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Emily Royall, Smart City Administrator, Office of Innovation, City of San Antonio, USA
As San Antonio creates a city for the future, it has to think outside the “black box” of technology.
On a sweltering June day, a charter bus pulled up to a historic building in downtown San Antonio, Texas. About 20 senior citizens stepped off the bus, jittery with excitement and curiosity. The group moved energetically up the stairs and through the elevators to reach the second floor. Event organizers were just barely putting together final touches on audio visuals, fliers, and displays. The group burst onto the floor, apologizing for arriving early. They had organized a charter bus to pick them up from the senior center, but the bus arrived earlier than planned. It was probably for the best, one senior joked, as they would need a little extra time to make sense of what a “smart city” was.
San Antonio is the 7th largest city in the U.S., and the fastest-growing, adding 22,000 new residents last year. But it also faces some of the greatest public health and income disparities in the United States. In 2022, San Antonio became America’s most impoverished major city, according to the U.S. Census Bureau: 15.7% of residents in Bexar County, where San Antonio is located, experience poverty, a percentage higher than both the state and national average. Public health issues also poses significant challenges, with higher-than-average rates of obesity and diabetes.
For all these reasons, San Antonio needed a smart city vision that was responsive to the needs of our residents.
Who can you trust?
Sometimes seen as a euphemism for surveillance capitalism, the term "smart cities" was used in a 2008 IBM branding campaign to describe the development of sensor technology for the public sector. Since the inception of the smart cities movement in 2010, governments around the world have shown mixed results in their ability to balance digital transformation with public values such as human rights and privacy.
Sidewalk Labs’ infamous Quayside project, a planned waterside development in Toronto, Canada, met public backlash when it failed to address citizens’ concerns about ubiquitous data collection. In San Diego, a US$30 million project drew ire over concerns about police access to camera data on smart streetlights, leading the former Mayor to pause the installation of 3,200 lights until an ordinance was in place governing their use. The growing number of such failures led the MIT Technology Review to publish an edition devoted to “the death of the smart city” in 2022.
Americans’ growing lack of trust in government stems in part from the failure of our bureaucracies to adapt to a digital environment and to demonstrate how investing in technology can improve government operations – and, in turn, the lives of everyday people. The challenge for San Antonio was to establish a smart cities program that realized the public’s vision and met their needs.
Working with my team to build San Antonio’s Smarter Together initiative has shaped my perspective on what a “people-centered” smart city actually is: one that integrates residents into the process of digital transformation, breaks siloes within government to achieve results, and effectively uses tools like procurement to bake public values into technology investments.
Smarter Together: integrating residents into digital transformation
Local authorities are center stage in the messy business of democracy, balancing complex state regulations and local ordinances with accountable stewardship of public funds and the political winds of city council. When it comes to technology, most cities don’t build new tools; instead, they buy them from a handful of big technology companies. For that reason, how to spend a city’s limited tax dollars should be a community conversation.
Starting such conversations requires a hands-on approach.
In Long Beach, California, for example, the Pitch Long Beach program lets residents co-design smart city projects directly within their neighborhoods.
In Europe, the city of Paris has started experimenting with Civic Assemblies, where residents, chosen through a lottery, participate in technology policy-making and, in exchange, receive a credential with genuine market value. Additionally, Helpful Places, founded by a former Sidewalk Labs employee, is increasing the transparency of smart city tech in public spaces by standardizing public signage to let people know when technology is being used nearby.
In San Antonio, we spent nearly a year on community engagement for our smart city framework. Our team distributed paper surveys, met with residents at libraries and senior centers, and participated in dozens of community events. We received thousands of survey responses and incorporated them into a Community Story Map that illustrates residents’ perspectives on the roles they want technology to play in their daily lives.
We also interviewed city staff and frontline workers about the challenges they faced in using technology to improve public services. The collective responses resulted in a set of guiding principles and “challenge areas” that define every project we embark on under our Smarter Together initiative.
In addition to employing a community-driven framework to steer San Antonio's technology investments, we regard the public as active collaborators and creators, not merely consumers of technology. Our program, SmartSA Sandbox, functions as a platform to enhance the digital skills of both the current and future workforce. During this annual event, we collaborate with more 25 local STEM-based community organizations that offer free educational programming for the city’s youth. We also gather user feedback on smart city technologies from adults, who can enroll in public initiatives like the Affordable Connectivity Program. Each year, this event attracts more than 500 adults and children.
Smart Cities as a Service: breaking down silos for strategic collaboration
Building trust in government involves not only engaging residents in innovative ways but also accomplishing a set of objectives. This can be particularly challenging in government, owing to strict procurement laws, policy conflicts among legal, procurement, and finance teams, and a culture that often prioritizes risk reduction over innovation.
To make smart cities work, a governance model supported by champions from across the organization is essential. Last year, San Antonio launched its "Smart Cities as a Service" model, which unites innovators from the procurement, legal, finance, IT, Diversity Equity Inclusion & Accessibility (DEIA), and sustainability departments. This team collaboratively reviews, refines, and approves smart city projects. Instead of allocating millions of dollars to major initiatives, we manage a modest fund that supports approximately 10-15 prototypes annually. To combat "pilot fatigue," we clearly define project KPIs and integrate them into the organization’s IT and procurement workflows, setting the stage for competitive bidding if a prototype proves successful.
The implementation of Smart Cities as a Service has garnered widespread support across departments, accelerated the scaling of emerging technology projects; and it has equipped the organization with tools to evaluate and inform policy on new technologies. This approach has effectively integrated the Smart Cities program into San Antonio's operational framework.
Prying open the black box
In my shop, when our department is being upsold technology features that don’t actually address our business case, we say “Technology is looking for a problem to solve.” The procurement team plays a crucial role in steering us away from irrelevant tech solutions.
It also helps define, in contractual terms, public values such as transparency, accountability, and fairness, thereby helping ensure that such values are “baked into” any technology used by the city.
Most cities want access to leading-edge tech promising to boost efficiency and produce other positive outcomes. As a result, they often agree to contract terms that limit their control of the technology they license or buy from a vendor. Reasons for this include a lack of expertise, limited resources, laws favoring the private sector, and insufficient market leverage.
The unfortunate consequence is that smart city technology becomes a “black box” whose insides are invisible to the buyer. This can prevent cities from doing three key things they really should be doing:
Ultimately, “black box” contracts and their attendant shortcomings lead to an increased privatization of public services and a diminished ability for city governments to maintain transparency, accountability, and fairness.
Recognizing these issues, municipal governments have begun seeing the value of collaboration in shaping policy and procurement practices – especially when it comes to the use of artificial intelligence. In 2023, San Antonio joined eight lead agencies to establish the GovAI coalition, a group that aims to amplify local government influence on the future development of AI, and ensure that it benefits society as a whole.
The GovAI Coalition has expanded rapidly and now includes 600 public servants representing over 150 million people in more than 250 local, county, and state governments across the U.S. This coordinated effort showcases a proactive approach to overcoming the longstanding barriers that have hindered or blocked innovative digital transformation in the public sector.
A future centered on people
The enthusiastic participation of the seniors in our "Smarter Together" launch showed the initiative’s relevance and accessibility, and achieved a degree of resident engagement that my team strives for. Building a smart cities program that is “people-centered” is ultimately an exercise in breaking down barriers that block public access to decision-making about technology, thwart interdepartmental collaboration, and keep people from regaining autonomy in the digital marketplace.
As we advance, San Antonio remains committed to a smart city model that is inclusive, transparent, and beneficial, ensuring that all community members, particularly the most vulnerable, can enjoy the fruits of technological progress.
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