Dream States by John Lorinc

Author:John Lorinc [Lorinc, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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Much more than Canada’s, the Netherlands’ climate policies reflect a great sense of urgency, given its exposure to sea level rise and flooding on rivers that flow into the country from the east. For that reason, both adaptation and mitigation have been central to the country’s plans for future-proofing its cities.

Rob Schmidt, a sustainability policy expert with the City of Rotterdam, points out that the Netherlands’ nine largest city regions collaborate to develop and test approaches and technologies: ‘We learn from each other how to cope with these so-called smart city projects.’ Each city has adopted a policy area: Rotterdam is focused on climate adaptation; Amsterdam, circular economy; Eindhoven, low-carbon mobility and energy transition; and so on.

The national government has launched an Urban Agenda that calls for negotiating ‘city deals,’ many of which involve smart city projects that typically include multiple partners, such as research institutions. ‘Our approach is focused on the opportunity and finding everyone you need to get to a solution,’ says Urban Agenda program manager Frank Reniers. ‘You put them in a room and try to innovate your way out of the problem.’

The Netherlands wasn’t always so collaborative. According to Frank Kresin, dean of the Faculty of Digital Media and Creative Industry at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, Amsterdam in the late 2000s and early 2010s ‘was doing everything in its power to become “smart.”’ The city’s appetite for tech drove a great deal of private investment in automation and digitization.

But the infatuation with these corporate solutions, Kresin wrote in a 2016 study, ‘had some flaws,’ including the risk of excessive surveillance and an unquestioning embrace of the idea that the smart city was ‘a machine that needs to be optimized, with no consideration or understanding of the organic reality. It wants to maximize efficiency and avoid friction, so it simply and non-negotiably imposes topdown, non-transparent technological solutions.’

Kresin wasn’t the only one concerned about this drift. Beginning in the mid-2010s, citizen groups, entrepreneurs, and academic institutions pushed Dutch policy makers and companies to swap out the top-down approach in favour of a more grassroots philosophy that features extensive public engagement, citizen-science projects, and applied research.

‘The big threat is loss of autonomy,’ says Jan-Willem Wesselink of Future City Foundation, a Dutch network of municipal agencies, civil society organizations, universities, and technology companies seeking to promote a democratic approach to smart urbanism that aligns with a U.N. social development goal (#11) about resilient, sustainable, and inclusive cities. ‘Does Google or some other company decide how you use the city?’

Kresin describes one early effort at broadening the conversation. In 2014, Amsterdam Smart City, a tech incubator, distributed several hundred ‘smart citizen kits,’ which provided rudimentary sensors to allow people to perform environmental indicator tests on water and air quality around the city. Their findings were fed to the city. While the readings fell short of research-grade data, this experiment in citizen science attracted many participants, generated upbeat media coverage, and, in a few cases, led the city to clean up local beach areas.

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