It all sounds so smart and its vision is seductive: the smart city. Imagine a place where traffic flows seamlessly, waste disappears efficiently, energy is optimized, and safety is enforced by predictive algorithms. Imagine a city that seems to think—one where technology quietly orchestrates daily life for peak efficiency and ease. It’s a vision born from the minds of engineers and executives: streamlined, data-driven, and supposedly utopian. But scratch the surface, and the smart city begins to look less like a beacon of the future and more like a warning. The fundamental premise—that technology can “fix” the city—misses the point entirely. Cities are not broken machines. They are complex, organic, often chaotic expressions of human society. Trying to optimize them like a software program isn’t just misguided—it’s dangerous.
At the heart of the smart city concept is the idea that data leads to better decisions. Install enough sensors, collect enough metrics, and urban life can be fine-tuned like a thermostat. But this presumes that all relevant factors can be measured—and that the interpretation of those measurements will be fair, accurate, and inclusive. In practice, neither is true. Data is never neutral. It reflects the values of those who collect it, and the algorithms that act on it carry the biases of their creators. From predictive policing to automated welfare decisions, technology has repeatedly been shown to amplify inequality rather than alleviate it. What’s sold as innovation often turns out to be surveillance, especially for communities already subject to over-policing and under-representation.
Furthermore, the “smartness” of smart cities often privileges efficiency over democracy. Decision-making shifts from public institutions to private companies, from elected officials to proprietary systems. Citizens are reduced to users. The feedback loop that defines healthy urban governance—messy, deliberative, human—is replaced by the cold logic of optimization. And when public funds are poured into high-tech infrastructure, there’s less left for the social foundations of a just city: housing, healthcare, education, public transport.
Even the economic logic is suspect. The installation and maintenance of high-tech urban systems are costly, often running into tens of millions annually. These investments are frequently justified by promises of long-term savings or growth, but the returns are uneven at best. In reality, the benefits tend to accrue to wealthier, connected districts, while marginalized neighbourhoods are either left behind or actively displaced under the banner of “modernization.” What’s presented as progress can, in practice, deepen existing inequalities.
What makes cities remarkable is not how well they function, but how much they can hold. They are places of contradiction, diversity, creativity, resistance, and resilience. They succeed not when they are controlled, but when they are flexible. The very idea of reducing urban life to a set of programmable outcomes betrays a profound misunderstanding of what cities are for. A smart city may know how many people ride a bus at 8 a.m., but it cannot understand why they ride, what they carry with them, or what it means when that ride is cancelled. Technology does not know what it is to live in a city. People do.
There is a better kind of intelligence available to cities—one rooted not in sensors and algorithms, but in citizens. It lies in participatory governance, in neighbourhood knowledge, in collective problem-solving. Some urban initiatives are beginning to recognize this, experimenting with digital platforms that facilitate collaboration rather than control. But these efforts remain the exception. The dominant narrative still centres on systems, not souls.
Perhaps the future doesn’t need to be smarter in the way we’ve been told—algorithmic, optimized, and tightly controlled—but more attuned to the messy, creative, and unpredictable nature of human life. Cities thrive not because they are efficient, but because they are alive. Yet this doesn’t mean technology has no place in shaping better urban futures. Far from it.
When used thoughtfully and democratically, technology can be a powerful tool for supporting civic life. It can help visualize inequality through open data platforms, improve access to services with user-friendly digital interfaces, and enable participatory budgeting through inclusive online tools. It can support sustainability through real-time monitoring of energy and water use, and enhance mobility by integrating transportation options in ways that prioritize accessibility, not just speed.
But the key is context. Technology should follow urban values—not dictate them. It should be transparent, accountable, and co-created with the communities it affects. It should support rather than replace public institutions, and extend human capacity rather than automate human judgment. The question, then, is not whether cities should be smart, but what kind of intelligence they need—and who gets to define it. The answers won’t come from code alone. They’ll come from conversations, from communities, and from the collective reimagining of what cities are for. In that light, perhaps the smartest thing we can do is stop chasing smartness—and start building cities that are wise.
