Posthumanist Perspectives of Smart City Evaluations

Abstract

In the concept of smart cities, technology is becoming centric over living and non-living beings in the cities. Radically saying, human beings are becoming human resources, and non-humans are being excluded from smart city plans but only focus on those qualified smart city people. The minorities, non-human living things, and even mother nature are being sacrificed under the name of technological advance since it is assumed that smart cities possibly control and care for them. This paper is to ask what and how smart cities should be in the next generation of city development if all living and non-living beings can be treated the same as the city members. To do so, we critically review the concepts of smart cities and human smart cities using three well-known smart cities’ planning phases including Barcelona, Dubai, and Singapore. Criticizing their human dimensions of smart cities, we legitimate three posthumanist dimensions: non-dualism, more-than-humans, and ecological community to ensure that the next generation of smart cities becomes inclusive of all humans, non-humans, and more-than-humans. From the legitimation, we articulate emerging values: inclusion, agency, and smartness which should be considered to embed each posthumanist dimension in smart city planning. Using this new posthumanistic framework, we evaluate three popular smart city evaluation models to prove their anti-humanism and anti-non-humanism aspects in detail and argue that the framework is meaningful and effective to ensure that next smart cities are free from dualistic anthropocentrism at least.