Not long ago I received the very welcome news that the publishing house GOG Edizioni was interested in bringing out an Italian translation of my 2013 pamphlet “Against the Smart City,” in time for its tenth anniversary. I’ve contributed a new introduction, which I hereby share with you. Godere e gustare!
It is only very rarely that a writer of polemical tracts is validated the way I was in July 2018, when the global consulting titan McKinsey published a report entitled “Smart city solutions: What drives citizen adoption around the globe?”.
On page 7 of that report, there is a graph, not so dissimilar to the famous Hype Curve charts that McKinsey’s competitor consultancy Gartner releases from time to time, that seeks to trace the fortunes of the smart city as they evolve over a ten-year period. Starting from November 2008, with the launch of IBM’s Smart Planet initiative, and “the entry of tech companies into the field,” the chart traces an early swell in activity and interest that peaks two years later. At this point, the sinusoidal wave of enthusiasm for the smart city takes a sharp downward turn, plummeting into a trough it never quite recovers from during the entire half-decade that follows.
What marks the downturn, the inflection point at which global enthusiasm for the smart city suffers such a tremendous reverse? According to McKinsey, anyway, it is the moment at which “critical voices start dominating the debate” — a moment emblematized for them by the publication of the very book you are now reading.
Well. That’s very flattering, isn’t it? Who wouldn’t want to think their work had that kind of impact on the world? As much as it’s nice to believe, though, that a pamphlet self-published by a lone, uncredentialed and unaffiliated researcher might bear on the investment choices made by municipal governments around the world, and in doing so change the shape of a multibillion-dollar global market for products and services, I don’t think that’s actually what happened. I think that when the early conception of a smart city inevitably did die, it succumbed to its own fatuity (or, more to the point, to the fact that there never was a sustainable business model beneath all the hype). It would have done so in any event, whether or not this book or anything like it had ever appeared.
Consider the eventual fates of the three smart-city projects treated most centrally in these pages: New Songdo, in South Korea; Abu Dhabi’s Masdar City, and the frankly ludicrous, never-was private development of PlanIT Valley, plopped down on a semi-rural site in northern Portugal.
Of these, Songdo comes closest to being anything we might recognize as “a success,” though not at all in the form of the gleaming edge-tech metropolis it was sold as. Shorn of the elaborate automated management systems planned for it, it is now an entirely conventional satellite city of the vast Seoul megurbation, last reported to be something of a ghost town on weekends. Masdar is currently home to some 1,300 residents — far short of the 40,000 it was planned for — and, similarly, has dispensed with virtually the entire armature of advanced technologies daily life there was ostensibly going to be founded upon. It is fair to say that, while this dusty, depopulated precinct somehow soldiers on, it has had no net impact whatsoever on the way people around the world think about, design or live in cities.
This brings us to the matter of PlanIT Valley. I can express far more clearly now what I wanted and did not quite dare to say in 2013: though Living PlanIT founder Steve Lewis has angrily denied this to me, in a series of sputtering, illiterate messages over the years, I do not believe there was ever any way the project could have been seen through to completion. Whether the result of incapacity, incompetence or intention, none of the published plans for PlanIT Valley ever remotely came to pass. The putative “city” on which “ground had already been broken” never took any form more concrete than a series of renderings shopped around to potential investment partners; a few pages of a clownishly amateur social-networking site ostensibly intended for the use of PlanIT Valley residents survived online for awhile, though you’d have to be some kind of a search-engine genius to track them down now. Whatever is left of Lewis’s pretentious folly lies in the Earth now, unmourned and unmentionable, like so many failed smart-city projects before and since.
The arc toward failure and insignificance of these three heavily-promoted projects suggests that the original vision of the smart city as a heavily-instrumented urban environment, overseen and managed through a single centralized operating system, manifestly could not have been sustained. But what swiftly became plain in the aftermath was that the rhetoric of technologically-enhanced urban place would die harder. Undead, it shambled back to abominable life, taking a number of different forms as it was molded to suit the agendas of a new set of actors, accomodate the conditions imposed by novel terrains, and incorporate the premises of emerging technologies.
In Toronto, where a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet tried to develop a smart district called Quayside, the architects had clearly internalized and prepared to counter the arguments of books like this one: their promotional materials at least paid lip service to issues like citizen empowerment and the conservation of privacy. (A leak of internal documentation later undermined their professions of sincerity on such matters.) Only concerted citizen opposition helped see the Quayside initiative off. In India, under Narendra Modi and his ethnonationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, the figure of the smart city was mobilized as part of a faintly retrograde, developmental state-style project of national greatness. The BJP vows, even now, to plant “100 smart cities” on the land, with frankly eliminationist consequences for the powerless peasants, pastoralists and fisherpeople that get in the way. Across the Arabian Sea, a similar fate no doubt awaits the Bedouin struggling to preserve their way of life against the onslaught of Saudi Arabia’s fabulist NEOM project, with its plans to gouge a linear megastructure called The Line a hundred miles across the 45-degree desert.
In all of these cases, calling something “smart” is simply to sprinkle the pixie dust of technological futurity over entirely conventional processes of state capture or accumulation by disposession, in the evident hope that key audiences will be so dazzled that they will fail to perceive what’s actually happening. Nor does the bullshit ever let up: each new technological development, from drones to self-driving cars to blockchains to “AI,” swiftly gets folded into the next generation of smart-city marketing, in a dreary precession of the buzzwords. All of this suggests that, for better or worse, the McKinseyan sine wave of hype and deflation will propagate onward through history for some time yet to come.
At the distance of ten years, are there things I wish I’d gone harder on? Of course there are. I should have been much more pointed about the role of global management consultancies (like McKinsey itself!) in peddling these visions to the variously understaffed, underresourced or just plain insecure administrators of cities, and the way in which their involvement undermines the organic competence of democratically-elected governing bodies to determine what is appropriate for their constituents. Given the existential stakes, I feel now that the book should have been still more critical about the way smart-city discourse folds in unquestioned and thoroughly hegemonic assumptions about the virtues of growth and development. Finally, I wish I’d been harder on myself. The final section, particularly, pulls a few punches; at the time of writing, I believed this was necessary to secure the book any readership at all, but it now seems tepid and pusillanimous of me.
That said, though: what a joy this book was to write. What an absolute pleasure it was to flag up the overweening arrogance and naivety of what are still all-too-often regarded as cutting-edge takes on the future city, to name fools, charlatans and closet authoritarians for what they were, and to make plain that the parties most fervently touting the fusion of networked digital information technology with everyday urban experience understood neither domain in any particular depth. (We should all be so lucky in life as to be granted such opponents, honestly — pointing out the fatal flaws in their arguments was like shooting fish in the proverbial barrel.) And what a privilege it was to represent in writing the feelings of everyone who ever suspected they were being sold a bill of goods, that there was far less to the smart city than met the eye, and that the real generators of pleasure, meaning and value in urban life lay far outside its limited ambit. Of everything I’ve ever written, this book came together most easily, and sparked the most glee in the process of composition. I hope you find it even half as much fun to read as it was to write.