Much of the fabric of society for the last several hundred years is based on the geographical and social structure of the city. The city touches on virtually every aspect of the lives of almost everyone in the world. Using ubiquitous internet access, it becomes possible to fundamentally reinvent much of the basic fabric of the industrial world.

I had a schoolteacher a long time ago who said something to me that really stuck- everything is technology. When most people think “technology” they imagine computers, cell phones, airplanes. But the example my middle school teacher pointed to was the pencil. Your garden variety, wooden #2 pencil, is technology. Indeed it is actually well-designed, effective, sophisticated technology, even though its materials and construction are simple. Its simplicity and efficiency are a result of extensive technological refinement.

Technology is the shaping of matter for an intentional purpose, for a function. A pencil has a function- to make marks on paper. And the humble #2 pencil is so efficient at this function, so streamlined and optimized, to the point that further improvements are almost impossible. Its manufacturing process, even the shape and dimensions of its shaft, the technique and technology to sharpen it, the established common standards for types of leads. The pencil is advanced technology.

Returning to the topic of the city– the city is another example of technology.

First of all, look at the city through the lens that the city is a machine. A city IS technology. It is a construct that is devised and built by humans, intentionally designed for a purpose. To accomplish a goal. Although cities are so complex there is not just one purpose- there are many purposes. Indeed you might even say a city is designed to facilitate any and all purposes. Whether that is recreational, business, creative, industrial, or other purposes the city is a great machine designed to enable a person to do what they want.

Unlike a pencil however a city is a complex network of a tremendous number of interconnected systems. Like an assembly line is composed of machines which are themselves composed of smaller machines.

The “Smart City” reinvents the organizational fabric of the city around the assumption of universally available internet, and applies that technology to a tremendous array of systems in the city. This is not a project with a definite end date- I expect the process of developing and improving smart cities will be ongoing and continuous for decades.

Remote Work and Cost of Living

One aspect of the traditional layout of urban areas is the distinction drawn between high cost-of-living areas and low cost-of-living areas. Jobs in HCOL areas invariably have much higher pay, to make up for the fact that rent and services are all much more expensive, but in the converse the reason housing is in such demand is because of better job opportunities. This distinction is often used to compare housing prices between different cities. But for purposes of this discussion it is more useful to compare relative cost of living between the urban center and the more distant outskirts of the same city.

An important fact of the smart city is the partial dissolution of this cost of living barrier. For many types of jobs where remote work is viable it is not necessary to suffer the high cost of living in order to earn the increased income from the HCOL job. It becomes entirely possible to greatly increase commute distance and then simply not commute- working via an internet connection. The mere act of changing the social norm of in-person workplaces results in a seismic economic change of an uncountable amount of lost time and expense in the form of commutes, commercial leases, vehicles, parking, and more.

The smart city changes the distance equation in a sharp and dramatic way, expanding the effective footprint of the city greatly. Increasing the reach and utility of land further away from the city center will have the effect of decreasing the demand for land in the very center, and will increase the appeal of property that is further away from the urban center. Depending on the person and whether their job requires a commute, a very rural property with adequate services could be highly attractive.

Mass transit and decentralized rideshare/autonomous vehicles are all further factors that reinforce this trend. Higher capacity, higher reach, higher efficiency, all these things expand the footprint of the urban center by making transportation quicker, cheaper, and higher bandwidth.

Key Services of Data and Power

The smart city only works with ubiquitous access to both electricity and internet connectivity. These are essential services in a smart city. Therefore I posit that the next generation smart city should make available at least basic internet service, sufficient to use the smart city’s services, for free generally and without conditions.

The “digital divide” of unfair or unequal internet availability is an important issue today, and in a smart city it is mission critical to ensure at least basic internet connectivity is everywhere, and either free or available at negligible cost. Without a reasonable guarantee of internet a smart city’s services are unequally available and the smart city changes from being a next-generation working urban construct, to a high-tech living space for the rich. The smart city must be designed to work for everyone, not just for those with the wealth to pay for high technology. And this can be achieved because high technology scales better than linearly when supplied to more people and more buildings. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Decentralized power generation of requiring solar panels on building construction, and likely installing a battery unit in buildings as well, is another excellent building code policy idea that essentially creates power for almost nothing. This approach is particularly advantageous in an urban environment for generating “free” electricity, but requires the installation of smart meters that can both buy and sell electricity to and from the power grid. Making these meters internet-connected is a perfect example of why internet access is so critical to the smart city’s infrastructure- power meters reporting their battery units’ current charge level as well as their ongoing activities drawing or supplying power, simultaneously makes the entire grid more effective, provides a breadth of information both to the end user and the city, and makes it very difficult for a roguish customer to engage in skullduggery.

And, although likely unnecessary to require, rural structures also benefit greatly from on-site electrical generation.

Farming, 3D Printing, and Decentralized Production

Agriculture has historically been the predominant purpose of rural areas, to grow food to keep everyone alive. Although modern agriculture is so advanced it scarcely resembles archaic techniques, the same basic fact that the plants grow in the dirt and therefore require large amounts of land is still a constant. But with hydroponics or other techniques that allow technology to replace dirt, it becomes a real possibility to distribute agriculture.

At this point it is perhaps too early to say whether ultimately this will look like massive urban vertical farms on floors above street-level stores, or whether many city residents will have some smaller agricultural capacity. Perhaps a hydroponics rack in their garage or basement. By obviating the need for dirt it becomes possible to construct an arbitrarily large amount of farm capacity, anywhere at all.

What about manufacturing- applying the same principles that we have for social geography and to power and data, consider that 3D printing devices potentially allow for people to produce many common items from input raw materials.

Naturally the current state of this technology is not a complete replacement for factories. But for items a printer CAN produce, it completely eliminates the need for large factories and shipping. Each person can simply make whatever they want or need on an as-needed basis.

The most difficult ingredient is the digital file needed to manufacture the object in question. And that file can be created anywhere in the world and distributed virtually like a song or an ebook. Engineers designing a product could distribute an STL file around the world in moments.

The “economy” in this context is a huge open question. It’s entirely possible that the social and employment order we have always known will simply go away. Replaced with a huge body of independent producers of a tremendous variety of goods and digital products, ranging from celery grown in your basement to widgets printed there. Business conducted over the internet and products transported through the mail in both directions could very well become the norm. Other possibilities also exist.

The real question here is- what kind of smart city social order would you prefer? And how should we design the technology of the city to accomplish those goals?