Nowadays when we talk about the smart city we don’t necessarily talk about smartness or cities.
I feel like when the term is used it often obscures more than it reveals.
Here a few reasons why.
To begin with, the term suggests something that is yet to arrive. Some kind of tech-enabled utopia. But actually, current day cities are already smart to a greater or lesser degree depending on where and how you look.
This is important because too often we postpone action as we wait for the smart city to arrive. We don’t have to wait. We can act to improve things right now.
Furthermore, ‘smart city’ suggests something monolithic that can be designed as a whole. But a smart city, like any city, is a huge mess of interconnected things. It resists topdown design.
History is littered with failed attempts at authoritarian high-modernist city design. Just stop it.
Smartness should not be an end but a means.
I read ‘smart’ as a shorthand for ‘technologically augmented’. A smart city is a city eaten by software. All cities are being eaten (or have been eaten) by software to a greater or lesser extent. Uber and Airbnb are obvious examples. Smaller more subtle ones abound.
The question is, smart to what end? Efficiency? Legibility? Controllability? Anti-fragility? Playability? Liveability? Sustainability? The answer depends on your outlook.
These are ways in which the smart city label obscures. It obscures agency. It obscures networks. It obscures intent.
I’m not saying don’t ever use it. But in many cases you can get by without it. You can talk about specific parts that make up the whole of a city, specific technologies and specific aims.
Postscript 1
We can do the same exercise with the ‘city’ part of the meme.
The same process that is making cities smart (software eating the world) is also making everything else smart. Smart towns. Smart countrysides. The ends are different. The networks are different. The processes play out in different ways.
It’s okay to think about cities but don’t think they have a monopoly on ‘disruption’.
Postscript 2
Some of this inspired by clever things I heard Sebastian Quack say at Playful Design for Smart Cities and Usman Haque at ThingsCon Amsterdam.