Thanks! I haven’t seen any really effective proven examples of CE at the city scale either - just theoretical plans so far, but it’s good to see some movement in this direction. I just had a look through the examples you mentioned - some promising ideas, though I’m very sceptical of the centralized ‘smart city’ approach and would find a peer-to-peer, more citizen-focused architecture much more empowering, sustainable and effective.
The data gathered in a Siemens/Cisco/Microsoft smart city may help us along the path to a circular economy, but we need to be wary of what data is being gathered, who owns it and how it is being / can be used. As it is, the excellent goals of sustainability, improved cycleways, waste management, resource efficiency etc obscure the nastier side of the ‘smart city’ which inevitably gets rolled into it. Glasgow’s surveillance panopticon (sorry, world-class public safety Operations Centre) is particularly frightening in its ‘proactive, not reactive’ approach to surveillance - while it may be ostensibly designed to reduce violent crime, the aggregation of CCTV footage with behavioural data is also an excellent tool for identifying any other form of ‘outlier’ by algorithmically profiling people, resulting in chilling effects on behaviour, and (actively or passively) reducing dissent and exerting further control over the citizens.
Another issue is the misuse/misunderstanding around ‘open’ - I see Glasgow uses their own custom ‘open’ license for its data, rather than an established standard open data license like CC-BY. This is always a red flag indicating that there’s probably openwashing going on. Sure enough, this license makes their ‘open’ data incompatible with existing open source / open data projects as it contains the clause ‘You must not use any of the Information for an illegal or immoral purpose’ which sounds lovely, but actually renders it unusable for many perfectly moral uses (see this earlier discussion). Anyway, if you want to use data for an illegal purpose, why on earth would infringing a copyright license make you change your mind?
I feel that the top-down smart city approach has many of the same problems as the top-down circular economy approach - it glorifies technology in a remarkably uncritical way, and its design renders individual citizens passive ‘consumers’ of goods, services and information, leaving all agency, responsibilty and control in the hands of established players.
