Smart Cities and Citizens from another World

The hum of the swarm is becoming increasingly deafening, an information avalanche that grows incessantly, backed by multiple studies, hundreds of thousands of “expert” opinions, novel initiatives that spring up like mushrooms in the most remote place in the world.

Information is growing at a dizzying rate, “in the year 2020 there will be I don’t know how many millions of connected devices, I don’t know how many hundreds of smart cities in the world…”

In the shadow of the concept “Smart Cities” and its sister concepts “IoT “M2M” “BigData” rivers of characters run through the network, there is an uncontrolled information fever that spreads like a plague, fed and refueled with a multitude of congresses, events, conferences, talks, colloquiums, among engineers, mayors, ministers, communication directors, technology consultants, etc….

But amidst the crossfire of theories, counter-theories, opinion articles, tweets and retweets, no one seems to have yet formulated the key question: What would an alien think of the Smart Cities phenomenon if they arrived on Earth right now?

It usually happens when one is embedded in a whirlwind or dragged by a whirlwind or dragged by a current of force so devastating that it is difficult to make an accurate diagnosis, let alone a clear one, of that situation in which one finds oneself. So the advent of a being from another planet endowed with great intelligence and alien to the contamination and media saturation that we earthlings suffer could be an interesting point of view or at least bring some fresh air to the Smart Cities panorama.

To begin with, perhaps they would realize that the labels with which we humans seem to enjoy so much, in all their versions, original (American English), translated or various acronyms, are nothing more than that, labels, perhaps useful in the origin of the phenomenon but which, with the passage of time, lose their meaning, even perverting the phenomenon itself. Taking it to the philosophical extreme (which perhaps only a superior extraterrestrial mind can pose), what is more important, being or doing? The real physical reality, or the virtual one? To be or to seem to be? To be something or to be in the know about something?

The reality is that technology has been transforming the world for hundreds, even thousands of years (Roman sewers did not analyze data in real time but represented a technological advance that improved the lives of citizens), the only difference is that now it can be done more quickly or, let’s say, more efficiently, due to this capacity for selective information analysis. And let’s not fool ourselves, that is good for technology or industrial companies because it provides them with an environment in which to develop; for public institutions or governments because it covers them with a double patina, one of service to the citizen and another of “commitment to sustainability”, and of course, it is supposed to be beneficial for citizens as well, or at least for a large part of them.

Perhaps they would also realize that in this feverish labeling process we tend to generalize or rather globalize (another label) the question: Yes, we have already made impressive efforts in smart city initiatives, but they are nothing more than specific solutions and the driving forces of the Smart world cry out in unison: “When will we see large-scale, multi-disciplinary implementations?”…

It is true that we must tend towards standardization and towards a common model with respect to methodology, technology, and ways of using it, but in the face of such a question our extraterrestrial with a mega-developed brain and peripheral world vision would probably say that there is no single universal model, for the simple reason that each city is a world: What does Medellín have to do with London or with any of the 100 smart cities that the Indian government has “programmed”? Little, beyond the fact that they are places where people have come together to live. In this way, that much-demanded model of planning or implementation of Smart City does not exist, nor will it ever exist. The most “intelligent” thing to do would be to stop worrying about the definition of a smart city in an integral way and for each city to create its own metric of “smart city” under some common technological standards. Thus, there will be some cities that will focus on telemedicine, others on citizen security and others on traffic management. Each city must make its own determination, trying to put them all in the same bag is nothing more than a detriment to the process itself.

How would the actors in the process receive a ruling from a superior being who is a citizen of another world? Well, surely with a cascade of tweets, excuses to propose new presentations, conferences or even world congresses, all very quickly lest the world end or we lose some dollar for being asleep in the face of so much and such fierce competition.

The alien would leave at full speed back to his distant planet, bored and dizzy from the deafening “buzz” of social networks, understanding nothing…but if at least we had the tranquility or the intelligent pause to look up at the sky, before rushing to senselessly pound the screens of our terminals, we could have seen the message he dropped from his supersonic ship as a farewell: Keep calm and Smart City.