There is nothing new about trying to use internet-era technologies to make the world’s cities function better. But Google’s emergence on the scene — with a declared goal of making life better for billions of people — has brought new attention to a field that most experts say has been slow to deliver on its promises.

The internet search company’s announcement that it had set up a division to develop “urban technologies” came with characteristic audacity. Under Dan Doctoroff, a former deputy mayor of New York City and chief executive of media group Bloomberg, the division will work on ideas that affect sweeping issues such as “cost of living, efficient transportation and energy usage” for many of the world’s city dwellers, according to Larry Page, chief executive.

The grandness of the ambition provoked a reaction that has become familiar with Google’s increasingly frequent forays into sweeping new areas of economic and social life. As one expert in the field — and self-professed fan of the company’s efforts — says: “You can’t help feeling there’s a lot of hubris.”

The initiative, called Sidewalk Labs, is shaping up to be different from much of the work that has been done by technology companies to create so-called smart cities. Doctoroff wants to assemble small teams of experts to brainstorm ideas and launch experimental projects that have the potential to catch on virally with large numbers of city dwellers, according to Carlo Ratti, an expert on cities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has been contacted by Google.

This kind of “bottom-up” approach has the potential to bring rapid change at low cost, he says — in contrast to the more centralised, “top-down” tech projects that cities have used in the past to reduce costs or improve the delivery of their services.

Google is far from being from the first technology company to see the huge potential market around smart cities. “I think they’re a little late — IBM and others have marketed this idea for some time,” says Ryan Chin, head of an initiative at MIT’s Media Lab.

Much of the work has been focused on getting more value out of a city’s assets by optimising their use, or on bringing greater efficiency to capacity planning for future investments, says Michael Dixon, general manager of IBM’s initiative in the area.

Yet it has taken time to get results. “It’s definitely been slower than people wanted,” says Ruthbea Yesner Clarke, an analyst at IDC, the research firm.

Part of the reason, she says, is that the first wave of smart city technology coincided with a downturn that left many cities short of cash to back new projects.

Sheer complexity has also played a part. Projects often rely on a range of technologies, from using “internet of things” products such as sensors to gather and analyse massive amounts of data, to open databases of civic information. In densely populated places, projects that lead to changes in behaviour, such as new transport arrangements, also have unexpected knock-on effects in other areas.

If change is in the air, it owes a lot to a deeper knowledge of how life works inside the world’s biggest cities, according to experts. “We’ve crossed a threshold in that there is a lot of data out there and it continues to grow exponentially,” says Steve Koonin, head of a cities project at New York University who is among the people Doctoroff has assembled to work on advisory boards for Sidewalk.

It also reflects a belief that pervasive new technologies such as smartphones and the cloud have laid a foundation for disruptive change. Ride-hailing service Uber has become a widely touted model for bottom-up change: by making car services cheaper and more convenient it could reduce the incentives for car ownership, with significant impacts on the way cities operate.

With its history of collecting and crunching large amounts of data, Google should be particularly suited to this field, says Koonin — though this is likely to stir the privacy concerns that often accompany its most ambitious new projects.

Google has other assets that it could bring to bear on its urban ambitions: driverless cars, the Nest “smart homes” division which makes thermostats and smoke alarms, the Waze app for tracking traffic congestion, even the local broadband networks it is building in a number of US cities. These are all part of a broad technology platform that could be applied, says Clarke.

But to have an effect in such a vast and complex field, the company will also have to find new forms of leverage. That might include “accessing government data that isn’t open yet”, or trying to own “a particular piece of infrastructure, particularly data infrastructure” that would give it influence, says Koonin

For Page, Sidewalk Labs could also address issues close to home. With the technology industry booming, a lack of affordable housing has become one of San Francisco’s biggest problems, says Chin. Google’s private bus system to ferry its employees from the city to its offices in Silicon Valley has become a symbol of rising inequality and “created a lot of anxiety”, he adds.

These issues have been on Page’s mind. In an interview with the Financial Times last year, he said it should be possible to achieve radical reductions in house prices in Silicon Valley. New types of building material and structure are among the issues on which Sidewalk will be focused, according to a person familiar with its plans.

With Google investors becoming restless at the company’s spending on long-term projects, Page said it had made only a “relatively modest investment” in its urban technology division, without revealing specific details. To have the kind of broad impact he hopes for, the company will either have to spend a lot more — or persuade a broad array of other companies and civic organisations that its vision for better urban living is worth backing.

— Financial Times