The Smart Enough City

with a keen awareness of the many nontechnological barriers to using technology in government, Smart Enough Cities recognize that technology will have little impact unless it is thoughtfully embedded into municipal structures and practices.

The first is that the most impactful applications of technology occur when it is deployed in conjunction with other forms of innovation.

We become stuck asking a meaningless, tautological question—is a smart city preferable to a dumb city?—instead of debating a more fundamental one: does the smart city represent the urban future that best fosters democracy, justice, and equity?

the smart city achieves much of its appeal via its juxtaposition to a boogeyman: the “dumb city,” a municipality that stubbornly refuses new technology and clings to obsolete and inefficient practices. Acolytes present smart city solutions as a necessary improvement to the dumb city without analyzing technology’s social impacts or considering alter

Many believe that technological advancements in communication will support a bright new era of political engagement and dialogue, for example. But these dreams have not been realized, because the fundamental limitations on democratic decision making and civic engagement are not informational or conversational inefficiencies but rather power, politi

jail. No matter how advanced our technology may be, in other words, we can never escape from the normative and political task of deciding how to use it.

Smart city rhetoric implies that technology follows an inevitable path, can take only one particular form, and is the primary driver of social and political progress—a common attitude, known as “technological determinism.” Tech goggles suggest that adopting newer, faster, and more sophisticated technology is the sole path to improving cities. Inste

To technologists, the benefits of enhanced efficiency are so obvious that the smart city transcends social and political debate—nay, renders it obsolete. Of course,

Suggesting that technology can solve these types of problems—an attitude that the technology critic Evgeny Morozov decries as “solutionism”13—is misguided at best and duplicitous at worst. Tech