Our inter-city streets are on the cusp of transition into a digitalised landscape of augmented reality, robotic service and surveillance, AI, autonomy, big data, and ‘everything’ recognition.

But will this deliver us the secure, healthy, and socially connected societies that we crave so much? or a technocratic fusion of something between Blade Runner and Roger Rabbit’s Toon Town?

And who or what are the drivers behind this transition, and where do their priorities lie?

There is no reason to doubt that things will be any different from what we have seen for the last century. The corporate world driving change for the advancement of consumerism, with a priority to get people back spending money in the streets, with the next wave of interactive commercialisation to reactivate our COVID and online shopping devastated commercial districts.

And the government, with weight from their corporate sponsors, doing their part to clear the path for big business to develop their real asset sales funnels, will take advantage of this distraction to consolidate control on the population through fear-mongering, legislative changes, and advanced security measures in these new-newer unprecedented times.

So who’s keeping watch on the people keeping watch, as we navigate into this, multi-layered reality? Well… us, I guess.

Social Capital has seen as meteoric a rise in value in recent times as data has had its triumph over oil. This was evident in the collapse of Alphabet’s (the parent company of Google) Sidewalk Labs smart city development proposal for 12 acres of waterfront property in Toronto.

The pushback from every layer of society, and even government, on the perceived development, in regards to trust and transparency, was fierce, and the US tech giants had little understanding of the value of social capital for the project.

So who’s doing it well then? I would say the city-state of Singapore, but there are much finer socio-political and economic reasons why this model would not be suitable to scale from here.

Singapore has Autonomous vehicles in the streets, along with, comparatively, a very large population of service and surveillance robots including quad-copter police drones. They have whole neighborhoods which are equipped with smart sensors to help enable their ‘smart-enabled home’ initiative, which combined with ‘smart streets’ infrastructure, has pushed them to the top of the world's smartest cities lists.

Back to Australia though, do we have enough confidence in the combination of our public and private sector to develop a sustainable and equitable digitalised built environment for the benefit of people and country? Erm… probably not. This is reflected by the fact we need handfuls of sustainability and human health standards for built form to set THE standard for the industry and the government to change building legislation in the first place.

From Green Star to Living Futures, Passive House, Well AP, and ISCA for infrastructure sustainability, it seems that without the independent frameworks and standards that protect us, our planet, and the future of our societies, we would be sold off to the cheapest bidder.

And remember that all these frameworks are propped up and supported by social capital.

So where is our protection from the next mega-trend to hit an inter-city street near you?

The Sustainable Digitalisation Project, https://www.sdp.digital/, has released its Draft Principles Working Paper, which outlines 5 Principles that serve as an overarching framework and definition for sustainable digitalisation in the built environment, with much more to come.

The SDP is hugely supported by industry bodies including some of the most reputable sustainable standards in the market today, and for good reason.

It addresses one of the fundamentally most important issues that we as a society face as we transition into the 4th industrial revolution… What provisions do we need in place, to live, work, survive and prosper, through the digitalisation of our built world?