Why Smart Cities Are a Dumb Idea
The technocratic fantasy that forgets how cities actually work
From my piece out this week at UnHerd.
No paywall—my first for them, and it’s free to read. I wanted to share it directly with you, since it builds on themes I’ve explored here before—especially the social and cultural costs of techno-solutionist thinking.
On Seattle:
Seattle, in its current state, feels like the ghost of a promise. Once a beacon of West Coast progressivism, the city now presents an uncanny blend of technological optimism and visible collapse. Sidewalks are cracked not just with concrete fatigue but with a deeper erosion — of order, of public trust, of any shared vision of the good.
The intellectual roots of the smart city:
Conant’s American meritocracy — rooted in IQ and STEM aptitude — produced not just McNamara, but Gates, Jobs, and later Brin, Page, Thiel, Zuckerberg, Musk... Visionaries, certainly. Builders of systems. But also, inheritors of a blind spot: phronesis — or what Aristotle called practical wisdom. It is the kind of intelligence that knows how to act well when rules run out. It cannot be taught in a classroom, measured on a test, or programmed into a machine.
The false promise of optimization:
Seattle has become a paradox: optimised yet abandoned... We don’t ask what it means to move joyfully through a city — we ask how to reduce pedestrian friction
On Portland:
Portland built the infrastructure of a successful city but failed to create the conditions for human flourishing... There are no dashboards for despair. No API call that fixes trust, presence, or care.
The Copenhagen contrast:
The city feels human-scaled, walkable, safe — not because of some cutting-edge surveillance grid, but because it was designed for people, not machines... The contrast says something profound about trust and control, and about the limits of the technocratic imagination.
Read the full piece at UnHerd: Why Smart Cities Are a Dumb Idea
Erik J. Larson
Nicely done. I look forward to seeing the whole thing in Unherd.
I largely agree with the reasoning behind this. However, I find the terminology used in the text somewhat misleading. The problem is not the perception of cities as systems. Cities ARE systems, in the sense that Luhmann attempts to describe them. Organisms are also systems. But cities are not organisms.
In my opinion, the problem lies primarily in the fact that the complexity of systems is regularly underestimated. And in the hubris of wanting to control or manage complex systems, or seeing oneself as capable of doing so. Systems can certainly be influenced. (And your approach runs the risk of overlooking the extent to which this happens.) But the more complex a system is, the more unpredictable the consequences of influencing it are. And therefore the more impossible it is to control them.