Major era-defining events have shaped cities for millennia. So what will this one bring? ‘The Post-COVID-19 Urban Futures’ project will hear from contributors about the future for urban development after COVID-19.

Case Study: All cities

The anti-racist and anti-police protests that have erupted in the United States and worldwide over the last week, amidst the backdrop of the worst pandemic in a century, pose a critical opportunity to ask what cities will look like after this. We are in the middle of incredibly important debates and struggles about the future of public health and public safety, all while heading full-on into what appears to be an economic depression. This is a moment unlike any other to talk about the role technology and major tech companies will play in shaping how we come out of these crises.

It is all but guaranteed that the big tech firms — Google, Amazon, Facebook etc. — will pitch themselves to cities as the saviours with solutions to the triple-barrelled public health, public safety, and economic crises. Their offer will be safety, security and shared profits in exchange for surveillance. In the coming months, where to deploy and how to govern technology will come to critical junctures, because the solutions to these interrelated crises are likely to be tech-infused. And these junctures will have significant implications for urban life over the next few decades.

Surveillance-Based Solutions to Public Health and Economic Recovery

Cities have decisions to make about whether they outsource the responsibility for public health to the companies that manufacture phones, smart homes, and wearable tech, like smart watches. The deal would be that by allowing companies to monitor our movements and develop products based on the insights they can derive from this monitoring, these companies will keep us safe from the spread of diseases and make us physically healthier. The former is the idea behind contact tracing apps developed by Apple and Google, as well as others, which cities have thus far been hesitant to adopt.

Monitoring in post-Covid-19 cities will not be limited just to the devices we carry, however. The dream for companies like Sidewalk Labs, the Google sister company headed by Michael Bloomberg’s former deputy mayor Dan Doctoroff, is to have sensors on streetlights and in parks so that they can gather data on a scale way beyond what we have today. Sidewalk Labs promises that these sensors will allow them to build cities that are more sustainable, safe, and profitable. There is a high probability that surveillance technology will be integrated into the next generation of urban infrastructure — and the fallout from the pandemic may well accelerate this deployment.

Sidewalk Labs recently walked away from a project to build a futuristic smart city in Toronto. The company envisioned a downtown neighbourhood filled with sensors, which would enable innovative experiments on residents and passers-by that the company hoped would lead to profitable innovations. Sidewalk Labs even promised to share the profits from innovations developed based on this urban data with the city. The project fell through in no small part because of fierce resistance from Torontonians fearful of the amount of power this project would have given Sidewalk Labs and Google over the city’s future. 

Sidewalk Labs supporter and Toronto resident Richard Florida attributed the failure of the Toronto project to outdated governance structures. Bianca Wylie, a tech expert and a major critic of the project, said Sidewalk Labs pulling out was the result of government oversight functioning in the messy way it is supposed to. That Florida went on to say that Sidewalk Labs’ vision would work better in Detroit or Pittsburgh than Toronto is a sign that these kinds of futuristic proposals feed off of desperation by targeting places without the resources to adequately fund public services or to thoroughly vet tech company’s proposals. The decision by Governor Andrew Cuomo to name former Alphabet CEO Eric Schmidt as head of the team that will “reimagine” the state of New York after the pandemic shows that the struggle over surveillance in the post-Covid-19 city is just heating up.

Anti-Racist Uprisings Change the Surveillance Conversation

The uprisings sparked by the Minneapolis police’s murder of George Floyd have highlighted the dark side of surveillance that may have otherwise looked more appealing than usual because of the pandemic. With the violence enacted against civilians by police, people are more likely to be skeptical about who should have potential access to your location at all times, especially as police unleash new surveillance tech. For states, however, these uprisings may mean they see the potential for a symbiotic relationship with big tech firms. If the priority is state security, then partnering with surveillance tech producers might be in their best interest. Companies, like the pseudo-essential lockdown service Zoom, are already cosying up to law enforcement because that is, currently, the profitable thing to do. The uprisings may simultaneously spread public distrust of surveillance tech while growing state support of it.

The growing calls to defund police may play into the hands of surveillance capitalists. Faced with pressure to reduce spending on police in a time of economic instability and recession, city leaders may lean on surveillance tech as a cheap and easy alternative to real transformation of the systems supposed to keep communities safe. Surveillance systems are sure to be less physically violent than police officers. This could save mayors and governors the embarrassment of having to respond to yet another violent viral video. 

Unfortunately, surveillance is just a more effective means of suppressing dissent and sweeping problems under the rug, rather than a way to address root causes. Less violence might bring more legitimacy to systems that continue to uphold structural racism and inequality while simultaneously siphoning off resources that could go to community building and alleviate those same systemic issues. For the record, there was uncertainty about whether Sidewalk Labs’ proposed innovations would actually save cities money. Regardless of contested financial facts, without considerable public pressure, policymakers may be much more willing to trust a handful of tech executives with billions in infrastructure funding than thousands of community groups with funding for community-based programming to ensure safety.

What are the potential alternatives?

Cities are facing unprecedented problems today. The big tech business model is to pitch yourself as the sole solution to the problem. Tech giants promise the moon, captivate our imaginations, and by the time we see whether these companies can deliver the goods, it will be too late to reverse course. In all likelihood, any problems that arise with the systems the tech giants create will be ones that only they have the capacity to address. And the cycle of corporate control continues.

There are no silver bullet solutions to the public health, public safety and economic crises. Cities need to figure out how to rebuild economies and communities after Covid-19, and tech is likely to be part of the recovery package. Open access to the urban data extracted is problematic if the same powerful corporate actors have the best ability to exploit that data. Public control of data is only appealing if public authorities can be trusted to protect civil liberties and human rights. Public accountability requires data oversight bodies with a sufficient mandate and enforcement capacity to be created. There may not be easy answers, but the scale of public resistance to injustice today is reason to be hopeful.

The prison and police abolition movements are growing in popularity, but need to be infused with a positive vision for how to regulate and deploy technology in order to be successful. This can happen if some of the energy that is driving uprisings is channeled into giving local communities the opportunity to define the problems they want addressed and giving them the resources to develop their own solutions. This is a future that we might be able to bring about with regulations that enable local control and/or accountability of tech and an expanded, more accessible conversation about tech and community building. 

As Joy Buolamwini of the Algorithmic Justice League puts it, “if you have a face, you have a place in this conversation.” We can regulate the tech sector in such a way that it must genuinely listen to and serve local communities. That way tech would play one part of a larger effort to address root causes, instead of a status quo which squeezes marginalized folks out of the process of finding solutions to the problems that are reaching a breaking point in cities around the world today.

Given enough time, human ingenuity will develop innovations (digital, social, structural or otherwise) that will optimize our systems to whatever set of values we want to dominate. Tech firms today are phenomenally good at developing technologies that will make them more profitable and powerful. Cities post-Covid-19 will be built according to whatever values we choose to guide us out of this crisis. So what sort of cities are we going to build? 

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Dexter Docherty is the project lead of the Post-COVID-19 Urban Futures Project. He is an MSc student in Evidence-Based Social Intervention and Policy Evaluation at the University of Oxford, working on surveillance, digital governance, and smart-cities. His interest in urban futures stems from prisoners’ rights work in Montreal and Ottawa that made him want to build more compassionate communities.