Over the past few years Amsterdam has been doing everything in its power to become ‘smart’. Like all other significant big cities, it is working hard to find innovative ways to make life more pleasant, safe and sustainable. It is positioning all sorts of sensors and collecting large amounts of data to help it make better decisions, and in so doing, automating society. Oftentimes this involves casting an envious eye on a number of smart ‘model cities’, such as Songdo in South Korea and Masdar in the desert of the United Arab Emirates. Here, large-scale pilot projects have been launched, full of impressive tech, sensors and screens that make life easier. Another attractive example can be found in Rio de Janeiro, where IBM has built a huge, futuristic command centre to regulate traffic as efficiently as possible, serve tickets for traffic violations and predict and respond to emergency incidents.

Smart cities 1.0

There are some flaws to this approach. The first generation of smart cities tries to provide their residents with all the comforts, but see them exclusively as consumers. Technology and data provide previously unheard-of possibilities for surveillance – criminals can even be identified before having committed a possible crime. In this context, every citizen becomes a potential offender who has to be kept in check. In the ultimate smart city, residents are anything but conscious agents who play a part in shaping their living and working environment. This smart city is a machine that needs to be optimised, with no consideration or understanding of the organic reality. It wants to maximise efficiency and avoid friction, so it simply and non-negotiably imposes top-down, non-transparent technological solutions.

The paradox is that, by doing this, the smart city ends up stifling innovation. Citizens find themselves faced with increasingly complex systems that affect their lives profoundly, but that they have less and less understanding of. The same is true, incidentally, for politicians and policymakers; they tend to be just as removed from the innovations that they are promoting. The net result of this is that cities render their residents passive and, by doing so, leave their tremendous potential untapped. That is a great shame, because it is their experience, engagement and energy that are essential in identifying and addressing social issues.