The Smart City Sandbox: Playground or Pitfall?

By Chelsea McCullough (Collier)

November 22, 2024

Cities are a complex amalgamation of people, infrastructures, and systems. The concept of a smart city is ideally an attempt to better understand residents’ needs and wants by gaining knowledge about urban infrastructures and systems through data and technology. Designing, testing, and implementing smart city technologies is fraught with challenges such as bureaucratic government processes that run counter to innovative, entrepreneurial approaches. In attempts to accelerate creative solutions, city leaders are experimenting with the concept of a sandbox. 

While there is not an official or widely accepted definition of a sandbox, a query on ChatGPT (OpenAI, 2024) reveals a strikingly accurate summary:  

A **Smart City Sandbox** is a controlled, experimental environment where new technologies, solutions, and innovations related to urban development and management can be tested and refined before being deployed on a larger scale. The concept of a “sandbox” allows municipalities, companies, startups, or governments to explore and pilot new ideas without the risks associated with full-scale implementation.

Key features of a **Smart City Sandbox** include:

1. **Testing and Innovation:** It provides a space for testing advanced technologies such as IoT (Internet of Things), AI (Artificial Intelligence), renewable energy systems, smart infrastructure, and data analytics to address urban challenges like traffic management, waste management, energy efficiency, and public safety.

2. **Collaboration:** It encourages collaboration among various stakeholders, including local governments, private companies, academic institutions, and citizens. This fosters the development of solutions that are more aligned with real-world needs and practical constraints.

3. **Data Collection:** The sandbox generates real-time data on the effectiveness of various smart city technologies, which can be used for further research, policy decisions, and scaling up successful initiatives.

4. **Regulatory Testing:** Regulatory frameworks for emerging technologies can be tested in the sandbox, ensuring that solutions comply with legal and ethical standards before being implemented citywide.

5. **Risk Mitigation:** By piloting projects in a sandbox environment, cities can mitigate the risks of failure and avoid large-scale disruption, ensuring that technologies are viable and effective before widespread adoption.

6. **Public Engagement:** In some cases, smart city sandboxes involve local residents and community members, allowing them to provide feedback and participate in the development of the technologies that will affect their lives.

**Examples** of smart city sandbox initiatives include testing autonomous vehicles, smart lighting systems, energy-efficient buildings, and traffic management systems in specific districts or neighborhoods before broader application.

Not surprisingly, ChatGPT prioritizes technology as the leading (#1), and therefore defining, feature of the Smart City Sandbox. The elevation of technology over people is a serious problem and hindrance of both smart cities and its resulting sandbox. 

Each of these features has the potential to both create interesting new approaches to urban challenges, but in the rush to create new solutions, it is first most important to define the challenges. We must first invest time and attention to understand how people experience their city, and not just from the perspective of a select and privileged group of stakeholders, but for all residents and their unique lived experience. 

Flipping the order of prioritization for the Smart City Sandbox would mean public engagement comes first followed by collaboration with a wide range of stakeholders (including residents). The work to identify, understand, and incentivize a diverse group of people is arduous and time-intensive work. Often this is deprioritized and rushed. Only then from deliberation and shared agreement on a set of the values, goals, and objectives can the other aspects of the sandbox emerge. Only then can features such as “testing and innovation”, “data collection”, “regulatory testing” and “risk mitigation” move forward. Even then, each of these require constant reconsideration and re-evaluation with the goal of creating alternative, inclusive solutions that address real urban issues (and some of these solutions may not involve technology!)

An example of a well-concepted and designed Smart City Sandbox is the SmartSA Sandbox in the City of San Antonio, Texas. The purpose of the SmartSA Sandbox is to create a “festival-style event that is an interactive space for residents.” SmartSA lists the following activities:

  • Get informed about SmartSA, smart cities, and the pilot projects upcoming or underway in their Innovation Zone, and how they can continue to be involved,
  • Imagine, explore, and question the role new technologies play in San Antonio neighborhoods,
  • Discover connections between smart city technologies and data by providing hands-on activities involving pilot technologies,
  • Explore local innovation featuring innovative programs, services and opportunities offered by partners in each Innovation Zone,
  • Identify new opportunities for future SmartSA pilot projects.

This video provides additional information. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzyxBinyoAQ)

From 2019 – 2023, more than 50 community stakeholders and organizations collaborated to produce events that attracted more than 2,500 residents, including children. Although the program concluded after a department reorganization, the City’s Information & Technology Services Department (ITSD) remains committed to the principles of resident-centric city decision making.

Like all smart city initiatives and technology, the framework can be used to create a negative or positive impact. The nefarious use of a smart city sandbox is to skirt responsible oversight and regulation to prioritize industry’s technical products and services. The potentially positive use of a sandbox is to invite new perspectives to consider urban challenges, encourage creative and interesting approaches, and ethically examine and test solutions in a safe and transparent environment where all stakeholders can provide their input. 

Please share your feedback, ideas, critique of the perspectives shared in this article and/or examples of smart city sandboxes!

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