Smart cities require trusted governance and engaged citizens, especially governance of intelligence and intelligence-enabled control. In some very important respects, smart cities should remain dumb, and that will take governance. This introduction provides an overview of the book’s aims, structure, and contributions of individual chapters.

This case study focuses on smart tech deployment and governance in Philadelphia. In 2019, the City of Philadelphia launched a new smart city initiative, SmartCityPHL. SmartCityPHL includes a roadmap of strategies, processes, and plans for deployment. In many ways, the new initiative is remarkable. It is ambitious yet pragmatic; it outlines a set of guiding principles along with deliberative and participatory processes; it is broadly inclusive of people and values – as reflected in its simple definition of a smart city: “a city that uses integrated information and communication technology to support the economic, social, and environmental goals of its community.” On its face, and perhaps in comparison with other smart city initiatives, SmartCityPHL provides an exciting roadmap. But the 2019 initiative was not the first smart city project in Philadelphia. There is, in fact, a long history of Philadelphians turning to supposedly smart technology to solve community problems.

This chapter outlines a forward-looking, intelligent approach to thinking through and evaluating supposedly smart systems. First, it clarifies that it is not the city that is smart. Rather, smartness is better understood and evaluated in terms of affordances supposedly smart tools provide actual people. Who gains what kinds of intelligence? For what purposes? Subject to what governance? Second, it identifies and addresses key challenges to intelligent governance in smart city projects. Cities must move beyond a transactional mindset, appreciate how smart systems become an integral part of the built environment, and develop appropriate governance. Third, it proposes an approach to smart city governance grounded in local, contextual norms and scaffolded by key questions to ask throughout smart city planning, procurement, implementation, and management processes. This approach is importantly not oriented around Elinor Ostrom’s famous design principles, but rather a shared set of evaluative questions to guide decision-making.

Smart cities require much more than smart tech. Cities need trusted governance and engaged citizens. Integrating surveillance, AI, automation, and smart tech within basic infrastructure, as well as public and private services and spaces, raises a complex set of ethical, economic, political, social, and technological questions that requires systematic study and careful deliberation. Throughout this book, authors have asked contextual research questions and explored compelling but often distinct answers guided by the shared structure of the GKC framework. The Conclusion discusses some of the key themes across chapters in this volume, considering lessons learned and implications for future research.

Smart city technology has its value and its place; it isn’t automatically or universally harmful. Urban challenges andopportunities addressed via smart technology demand systematic study, examining general patterns and local variations as smart city practices unfold around the world. Smart cities are complex blends of community governance institutions, social dilemmas that cities face, and dynamic relationships among information and data, technology, and human lives. Some of those blends are more typical and common. Some are more nuanced in specific contexts. This volume uses the Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) framework to sort out relevant and important distinctions. The framework grounds a series of case studies examining smart technology deployment and use in different cities. This chapter briefly explains what that framework is, why and how it is a critical and useful tool for studying smart city practices, and what the key elements of the framework are. The GKC framework is useful both here and can be used in additional smart city case studies in the future.