America’s ‘Smart City’ Didn’t Get Much Smarter

In 2016 Columbus, OH beat out 77 other small and midsize US cities for a pot of $50 million that was meant to reshape its future. The Department of Transportation’s Smart City Challenge was the first competition of its kind, conceived as a down payment to jump-start one city’s adaptation to the new technologies that were suddenly everywhere. Five years later, the Smart City Challenge is over, but the revolution never arrived. According to the project’s final report, the pandemic hit just as some projects were getting off the ground. The discrepancy between the promise of whiz-bang technology and the reality in Columbus points to a shift away from tech as a silver bullet, and a newer wariness of the troubles that web-based applications can bring. Still, Columbus officials insist the Smart City project was not a failure, and want to rethink the initiative and its goals. Five of the eight launched Smart City projects will continue, including a citywide “operating system” to share data between government and private entities, the smart kiosks, and the parking and trip-planning apps. Smart Columbus will also focus on providing broadband access to all of its residents who lack it—a gap that officials say became even more problematic during the pandemic.