Sidewalk Toronto. Masdar City. Songdo. There have been so many smart cities that have been scrapped or have failed to live up to their expectations. Making a viable city, smart or not, has proven to be much harder than planners expect. But that doesn’t stop them from trying. There are several large smart city projects underway right now, including Neom in Saudi Arabia, Telosa in the U.S., and “The Woven City” in Japan.
These cities are all being built in remote regions, where land is cheap, and municipal governments are easy to persuade. This might prove to be their undoing. Cities generally grow organically thanks to their geography, so getting people to move to the middle of nowhere for the promise of better infrastructure is usually not enough.
That is where Chinese tech giant Tencent’s proposal for their “Net City” project in Shenzhen stands out. It is set to be located adjacent to a densely populated residential area and close to the city’s airport. It will also be able to provide plenty of jobs, another shortcoming of many smart cities since Tencent’s giant new headquarters, which just got revealed this week, will be built in the middle of it.
Tencent’s plans call for the city to be more urban than other tech campuses and more connected to its surroundings than other smart cities. This is similar to what Sidewalk was trying to do with their Toronto project, but China’s authoritarian, pro-development government will put up much less resistance than Sidewalk faced. A sticking point for the Toronto residents, and what might have caused the project to be canceled, was what the development’s parent company, Alphabet, was going to do with the public data that gets collected. China is already the most surveilled country in the world, so even if residents have reservations about data collection, it won’t matter much to those in charge of planning.
I am of the opinion that most smart cities are destined to fail. No matter how much technology you put into a city, it won’t magically make it a place where people want to live. But Tencent’s Net City seems to be much more practical than most, and with the Chinese communist party behind it, I think that they might just pull it off. Granted, the rest of the world might not be able to replicate what China can do when it comes to urban development, but it will be nice to see a rare mark in the win column for cities built around technology.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Franco Faraudo
Quelle/Source: propmodo, 07.12.2023
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