Smart cities, like many things, took a beating in 2020. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, pulled its Sidewalk Labs subsidiary out of a smart-city project in Toronto. Cisco killed its plans to sell smart-city technology. And in many places, city budgets will be affected for years to come by the pandemic’s economic shock, making it more difficult to justify smart-city expenses.
That said, the pandemic also provided municipalities around the world with reason to invest new technologies for public transportation, contact tracing, and enforcing social distancing. In a way, the present moment is an ideal time for a new understanding of smart-city infrastructure and a new way of paying for it.
+INFO: IEEE Spectrum
