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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today I will introduce a research paper by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original paper, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole paper.

Our summary today works with the article titled But how bad this smart city from 2015 by Umberto Cao published in the Festival Architettura magazine. Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see smart city as the efficient city in absolute sense. This article investigates how this efficiency affects the architectural form and quality of the city, possibly creating a dystopia.

Cao started with the technological and digital revolution, and these have been influencing everything about human life in the last 40 years. Technological progress and development in connections and management systems created by it can improve the quality of life in urban areas. Smart city starts from the wired city as a source of development with digital networks suitably integrated and considered as structural systems for a more balanced and sustainable contemporary metropolis.

However, the smart city has taken different values from academia, professionals, marketing and business lobbyists, with different purposes. The already existing smart city is largely circumscribed by urban episodes or individual buildings with automation. Therefore, it is not only a theory but a reality which takes shape day by day. According to Cao, smart city will become a sort of protocol for urban regeneration based on interactivity and communication, with different aims – to save energy, improve health or mobility, and increase efficiency and productivity. This creates a city engine, a city computer, with hardware based on buildings and infrastructure, and software made up by integrated digital networks. This is the efficient city, in absolute sense, which is acceptable. The problems start when these aims are considered as the generators of architectural form or enough to return quality to the city.

Cao mentioned Rem Koolhaas appreciating the digital technologies and the need to create synergies between disciplines, though the future of cities may not result from the network system designed to monitor working conditions, mobility, and free time. According to Koolhaas, it would be dangerous to transfer the authority from the political to the digital domain, from the administrator to the manager, from the architect and designer to the computer technician.

Additionally, currently cities are also identified with the community. The architect is its bearer and should devote to this, just in case by reformulating the concept of community. Architecture has been championing the interests of the private sector since the start of the market economy in the late 70s instead of the public values. Money has been impacting the city as the true regime and influencing the understanding of the city. For example, the metropolis has become a place of safety, but safety for the power of the market. Architects stopped thinking about manifestos and futures for cities, and thus, the smart city with the technological controlling devices has occupied this cultural vacuum.

Cao, and Koolhaas, highlighted that the smart city usually has a protagonist with apocalyptic messages, such as the climate change, aging population, the mobility or infrastructure crises, energy and water supply, or waste management. These are real problems, but not presented as the results of the current management and administration, but as solvable issues under the slogan: “fix leaky pipes, save millions”. It seems that the commercial motivation corrupts the problems which should be solved, getting to the extreme point that to save the city, we may have before to destroy it.

The level of possible automation with windows opening, cars moving, heating and cooling operating without human intervention seems more science fiction than true innovation for urban living. This is a rhetoric providing easy, emotional and ephemeral patterns. A system too obvious to re-establish the trust in technology and progress that modernity has inspired and now seems lost. Too much built on the exaltation of a universal informatics science based on individual well-being bubbles, that isolate from the public sphere. And thus, everything formless will make the city ugly and stupid.

Smart city commonly represented with easy impact images with soft shapes, bright colours, lots of greenery, and invisible technology for the day, and intelligence and efficient energy consumption glowing through the night, creating a controversy between day and night suspending it between the environment and the development of electronics. Other, more prudent representation throw in slogans like sustainability and energy conservation, but they stop before defining the morphology to it.

To date, the debate on the smart city, mostly promoted by digital technology companies, involves building contractors, material producers, governors and local administrators, environmentalists, researchers and teachers of computer science and technology, but few architects, and very few researchers of designers of the city. A good example is the Horizon 2020 program with macro themes within which is difficult to find space for the architectural and spatial regeneration of the contemporary city. Urban design had lost control over the city and the landscape, perfectly exemplified by the sprawling cities, and it could not reorder its disciplinary code in the urban transformation on the small scale and the government of the territory on the larger scale.

It seems to be hard for urban design to communicate with the new technological dimensions of the city and to find this common profile will be a difficult and long journey. Cao finished with 5 goals for cities and urban design:

1. Building a new city transforming volume-zero so it builds as it demolishes.
2. Intervening in the landscape for rarefaction or densification, depending on the case: the one part protection and the other completeness.
3. Working in the ancient city for regeneration and recycling of the existing, in the suburbs for separate parts.
4. Returning to work about the infrastructure system which we studied in the last fifteen years, even in their formal characterizations, but receiving network and communication cabling.
5. Welcoming into the project signs new technical and new technologies, following the principle that architectural form must become the synthesis of the various knowledge once again.

As the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects:

1. Efficient cities are great for urban management and productivity but efficiency is dangerous to establish architectural forms for the city and to determine the quality of the city.
2. Smart city, as the efficient, wired and digital city can be a useful tool although it must be investigated whether its use really create value or only the marketing behind it seems to be working, it needs to be checked whether it really solves the problems or just corrupts them.
3. Smart city with the technological advancements needs to be part of the urban landscape but only with connection to the urban transformation, management and design to tackle the real problems.

Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions:

1. Has urban design become better at using, utilising and connecting technology to the city?
2. How can the urban designers, researchers, architects better participate in the discussion about the urban landscape and the smart cities?
3. How have the new technologies, such as blockchain, changed the dystopian future of our cities?
4. To create a better city, shouldn’t the different disciplines all work together, architects with the computer technicians?
5. Have you noticed the technology in your urban area? Do you know what problem it solves? Do you know problems which it could solve?

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