Who Gets Left Behind in the Push for Smart Cities? Insights from Marginalized Communities

Smart cities take advantage of advances in ubiquitous computing and big data analytics to build and deploy technologies that increase efficiency and sustainability. However, benefits derived from smart cities are not equally distributed. In this paper, we consider how smart city initiatives can better serve and engage marginalized communities through a focus on the city of Baltimore, MD. Through focus groups with 43 Black Baltimore residents living in low-income neighborhoods, we identify key barriers they perceive to being more engaged in and trusting of smart city initiatives, as well as important disconnects between residents’ needs and the city’s solutions. Based on these findings, we make the case for cities to more deeply engage these communities in smart city initiatives, as many technologies are not designed with their unique needs in mind, and they are the most likely to experience harms from surveillance technologies that collect large quantities of data and build predictive models used by cities.