Smart city
The smart city is the promise of running the city with sensors, data and algorithms: adaptive traffic lights, bins that call for collection, platforms that integrate services. It was born as a product of large technology firms around 2010 and has moved from efficiency utopia to object of critique for surveillance, dependency and depoliticisation.
Ben Green proposed in The Smart Enough City (2019) that technology solve problems defined by politics and not the other way round; Rob Kitchin analyses how data redefine what a city can know about itself. The collapse of the Sidewalk Labs project in Toronto (2020) marked the end of the first wave.
Videos on this term (7)
- Urban AI
William J. Mitchell: The Future City, Information and Connection
William J. Mitchell anticipated in City of Bits, e-topia and Me++ the hybrid city of matter and information: the…
William J. Mitchell 3 min read - Public space
Richard Sennett's Open City: Open or Close the Public Space?
Richard Sennett defends the open city, designed for encounters with strangers, against closed enclosures. Ville and…
Richard Sennett 3 min read - Urban AI
Who Controls the City When Software Is Privately Owned?
When a company operates a city's sensors and algorithms, the vendor governs: lock-in, algorithmic opacity, the…
3 min read - Urban geopolitics
Who Experiments in Our Cities? Pilots and Risk in the Global South
Experimental urbanism tests the cities of the future in the Global South, from Eko Atlantic to India's smart cities…
3 min read - Urban ecology
Smart for Whom? The Other Side of Smart City Rankings
Smart city rankings do not describe the city but define it: what they measure, what they omit, how weighting…
3 min read - Urban AI
Technopolitics and Urban Governance per Kitchin and Jasanoff
Urban technopolitics decides who owns a city's data and which algorithms govern. What Rob Kitchin and Sheila…
3 min read - Urban AI
The Right to the Smart City: Who Benefits from Digital Cities?
The Right to the Smart City, edited by Cardullo, Di Feliciantonio and Kitchin, carries Lefebvre's right to the city…
3 min read
