What does it mean to be a ‘smart city’?
It involves tech-driven innovation. But it also means listening to the people who make it a city in the first place.
By William Newlin
Sometimes Mina Sartipi sees drivers going the wrong way on Market Street. Other times, she’ll notice a blind left turn putting cars and pedestrians on a collision course. But one person’s observations — even an award-winning researcher and professor at UTC — aren’t enough to improve how traffic flows. Years of hard data, though, make a more informed argument.
“By observing and analyzing this 24/7, we would have actual numbers that show that this is what is happening,” she said. “And then we can look into it to see that, ‘OK, what are the things we can do to mitigate this situation?’”
That’s a job for the Center for Urban Informatics and Progress (CUIP), a research center at UTC directed by Sartipi. CUIP’s Smart Corridor on M.L.K. Boulevard has cataloged an archive of data since 2019 about street crossings, traffic patterns, and near-miss accidents.
Through a partnership with the City of Chattanooga, insights from the corridor have led to changes in traffic signal timing and new crosswalks where people need them.
The project illustrates the ethos behind “smart city” work happening in Chattanooga: broad cooperation that translates lab research into practical applications.
“I think that’s the big thing — using data in a way to prove something out before you go whole hog,” said Tyson Morris, the city’s chief information officer. “And then take that data say ‘Is this worth investing further?’”
Priorities
Sartipi and Morris are part of Chattanooga’s Smart Community Collaborative. Formed in 2019, it includes the city and county governments, UTC, EPB, the Erlanger Health System, and others organizations.
At monthly meetings, their representatives look at what research projects, and the grants making them possible, can solve Chattanooga-specific problems.
However, decision-makers overseeing smart city initiatives can have blindspots, said UTC sociology professor and CUIP faculty member Chandra Ward.
“There are a lot of assumptions embedded in smart city technologies, smart city projects that bypass what the end user actually wants and needs,” she said.
For example, designing a system for residents to call on-demand CARTA shuttles through an app can overlook public transit riders without smartphones.
More broadly, analyzing data on traffic patterns can seem out of touch to residents with basic concerns like affordable housing and sufficient computer access for kids in school, Ward said.
From Morris’ perspective, using technology to make the city’s Traffic and Public Works divisions more efficient doesn’t subtract resources from pressing social issues. Rather, it allows the city to make improvements that may go unnoticed — shorter commutes and safer intersections — while keeping pace with technological change.
“It's not to say that some of the work that we're doing when it comes to AI pothole detection is going to solve the homeless crisis,” Morris said. “But we have to start thinking about smart ways to do things.”
Privacy
Morris described the phrase “smart city” as a buzzword in line with smartphones and smart homes. And in the age of targeted advertisements and doorbell cameras, being “smart” can be associated with an invasion of privacy.
Since it began, the collaborative has focused on anonymity and privacy. Morris said it’s guided by an “ethical nature” of putting research and development to practical use.
“I'd be more worried about what Baskin-Robbins has on me than what the City of Chattanooga does,” he said. “They're trying to sell me something, right? I'm just trying to get you to work faster or have the air you breathe cleaner.”
Data privacy is central to the research at CUIP. Its algorithms learn from a live feed of information coming from cameras, air quality and audio sensors (which pick up sirens and gunshots), and lidar, a tool that bounces light off pedestrians and cars to create a digital rendering of the environment.
By feeding that information into a digital copy of Chattanooga’s streets, the data becomes anonymous with video-game-like “objects” representing people, cyclists, and vehicles.
“We can say that, ‘OK, so today this was the traffic sequence, this was the traffic flow,” Sartipi said. She added that given the privacy measures in place, details like the make and model of vehicles are unknown to researchers analyzing the data.
Except for periodic checks to make sure the digital version is matching up with real-time images, no camera footage is stored. And companies or other researchers who want to tap into the anonymized data stored at UTC have to sign strict use agreements.
When CUIP first developed its smart corridor, community meetings helped residents understand the purpose of data collection and the precautions in place to protect it.
Ward thinks consistent engagement is necessary to both demystify the work done by UTC and its partners and to give those who stand to gain from smart city initiatives a say in their development. She said the experiences, opinions, and concerns of Chattanoogans are a form of "living data" that can also make the city smarter.
“People oftentimes conflate smart cities with just the sort of abstract sensors and technologies that are way above anything that folks can comprehend,” Ward said. “But cities are people. A city does not exist without people.”
Editor’s note: Mina Sartipi is on the board of directors of The Enterprise Center, which is a founding member of the Smart Community Collaborative. Chattamatters is a program of The Enterprise Center.