Listen to the episode:

You can find the shownotes through this link.

---

Are you interested in post-anthropocentric cities after smart ones?

Our summary today works with the article titled Towards Post-Anthropocentric Cities: Reconceptualising smart cities to evade urban ecocide from 2019 by Tan Yigitcanlar, Marcus Foth, and Md Kamruzzaman, published in the Journal of Urban Technology. Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see how to change current smart city approaches to evade a most likely urban ecocide. This article presents the next step in smart city evolution with post-anthropocentric cities.

[intro music]

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. Stay tuned until because I will give you the 3 most important things and some questions which would be interesting to discuss with a special attention to Australian cities.

[music]

The current Anthropocene is characterised by greenhouse gas emissions and human domination, resulting in severe environmental, economic and social crises. At this dire state, contemporary urban policy and practice tend to place all their bets on technology to ensure our survival. Yet, can technology really save us? Previous aggressive marketing and rapid technological advancements gave false hope to policy-makers and urban administrators that the effects of global-scale environmental and socioeconomic crises could be reversed through feasible technology solutions. Thus, the amalgamation of technology and the city is widely seen as an effective instrument to manage the challenges that cities and societies face. Enter the smart city.

The smart city started with the intelligent city paradigm which brought together knowledge and innovation economy and the spread of the internet. This concept was heavily expert-focused and almost no opportunity was given for citizens to participate in the decision-making process. Later, the smart city movement emphasised a greater involvement of local authorities in deploying smart cities establishing a new digital data layer to drive efficiencies. Yet, this concept was still more top-down leaving little room for the community to participate in policy-making. As a reaction to the limitation of smart cities, a new type of city – the responsive city – is envisaged: a city that provides citizens with active engagement in and usage of smart solutions to improve living standards and urban sustainable cities.

In spite of such efforts, urban innovation remains largely technocentric with much needed governance, policy and regulatory reform lagging behind in both speed and scope. Rankings provide global listings of smart cities, but a closer look to their environmental performance reveals unsustainable levels of per capita greenhouse gas emissions despite some regulations. Moreover, recent empirical studies have reported that smart cities are not after all that smart as they fail to live up to sustainability expectations. The focus on technology and technical solutions raises the question of resource management and ecological entanglements with nature. These approaches do not avoid the ecocide and existential crisis we face in light of forthcoming catastrophes of the Anthropocene era, like the ecosystem collapse of the Great Barrier Reef.

Current smart city practice is generating a twisted urbanism by forcing the union of different and incompatible elements in cities – like addressing quality of life and sustainability. Hence, there is an urgency to reconceptualise urban planning, design, and development paradigms and act accordingly immediately. In such reconceptualizations, urban space cannot be seen as an entity separate from nature and thus it cannot be designed just or primarily for humans. Decentring the human urban design will help to develop post-anthropocentric cities or more-than-human cities, that are truly smart, sustainable and equitable. Maybe that will be the fourth generation of the smart city.

The current smart city practice at its best is a zero-sum game for sustainability – environmental gains are cancelled out by the impact of increased technology and energy use. The biggest challenge now is to find a way to change our mentality and politics on urban transformation. We need to focus more on an ecological human settlement theory that will create cohabitation spaces to house humans and non-humans in a sustainable and inclusive way in the post-anthropocentric cities of tomorrow. Building post-anthropocentric cities for more-than-human futures might be the last resort for humankind to evolve and avoid extinction in the not too distant future.

[music]

---

What was the most interesting part for you? What questions did arise for you? Do you have any follow up question? Let me know on Twitter at WTF4Cities or on the wtf4cities.com website where the transcripts and show notes are available! Additionally, I will highly appreciate if you consider subscribing to the podcast or on the website. I hope this was an interesting paper for you as well, and thanks for tuning in!

---

[music]

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

1. Smart city have gone through the intelligent city, the smart city and the responsive city phase, and probably it is time for to evolve further for its fourth generation.
2. The biggest challenge now is to find a way to change our mentality and politics on urban transformation.
3. Urban evolution and smart cities arrived to cross road where the next decisions need to include more sustainable ideas and more-than-human elements.

Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions which were suggested by the authors as well:

1. Will urban scholars, planners, designers, and activists be able to convince urban policy-makers and the general public of the urban need for a post-anthropocentric urban turnaround?
2. How can we – jointly with public, private, and academic sectors along with communities – pave the way for post-anthropocentric cities and more-than-human futures?

[outro music]

---