2.1. The demographic and economic challenges: toward a change in economic model

In 2008, we saw the urban population grow past 50% of the total population, including in emerging and developing countries in Latin America and Asia, with an estimated 70% growth predicted by 2030.

Urban growth is subject to a specific phenomenon of increasing returns which, according to the maths of Geoffrey West and Luis Bettencourt of the Santa Fe Institute, makes every marginal kilometer of existing infrastructure 0.85% cheaper than new infrastructure, and its resulting externalities 1.15% stronger. This is unlike a human organization – such as a company or an administration – which sees diminishing returns as its size increases. The problem is that these increasing returns affect positive externalities as well as negative ones: pollution, waste management, criminality, squalor, energy costs, etc. This growth model, born from the second industrial revolution and the “death of distance” caused by the transportation revolution during the 19th Century, is based on the consumption of fossil fuels and presents the paradox of making things easier in the short term, but non-sustainable in the medium term.

Counterintuitively, the challenge of urban development focuses more on developing countries, since the ecological footprint increases with the level of consumption (+57% every time the consumption doubles), and in small cities (population below 1 million) that increase faster.

This model knows three bottlenecks: energy consumption, pollution and social costs (stress, health, criminality, etc.) induced by a dysfunctional urban growth. Add to that and the cost of renewing infrastructures becomes considerable without providing any improvement to the current model of modern cities if they are undertaken without ever reviewing the business model.

These direct costs impact growth if they are destined to maintain the city within a constant model, when instead they can be opportunities for innovation. Considering them as management costs will lead to postponing necessary investments when, at the very least, integrating the impact of the costs of their externalities into the cost calculation makes the operation largely beneficial.

The American Association of Civil Engineers calculates that the lack of investment in water management results in a global surcharge for the economic world of $147 billion and $59 billion for households, which by 2020 will be bearing a cost of an additional $900 for water processing (Figure 2.1).

The required investment is $84 billion, which would translate to a cost reduction for businesses and protect 700,000 jobs, $541 billion in household revenue, $460 billion in GDP and $6 billion in exports (Tabel 2.1).

The same calculation was applied for renovating the electrical grid and the transportation network, such as ports, canals and airports. In every possible case, the return on investment as it impacts the GDP, exports, employment and household budgets is appreciable.

The current economic model of public decision is characterized by the fact that investments are postponed due to policies that enact low involvement from public power, which have been in place since the 1980s. The question of the economic model of public decision-making and its ability to integrate all externalities tied to these investments will inevitably be included in the conversation surrounding smart cities.

However, the challenges of the transition to smart cities in emerging countries are far more significant.

Urban growth in these emerging countries is very high, and the environmental impact is all the more significant as the quality of life increases. On the one hand, this development will no longer allow developed countries to externalize their polluting activities toward emerging and newly developing countries. On the other hand, from the perspective of energy consumption alone, if emerging countries were to adopt the same model as developed countries, the situation would be unsustainable; their energy consumption would quickly surpass that of developed countries within 30 years.

The experience of developed countries shows that the cost to fix a badly designed city (such as American ones, for instance, which are designed for vehicles) is far greater than the cost to build a sustainable city from the ground up. This phenomenon is well understood by system architects: a system that was not designed to be scaled must develop in successive layers which produce a “spaghetti architecture” which becomes illegible, and it becomes very complicated and costly to intervene, with unreliable results. The phenomenon is even more significant in the US where there are plenty of infrastructure stakeholders. This type of problem has driven the development of architectural methods – called “urbanization” by analogy – of information systems where the problem of spaghetti architecture is more significant because it is immaterial.

The urbanization of emerging countries is therefore a critical market both in its volume and its nature. The investment in sustainability must happen upstream during the design phase. The balance sheet of urban development in China has imitated the Western model with dramatic consequences in terms of energy consumption, waste pollution and quality of life, which has been degraded by dysfunctional cities, and illustrates the necessity of urban planning that integrates restrictions upstream.

These countries still do not have the financial or, more relevantly, the technological resources to develop these integrative approaches. Western companies will therefore be solicited to ensure the transfer of technologies as emerging countries develop ambitious strategies for mastering technological abilities. Studying strategic orientation documents from Latin American countries, China and Morocco reveals the concerns of developing integrative approaches, rather than project by project, through ambitious public policies that highlight their necessary holistic dimensions and accentuate the coherence of sectorial policies and central and local initiatives.

The report by the OECD titled Green Growth highlights the need to dispose of a set of sophisticated tools for neutralizing the perverse effects of solutions applied unilaterally or out of context. But this set must remain legible and simple to understand and provide a frame of reference for integrating urban policy tools, rather than an exhaustive plethora of tools. This is the challenge of developing an approach through systemic modeling.

2.2. Geopolitical challenges: the polar shift in development in favor of the south-west and the different strategies among industrialized and emerging countries

The developmental challenges for emerging cities are those of the industrialization of emerging countries. Urban growth is linked to development and industrialization and has the ability to turn the tables for powers tied to urban development in the South and particularly in the East (Asia). McKinsey calculates that of the 600 largest cities, 380 are situated in developed countries and contributed to more than 50% of the 2007 global GDP. The 280 cities located in developing countries did not contribute more than 10% of the world’s GDP. By 2025, 136 new cities will enter the top 600, and all of them will be from emerging countries: 100 of them will be in China, 13 in India and 8 in Latin America.

The nature of this growth will change drastically. While in 2007, 23 megacities (population of over 10 million people) produced 14% of the world’s GDP, we will soon see, at the top of the 600, 230 medium-sized cities (population 150,000 to 10 million people) all in emerging countries. Contrary to the common perception, the megacities will not be the ones to drive the world’s growth in the near future of 2025: 423 of the top 600 cities, all of them in emerging countries, will be middleweight cities responsible for 45% of growth.

However, this does not mean that we should only focus on these top cities. Secondary cities (population of 100,000 people or less) contribute to creating systems of cities around larger cities, which have specialized complementary roles that perform based on their connection to the urban system. This is an important point in the Latin American strategy because their cities do not receive sufficient amounts of capital or knowledge investments.

The development of cities will not occur through a constant economic model.

In the current model for non-industrialized developing countries, urban development will happen through propagation, where shanty towns appear and are subsequently incorporated into the city (e.g. Casablanca). This scenario relies on a system of relations between industrialized countries based on the outsourcing of activities that have negative side effects (environmental hazards, pollution, reduced working conditions) and diminishing returns to less-developed countries, thus applying the “Summers doctrine”¹. This is a “lose-lose” scenario, in that it discourages innovation surrounding urban development in emerging countries and does not respond to the issues of environmental hazards. It highlights the necessity of environmental accountability which reintegrates the cost of outsourced environmental damage by importing products made in non-industrialized countries into the balance of cities in developed countries.

In the industrializing and innovative scenario, emerging countries use the fact that activities are being outsourced to organize the transfer of technologies. Rather than accentuating a quantitative accumulation of technologies, they focus on integrating them into a global approach, described as holistic, into urban planning and development in the long term. These countries do not have the technology, but do have a political and strategic vision of urban development. This is a classic approach to catching up that turns being behind technologically into an advantage, as theorized by Alexander Gerschenkron in his 1962² book. These nations can marry a traditional technology that they master and look for synergies with newly imported technologies.

The Koreans, with the smart city of Songdo, marry metal-working technology in the form of their company called POSCO with digital routing imported by Cisco. They thus apply strategic innovations: the impact of one innovation does not lie in the technology itself, but rather in the synergies with older technologies. In Songdo, Cisco’s expenses only make up for 2.9% of the overall budget (Cisco invested $49 billion in 2009) The rest is made up of traditional technologies such as concrete and steel made “smart” by communications’ technologies.

The archetype for these long-term catch-up strategies is the Chinese strategy which is currently moving from “made in China” to “innovated in China”, increasingly driven by the interior market, which clearly sets these two options: China is at a turning point in the relation between development and urbanization, the threshold of a 60% urban population. It either pursues a tendency scenario toward a non-smart urbanization, or it adopts an innovative strategy linking cities with economic, social and political development³.

In this industrialist holistic strategy, Western technology is acquired by partnerships that are the condition for entry into the Chinese market, or even through “honeypot” strategies destined to attract these industries in clusters. Thus, inviting the French to build model smart cities in Chengdu, Wuhan and Shenyang allowed the Chinese to attract all of France’s expertise onto a delineated geographic perimeter.

The strategies of industrialized countries are centered around sector-specific markets that correspond with their technological offerings. Therefore, while an English research paper [DEP 13] highlights the need to develop – indiscriminately, presumably – global offers, it is structured around five vertical sectors of British offerings: water, transportation, waste, energy and housing. The French strategy, developed by the previous Minister for Foreign Trade, while claiming to attempt to develop a global offer around “living well in the city”, has remained an additive to the offers of French businesses. The report from the Commissariat Général au Développement Durable⁴ even moved backwards on these new approaches by attempting to organize French offerings into activity sectors, before realizing how little sense such an approach would make since “smart cities lead industrials to adopt an open approach” [CGD 12].

Conversely, the strategies of emerging countries focus on integration which relies on politico-institutional strategies and not just technologies. Emerging countries formulate their urban strategy in terms of long-term development, not just in terms of commercial results as is so often the case in industrialized countries. The Chinese report defines its political objective to be to build livable cities that can grow sustainably in accordance with the principles of an ecological civilization. Thus, China has gone from a development-centric strategy that favors functional urbanism, known as “copy and paste urbanism”, to an integrationist urbanism. The law surrounding urban and rural development, passed in 2008, marks a significant turning point. It confirms the importance of social and environmental matters in the face of economic matters. Cities are no longer considered part of a quantitative extending dynamic, but as part of a renewable qualitative ideology. The key notion here is that of “beauty” and harmony, aiming to reconcile all dimensions of our cities [DOU 15].

Figure 2.6 represents China’s strategy, which balances five dimensions:

• – Equity: in the ancient philosophy of yin and yang, imbalance is more dangerous than rarity. In addition, the out-of-control growth of the past few decades has made China one of the most unequal countries in the world with a Gini coefficient in the order of 0.6.
• – Efficiency: with the blind expansion in the past decades, China has seen prices skyrocket along with wasted resources. The mistakes from China’s urban policies are attributed to an error in the perception of the role played by the government in urban development. Here, the government should be seen as a designer rather than a monitor; a hierarchy that favors size above all else, and an erroneous notion that large cities are always the best cities. The responsibility is thus placed on the necessary leadership to integrate stakeholder contributions into a shared strategic vision of urban development.
• – Sustainability: this looks at technological and human objectives.
  • - Technological: the cost in energy and the increasing demand for resources, the immaturity of technologies, the adjustment in industrial structure and the context.
  • - Human: residents must be able to live where they work, thus development must focus on residents.
• – Innovation: in this case, innovation correlates with the ability to integrate cultural heritage rather than copying European architecture for tourism and business. The uniformization of cities indicates a lack of creativity and innovation.
• – Security: whether it be economic, social, environmental or dietary, security must move past the conversation about citizens’ rights. This strategy focuses on education and the development of a social capital and civic spirit.

This multidimensional strategy is coherent with the state-of-the-art economics of innovation: material capital is mobile and can therefore be copied, while immaterial effects (knowledge, expertise, social capital) are rooted to a territory and are not highly mobile. Thus, immaterial effects must be reproduced endogenously by learning from the historical specificities of the social capital of the territory. Abilities are idiosyncratic in nature, meaning they belong to a context or an organization and are difficult to employ in another form. While a technology can be copied, an ability cannot. The latter must be recreated through a long learning process endogenous to the hosting country and territory. It depends on a technological culture, which in turn is dependent on social capital.

This, in fact, is the etymological meaning of the word techno-logy, as historians in economic development are rediscovering and as the thinkers of Western Enlightenment philosophy, Francis Bacon, Giambattista Vico and Blaise Pascal, understood it. The term is composed of techné, technique, the mechanical which works off the same principle as an automation, and logos, tacit and explicit knowledge (Figure 2.7). Recent works on the history of economics, in particular, those by Professor Joel Mokyr at Northwestern University [MOK 02], highlight the confusion – which gradually infected Western thinking – between technique and technology. This confusion leads us to forget the immaterial and cultural aspect at the heart of the true competitive advantage of businesses and nations, which has been the driving force behind previous industrial revolutions.

Emerging countries have a strategy based on integrating existing technologies they can acquire from industrialized countries, while the former have strategies based on exportation. On the one hand, the medium-term integrative strategies dictate the demand; on the other, the additive short-term strategies of industrialized countries dictate the supply. A common frame of reference based on the development of systemic modeling would rebalance this probable leadership inversion in favor of emerging countries.

2.3. Energy transfer: the fossil fuel curse is not about to disappear

Two recent works, Carbon Democracy by Timothy Mitchell [MIT 11] and Or Noir by Matthieu Auzaneau [AUZ 15], highlight how much fossil fuels have shaped our social and political systems. The energy behind the first industrial revolution was coal, which caused a dissociation between areas of industrial production and rich housing communities fleeing Coketown. However, as Timothy Mitchell explains, coal production was centralized into areas that concentrated working-class laborers and was shipped via specific and localized canals, which also required laborers. This allowed the working class to promote workers’ rights, improving their conditions beginning with their housing and health, and establishing unions, or labor exchanges, which contributed to a lost ecosystem of life that disappeared with the exodus to the city.

With the transition to oil, an energy that is easy to transport, production areas were spread outside of working class living areas, and things began to change. Keep in mind that the young revolutionary Joseph Stalin was an oil worker in Baku, where he pushed for revolutionary strikes. But the power of oil would destroy this labor power. On top of this, oil shapes global geopolitics: the great oil companies such as a Standard Oil organize oil shortages in order to drive up the prices and maintain control over the production points. The problems in the Middle East today are, for the most part, a result of borders drawn by Western powers (Britain, United States, France) according to the locations of oil-rich areas in Iraq and Syria, which gave birth to nations that do not correspond to their history.

The power of oil shaped modern cities in accordance with their needs. Shortly thereafter, oil companies, Renault in France, and General Motors in the United States, torpedoed electric tramway systems replacing them with buses. Paris’ streetcar network was the largest in the world and connected the city to its suburbs. It was done away with between 1930 and 1932 to make way for Renault buses. In 1935, the United States Congress forbade energy companies from owning streetcar holdings. General Motors then bought these holdings and deliberately let the infrastructures deteriorate. Two years later, GM began dismantling the streetcar networks throughout the major American cities. GM was reprimanded in 1949 along with Firestone and Standard Oil, but the damage was done [JAR 17].

Leaving the oil era behind would therefore be a blessing, but economic history teaches us that such a change only happens if it is cost effective. In addition, as we saw in the Introduction, this is gradually becoming the case, though the death of petrol is not imminent. For the International Energy Agency (IAE), the energy market will continue to grow until 2040: oil consumption will go from 90 million barrels a day in 2016 to 121 million barrels a day in 2040. Oil is not done shaping global geopolitics – something Jean-Michel Valantin points out [VAL 17] – what with China’s growing oil needs to ensure its transition out of coal, which is the source of the unlivable pollution in its cities. Oil and gas will structure a new age of geopolitics around the New Silk Road, the Chinese strategy for securing its energy provisions, relying on the Russian Arctic, via a route that will go from Iceland to the Middle East, and will be twice the size of the ancient Silk Road that crossed Central Asia. Nonetheless, the end of the oil economy is nigh. The classic oil deposits have reached peak oil, even though that deadline keeps moving further back with the growing presence of unconventional hydrocarbons.

Even with the new impulse given by the use of the Russian Arctic, oil’s diminishing returns are appearing. The energy return on investment (ERI) [HAL 17] was originally excellent and was the driving factor behind the second industrial revolution. But from an ERI of 60 to 1 (1 barrel consumed to produce 60), it is down to 10 to 1, whereas that of green energies remains far below, reaching 1 to 1 for biofuels. Hall estimates that the required ERI to power an industrial society is somewhere between 10 to 15. This means we will not only need to change the nature of the energy we consume, but, supposing that renewable energies are able to substitute fossil fuels, the way that we consume energy (i.e. our living systems) will have to change, starting with the urban systems.

Let’s not kid ourselves about sustainable energies: in an invigorating book [PRU 17], professor Rémy Prud’homme shows that the maturity and deployment of renewable energies for the production of electricity are not anywhere near the levels portrayed by certain politicians and industry leaders. Their production capacity and returns are effectively low, and there is a lot of misinformation in circulation. Public financing can lead to deployment of technologies that have not yet reached technological maturity. This is the case for Denmark, an exception that does not confirm the rule. Comparing Danish production and consumption, argues Remy Prud’homme, can make one dream of a potential for electric self-sufficiency based on harnessing the energy of the sun and wind. However, the hours during which Denmark consumes are generally not the ones during which it produces. In the absence of a vast capacity for electrical storage, the country can only function through its integration into a larger grid that includes Sweden and Norway (and their hydraulic and nuclear electricity). Not to mention that Denmark produces electricity that no one wants, and it is forced to pay to get rid of it. Renewable electricity is still, to this day, hindered by the inability to store it. It is therefore not mature.

Renewable energies do not free us from the geopolitical agendas of their promoters, similar to the oil era. China maintains a quasi-monopoly on rare earth minerals necessary to the digital industry. There will be geopolitics driven by the digital economy, the same way that geopolitics is currently driven by oil. In the name of the fight against climate change, emerging countries are being banned from building energy farms using fossil fuels. Parts of Africa are in dire need of electricity, but they are not expected to create fossil fuel plants using a readily accessible technology. This is a typical case of a “kicking away the ladder” strategy similar to the one that developed countries applied against other nations after the first industrial revolution⁵.

For Development Economics Historian Erik Reinert, we have entered a sixth development cycle⁶ based on “green technology” for which the industry is now entering a phase of increasing returns [REI 15]. Industry interests would therefore become compatible with a respect for the planet’s ecological limitations, which is good news, because in the real world – specifically in the capitalist world – things do not change for good, but because it becomes more cost effective. For Australian management professor John Mathews [MAT 13], this is a “Schumpeter” socioeconomical paradigm shift as identified by Carlota Perez, which would follow the fifth paradigm shift based on information technologies [ROC 15b]. A change in paradigm means that we are entering a continuous learning cycle and a cost reduction cycle. One such cycle occurs in two ways: through process innovation (or learning curve) and by applying these processes to increasing production volumes. Both phenomena are inseparable. Economist Nicholas Kaldor characterized this process as a chain reaction: the more costs drop, the higher the returns increase, and the more incentive there is to develop this new industry.

In addition, as we progress along the learning curve by solving occurring problems, polluted countries – India and China – are in the best positions with their green growth to take leadership in this new and growing industry, while the Western world runs the risk of being trapped by fossil fuels, and the dominant industries benefit from vested interests, allowing them to lobby intensely in favor of the status quo (generally through over-employment blackmail).

The East’s green development strategy rests on the hypothesis that renewable energies are reaching maturity. However, the real technological break will be an innovation in energy storage. Without that, renewable energies remain intermittent and dependent on their pairing with gas and oil. During the second industrial revolution, electricity was not an improvement upon the candle, but a radical split. This is not the case with the wind turbine, which is just an improved fan, an incremental improvement combined with an improved turbine [PRU 17]. This industry is not managed as an innovative industry: it mostly depends on large companies and benefits from public financing. In France, there are no French companies. The only two were sold: Alstom was sold to General Electric and Areva sold its subsidiary to a Spanish conglomerate, which was subsequently bought by Siemens. Thus, the progression along the learning curve does not benefit France’s economy. Since Schumpeter, we know that an industrial revolution is driven by entrepreneurs who take innovative, industrial and financial risks. There are no great entrepreneurs in renewable energies that are over-financed with public money for the benefit of large international industrial corporations. Because of this, we are witnessing cities finance the installation of electric automotive charging stations: did the second industrial revolution have public funding financing gas pumps? Contradictorily, modern politics make renewables – which are currently limited to wind farming and solar panels, omitting nuclear, biomass and many others – a vested interest. If these industries require support from nascent industries [ROC 14], it is for the purpose of building a new market, which cannot be on the agenda.

2.4. The six breakthroughs in urban development based on smart cities

As we’ve seen, smart cities will not appear from the addition of technologies, no matter how effective. Nor will their development be a result of market forces alone. It will be a global change, a breakthrough. The digital economy of the third industrial revolution – now known as the iconomy⁷ – allows us to establish multiple connections between residents and objects and reinvent business models. It isn’t technology that makes a city smart, but its ability to be a city in the classic sense: with a diversity of activities, an ability to evolve naturally – known as organic growth – from its own set of operating rules, with no centralized planning, through an active civic life.

Approaching a city as a life system highlights six disruptions, six great challenges that affect all aspects of our social, economic, political and geopolitical lives.

A geostrategic break will occur because emerging countries will be the ones to experience the highest demographic and urban growth. Added to this are geopolitical breaks linked with climate change. The increase in forest fires is saturating the rescue services which can no longer cooperate. The opening of the Russian Arctic to travel will save them from crossing Africa through the Suez Canal and the Malacca strait and open up possibilities giving birth to an ambitious plan for Russia to urbanize the Arctic. All of these elements of thought and these new contexts highlight the notion of cities as a whole, as life systems that integrate work, housing, social and civic life. Thus, the Casablanca smart city project aims to remedy the out-of-control growth of the city – 300 hectares every year – and its monstrous pollution. Meanwhile, industrialized countries have industrial offers regarding urban subsystems (transportation, energy, water, housing, infrastructure, environment, etc.) and are not yet ready to develop a global offer that would have to be more than the sum of all of these subsystems. The South has the markets, the North has the technologies, but technologies that are not currently integrated into a systemic global model of the city. Therefore, the challenge is for the South to develop the methodologies (soft), which will help them integrate the material technologies (hard).

This requires a scientific breakthrough, because a city is more than the sum of its buildings and more than an aggregate of its cutting-edge technologies. The city is a complex ecosystem, the rules of which are still beyond us. This includes emerging countries such as China that are working to highlight this integration and modeling effort of the city as a life system governed by a harmony among the elements, a principle at the heart of some Chinese philosophy. Whoever masters the ecosystem of the city will de facto master the underlying technologies, define the demand and the supply for smart-city construction, and will define the standards in a field that is still largely unknown despite such a ubiquitous point of focus. If we look at the expansion of Singapore [ROC 17a], we can see that absorbing hard technologies is actually relatively easy, and as soon as a country has understood that the keys to success are in intellectual investment of soft technologies and social capital, the student overtakes the master in only a matter of decades.

Managerial disruption will be necessary because this project will require an in-depth transformation of business models for governments and businesses. Businesses – many of which have already started – must collaborate along the principle of “coopetition” to develop global offerings and integrate positive and negative externalities (unchecked induced effects) when calculating the return on investment. In the 1920s, British economist Arthur Cecil Pigou suggested integrating the cost of externalities (pollution, increasing transportation costs due to globalization, waste management, etc.) when calculating the cost of investments. A city can be green in appearance, but one must take into account in its economic and ecologic balance its pollution and the social costs of products that are being manufactured overseas in low-salary factories. The pollution generated by the Chinese industry mainly comes from the demand for low-cost products from the Western world. When the city of Séné, in Brittany, buys its granite in China to save money, the resulting pollution and social costs in China must be considered, along with the transportation and its impact on the environment and the loss of jobs in Brittany.

A split in public policies will occur because public authorities must be capable of thinking “city” and developing new abilities in system architecture, which implies a profound evolution of administrative organization which must operate transversally as it is impossible to think in terms of complex systems with an administration compartmentalized into silos. Thinking about a city also means thinking about the coherence of the social fabric that makes up a city: its life system and its relation to its suburbs. The impact of globalization is noxious, in that it causes a metropolization of activities with a high economic potential and a high decisional content. In sociological terms, this translates to an over-representation of high executives appropriating housing in the once working-class areas and the development of suburbs into areas for under-qualified immigrant labor.⁸ Metropolization causes a double phenomenon of social decomposition: within its urban fabric, which divides into two extreme poles, and the city and its suburbs, which become unindustrialized. If the city is rich and competitive, there is no invisible hand to harmoniously distribute this wealth: urban violence in suburbs and popular revolts of surrounding cities have become phenomena common in all advanced capitalist countries.

A social and technological split will occur because the digital economy – iconomics – is a new field which cannot be left to the big players such as GAFAM (Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon), the market capitalization is now equivalent to France’s GDP. In iconomics, virtually everything can be connected to everything else – in particular with the Internet of Things – and create an unchecked complexity. It is important to define what must remain human and what can be incorporated into a technical system. For instance, a car can brake automatically if it is too close to another car. This increases safety, but the system must be more than 100% reliable in practice since it has to be redundant. Furthermore, cars equipped with effective systems will encounter vehicles that are not equipped with this technology. Therefore, we must navigate between passive and active safety, perform studies in ergonomics, etc. To design this, competing companies must cooperate with one another and with specialists in social sciences, which is still not present in today’s business models. Another vast worksite is that of Big Data, which allows businesses to establish correlations helpful for understanding human behavior or predicting events. However, this can be detrimental to data confidentiality and develop overly intrusive control systems. This is also a split with the current urban development model, which creates gaps between production facilities and consumption locations. Polluting activities have been pushed outwards toward poor countries and the outskirts of cities with working class neighborhoods. This policy was adopted at the end of the 19th Century and worsened throughout the 20th Century along with the impossibility of finding a solution to the problem of pollution⁹. This approach pushed the poor to the outskirts of cities. The discourse surrounding sustainable cities, green cities and inclusive cities is just a social lie if the environmental costs of manufacturing countries and negative externalities such as traffic and pollution being moved to the outskirts are not reintegrated.

A political split is necessary because smart cities can also become the hell imagined by Jeremy Bentham in the early 19th Century with his panopticon – a society of generalized surveillance – if we follow a utilitarian approach guided only by the optimization of costs and the power of technology, rather than a city for its people where living is good. Throughout the history of urban development, Lewis Mumford shows us that the forces of the markets have been the drivers for urban degeneration by focusing solely on the pursuit of profit by promoters at the expense of the equilibrium of the city. Tall towers made fortunes for elevator companies and optimized the housing prices by concentrating housing and creating congested city centers, where getting around with a car is slower than a horse-drawn carriage and resulted in forced exoduses to dysfunctional city suburbs. We will have to reinvent the use of public construction around the notion of smart city as designed as an ecosystem. At the core of this complexity, residents will have to reacquire power in order to not be consumed by an Orwellian hell, which may bring the spotlight back on direct democratic practices and political control, which developed at the beginning of urban civilization, and will now be augmented by the power of digital.

To conclude, smart cities are more of a political project rather than a technical vision of the future of society and its values.