Abstract
It is often uncritically assumed that, when digital technologies are integrated into the operation of city functions, they inevitably contribute to sustainable urban development. Such a notion rests largely on the belief that Information and Communication Technology (ICT) solutions pave the way for more democratic forms of planning, and that ‘smart’ technological devices result in a range of environmental benefits, e.g., energy efficiency and the mitigation of global warming. Drawing on the scientific literature that deals with ‘smart cities’, we here elaborate on how both propositions fail to consider drawbacks that could be characterized as ‘wicked’, i.e., problems that lack simplistic solutions and straightforward planning responses, and which often come about as ‘management surprises’, as a byproduct of achieving sustainability. We here deal with problems related to public choice constraints, ‘non-choice default technologies’ and the costs of automation for human learning and resilience. To avoid undemocratic forms of planning and too strong a dependence on non-choice default technologies, e.g., smart phones, we recommend that planners and policy makers safeguard redundancy in public-choice options by maintaining a wide range of alternative choices, including analog ones. Resilience thinking could help planners deal more effectively with the ‘wickedness’ of an increasingly hyper-connected society.
Highlights
In the last decade, digital technological solutions have been launched, as a way to make our cities more sustainable
This balancing heuristic has its evolutionary roots in governing social exchange and works well for that purpose, but when the same balancing heuristic is applied to environmental issues it leads to systematically erroneous thinking and potentially harmful behavior [22]
While it might be difficult to find adequate solutions to effectively deal with wicked problems, we argue here that the political-economic elites that prescribe smart city (SC)-development as a way to build more inclusive and sustainable cities should pay more attention to resilience principles when designing and creating the digital city [51]
Summary
Digital technological solutions have been launched, as a way to make our cities more sustainable. By a smart city (SC), in this paper, we mean “a city in which Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is merged with traditional infrastructure, coordinated and integrated using new digital technologies” [8]. It is often assumed that the digitalization of increasing amounts of services and functions in a city inevitably contributes to sustainable urban development [10] Such an assumption rests largely on two propositions: first, that ICT solutions can pave the way for more democratic forms of urban planning and governance regimes; second, that smart technological devices will result in cleaner technologies (e.g., energy efficiency) and, in this way contribute, to the mitigation of global warming [11]. We highlight the important role that redundancy plays in managing complex adaptive systems (CAS) and conclude by proposing that planners and policymakers build smarter cities whilst paying greater attention to resilience thinking
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