For the Smarter Good of Cities: On Cities, Complexity and Slippages in the Smart City Discourse (original) (raw)

Springer eBooks, 2013

Abstract

The notion of the Smart City describes the city as a system of information and flow, one that, although complex and wayward, can be controlled, manipulated and optimised to increase efficiency in sectors such as transportation infrastructures, health care, etc. This way of thinking takes for granted that there exists something like a common goal of optimisation which would benefit the larger whole of the city and which would make purposeness and meaning come together in the built environment. It thus propagates a rhetoric that echoes modernist visions from the early twentieth century of betterment of culture through technology. What remains to be understood in a cultural-theoretical perspective, however, is what consequences this way of thinking has on the urban cultural level.

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