*Take it away, Google Translator:
Le città intelligenti non esistono
Bruce Sterling, The Atlantic, Stati Uniti
10 aprile 2018 13.07
The expression smart city is interesting but not important, since nobody cares to define it. Smart is an imaginative political label used by a contemporary alliance between left-wing urbanists and technology entrepreneurs. To be smart, smart, it's just a way to make stupid those who believe in market forces and nimby (not in my backyard, not in my backyard), those who oppose the construction of public works near their homes.
Smart city fans from around the world will agree that London is a particularly smart city. But why? London is a huge and awkward beast that lives unabated in a state of irrational and eccentric disorder. London is an absurd urban chaos, but it also hosts some of the best smart city conferences. London also has a big administration bureaucracy that uses words like "smart city" (it even coined some). The language of smart cities is always an international business English, in any city you are in.
And so, if dear old London is a smart city - with its empty skyscrapers, its disturbing surveillance cameras and its sewers clogged with animal fat - then maybe we do not have to worry too much about the inventions of Elon Musk and all the enthusiasm that surrounds digital urban planning.
It is better to rethink the future of cities as a mirror of Rome, the eternal city where almost nothing is resolved by technology, but where everything changes constantly so that everything remains as it is.
Why take the trouble to ask citizens what they expect from the city, when you can watch them?
Rome and London are two gigantic and numb giant, surviving thousands of years of willing reforms. Both are part of a world where half the population lives in cities and another couple of billions will do so soon. The population is aging fast, infrastructures crumble and climate change is replacing the fires, wars and epidemics of the past. These are the important urban problems. As boring as it is, it is on these that we must concentrate.
The digital technologies loved by fans of smart cities are flashy and fragile, some even harmful, but are already part of the urban heritage. When you install the fiber optic under the sidewalks of a city, you get the internet. When you have skyscrapers and smartphones, you get portable ubiquity. When you break a smartphone into sensors, switches and radios, you get the internet of things. These boring but important technological transformations have been spreading in cities for a couple of generations. They are practically the only things that city dwellers can use.
Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent: these are the industrial giants of our era. That's how people make money, that's how they make war and then, of course, that's how they will build cities.
However, cities of the future will not be smart, well designed, efficient, clean, fair, green, sustainable, safe, healthy, cheap or resilient. Nor will they have high ideals of freedom, equality or brotherhood. The smart city of the future will be the internet, the cloud, and a lot of other gadgets put in place by the municipal administrations, mostly with the aim of making the cities more attractive to the capital. When this is done well, the influence of the most attentive and ambitious cities will increase, making the mayors more worthy of being elected appear. When it gets hurt, it will look very much like the worn-out carcasses of previous waves of urban innovation, such as railways, power lines, highways and oil pipelines. There will also be negative side effects and repercussions that not even the wisest of urban planners could foresee. These smart cities will not be seemingly impeccable efficiency paradises, like Apple's new headquarters....
