Yves here. The smart city vogue has been under way for a while. Some of this reflects a belief that new must be better. Others seem to result from tech bro pet visions that often unwittingly expose their libertarian, computer/surveillance bent. This article takes an unsparing look at some of these experiments and find there is a lot not to like.
By Pascual Berrone, Head of Strategic Management Department and Chair of Sustainability and Business Strategy, IESE Business School (Universidad de Navarra). Originally published at The Conversation
For residents of European cities – with their snarled traffic, draughty old buildings, creaking public services and grey winters – it’s easy to see the appeal of moving to a brand-new, high-tech metropolis.
Enter Dunia Cyber City, a new special economic zone in Zanzibar aimed at attracting tech workers (real and virtual) and companies with its low taxes. Backed by former Apple executive Florian Fournier and the Zanzibar government, the proposed development is inspired by so-called network states – autonomous, digitally crowdfunded micronations or city states – and is meant to bring together like-minded individuals to focus on technological experimentation and cryptocurrency.
Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, has recently scaled back its own massive and controversial experiment in smart cities. The Line was envisioned as a metropolis for up to 9 million people stretching in a straight, 170-kilometre line across the desert and mountains.
While these projects, and similar past attempts such as South Korea’s Songdo, differ in scale and ambition, one of the elements that links them is the conviction that deploying technology – the more the better – is the key to the cities of the future.
This is not a minor issue, as the world’s cities are its future – 55% of the global population currently lives in a city, a figure expected to grow to 68% by 2050.
Urban centres account for a growing portion of global GDP and are drivers of innovation and creativity. But they are also plagued by quality-of-life problems related to crime, pollution and income inequality, and a lack of social cohesion. Global issues such as climate change and migration – both internal and international – also loom large.
For some policymakers, turning to technology and converting their cities into “smart cities” can solve their problems. But experience and research show that this approach is anything but a universal solution.
One of the problems surrounding smart cities is that the concept is vague and ill-defined. The list of the world’s cities that consider themselves smart – from San Diego to Tel Aviv, Kochi and Bogota – is a testament to how varied the designation is.
A more unified definition, one built around responsible governance rather than cutting-edge technology, would be useful. Frontier smart city projects like Dunia and The Line have failed on fundamental governance issues such as legitimacy, inclusion, accountability, rights and long-term delivery.
Tech Does Not Equal Liveability
In calculating our yearly Cities in Motion Index (CIMI) of sustainable and liveable cities, we have found that cities with high scores in technology don’t necessarily perform well in other areas, or in the overall ranking.
The CIMI ranks nearly 200 global cities on nine criteria, including technology. For the technology score, we measure factors such as percentage of the population covered by 4G and 5G networks, households with internet access, and the number of mobile phones per 100 inhabitants.
In the 2025 CIMI, it’s interesting to note that none of the top five in technology – Hong Kong, Dubai, Singapore, Abu Dhabi and Seoul – appeared in the top five of the overall ranking. In fact, they were virtually absent from the leading cities in all the other eight dimensions: human capital, social cohesion, economy, governance, environment, mobility and transportation, urban planning and international profile, and even economy.
For the overall ranking, the top five were London, New York, Paris, Tokyo and Berlin. Yes, these are cities with snarled traffic and draughty buildings, but they are also home to diverse global talent, cultural institutions and relative political stability. Another cluster of cities – places such as Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Zurich – not only rank well overall but also show a balanced approach among the different urban dimensions.
Smart Governance, Not Smart Cities
Clearly, technology is not enough to make a city liveable or sustainable. Our research has shown that instead of focusing on smart cities, the focus should be on smart governance. This requires:
- Strategic thinking. Holistic, long-term policies which incorporate factors such as sustainability and social cohesion. An objective diagnosis of a city’s real weaknesses is essential before leaping into marketing-friendly smart city projects.
- Seeing beyond technology. Technology is a means and not an end. Smart buildings, for example, have little impact if everything around them is decidedly unsmart. Access must be broad, and geared toward problem solving.
- Creative local approach. Each city is unique and there are few one-size-fits-all answers. Importing planning solutions from, say, the US may not work in other contexts. Policymakers should not just learn best practices from other cities – they also need to adapt them to their own reality.
- Collaboration. It takes a village to make a city. Stakeholder cooperation is key. Public-private partnerships can be particularly effective in getting things done in cities, and can also help to break siloed mentalities that fail to respond to citizens’ needs.
- People-centred mindset. Every solution must solve a real problem that residents are facing, offering them value. If not, initiatives may fall flat and create backlash against change.
- Innovations to solve the big challenges. Policymakers will need to consider the major challenges the world is facing, from climate change to migration, and plan for how it will impact their city. These global issues have local impact to varying degrees.
The advantage of smart governance is that it fosters sustainable economic, social and environmental development in a way that other governance approaches fail to do.
Dunia Cyber City and The Line promise technological utopias, but the world’s most liveable cities weren’t designed on blank canvases by tech visionaries. They evolved through decades of messy, incremental governance that put people first. That’s the blueprint to learn from.
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As Steward Brand in his book ‘How Buildings Learn’ puts it ‘all buildings are predictions, all predictions are wrong’. You can multiply this for planned cities. Even the lag effect alone dooms ‘smart’ cities – by the time you get from conception to operation, the technology built in is always out of date. Plus of course there is an inherent contradiction in using technology that allows people to live and work thousands of miles from their company to somehow facilitate dense cities.
When it comes to new cities, the Greeks got it right 3000 years ago, but we usually fail to learn their lessons. They chose a good site, put in place a rational basic dense pattern and infrastructure, then, most importantly, brought in a coherent community of people looking for a new place to live, and then more or less got out of the way. Since then, far more new cities have failed than succeeded. It’s not just Neom – even more modest and conservative attempts like Nusantara in Indonesia have hit inevitable problems. Invariably, it is much easier, cheaper, and more sustainable to put resources into existing cities. Even those cities which have lost their original raison d’être, such as old coal industrial centres, can often thrive with the right support and policies.
The idea that you can plan everything to work for decades into the future is a conceit. Most of the great cities of the world have reached their present state through evolutionary growth, with constant small additions reacting to the changes of a new decade. But it’s hard to pre=sell real estate that way.
I met a developer from China a while back who develops land in big cities, one square mile at a time. He just goes in and builds all the amenities first — a park and a school and whatever else — and then opens up sales. He said on his last project he had sold $2bn worth of real estate in a couple of months once it opened up.
Well–exactly. I read that many millenials are losing their flirtation with the “new urbanism” and like their parents are turning back to suburbs–which are probably where most of the people cited as living in cities do live.
So yes practicality rules in the long run, and given modern technology that doesn’t necessarily bode well for big cities in general. Increasingly these big imperial capitols are hives for the rich and the super rich or super rich tech bros who don’t have to worry about practicality.
Perhaps it fits in the “strategic thinking” aspect raised by the author, but I keep wondering how those “smart” cities — and even those not necessarily touted as smart, such as the new Chinese megalopoles — will be maintained.
Showing off lots of technical bells and whistles, covered in LED lights, built with fancy materials, full of fancy escalators and lifts, relying upon a dense coverage of high-bandwidth, low-latency communication networks and the availability of plenty of electricity and water… How are they going to age and continue working as originally planned, say 40 years from now? How brittle is their design?
Smart cities will be high technology, high power consumption, and high maintenance.
This means continued dependence on outside stuff, so very fragile ecosystem.
See Zardoz for an example of a siloed smart city, where the population spend a lot of time on agriculture and food prep. (also, a Scottish actor wearing red breeches)
“This means continued dependence on outside stuff, so very fragile ecosystem.”
This is (and was) true of all cities. After all, they do not grow their own food, do not produce their own energy, and nowadays do not manufacture most of the goods required for their functioning.
There is a concept called “graceful degradation”: if something stops working, a system can nevertheless continue operating albeit with reduced functionality or performance — and these are progressively scaled back as more and more elements break down. I suspect those so-called smart cities are more brittle, i.e. they will suddenly become unliveable as soon as one of their technological component fails (permanently or temporarily). For instance, what happens in case of an outage in the network that serves to control accesses to buildings, pay for amenities, guide vehicles, activate air conditioning and window shutters, regulate the inclination of solar panels, etc? How feasible will it be to maintain a smart city and keep it ship-shape so that such brittleness does not cause trouble?
Historically a lot of cities produced a sizeable proportion of their own food either within or on the periphery (but eithin city limits). For example Paris was famous for it’s market gardens that utilised hot beds to grow food all year round, and this included sending a good proprotion of it to London each day by train.
Lots of cities had fruit orchards and such like. And of course allotments were fsr nore common and were primarily for growing food for indivduals.
Fruit orchards and horticultural crops used to be very present (there are still remnants in the form of few kitchen gardens) but the real deal was wheat, rye, barley, potatoes, as well as fish and meat — everything that provided the necessary calories to the inhabitants of cities; lettuce and peaches were not enough. Apart from rabbits and chickens, cities never produced those foodstuffs in any significant amount.
In the course of the past 50 years, hutches on balconies have been prohibited throughout Europe, and most kitchen and market gardens have fallen prey to real-estate speculation. I do not think that smart city developers want to see them re-appear in their futuristic designs.
Certainly was never enough produced within cities. But it wasn’t an insignificant amount either.
As you say mostly all gone now and not to return. Hell it’s hard enough to be allowed a lot of that stuff in the countryside.
Though quite a few of these modern citiea that are advertised as “green” certainly show lots of vegetation on buildings. But god forbid any of that would be for even minimal food.
They will not age well at all. Especially is built in obsolescence comes with it all free of charge. One of the wrrors I see often is the idea that robotics can help with maintenance of all these technological marvels. This ignores that robotics is just more infrastructure that requires repair.
On another note, is it just me that sees these videos showing off wonderous Chinese cities that is turned cold by them? I can’t see covering buildings in neon lights is really progress.
I have the same reaction. The architects designing those Chinese cities have probably seen too many mangas/sci-fi movies.
“Hey, doesn’t blade runner look swell”
With regards to the feeling you get when looking at modern Chinese cities with all of their LEDs and shiny trapping, I don’t think you are alone.
If nothing else, it appears China is making infrastructure mistakes like the West, just in different ways. KISS is a key concept if you want to make things last and easy (or easier) to maintain. Keep It Simple Stupid.
What exactly is gained by adding complexity that does nothing except show how modern and advanced you are?
I’d say it’s not even shoeing hoe modern and advanced. But showing a pretence of modern and advanced. The old saying here is fur coat and no knickers.
A few cities I’ve worked in that I’ve seen promtional material for make them look all shiny and modern. But having been to them i knoe at street level the pavements are all broken up. Or if yoy turn 180 defrees from the big shiny building they are showing off it’s crumbling apartments. Or qorse these bright shiny buildings are not maintained and soon look very poor. I could be wrong but I suspect a lot of Chinese cities will be like that.
You might plan those “smart” buildings & cities in order to be robust and durable. The only problem then would be that you might end having a very robust & useless city because, after the design and construction period, nothing went according to plan.
Don’t forget that all of the good geographical spots were taken hundreds of years ago.
See
…for an example of clever architecture on a great location. The building stays cool in the baking heat by passive design.
A nice place to spend half a day, and there are great fish restaurants in Moss Landing for after.
Indeed. Quiet location and nice landscape too. This was a nice surprise when riding the 101 route southwards from SF in 1997 with the woman of my life. Went again 20 years later but this time from LA and with son and daughter with us.
I used to love going to the combination fish store and restaurant (whose name I don’t recall) right on the docks in Moss Landing: I hope it’s still there.
Phil’s Fish Market.
I lived off of Highway 1 for nearly half a century. Oligarch Julie “H-P” Packard’s Monterey Bay Research Institute evicted Phil from his longstanding waterfront location but the restaurant reopened inland down in Castroville.
Phil’s was an institution. All these “Smart Cities” empty-out in search of “authenticity” on the weekends. It’s gridlock all the way from charming San Juan Bautista through Castroville to Moss Landing. Traffic got so bad that I finally threw in the towel. Too many people, all of them with Yelp!
…of course it stays cool in the baking summer heat. The structure has thick walls (adobe?) and little solar gain. It is likely uncomfortable in the Winter.
A suburban development that employs true passive solar design principles is Village Homes in Davis, CA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_Homes
that would be a good bar trivia argument……best underdeveloped site in the world, if you were an omnipotent oligarch, to build an enclave of 500,000 (it isn’t the Arizona desert, Bill gates, lmao)
temperate climate + water + a decent-sized plain for a >9,000-ft runway.
guessing Argentina, Uruguay, NZ, Tasmania, Paraguay?
Dunia Cyber City, Zanzibar
Shades of “Stand On Zanzibar” the great dystopian sci-fi novel! Need I say more?
https://newbookrecommendation.com/summary-of-stand-on-zanzibar-by-john-brunner-a-detailed-synopsis
Overpopulation, excessive corporate influence, repressive governance through high tech, it’s all there…
May be the birth of utopian projects reflects the death of progress as a driver of change. Utopian agency at the end of progress is a paper within a publication whose provocative title is Organizing for Apocalypse. It might be possible that we somehow need those utopian projects as a way to confront the nastiness of current developments, as the only way to think of a future out of the many horrors awaiting for us. (Yeah, sorry for this apocalyptic view). And yes, utopias look contrarian to pragmatism and those “smart cities” are almost certainly impossible projects but, may be, interesting ideas might arise from these. When the author talks about Smart Governance, isn’t he providing an utopian view of politics too? An utopian project disguised as progress. Not to say I am against such ways of thinking, we might need such “utopian agency” more than ever. That is why I found this article interesting.
The only exception that “proves” the rule that: top-down planning makes suboptimal cities is Washington DC (which was a sleepy town after 5p even until 1990).
it only took 200 years of imperial expansion, 50 years of full-spectrum hegemony status, **and** 20 years of EZ central bank monetary policy.
as art critic Robert Hughes said in his “Shock of the New”…
“nothing dates faster than people’s (city planning) fantasies about the future….much like plants, we need the shit of others to survive….”
Makes me think of Jane Jacobs and her critiques of development projects in NYC. Evolution, mixed use, and a mix of older and newer buildings prove more dynamic than planned development.
Hopefully the AI’S that are designing the new cities will scrape out and internalize every word Jane Jacob’s ever wrote.
BTW, can AI’S internalize?
This misses the point. These cities aren’t meant to be livable. They’re meant to be company towns for Silicon Valley billionaires to rule by fiat and be the only ones with any rights or money.
Like Lambert used to say about „smart“: there‘s that word again. It never turns out to be functional, the „smart“ stuff, does it?
A better approach to cities could be „functional cities“.
Indeed. Lambert (bless his memory) had trained us well to recoil from that word.
Next time, a trigger warning, please?
It would be a miserable place to live for all those workers there. They would be first and foremost surveillance cities and every move, every purchase and every personal private transaction would be watched, recorded, scrutinized and then monetized. It would be like being lab rats for some techbro fantasy of 100% total control. The only privacy that you would have would be between your ears but you can bet that AIs would be analyzing you to see what you are really thinking. It would be a dystopian nightmare.
I studied mechanical engineering at uni in the late nineties. In some of the lecture rooms there were curtains that people could pull across when the sun was shining in and it was hard to see the board up front. Few seconds and job done.
After one summer period. We came back to find they had been replaced with electric blinds. They just about never worked, when they did it would take well over a minute to close. Instead of students closing them with little disruption it would involve interrupting the lecturer to ask him to close them. Which of course because they hardly ever worked involved the lecturer faffing about for ages before giving up.
An expensive, complicated system was used to replace a cheap workable system. It was probably the most valuable lesson from my entire time at uni. If something is simple, reliable and works then you need a very good reason to replace it with something more complicated and more expensive.
Moral: when installing anything in your house, don’t install anything that needs internet connection. If it doesn’t need internet connection, but has features that add functionality with internet connection, don’t be tempted. The internet connection can be used to downgrade the firmware later by the manufacturer. Sony removed Linux compatibility from the early Playstation by an OTA firmware downgrade, and won the subsequent lawsuit when sued over it.
I recently bought an (old and on sale) Bios indoor/outdoor thermometer. It has a button on the back, F/C, to change the display.
When attempting the same with my SALUS (don’t get one) thermostat I have somehow entered installation mode and changed the upper heating limit to 63F. With one mistake I have turned my primary heating into emergency back-up. Even ChatGPT remarked that SALUS documentation is awful.
Still attempting a fix but ChatGPT is hinting I should replace the system.
I can see AI making a killing in these shiny, new metropolises.
Things badly thought, planned and executed will never cease to occur but in many other examples complicated systems bring a swift improvement. For instance PLCs can be rather complicated yet making life simpler and easier in many industrial and non industrial environments if well thought, planned, programmed and executed.
Today, entire cities (existing or hypothetical ones) are modelled, not that I am an expert on REVIT or other tridimensional modelling software. The modelling can include, apart of the pure constructive elements, lots of systems which perform the most fundamental functions including lightning, power energy distribution, HVAC systems, water distribution, evacuation and treatment, residues treatment, emergency systems,… whatever. Modelling programs can even check if everything in the model complies with building, electrical, safety codes, … buff. Complex things can be modelled indeed.
Well, but anyone who has been given one of these models to go and build the thing, translate it in the real thing will have found that realities change the model in many ways. Yet, if the model is a Hotel, at the end you might have a Hotel which very much resembles the original design. Ah! If only visitors were willing to come and try its niceties. What if we repurpose it to be a Student Hall? Designing a city in full is another scale of complexity above that. The probability that the Model City fits with the needs of Reality is extremely low. Model and Reality would crash at any corner. I believe it would need to be done in a way that every building could be repurposed to functions different to those envisioned in the project.
I work on oul rigs and the big trend in those now is creating digital twins for them. Can be very helpful. Except for a few issues that keep cropping up. Firstly trying to prevent any physical work that can be down by the digital twin. I.e. we need to know the lgenth of a pipe, well measure it on the digital twin. Sure but that might not be exactly how it is in reality. And secondly people who insist that if the dogital twin and reality don’t match up then it must be reality that is wrong. Of course that is not how they say it but it is effectively how they act. I’ve been in situations where something won’t fit and being told well it must fit because we designed it off the model.
Any kind of smart or tech city tries to capture or make permanent that which cannot be made permanent. So to me a smart city would need to be highly modular, adaptable, capable of rapid teardown as well as rapid build. Skyscrapers would seem to be the opposite of this, as are subways and even roads. A truly smart city would be as if you had a big god-like person in the sky playing SimCities or City Skylines, just pointing and deleting, rezoning at will, plopping down services wherever, rejigging the roads, experimenting with this, that, the other. None of this is possible in real life.
An aspect of all of these simulated city games, by the way, is being mindful of distance a simcitizen needs to travel to get to work, always trying to minimize that distance, and this is basically not done in any real city I know of except maybe Amsterdam?
I started to read the underlying city ranking report, CIMI, then shifted to skimming, then stopped altogether.
San Francisco ranks high – and so I ask: What are they smoking? I have to visit that “literal” sh-t hole periodically, where it is uber dangerous at night, the cost of living is ridiculous – I would take any second tier, safe and clean Chinese city (none scored well) where air pollution levels are better than small european cities thanks to electrification, even if it is not concerned about climate change (Cities and climate are performative given the drivers of climate change, such as EU restarting coal (because, Russia!), the US trashing all things green, the militaries and war!, and the rapidly developing developing world’s – its a GLOBAL problem).
Or is the idea to rate cities as livable for the 0.001% with private helicopters, bodyguards, and chauffeurs?
The report relies heavily on Euromonitor, so surprise, surprise, it loves European cities – almost as if the EU paid for it to get what they expected.
It was a tough night in the “literal sh-t hole”. I went to a Latin Jazz show at an Ethiopian restaurant. I walked home near midnight through the Mission (a largely Latino neighborhood) where a drunk coming out of a bar bumped into me and then apologized profusely for doing so. Tomorrow I will take a bus (cheap senior fare) to the beach for a walk before going to an Irish bar to watch the game. God knows how I will get home safely, apparently it will be uber dangerous. Oh well, I guess I will just have to wade through it and survive as best I can.
I was surprised to see Berlin in the number 5 spot, so I also read the CIMI report.
My take on it is, that it is mostly based on quantity metrics (like number of schools, GDP per capita, length of metro lines, etc.) but only very few quality metrics. So it only covers how it looks “on paper”. There are also some weird metrics, like “Indicator that assesses whether Bitcoin is legal in the city” (Governance) or “Whether or not the city has AI projects” (Urban Planing, ” … initiatives that use AI to
promote urban growth and well-being”).
There is a bit more detailed overview, where a city is ranked in the nine index areas (page 28 ff.). Berlin is in the Top 10 of “Human Capital”, “Governance”, “Urban Planing”, “Mobility and Transport”. Berlin should be nowhere near the top in all of these areas.
Some quality metrics missing I would include are:
* average time/money to get an appointment/new ID card/car registration/etc. from the government (in the economy part there is something like that: “Number of calendar days needed to complete the procedure to legally operate a business”.)
* percentage of trains/busses that are delayed/cancelled
* some school quality/result index like PISA
* number of new buildings built per year
* average time to settle a lawsuit
* average time to plan and build a bridge/school/house/etc.
…
I can see that this index might work on the lower end, with cities where you can be happy to have busses, schools or running water. But on the top end, I think there are a lot more quality metrics needed.
Regarding SF: Crime is part of social cohesion where SF is ranked at 122 (of 183) (also lower in Environment and Mobility and Transport), it’s TOP 5 in Economy. So it looks like that issue is addressed in the report.
Even if the concept of smart cities is sound, not all smart cities will be rich enough to be able to maintain themselves.
Here in germany we already have the situation that many cities are too poor to proper maintain infrastructure (bridges, streets, public transport, and so on), while neighboring cities are rich enough to do so.
Even 50 years ago nobody would have correctly predicted which cities would be successful and which not.
That will also be true for smart cities. But what will happen if the less successful ones cannot maintain their smart infrastructure?
We know how to deal with road holes and aging bridges (reduce the speed limit). We don’t like it, but it works.
But how do we deal with the pitfalls of hightech? Increasing prices, shutdowns of unprofitable services, and so on?
How many of the top five cities began as colonial empires based on coercive and save labor ?