A vision of the future with smart, efficient, utopian, technology-empowered “smart cities” has gleamed on the horizon for years. The concept offers vague promises that all of a city’s infrastructure and operations will be connecting, communicating and automatically adjusting facilities and services to deliver ever higher levels of satisfaction and efficiency.
But when you try to get close to these fabled cities that boosters periodically declare with fanfare to be rising around the world, the visions tend to resolve into failed, stalled or lagging projects, or more likely, normal cities with incremental improvements to the technological support of existing services, rather than brand new, technologically integrated cities.