This year, our family summer vacation took us to Guangzhou (GZ), my spouse's hometown and the manufacturing capital of the world. Compared to Shenzhen or Hong Kong, it's an older city; most of its growth in industry and population occurred back in the 1950s. We walked down streets where old factories sat alongside contemporary skyscrapers, and mixed-use qilou buildings squeezed up against modern apartment complexes. I found a Huawei store, showcasing their latest EVs, two blocks away from the 80-year-old dim sum restaurant where we were enjoying brunch.
Beyond the imposing urban skyline or the robots skittering around food courts, the most striking novelty of my visit was navigating the hive of scooters that constantly buzzed alongside cars and pedestrians. Now, scooters are a common sight in Asia, but other cities like Taipei redesigned their roads to include mopeds as formal traffic. GZ takes a more laissez-faire approach: humans and e-bikes and cars all route and weave in and around each other, and with minimal dedicated infrastructure, the ubiquitous bikes crowd onto every open piece of asphalt. It all kinda works, although I witnessed my fair share of near-misses in my week's travel.
This dense web of transportation supports the world's largest dispatch network. As my cousin-in-law explained to me, e-commerce and near-instantaneous deliveries are just a fact of life in modern China; the shopping app Taobao alone serves nearly a billion users in the country. To make deliveries work at this scale, Meituan, one of the major players, employs over 3 million couriers, criss-crossing streets and neighborhoods to get hot food to doorsteps[1] within 30 minutes.
This is the smart city realized.
Granted, this doesn't sound like the vision that was long promised in science fiction stories. Scooter swarms are a poor substitute for multilevel hovercar freeways, and simple billboards refuse to be replaced by neon holograms. People have imagined the possibility of drone deliveries for years, but even with drone tech maturing over a decade's time, the logistical challenges keep stalling progress. When they make the news, it's for the wrong reasons.
The biggest and flashiest instance of failed fantastical futurism is the Saudi Arabian megaproject NEOM. When the kingdom announced its intentions to build multiple cities and resorts in the middle of the desert, it sold its vision of modernity, enabled by civil engineering and financing at a ludicrous scale. There was the luxury ski resort, in a place that saw no natural snow at any time of the year; the manmade mansion islands that would require years of rigorous terraforming; and most famously, the baffling linear city buttressed with mirrored walls.
This project felt so over-the-top that it became a self-parody of the idea of smart cities. While they did eventually break ground on these sites, construction seems to have halted within a few years; with the expected costs expanding tenfold, investments have redirected toward other pieces of globalized infrastructure, i.e., data centers. Sure, 3D renders of megayachts docking in a floating, elevated port look much cooler than a hundred e-bikes idling at a busy intersection, but that latter vision already exists—deeply integrated into the ecosystem of Chinese cities.
Beyond the disappointment of seeing dingy mopeds instead of sleek robotic couriers, there is also the human cost of convenience that, upon inspection, feels a bit dystopian. I've been reading a memoir, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, written by such a worker in China who spent his 20s hopping between low-paying jobs. He recalls the workplace dynamics: the types of workers who stay or leave, the various abuses heaped upon the lowest rungs of the gig economy, and how the workers themselves manage their own mentalities through the grind. At one point, he looks wistfully through apartment windows at people sprawled on the couch in the evening, after a hard day's work, pining for that same sense of satisfaction as he knows there's at least two more hours of deliveries before he can return back to the warehouse, and then another hour of listening to his boss lecture on team performance before crashing out at midnight.
This is how smart cities will actually evolve—fewer headlines and press releases, but instead, quiet integration into the fabric of the populace. Just as Waymo's autonomous cars normalized after years of service in the Bay Area, the sea of Meituan helmets on the street acclimated into the scenery: initially a novelty, but soon thereafter just an obstacle course to navigate.
We spent a week in Guangzhou and another week in Hong Kong before coming back stateside, and through the summer, I've been reflecting on the lifestyle differences between home and abroad. Here, we tried micromobility with on-demand e-bike rentals, but momentum stalled post-COVID, even in sunny California; now there are just these rusting bikes and scooters thrown onto sidewalks in my town. There's Uber Eats, but despite the pricier menu items and extractive tipping requirements, I find it faster to pick up orders myself than wait for a driver to drop it off. The robotic barista at SFO is out of order every time I walk by.
So perhaps the secret to the smart city is all the invisible people underneath.
This is even more impressive when you consider that most people live in high-rise apartment buildings, and couriers are expected to leave their packages at the front door of the actual unit. ↩︎
