When concepts are repeated many times, they lose their meaning, somehow eroding the close link between signifier and signified.
When concepts are presented as the magical answer to a problem, they arouse distrust.
When we provide solutions without understanding the problem, it is quite likely that we will make mistakes.
At a time when everything has become 'smart' - homes, cars, phones... "Even people," as a professor sardonically said - the idea that cities are smart sounds rather like a bomb. of smoke that threatens to blur the real urban problems.
A bit like “pyrolytic oven”, which yes, is a catchy concept, which sounds good, but you are never quite sure what it actually is, even if you search for it on Google.
The analysis of cities is complex.
Very complex, in fact.
Cities are an agglomeration of people, ideas, social interactions, companies, economies, cars, smoke, noise, lives.
Urban processes are difficult to understand and we always, always, have questions and nuances left to explain, to understand, so we have many unanswered questions (although we also have some certainties).
Furthermore, cities have this great virtue of concentrating problems, so it is not unusual for quasi-magical solutions to proliferate, or answers to questions that, in reality, we have not even managed to formulate or pose adequately.
Partly for that reason, the
smart city thing
It continues to be a somewhat incomplete concept, almost flavorless, like a kind of half-sentence that lacks a predicate.
The smart city has ended up being one of those somewhat empty, tautological concepts (smart city is one that offers intelligent solutions to its inhabitants), unfortunate even, that define themselves from themselves, about themselves and so on. to infinity.
Adorned, yes, with algorithms and low-consumption LED lights.
Smart city sounds like a futuristic issue, far from our daily lives, but always efficient.
Whatever that efficiency is.
Even for those of us who didn't exist yet in 1962 or for those who have no idea who Hanna and Barbera were, it sounds a bit like a setting in which to place The Jetsons.
A bit like the Springfield that extolled the virtues of the monorail.
Probably, part of the dissatisfaction with the concept has to do with the expectations created and with a certain tendency that we have, as a society, to propose solutions without having properly analyzed and diagnosed the problems to which they should respond.
The smart city was going to be the innovative city that used information, communication technologies and other technological means to improve the quality of life of people, the efficiency of services and the competitiveness of societies.
But it turns out that we live in
unlivable
cities , dominated by traffic jams;
gentrified cities, cities that expel and lack accessible spaces.
The question, without a doubt, is whether a city that discriminates or expels its inhabitants can be intelligent.
How is a city that leaves the social behind going to be intelligent?
Can the city that segregates be intelligent?
And what about the one that discriminates or lacks physical accessibility?
So, if we go further: do foolish cities exist?
Do stupid cities exist?
The point is that cities, in addition to accumulating their own problems, do not stop manifesting the problems of the society in which they are located.
For this reason, the smart city cannot be the magical and all-powerful solution that makes inequality, traffic jams, pollution and, if you hurry me, your neighbor the one who wakes you up every night at 3 in the morning disappear.
The
smart city
is still a tool that can help us solve some of the problems that characterize cities today.
If they do it within the framework of efficiency and provide us with tools that help us evaluate solutions and problems, even better.
But, in the same way that Artificial Intelligence (another great promise) has its lights and shadows, no matter how many algorithms and sensors we install, we will need to be able to rethink what society we want to be, how we address problems, how we make cities are
liveable
and how we develop appropriate public policies.
Then we will be able to rely on all the technological tools at our disposal, on computer science and, if necessary and useful, even on the science of pyrolytic ovens.
Only then will we have fewer doubts about the intelligence of cities.
Irene Lebrusán
is a Doctor in Sociology, professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid and author of the book
Housing in old age: problems and strategies for aging in society
.