This paper analyzes how smart city infrastructures are planned, implemented, and scaled, even when they fail. Understanding how these processes unfold is critical for technology researchers committed to creating equitable public infrastructures. In this paper, we focus on an urban smart mobility solution called FRED, put in place to increase connectivity within downtown San Diego. We analyze it through a decade of public meetings, contract renewals, planning documents, and media coverage. Our findings show that FRED’s intervention was a cover for scaling neoliberal transit privatization in San Diego. This is facilitated by the "charisma" of smart mobility technology – framed as clean and green, app-based, algorithmically optimized, and innovative – to upper-class actors like tech entrepreneurs, property developers, business leaders, and city officials. Reflecting on these insights, we explore alternative strategies that could have produced different outcomes and discuss how our case study informs new design sensibilities in civic contexts.

This paper describes how the contemporary technology innovation ecology is hostile to community-driven design. These hostilities are important to understand if we want to intervene in the policy landscape of technology innovation to support viable alternatives to big tech consolidation and more democratic ways of developing and maintaining technology. We contribute a thick description of the hostile ecologies faced by transportation workers, community organizers, and allied technology researchers as they work toward building a cooperatively-owned taxi business with a digital dispatching technology. Our findings show that the hostile innovation ecology manifests as constrained access to resources, an inequitable regulatory framework, diminished agency in the software design process, and limits to the will of our community partners. We discuss the paths toward innovation for United Taxi Workers San Diego as compared with transportation network companies (e.g. Lyft, Uber) in terms of access to funding, regulation, labor, expertise, and market. We argue that a critical examination of institutions and policies in the innovation ecology is a necessary step toward charting fair, equitable, and community-strengthening pathways for technology innovation in the future.