Smart Cities attract strong attention from urban policy makers. They promise tech‑driven answers to today’s challenges – ecological transition, mobility, safety. Yet the vision is too narrow.
Behind the hype, the purely technological Smart‑City model is restrictive, sector‑focused, and blind to territorial dynamics. Real territories are far richer, more complex, and more fascinating than traditional maps suggest.
Innovations Without Solving Organizational Problems
Understanding a territory’s complex, dynamic, and interconnected challenges requires discarding a harmful shortcut: confusing function (quick fixes) with organization (systemic view). Without addressing this inherited bias, transformation projects stay unsatisfactory.
Most current Smart‑City projects rely on technical innovations applied to local issues. Sensors, connected bins, smart lighting improve comfort, cut costs, save energy. They remain patches on a far more demanding reality.
True transformation must examine all territorial dynamics, not just visible symptoms. Water‑leak sensors, smart waste bins, and illuminated streets do not solve structural issues such as mobility equity, service distribution, social justice, or ecology. These are attitudes and behaviours that must harmonise with the territory.
Fragmented Data Governance
Cities generate ever‑growing data streams. Data alone does not become knowledge or collective intelligence. New open, collaborative governance models are essential. Integrated platforms must analyse, share, and interpret semantically linked data across scales and in real time.
Without proper data governance, initiatives fragment. Each city invests according to its own budget, visibility goals, and competitive mindset. Solutions become isolated: one city pushes soft‑mobility, its neighbour clings to cars; another lights streetlamps while a third focuses on waste. No mutualisation, no coherence. Yet territories are interdependent; every decision creates systemic ripple effects.
From Competition to Territorial Cooperation
We must abandon trial‑and‑error actions based on preconceived notions of a territory. Organised, linked, meaningful data visualisations provide finer understanding and guide smarter actions.
The Smart‑City concept itself needs rethinking. A city should not be a battlefield for competing initiatives but a common ground for shared innovation. Technology is a tool for democratic cooperation, not a weapon for attraction or distinction.
The goal is not flashy, self‑contained showcases, but collective intelligence at local, regional, national, and even global scales. This shift demands moving from a competitive mindset to a collaborative one.
Every territory holds unique geography, memory, social fabric, and aspirations. Instead of copying “what works elsewhere,” we must surface, amplify, and adapt these singularities. The dominant Smart‑City model encourages mimicry; it imports projects without assessing local relevance, forcing foreign singularities onto local contexts.
A City That Isn’t So “Smart”
What personality do we want for our cities? Pure efficiency, algorithmic control, surveillance? Or vibrant, unpredictable, citizen‑built environments?
Current Smart‑City designs miss political, social, and poetic dimensions. They treat cities as micro‑machines to optimise, not as dynamic systems to understand or shared habitats.
We propose a new view: a city as a dynamic information system that reacts to data flows and expresses lived territorial transformations.
This perspective reframes the Smart City from a gadget collection to an evolving, responsive structure. It seeks shared intelligence, co‑construction, and diverse uses. It embraces contradictions and limits, turning them into innovative opportunities.
Reference: Hammoudi, T. (2021). Architecture as Information Machine. Footprint, 15(1). https://doi.org/10.7480/footprint.15.1.4984
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