability (do you know what is done with hours and hours of CCTV footage made of entirely innocent people going about entirely innocent lives?) But there are also wider issues including the obsession withcongestion and limiting the use of the motor car. Congestion - traffic - is a function of human activity meaning that controlling the amount of traffic literally limits or constrains that human activity. Things like the 15-minute city are, by their very design, coercive. People don’t switch to walking or cycling because they choose to, they do so because the municipal authorities intend to punish them if they don’t.

As with all these technology-driven green schemes the big losers are the working classes and the poor:

“The first thing we'll notice is how the '15-minute City' is popular in the grand arrondissements of Paris's wealthy centre. Such places already enjoy the benefits that come from being wealthy and situated in the heart of a city that, in normal circumstances, has millions of visitors adding to the extravagance of rich residents. Take a trip out of the city centre to some of the less salubrious banlieue with their unemployment, poverty and ethnic tensions - how does containing these residents inside a '15-minute' cordon help with their social mobility, with the betterment of their lives?”

Twenty years ago, CCTV was sold to us as a way to reduce crime. Despite this, and London is the most spied on city outside China, does anyone really believe crime and anti-social behaviour have fallen in the big city? Systems like the ANPR we opened with were presented as about traffic management and the control of anti-social driving, today they seem more like a cash generation tool than something providing real benefits. And latterly, tech-controlled schemes like London’s ULEZ (‘ultra low emissions zone’), and my city’s CAZ (‘clean air zone’) are pitched as part of net zero and the reduction of air pollution but, again, seem designed to make it prohibitive for a tradesman to go about his business or a family to live a regular life if that life involves a car. And those schemes are lucrative - in its first three months, Bradford’s CAZ raked in nearly £2 million. That’s two million taken straight from the economy of one of Britain’s poorest places. And the place isn’t noticeably less congested or safer.

Demographer Wendell Cox coined the term 'Louvre Café Syndrome' to describe:

“…when Americans sit at Paris cafes in view of the Louvre and imagine why it is that the United States does not look like this. In fact, most of Paris doesn't even look like this, nor do other European urban areas. Like their US counterparts, European urban areas rely principally on cars for mobility (though to a somewhat lesser degree) and their residents live in suburbs that have been built since World War II.”

Because people, given the choice, opt to live a terrible ‘car-dependent’ life out in the sprawling suburbs, the only way to get them to do the things that snobby urbanists want is to coerce them into doing so. The 15-minute city is one sort of coercion but there are many others - from ULEZ/CAZ types schemes through to the disaster of urban containment as a planning policy. The green urbanists, without an awful lot of evidence, have adopted an anti-car, anti-suburb view driven more by a distaste for Ford trucks and ranch houses than by any real indication that coercing and containing people into car-free urban density makes for a better world.

Worse, this green agenda is deeply and unquestioningly authoritarian. Not just the surveillance of our behaviour and the use of fines to direct it, but also that business strategies, transport choices and economic activity must be directed - through government fiat and the exploitation of technology - to a single ‘net zero’ objective regardless of the damage it does to people’s lives. For the powerful and the wealthy this isn’t so much of a bother, we can afford the more expensive vehicles, the higher rents and mortgages and the sky-high fuel bills. For the rest of the people, not just the poorest but ordinary regular folk, the impact of the green agenda is less choice, less opportunity and a controlling state.