Person in a Smart City: Anthropological Effects and Humanitarian Risks

Abstract

The article explores the concept of the smart city in terms of semiotics and anthropology. The author analyzes what axiological connotations, existential meanings, and cultural codes are expressed in smart cities, based on a semiotic approach to urban space as a discourse that can be read and interpreted. It is shown that the human being was displaced beyond the urban narrative under the original technological understanding of the smart city, but subsequently the smart city begins to be interpreted taking into account the smart community, with a focus on people and the human dimension of urban space. The example of South Korea's Songdo demonstrates that a smart city that ignores the cultural context and values of its inhabitants is a functional but semiotically unsaturated and lifeless space. The anti-historical characteristic of smart cities is noted as their axiological feature. The past and the disordered, uncomfortable present are evaluated negatively, while the technologically advanced future is idealized and assessed positively. Moreover, the concept of the smart city transforms the cultural opposition of the urban as artificial and the natural as inartificial. Smart cities reconstruct the idea of a “garden city”, relying not on the desire to conquer nature and exploit its resources, but on the necessity and existential healing of human contact with nature. At the same time, the positive anthropological effects of the smart transformation of cities, associated with the optimization of the daily life processes of citizens, are accompanied by certain humanitarian risks. Among such risks the author refers to the increasing “nervous tension” of urban residents caused by the acceleration of the pace of urban life and the complexity of urban technology; aggravation of social inequality and social polarization; reduction of social ties and atomization of subjects. In addition, attention is focused on the fact that the disposal and management of urban data through the use of smart technologies appears as a new form of covert control of society.