Where the Sidewalk Ended: The Future of Smart Cities after the Toronto Waterfront Demise

I'm Jennifer Bradley and I'm the director of the Urban Innovation Center which is part of the Aspen Institute's Aspen Digital Program. We help

cities

and others understand the implications of new technologies and use them to make

cities

more inclusive and equitable. We're here today to talk about the key secondary development of the end of

sidewalk

labs and what that teaches us about what's next for

smart

cities now. If you're watching this webinar, you're probably familiar with the project, but I'll move on and To summarize it, Sidewalk Labs is a division of Alphabet which is the parent company of Google in October 2017.

Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs announced a partnership to develop a key 12-acre portion of the Toronto Waterfront's largest

sidewalk

labs proposed to design an Internet neighborhood rendezvous deploy a new range of technologies in public and private spaces. These new technologies would also require new regulations. New infrastructure and really new types of relationships between the government, the private sector and residents. The ambitions of the projects and the attention they attracted were enormous. was a powerful center of gravity and had a reference point in the

smart

cities discussion and then suddenly, to outside observers on May 7, 2020, about two weeks ago, the project came to an end when the sidewalk announced that they were no longer pursuing the key side. project, although they continue with smart city technologies and other projects, the end of this particular development project does not put an end to the questions it raised about privacy surveillance and the interplay between public interests and private sector imperatives to scale and return on investment when When it comes to smart city technology, we're not here to bury labs in sidewalks or necessarily praise them.

Twitter is doing a very good job, what we want to do here is open up these doubts and questions about what are the trade-offs that When we think about smart city technology, how does smart city technology develop in existing neighborhoods with real people and real infrastructure rather than entirely new built environments and, more importantly, what technology will be like in cities in a post-pandemic era, we have an absolutely exceptional panel question for this discussion dr. Ann Kuvakin leads privacy through a design and center of excellence at Ryerson University and as former information and privacy commissioner of Ontario, Canada, Nigel Jacob, who is also Canadian, is the co-founder of the Mayor's Office of New Mechanics urban in the city of Boston.

Shareen Santosh am leads strategic initiatives for the CEO of Plenty, which is a vertical farming company, and before that she was chief innovation officer for the city of San Jose and dr. Anthony Townsend is the founder of Star City Group, a strategic planning and consulting studio, and is also the author of Smart City Big Data. Civic hackers and the search for a new utopia and the new book that was just published. I think this month Ghost Road beyond the driverless car. A little housekeeping before we begin during the second half of this broadcast. We will answer questions from the audience.

I'll do them to the audience. You can submit your question at any time by typing it in the Q&A box at the bottom. from your screen we ask that you include your name and affiliation if you feel comfortable because it helps us give context to the questions you can also join the conversation on Twitter using digital speed and perform Urban Aspen on NN or V we are recording this broadcast and Tomorrow we will send viewers a link to the video and as we all know, technology is not perfect, so we hope you will be patient with any technical difficulties.

Zoom freezes. We have tried to incorporate backstops and redundancies. but if something goes wrong, bear with us, so let's get started after all and the first question is for Nigel Nigel, you're already implementing a variety of smart city technologies in the city of Boston and you didn't have the luxury. Was the idea of ​​creating a neighborhood out of the Internet a key reference point for the work I was trying to do or was the context too different, from a newly built boardwalk to the intensely urbanized and inhabited city of Boston, in the first place. place. Thank you very much for inviting me.

I think it will be a great discussion. I think you know I was really interested in the key side project. I think I was also very critical, but I guess I'm glad someone tried it. It was big and bold and worth a try and certainly raised a lot of questions. Honestly, I think that project suffered from the same problem that many of us working in this space suffer from, which is the problem of fiduciary institutions. We generally suffer from a lack of trust on behalf of our communities, you know, if we're going to try to implement a technology or a new way of doing something in the built environment in people's neighborhoods, you know, we better have something trustworthy, you already know people better.

They have the feeling that we are going to live or fulfill what we say we are going to fulfill and that only works if they have the feeling that they will be respectful to them and not waste their time, you know one of the really interesting aspects of the life in the city that the key aspect that occurred to me was the question of private versus public. I think the built environment has always been a happy mix of public spaces in private spaces or public spaces. We use private spaces in all these different variations and as we think about implementing technology in that complex environment, how do we let people know that there are a lot of problems, but no, how do you know what to expect when you walk into a space that looks public?

It can actually be private, you know, look, you go to a mall, what is that? Then many questions arose for me. Wouldn't our answers to this question be public versus private and a kind of smart city control? project we called betablox, which was an attempt to create a bottom-up approach. Typically, the communities

where

smart marine technologies are implemented are like these gateways that are passive observers of what the company or City Council is implementing by city. The government and betablox was our attempt to create a community-driven approach to deciding the kinds of things they want the community to see implemented and tested for the purpose of learning in their community.

This is another thing that I think is really tricky to unpack is, you know, I think vendors often make claims or assumptions about what a technology will or won't have and the impacts of these things and I think maybe you know I'm willing to let you know, but I think it's really a matter of testing and experimenting and prototyping those things to see how they're going to affect, what impact they're going to actually have on the community and how people are going to tolerate these privately owned devices on public roads. Thank you very much and we have put a link to the betablox website in the chat window so that interested people can find out more about it.

Shareen, when I was chief innovation officer of San Jose, I was pretty much at the right intersection of Silicon Valley and the fabric of a city, one of the problems that Sidewalk Labs had or that was somewhat controversial was the issue of scale. , their original proposal was for the original question was 12 acres, some of their ambitions and plans incorporated the entire Toronto

waterfront

because they said they needed that larger demonstration scope as someone who has worked on both. the public sector side

where

we want to start small, as Nigel said, build trust, learn a bit about how things are going and also the private sector side where scale is needed to demonstrate return on investment to demonstrate viability to large scale, how is it managed?

That's why scale is such a challenge in the smart city conversation, so I think a big overarching concept is that we need to stop thinking about smart city infrastructure as something different than traditional infrastructure. I mean, it's very expensive to invest in these IoT networks and sensors in the built environment, so when a private company comes in wanting to do some sort of test and pilot, they can certainly do that, but the benefits only come when you're at the right scale, so having smart parking you know three boxes. it's not that useful, you know, it's really useful to have it all over the city, so there's just the reality of the investment that it requires and the kind of network effects around it, so you kind of know just pick up a little bit. what Nigel had been saying about public versus private.

I mean, traditional infrastructure has always been publicly owned, it's the public right of way, the things that happen in that environment are managed by some type of government entity and that's us the rules of the road, but when you have private companies that come in and invest, you know, massive amounts in smart infrastructure, you know they'll want to see some kind of return on investment, but that often comes in the form of generated data and the problem is, of course, the generated data is from the public and So there are no rules about who and how the data should be managed and that's certainly something that Sidewalk Lab looked into and they eventually agreed to establish some sort of data trust in court, but that's the way it is. it gets really complicated very quickly and then understanding what is public and what is private and what the new rules are and what everyone is comfortable with is I think the question that we have to deal with and then you know the reality of hey, this is kind of experimental and it might not work and you're making massive investments in it and it's always the best use of public funds so we would experiment a lot with smart city technology live in San Jose, but you know , build an IOT network at scale.

Do you know what is practically impossible? I would say that since you know the funding available, the kind of restrictions around privacy and data that we were putting in place because we were the first city in California to develop a privacy policy, then, you know, I don't think anyone is on board. everything deciphered. This yet, Anthony, you and I have had great philosophical and practical discussions about how technology interacts with cities. In the idea of ​​a city we keep seeing government officials or other powerful entities imagining that they can reinvent the city from scratch, be it the people. that some of these projects or these new cities Brasilia Songdo whether it's people like Robert Moses in New York in the mid-20th century why people keep doing this why people keep trying to create these kinds of shortcuts around some of the issues difficult topics that Nigel and Shireen have asked, I mean the question is answered correctly because they are difficult topics, but how do you see this from your understanding of technology in cities?

I mean, I think fundamentally you know that we love to celebrate the disorder of cities and there's a rich body of theory that says that disorder is valuable and it is in many ways, but sometimes it rightly holds us back, but I think Sidewalk saw regulations that were holding back the use of some technologies and tall timber was probably the most compelling example in the Toronto project that actually required removing the most part of the existing building code and develop a new building code. They made a really strong case for him and me with the understanding that in the last month or two, in the midst of the Kovat mess and all the other issues they were facing, they lost that case as well and I think ultimately that was a a big part of why they

ended

up shedding light on the talent you know.

On that and what everyone else has said, I think one of the reasons these mega smart city projects keep coming up is that tech companies and their real estate partners and their government partners keep confusing large scale with speed and impact, and it's not really So, you know, Masdar in Songdo, which were sort of two flagship smart city projects that have been on the decline for decades, are now two of the largest real estate projects in history and they have almost zero influence in how we build cities around the world for Toronto. If you layer it on the alphabet, this is a company that didn't want to do 500 state projects scattered around Toronto.

You know it's a company where people who have small visions are punished, not rewarded, so you know this company is dating this guy. overreach, on the other hand, you travel around the world when you look at the most interesting smart city projects and there are the kind of things thatthat we've heard about here where you have like a focused goal, you get a team together and you go and do it and then you replicate it in Eindhoven. One studio is doing a really interesting project on data governance. They have a hundred houses in a carbon cooperative housing project that basically works as a self-contained data cloud for all the data that comes in.

Outside of that, it's a smart complex so that all the benefits go to the people in the communities, not the utility companies, not the cloud company, not the government, and if they make that work, it will work out. to market and it will spread faster than any mega project, so you know, one of the things I've been wondering is if Sidewalk had come to Toronto and started building as one, building a project and the key side generated something of trust instead of all the grandiose planning and terrain. grabbing and they almost became a plague on the planners, you know, it's like a classic thing and kind of spoon-feeding the

future

instead of just trying to force it down Toronto's throat, that maybe things would have turned out differently . and they would have gotten to the same place they wanted, but just the process of doing it would have been really different and they could have built trust and maybe solved some of these problems together, but I think still the scale and the speed just weren't compatible with what they found and you know, I didn't learn of what was coming before them, so you had been part of the sidewalk labs project at the beginning, it was a big blow to them that you were on board given your deep experience in privacy that you

ended

up leaving because there was a difference of opinion on privacy and data protection, so we can't really talk about smart cities without thinking about these issues of data trust, public/private part of building smart cities in the La Popular imagination is that we give up a little of our privacy.

The city might know we're somewhere in exchange for better and cooler things. You're shaking your head. I can see it, not everyone on the screen can tell me why that's actually not the right trade-off for why they're not privacy services and helping us understand a vision where we could get the good stuff without giving up our privacy. We do not hear you. I think we're having a bit of a technology problem. Can you try again? How is this privileged? Well, I guess I was silenced by the old-fashioned zero-sum mentality of one interest versus another. You always have to make concessions in order to make a profit in one area always to the detriment of the other. that they told a zero shot sum to get rid of that "either win or lose" model, it largely doesn't work anywhere, but it can't work here because you see that in a smart city you have resonance, you have people who live there .

Privacy should be respected as much as anything else, so it's not about smart city versus privacy, it's about how you do both, so when sidewalk labs approached me and wanted to hire me to do consulting for them compare privacy by design, something I created many. They said years ago that we wanted you to make sure we had as much privacy as possible and I said I would be happy to do that, but I said mark my words: I will be a thorn in your side if you don't offer as much privacy as possible. possible because that's what the residents of Toronto deserve and they said that's why we're hiring great, so after studying it for a while I came back and said look in a smart city, the technology where the sensors will be 24 hours a day . 7 there will be no opportunity for people to consent or revoke their consent to the collection of their personal information, so I said what they need to do is D identify the data at the source, that is, at the time the sensor collects the data, removes it from all personal identifiers. anonymize the data then you'll still have a lot of data but it's not personally identifiable so it eliminates the privacy risks that everyone had for that in the beginning so we went ahead they anonymized the data at the source and everything was fine and then it came up the issue of data governance.

You know, they created this urban data trust that consists of multiple parties, not just sidewalk labs, but also the government Waterfront Toronto and all the different IT companies involved in delivering the technology and they told me and this. It's the one thing they didn't consult me ​​about, they said in a board meeting, I'll never forget it, they said, well, you know, we have all these companies and we can encourage them to anonymize the data, start, but we can't force them to do that and I knew the moment they said that was it, it's over because everyone wants data, not only are they going to do this for the sake of their business or their health, but they are going to keep identifiable data so that the next morning I called him and submitted my resignation.

I quit before that way and they said: What are you talking about? Dan Doctoroff, everything he's got. How do you feel about yourself? Christ and I said: this is the only thing you didn't consult. Nealon and if you had, I would have fixed it, but you didn't, so I'm out of here. The good news was that an hour later, the Waterfront Toronto board of directors called me and told me that we fully believed in de-identifying the data source. to offer as much privacy as possible to the residents of Key Side, come work for us and I loved that because they, and if Sidewalk had been smart and consulted me about this, I would have said, "Give me a week, let me go." Waterfront Toronto I know you believe in strong privacy, let me agree to post the missive that anyone working with us on this must be identified, the answer, but Sidewalk didn't do it, so Waterfront Toronto I want to do it.

Of course, this is not the

demise

of Waterfront Toronto, the key side project, but quite the opposite, this is a real opportunity because on the sidewalk they couldn't preach clearly, so they left because they felt they were being restricted, etc., well , goodbye to them, we will do it. In terms of what Waterfront Toronto will do, they are committed to stronger privacy and stronger innovation in terms of technologies that can, you know, facilitate traffic management and density and all these other things, and not vs. and incorporate privacy into it. We have to get rid of this trade-off mentality and say do both.

We will have multiple profits from multiple positive returns. Privacy and smart city. We can do this. We are starting to do it. Waterfront Toronto is totally behind this. There are places where you mentioned that

waterfront

to manage it, which is the development organization, it has representatives from the Canadian federal government, the Ontario government and the Toronto government, the analogue in the United States, I think it's something like an Authority of Economic Development and them. If they continue and that's it, it's a great point to raise: have you seen places that have managed to do that disidentification?

Then Anthony gave us the example of Idaho and their particular use of data. Are there other places we should? What we should look at when thinking about good examples of privacy protection in smart cities. I think of Barcelona. You know they have an amazing smart city and they're also committed to privacy, so it's eminently doable. I don't want people to think well. You know, it's too hard or whatever, people think you should preserve privacy in the city you live in and I live in Toronto, so the idea of ​​a smart city coming here and not preserving privacy, forget it, I would fight it like the plague, but we don't have to.

Waterfront Toronto is committed to that, we have other examples, but I said to Waterfront, oh, let's be the model of how to do this right. I'm working with them now that we can and can do great things by incorporating privacy by design, which is something I created years ago proactively in operations, in the technology that is being envisioned for the waterfront here in Toronto, for which ideally we will become the model that others will refer to. I think Bill Gates was talking about starting a smart city in Florida and I said to the people at Waterfront Toronto: let's make our model the model that others will want to emulate and we can present it to others in terms of this is how it's done, this is eminently doable, we just need to get rid of the zero sum mentality, so Ann mentioned the somewhat loaded term plague and you know we're all reading or Defoe's copy of Journal of the plague ear Nigel, how are you thinking about things like apps and contact tracing technology and smart vision?

It is also a safe city, especially in light of the pandemic. I know Boston has been hit hard. You are a city with many medical centers, many students, many populations that depend on that wonderful density that you have. Thinking about all these questions certainly Cove ignites change shows us that the public and the private can be very permeable, your private behavior can have consequences for public health. The most important thing can touch us a little bit about how that is developing in general, you know, when we think about the role of technology we have always been quite clear that it is good at some things and not so good at others and especially in a world where not everyone has the same level of access to technology, not even close, and that's why you know how to approach something.

Specific like the contact tracing that night that we've been doing in Boston in Massachusetts is largely based on a traditional model: you call people you know, wouldn't you go into the details of the type of information you need to make a contact implemented? Tracking is not very easy to apply, you know, because as you investigate where someone has spent the last two weeks, it is not just about collecting information, but also about referring people to the right services, so if you They have said. If we have tested positive for the disease, it now becomes a question of how your children will be cared for while you are in quarantine, etc., so it is worth the work.

We have always thought about technology from the perspective of appropriate uses of technology. And with that said, I want to say again, when you think about the point, recognize that we were one of the first cities years ago to implement an app in Boston and it's been a huge help to us in many ways over time. For years it has allowed us to partner and collaborate with our residents to engage in interesting ways, but we know from experience that implementing technology for the public is very difficult and getting enough people to do it is not an easy thing and a lot of that.

Is it about trust? Know? Do people trust us enough to answer what they are asking? What are we asking them to do? Shall we fill the bottle? Are we going to fix the traffic light?, etc., etc., I think Many of these solutions that I am seeing gave very little importance to the issue of trust. How do you trust us to provide them? Do you trust? You know we have a very complicated relationship with health care in this country. Do you trust um Healthcare to deliver an application? Do you trust the federal government not to give it to you?

So you know these are all difficult, open questions and we're trying to take a sophisticated look at how these things are going. designed and how what is the theory in which they will be implemented and who uses them and you can't use them and when they will give us accurate data on the status on the ground and when they won't but we are also at the same time. I don't need to be depressing, but we are also very interested in the capability of these tools, but we have a very strong feeling that most of these tools were built in the last month and so, there are a lot of problems and people keep pointing us towards Asia and that's a very different situation in Asia with respect to democracy and civil rights, so when we think about how these systems are being built, we're paying a lot of attention. to privacy like Madonna, but also to the broader issues around civil rights and, you know, these technologies are just to advance the targeting of people who have already been targeted by data-driven systems for many decades, so we have to endure all this. we have in mind as we think about implementing these technologies for our residents and you had something to say to add to this, thank you and in addition to those comments that are great, I want to point people to the new API framework that Apple Google has developed and I say this because hopefully a trustworthy person in terms of privacy, people contact me all the time so I wanted to learn more about them.

Apple has informed me twice about all the features of this API. Is incredible. I can give you this guarantee because I have examined it. I always think of it as total privacy protection. Not retainedno personal information. No geolocation data is retained. The way it works is that you would voluntarily choose to install the app on your phone. smartphone and you will be notified and they will call it exposure notification, not contact tracing because it is not tracing. You'll be notified if you've been around someone who self-reports as coded 19 positive so that you So you could go to your doctor and take whatever steps you want to explore that, but it's all totally privacy-friendly.

It uses Bluetooth beacons that change every 15 minutes, untraceable because they also added AES encryption to everything, so there is literally no personally identifiable data, this is retained here. They have built in privacy by design and privacy by default. I'm going to say it's 100% privacy protected and yet it gives you some information and the beauty of what they call an exposure notification is no wonder it makes it clear to people that we're not trying to track them on Absolutely, that trust is essential for people to use this and they are made to be available and it's just the fact that Apple and Google have partnered on this is huge, but they wanted to reach as many people as they could, of course, between iPhones and Android, that covers a lot, so they made it available to public health authorities, who would then take and create an app with it and hope that public health authorities, we're not allowing them, we're prohibiting them from collecting data from geolocation and things like that, which is quite a statement, so I applaud them and urge the public health authorities. to explore this same privacy, protect a form of learning if you have been exposed to Cove in 19 positive people, but without privacy implications of any kind.

It's good, awesome. I'm sure one of the things we're hearing well again is this notion of different. relationships and demonstrations of what is possible. Are there things you know? I know you're not on the front lines of city government, but yes. There are things that you think are possible or that you think you would like to see, as the Cova pandemic is certainly creating some profound losses, but also some opportunities for behave differently. Are there new ways to advance the smart city conversation? and the conversation about privacy. I think that these situations always have opportunities and disadvantages and you know that there is always a set of actors that have an agenda that they are going to push and use in any situation that arises, so I think we have to be aware.

Some of them go overboard, especially on the privacy side, but in terms of things that I think are really positive, you know one of the things they did before I left was experiment with a chatbot to help users. citizens to interact with our and 3-1- 1 essentially, that chop bot has now been used like a koban 19 as a data tool, so I think it's a very good opportunity to allow new technologies to make government easier to use and I think that's really essential on the trust side. I mean, one of the things that's really important to think about and I think this whole pandemic has laid bare is the digital divide and we're seeing a real conversation about that now and, as you know, Jennifer liked that the conversation It was not frontal. and downtown a year ago and people like me and others were really pushing that because we were seeing, you know, in San Jose, almost half of our low-income population without Internet access at home, so it's a problem important, but when we talk about these digital tools, you know, we have to think about who really has access to them and whether we are going to deepen the gap in a pandemic situation if we only rely on digital technologies, so I think some of this is outside, you know, in San Jose would be fine, how am I going to use analog here to reach some people or use text messages or, you know, reach those populations that are most at risk, which we know through the news, our low-income minority populations, so you know, I think?

Some of this isn't necessarily just technology driven, it's actually old school citizen engagement and education and working with your community nonprofits and then technology you know, I think you really have a chance. of doing it with the push of a button, you know, it takes care of certain problems that would otherwise take a lot of time, so I think hopefully you know that new technologies can save you time and money or make it easier to use for its residents, and so in all three dimensions, there are great opportunities. So, Anthony, an emerging theme, right, is that there are some things that technology is good at, there are some things that people are good at, and what's probably most interesting and generative is where those two are, where they're not. we overweight a technological solution.

I talked a little bit about how technology companies or you wrote about how technology companies can use their presence in the physical world to give us an indication of where the smart city could go in terms of the use of physical space, the integration of flexibility, is there any? There are ways that companies can create a smart city using bricks and mortar as much as Deena, yeah, I mean, I think we're in a very interesting time right now where technology companies in particular have the opportunity to show us the way to follow with your own. corporate campuses I think you know that the announcements from Twitter, Facebook and Google in the last week about various stages of abandonment of their multi-billion dollar campuses they have built in California over the last few years tell me that in some ways we just lost any perspective on the ability of technology to prevent us from working from home indefinitely and how many misconceptions there are about the pressures that keep us away from the workplace and the pressures that will force us to work.

Come back, you know, over the next 12 months, you know, and the difference between people who write op-eds, who are mostly older or mostly established in their careers, mostly have older kids, fewer interruptions and home offices, and young people who are desperate. to get back into the offices so they can, you know, meet their

future

partners, their mentors build their careers, get out of their little apartments or their childhood bedrooms, you know, and their voices aren't heard and you know they want to come back. Let's go back to the center and I think that instead of abandoning these future workplaces that they built in California, technology companies need to figure out how to create healthy and safe workplaces there, and their own technologies and other technologies will be a big part of Then , you know, I'd like to see us start thinking about how we can prototype some of these future communities.

You know, it's all the things that have been talked about in smart cities, but that are also healthy and safe in the places where they are located. I've been preparing for all these years and you know how to do it in a way that doesn't mean creating an antibody like apartheid that you can't get into unless they give you a clean test and they can continue to let you know. people who aren't pure towards the city gates and don't just become a model like a gated community model, it's totally in their power to do that, they're just playing it really safe right now and you know with the lack of leadership coming from other places, I think we need to start asking them more, frankly.

I look at what Twitter has been doing with the city of San Francisco, they have been playing very hardball and what they did last week was totally irresponsible, they abandoned San Francisco completely. It's okay to change it up a little. You know you said there were opportunities for improvement and there are things that bring us back a little bit to Sidewalk Nigel at the beginning of the conversation. He said he was glad someone was trying some of the things they were doing, is there something we've talked about a lot? Some of the cons, when some of the things that the sidewalk overlooked are things that you will take as a leap. off points or positive examples of what Sidewalk was doing in Toronto or some of their other technologies.

I'm sure I think it was actually a couple and a couple of our former team members who were involved in one of the efforts to look at how people are informed. when you move into a space that is being monitored by one or more devices, how are you informed that you know when you go from a seemingly public space to a private space, what does that look like, how do you give people agency to realize Oh, they're monitoring these four things about me. I'm going to go around or what is that, even something practical, and I think that, as we think about implementing sensor-based technology and that type of thing in communities, especially at-risk communities. people were at risk of homelessness or were sheltered in various ways, how do we think about giving them the right kind of information?

And I and you know that this is again a time where it doesn't have to be a digital-only solution like they were doing some interesting things, like having AI agents operating on your behalf, which was very interesting, but what What about better signage? Knows? What about better writing? Do you know better logos? you're moving into different types of spaces. I think there's a lot of opportunity for that sort of thing, so I think it was a good attempt and they had put a lot of thought into how to make a space more readable for a larger number of people is great, so Nigel, already whether accidentally or because it appeared by coincidence or because it appeared in the participants chat window, it has been moved to answer one of our audience's questions that comes from Richard Wit of the gli foundation.

I don't know Richard so I know he is a former Google employee and also a former member of the Mozilla Foundation so someone may think a lot about privacy issues and your question is the DTP team on data transparency in the public realm that was part of the sidewalk laboratories. sought to create icons and signs that provided useful transparency to citizens and pedestrians and, over time, this transformed into tangible ways for people to actually interact and interrogate the underlying systems, as Nigel said through chat BOTS and personal AI , and Richard says this looks like a promising solution. approach to enabling smart citizens and if this more agent-centric approach still exists at Shareen, how do you think?

Yeah, you know, I think all of these things are really good in theory and then actually implementing them can be really challenging. on two fronts, so one is an easy design to design so that someone approaching a space or a sign can easily understand what is happening and that is actually very difficult to do for someone who may not know anything about what's happening and then Secondly, you know? My experience interacting with the public about topics like privacy or educating them is like everyone wants privacy and yet beyond that I want a conversation about privacy, there's not a lot of similar details or any substance underneath so it's it gets very technical very quickly. and then you need people like and who can come in and really help you understand that you know privacy by design and other things, so I certainly appreciate the idea of ​​giving people some agency, but I think that's one of the big debates with the That you already know. tech privacy policies that we've had for years, and you know you can say you're giving people agency because you give them a hundred-page will about the privacy policy and you make them review all of us, but that's not really agency.

So, you know, with these things my fear is always whether they really give agency or not, and you know who's the arbiter of that and I'm sure you have some opinions. I agree that's not agency, read our hundred page magazine policy. and all the legal jargon and Terms of Service, I mean, give me a break, no one has the time to do that or the desire, but that doesn't mean people don't care deeply about privacy in the last two years, never I have seen it and I have been in this business for more than twenty years, I have never seen concern about privacy and it is an all-time high in all public opinion surveys, banking research, etc. ninety percent consistently at ninety percent ninety percent very concerned about their privacy ninety-two percent concerned about losing control over their personal data.

An agency is all about control, so we have to find ways to incorporate this into a smart city and that's why I thought the easiest way to do this was to de-identify the data. at the source right at the time of collection day so you don't have to deal with agency-related privacy issues andpersonal control because it is often out of reach in a smart city, so you eliminate that concern by identifying anonymized data. and then you still have a lot of data at your disposal, but you've eliminated the privacy risks, that's what it's all about, and we have a question specifically for you from Mitchell Weiss, who's at the Kennedy School, Nigel, who I can see It's not him, he's a former Mitchell, he's a former colleague of Nigel's at the city of Boston, Apple and Google, the crowd described what he missed by going just to the exposure notification and how they thought about weighing the and he's using the term compensation and as the ability of a government to then analyze the sources of transmission and the hotspots, what about that consideration that is seen when you look globally at the places that have attempted to exert greater control by the government, public health authorities to be able to track and trace it? etc., it hasn't worked, so if you look in Australia, they had a very primary invasive contact tracing park, it wasn't being used and that's the problem they're moving now to the Apple Google framework and the same thing in the UK , they had a very privacy invasive contact tracing model and no one was using it, so now they are considering switching to the Apple Google framework, so yeah, you won't get as much information, obviously, because you choose to anonymize the data, basically , delete them. of personal identifiers that will build trust like no other and encourage people to use them on a large scale, that is the goal and you are right, it will not go to public health authorities because there is nothing to send them because the data is all anonymous, no There are privacy issues, there is no geolocation tracking, but this will also encourage people to use the app, it will encourage people with a positive code of 19 to self-report without fear of retaliation or concern.

It is being tracked and will also encourage mouse use. Hopefully using the app because they don't have to deal with the fear of being identified and all that privacy is a big deal and you should approach it this way if you're developing a contact tracing trail. app that the public is going to use heavily and again the goal is exposure notification so that people are aware of the fact that they have been exposed to Cove in 19 rather than the fear of being tracked and traced and I think this provides sort of an interesting combination with some of the things Nigel was talking about about the deep human and anthropological work of contact tracing, so what you're saying is an app that does some of the things that a government might want it to do .

It's an app that no one would use, so we have to engage in the real world, as all political ventures are. We have a question from Wayne Cleghorn, who is the CEO of Privacy Resolved Communications, and I'll direct it to Anthony worldwide. States of the world such as the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are moving forward with smart cities in evaluating these projects from, say, an advisory role, what are the key questions to ask regarding the purpose, prospects of privacy and cybersecurity of these initiatives? I understand a question, I mean my general approach to analyzing these types of megaprojects from A smart city framework has been to think about what is the smart city version of an environmental impact assessment and you know there is now that type of practice in the world of cybersecurity, such as what is the process through which before undertaking a large smart city project. you stop, you get all the people who are really good at finding holes in your game, you find all those holes and then you develop mitigation strategies and implement them, you know Sidewalk didn't do that and it's one of the reasons I know that They ended up exposed on this privacy issue, I mean, they brought one in, but they didn't bring her in early enough.

She should have been involved, you know, before they got to Toronto and you know I think there needs to be a more systematic kind of comprehensive risk assessment around these things. I'm spending a lot of time looking at automated vehicles now and whether it's labor impacts and equity dimensions, whether it's safety, whether it's supply chain risk in another type of pandemic event like these. There are going to be multiple dimensions of demining that you're going to have to start understanding and mapping on different time scales to really understand the scope of what you are, what you're getting yourself into if you're going to do this. and doing it well, so I think it creates a lot of planning work, but I think educating clients who probably aren't aware that the scope of planning has to expand that much is the first step in that kind of dream job.

You know, one thing that I think Anthony is touching on that is really important in this context is the sequencing of communications and conversations and, for example, when we were introducing a privacy policy in San Jose, we started with a very small working group. internally. We had an external task force advisory board that included things like former ACLU n-double-a-cp police officers, but we had our filth, then we expanded to this think tank and then we went out into the public and sequenced it . in that order we were able to build a coalition, we were able to understand what could go wrong when we went out and you know, I think some of the challenges with some of these big projects they don't really think about sequencing and communication. that needs to happen, which can really mitigate some of those later issues that often come up so related and I mean, I'll move on to the next question because we're going to have a lot of questions from John Monde Berg from the Global Studies and Arts and Humanities at the University Michigan State asks how mid-sized city governments should think about incorporating tactical urbanism to build trust and iteratively learn in the implementation of smart city projects.

Nigel, would you consider some of the stuff in the beta block to be a kind of tactical urbanism? How would you answer that question? um you need yeah you're muted and someone needs to unmute you yeah I got it we should since we went for the first time I should no this is for me okay so I think Betablox is roughly in the category of Tactical urbanism, I mean, it's like playing with the line, you know, when I think about the tactical approaches of urban planners, I think they've been the most interesting in recent years, they tend not to be.

They originate in government, but they're sort of community or advocacy organizations that are trying to prove that something can work and something is possible, so they usually know they're fighting an uphill battle. I'm just trying to show this to City Hall, so from that perspective, you know Betablox isn't really in line with the idea of ​​a little bit of bottom up, you know rethinking the way the controls flow through these different solutions, I think it's very important and I think that You know these ways of working as collaboration is a verb, of course, obviously, it's something that you're good at, so you know, deciding that it's going to be a more collaborative organization in our city and which will be more open to innovators or creatives. people that doesn't really work and you have to be good at it and from that perspective I think taking a more tactical urban planning approach, especially for a smaller city, is a good way to flex those bottom-up collaboration and innovation muscles. . and working across sectors, so we have a question from Sasha Hassan, who is the founder of City Mart, which is a procurement and innovation platform for cities.

I hope I described it well, so if I didn't, let me know, who asks in retrospect if there were other proposals. on the table for the key side project that could have led to the project where we all seem to be describing something that was more iterative or smaller or more trust-based or and and I'm going to be fit Sasha's question to a little or, per Anthony's comment above, we're so fascinated by this idea of ​​something big, amazing, and world-changing that we never learn to make it as possible and least glamorous, and we're going to be repeating it.

This cycle has a lot to do with smart cities and what is your opinion about it? Well, I don't know if there are other things on the table. I'm sure there were, but the way she described it was exactly like that. I mean the Prime Minister of Canada. embraced this, the mayor of the city of Toronto, the premier of the province of Ontario, I mean everyone, I think they were just now with the size and depth of what sidewalk riding offered and they already know the connections alphabeticals that could do so much. I just think they accepted it so fully that they just assumed it was going to work and I don't want to make anything clear, although Waterfront Toronto admittedly they were very open to a variety of possible solutions as they are now, so I don't want this to be project as the disappearance of the friends of the water, but quite the opposite.

I think this frees up Waterfront Toronto now to take advantage of other opportunities that exist that will benefit Toronto residents and the key side and, in fact, I think this will lead to a much better solution that Waterfront Toronto will embrace and is pursuing now Anthony, Do you think we will continue to see people betting on you? You know, so to speak, the bold and the beautiful, as opposed to the more humble, dare I say, the pedestrian. I mean, it was such a quick anecdote that we didn't say at first. I also worked with sidewalk labs that were left long before they came into the Toronto project.

After I stopped working with them, I had an engagement with a client in China. I was basically looking to do much smaller smart city projects, but do one a year in different parts of the country and after I finished working with them, it became very clear to me that in ten years, through ten iterations of ten different projects, They were going to be light years ahead of where the sidewalk labs were after ten years of building their master plan and even so you know the sidewalk labs might change a little in 10 years, but they would still be sentimentally building the plan. that they designed today.

Whereas China's plan would be to build a new design every year, so I think you already know that type of agile development, as they would call it in the software world. You know, it's really the way the smart city should be built. keep scrapping the plans and redoing them otherwise they will never incorporate the latest laser and thinking technologies so this is the last question and I'm going to use moderator privilege to ask it myself and you all know what Now what is the only thing you want people to sign? Ideally, this should be short because we only have about three more minutes in the webinar.

Nigel. I'll start with you, what is the one thing you want people to sign? to know about smart cities or trust or anything when they come out of this webinar. I think I've been going back and forth since I learned that you have very little time to describe this. I think it's designing for the margins. There are many things in our cities that are not working well and many people that are not well served by the systems as they are currently set up, so I would encourage people who are in positions of authority to think about designing for the people who are designing. their smart cities for people that are traditionally designed around solutions and what's the one thing they want people to understand when they leave here?

The vital importance of privacy, the preservation of privacy, which forms the basis of our freedoms if we value living a In a free and democratic society, you must have a solid foundation of privacy and make no compromises, forget the date in the model of zero sum, you can have privacy and technology privacy and smart city privacy and whatever you have. proactively incorporate privacy by design into your operations so you can enjoy the benefits of both Anthony's and the industry's urban innovation. I think it was the most intriguing idea of ​​the Toronto sidewalk proposal and I hope Toronto doesn't let it slip away. the sidewalk house, to be fair, the sidewalk would say they are still in the urban innovation business even though they have pulled out of front Shereen.

I think for me it's the idea that smart infrastructure is infrastructure and therefore how do we fund that. really determining who owns and has power over the data, so making sure that we have federal funding for smart infrastructure and that we are very careful about this digital divide and how we manage that. I really appreciate all of our panelists. I appreciate the participants and the questioners who have been with us today. This conversation really incorporates the things that I love without this right, which is the fact that you can't talk about cities without talking about thehuman who creates and inhabits them, whether they are in positions of power or whether they are on the margins, we are all creators of cities and there is no technological solution that nullifies the basic humanity of cities and the values ​​we incorporate into them, as well that that's what I hope everyone takes away with um is that cities are fundamentally human Creations.

Thank you very much and we look forward to welcoming you to future Urban Innovation Center or Aspen Digital webinars. Thank you so much.