Cities and Technology: What Have We Learned?

By Greg Lindsay, February 15, 2025

This essay appears in the Lincoln Institute book City Tech: 20 Apps, Ideas, and Innovators Changing the Urban Landscape.

So, what have we learned? Because the conflicts and collaborations compiled in this book are a mere dress rehearsal for the next wave of disruptions poised to crash upon cities, led by AI and climate change (which are increasingly entwined). More important than the legacy of any single project contained within these pages are the overarching lessons ensuring we won’t get fooled again.

First, governments must build their capacity to assess, deploy, and regulate urban tech. They should become comfortable with forecasting the impacts of nascent technologies before they pose a problem—or potentially hold the solution to pressing needs. For example, consider the contrast between the way Uber and Lyft ran roughshod over regulators for more than a decade and cities’ far more proactive stance toward autonomous vehicles. Having internalized the former’s externalities through increased congestion, reduced transit ridership, and higher pedestrian fatalities, cities have rightly kept a tighter grip on the wheel this time around.

Demonstrating this kind of hard-won wisdom, New York City passed a law overseeing the use of AI in hiring decisions just months after the launch of ChatGPT. The mayors office quickly followed that by announcing a Department of Sustainable Delivery, which would be the first agency of its kind devoted to tackling the thorny issues raised by the skyrocketing number of e-bikes and e-commerce deliveries—including curb congestion and an epidemic of battery fires. But employers have overwhelmingly shirked the AI law, while even designated battery charging hubs have been fined for unsafe practices. There are still limits to what one city can do.

Which is why cities must work together to share tough lessons, find strength in numbers, and scale promising technologies. With more than 200 members in 40-plus states, Next Century Cities was a model for joint advocacy on behalf of public infrastructure. Over time it was joined by new peer networks such as the Open Mobility Foundation, an international city-led developer of open-source standards and software for managing vehicles and curbs. “You cannot negotiate with an Amazon or an Uber city by city,” former Paris Deputy Mayor Jean Louis Missika once told me. “You have to say the rules of the game are the same in Singapore and Paris.”

The only way for cities to set those rules is to invest in building digital infrastructure themselves. One reason Sidewalk Toronto’s cautionary tale still resonates is that the public-private partnership overseeing the project failed to define what it wanted from its Alphabet-backed vendor. While privacy concerns grabbed headlines, Waterfront Toronto’s dereliction of duty is more troubling. When public agencies lack technical sophistication, they risk ceding control of public assets and data to private companies, which may prioritize profitable enclaves over inclusive deployment. Building public-sector capacity is critical to ensuring urban tech innovations benefit all residents, not just a privileged few.

But it’s also essential to do so democratically, in conjunction with residents, and this is where public officials and agencies have repeatedly stumbled—whether folding in the face of implacable NIMBYs or failing to persuade marginalized communities their best intentions aren’t stalking horses for gentrification. CoUrbanize and pandemic-era virtual planning meetings hinted at the potential for new forms of cocreation, now being realized through generative AI tools such as UrbanistAI and Betterstreets.ai, which enable nonexperts to visualize exactly (more or less) what they want. Whether the matter at hand is new bus routes or bike lanes or berms against flooding, assuring public buy-in is crucial to meeting cities’ climate goals in time for them to matter.

If the last decade of urban tech has been a dress rehearsal, then the curtain is now rising on the most momentous decade of change most cities have ever had to face. “Technology is the answer, but what was the question?” the British architect Cedric Price famously asked. Finally it is our turn to formulate what we demand from our technologies, versus the other way around.

 


 

Greg Lindsay is a nonresident senior fellow of MIT’s Future Urban Collectives lab, Arizona State University’s Threatcasting Lab, and the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Strategy Initiative. He was the founding chief communications officer of AlphaGeo and remains a senior advisor. Most recently, he was a 2022–2023 urban tech fellow at Cornell Tech’s Jacobs Institute, where he explored the implications of AI and AR at urban scale.

Lead image: A fleet of electric buses waits to be exported from China to Chile. Credit: Yutong Bus Co., Ltd.