The smart city is, to many urban thinkers, just a buzzphrase that has outlived its usefulness: ‘the wrong idea pitched in the wrong way to the wrong people’. So why did that happen – and what’s coming in its place?

The smart city concept arguably dates back at least as far as the invention of automated traffic lights, which were first deployed in 1922 in Houston, Texas. Leo Hollis, author of Cities Are Good For You, says the one unarguably positive achievement of smart city-style thinking in modern times is the train indicator boards on the London Underground. But in the last decade, thanks to the rise of ubiquitous internet connectivity and the miniaturisation of electronics in such now-common devices as RFID tags, the concept seems to have crystallised into an image of the city as a vast, efficient robot – a vision that originated, according to Adam Greenfield at LSE Cities, with giant technology companies such as IBM, Cisco and Software AG, all of whom hoped to profit from big municipal contracts.

“The notion of the smart city in its full contemporary form appears to have originated within these businesses,” Greenfield notes in his 2013 book Against the Smart City, “rather than with any party, group or individual recognised for their contributions to the theory or practice of urban planning.” What’s more, if an entire city has an “operating system”, what happens when it goes wrong? The one thing that is certain about software is that it crashes. The smart city, according to Hollis, is really just a “perpetual beta city”. We can be sure that accidents will happen – driverless cars will crash; bugs will take down whole transport subsystems or the electricity grid; drones could hit passenger aircraft. How smart will the architects of the smart city look then?

Thank you for your answer.

From what I understand, you are then against intelligent cities!

however, whether we want it or not, future generations are trying to digitize and automate everything. I just asked the question about how to make banal buildings in cities that are smart and fast by their networks. on which the architect and the designer must work to innovate this kind of buildings (besides the intelligence in passive and bioclimatic architecture as well as the endowment by the most advanced technologies).

Being a smart city means using all available technology and resources in an intelligent and coordinated manner to develop urban centers that are at once integrated, habitable and sustainable. The use of Smart Computing technologies to make the critical infrastructure components and services of city-which include city administration, education, healthcare, public safety, real estate, transportation, and utilities- more intelligent, interconnected, and efficient.

thanks Aruditya Jasrotia for your answer