The smart city threatens to be a place where self-driving cars have the run of downtowns and force out pedestrians, where civic engagement is limited to requesting services through an app, where police use algorithms to justify and perpetuate racist practices, and where governments and companies surveil public space to control behavior.

The fundamental problem with tech goggles is that neat solutions to complex social issues are rarely, if ever, possible. The urban designers Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber describe urban social issues as “wicked problems,” so complex and devoid of value-free, true-false answers that “it makes no sense to talk about ‘optimal solutions.’”

Technologists can have big positive impacts on cities only by marrying deep technical skills with careful program design and an empathetic embrace of the complexity and contradictions of city life.

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,

The tendency to overlook deeper questions of values and trade-offs—in favor of a reductive, solutionist approach—is one of the blind spots of many technologists.

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.

Companies see possibilities (and dollar signs), while municipal employees see hard financial trade-offs and a complicated path to translate technology into real public value. Moreover, it illustrates a fundamental difference in how people see the challenges facing cities.

Connecting to the public Wi-Fi network therefore comes at the cost of providing data about your location and behavior to private companies. Everybody desires better public services, but if deploying them entails setting up corporate surveillance nodes throughout urban centers, what kinds of cities are we poised to create?

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?