What Is a Smart City? #192 (P)

...and is it a good thing?

From waste water treatment to synchronised traffic lights, the idea of smart infrastructure is not new. Still, it’s difficult to define what makes a city smart, and it’s even harder to tell whether the move towards smart cities will be beneficial to all or not.

Dear friends of Daily Philosophy,

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In the previous post in this series, we had a look at the various ways human societies relate to nature. If you missed it, that post is right here:

Wilderness and Civilisation #189 (P)

In our series on the future of mankind, we talked previously about humanity’s attempts to colonise the oceans, and we will be returning to space exploration later. But since we touched upon city building and city governance already, let’s just have another look at where cities are going and what city life might be in the near (and not so near) future.

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Sorry about that and thanks!

Defining “smart”

Smart cities are everywhere nowadays... but they are not quite as new as one might think.

If we consider “smart” to mean something like “technologically augmented,” then of course every city is smart. Cities are in their very essence technological products. Streets and means of transport are technologies, as are water and food distribution, waste collection and disposal systems. Modern cities also incorporate power generation and distribution and many types of communication infrastructure: from post offices to telephone networks to glass fibre cabling. A city cannot exist without technology. So when we call a city “smart,” something else, something beyond a basic technological infrastructure, must be meant by that word.