The city of the future may end up looking less like Orbit City from “The Jetsons” and more like miles of asphalt and carefully coordinated traffic lights. That’s one takeaway from Peachtree Corners — a small city in the northern suburbs of Atlanta that’s making a name as one of the nation’s top testing grounds for shiny new smart city technology. Think fully autonomous public shuttles that talk to smart streetlights on the 5.9 GHz band. The nation’s first “Internet of Things” control room, where city managers handle all the data coming from their smart traffic cameras and other sensors. When the Biden administration issued American Rescue Plan Act grants for 2021, over $16 million went to Peachtree. The 45,000-person city is home to an unusual public innovation experiment. Peachtree Corners’ chief technology officer, who also happens to be the assistant city manager, runs an incubator called Curiosity Lab, which invites private firms to come test out their prototypes in a 500-acre public space called Technology Park Atlanta. The city, in theory, benefits from the new ideas and can even adopt them. Given the attention and concern around smart cities recently, I called Brandon Branham, who is both the city’s chief technology officer and its deputy city manager, to ask how the experiment has been going. What emerged is that Peachtree definitely is a lab — not just for building new things, but for navigating the modern politics of data privacy and AI safety. It’s the kind of place entrepreneurs and civic leaders will need to reckon with as they make their next round of high-tech promises. The city already has a long history of courting the future. Technology Park itself dates from the late 1960s, when it was established with the hope of keeping Georgia Tech graduates in Georgia by giving them stable jobs in high-tech industries. Today, more than 2000 businesses, primarily engineering, health-tech and IT firms, have a presence in or around Technology Park. Those ambitions are now reflected in the city that grew around it, a young community which has a higher percentage of foreign-born and non-citizen residents than the surrounding area. Now that Peachtree is a settled city, it’s facing the challenges of bringing “the future” to an existing population. A lot of the promise of smart cities depends on data collection and algorithmic use of that data, so citizens are understandably wary. Rather than just plowing forward with autonomous everything into “Jetsons”-world, this city is proceeding with a lot of caution. “There's a lot of fear under the unknown, and so we do educational classes for that,” said Branham. The Lab runs 5G education classes and has invited citizens to come ride the city’s autonomous shuttles to get them used to the concept. He’s also wary of making his citizens guinea pigs for, say, autonomous vehicles. “We are not going to be the first place that these technologies are deployed,” Branham was quick to assure me. Right now, Peachtree Corners has gone as far as any American city in integrating self-driving vehicles — but the city’s autonomous shuttles still run only in dedicated lanes. With a maximum of only 14,000 cars traversing the designated roadways in a given day, Branham markets Peachtree Corners as “that next step, before you get into a dense urban environment.” Any prototypes that come to Peachtree Corners will first be tested in a closed course environment, he said. As for data privacy, Branham says the city isn’t developing its own rules; its data handling complies with the strictest current federal standards for storing, processing, and transmitting unclassified citizen data, which includes scrubbing all personally identifiable information on residents. One of his biggest concerns isn’t wiring, or data, but housing. As more skilled workers arrive in Peachtree Corners, the city is keeping close tabs on its housing stock to meet rising demands at affordable costs. The city encourages developers to install IoT smart home devices like Nest cameras in newer residential developments, said Branham. That’s a lot of potential data for Curiosity Labs to explore — although Branham says Curiosity Lab is not currently collecting user data “below the level” of what is needed to determine “movement of vehicles” on roadways. Branham said he is aware of the “fine balance” between ensuring data privacy and having a better operational base to deploy citywide IoT technologies. All those ambitions require serious funds. Rep. Carolyn Bourdeaux (D-Ga.) helped Peachtree Corners secure some of that federal grant money. She sees potential for its ideas to spread regionally. “The autonomous vehicle driving track could actually be something that's replicated as a kind of micro transit for the small cities that dot my district.” she told me. Bordeaux’s advocacy highlights a rather important precondition of Peachtree Corners’ vision for a technological utopia — that small government actors with broad access to funding and public data will work in lockstep with their local community in service of some common good. That’s no small assumption. “You always need to have oversight, to make sure everything is being done well,” said Bourdeaux. “But also, I think it is a very different story when the innovation comes from the local level based on visions of what our communities can be.”
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