I am not against smart cities. I want to be clear about this before I say anything else, because the phrase "smart city skeptic" has become a kind of badge that people wear to signal sophistication, and I do not want to be that person. Sensors are useful. Real-time data is useful. Platforms that help municipalities allocate resources more efficiently are useful. I have no objection to any of this in principle.
What I am against is the announcement. The press conference. The white paper that describes what a city will become once the platform is deployed. The conference talk that presents a rendering of a future public space as if the rendering were the thing itself. This is the part I find dishonest, and it has been dishonest for long enough that I think it deserves to be named.
What the announcement does
The smart city announcement serves several functions, most of them having nothing to do with cities. It generates media coverage. It attracts investment. It signals to residents and investors that the city is forward-looking, innovative, committed to the future. It creates a record — a public record — that the city's leadership has done something, even before anything has been done.
The announcement, in other words, is infrastructure for politicians. It serves the people who make it, on a timeline that is useful to them — the next election, the next funding round, the next conference invitation. The city's residents, who will eventually either benefit from or be burdened by what gets built, are secondary.
I am not against ambition. I am against ambition that announces itself before it has earned the right to. — Daniel Fadlon
The conference circuit problem
There is a set of cities that appear on every smart city conference program. Singapore. Amsterdam. Copenhagen. Barcelona. Songdo. They have become, over the past fifteen years, the canonical examples of urban innovation — the places that other cities are told to emulate. I have been to enough of these conferences to notice something: the cities on the circuit are rarely the ones learning the most. They are the ones teaching, which is a different thing.
Teaching requires a stable position. It requires a story that is clear enough to tell in forty-five minutes. It requires the kind of success that can be photographed and rendered. The cities that are doing the most interesting work — Plovdiv, managing infrastructure under demographic decline; mid-size cities in Southeast Asia building transit systems without international consultants; secondary cities in Latin America trying to formalize informal infrastructure — these cities are not on the circuit. They are too complicated. Their stories do not resolve cleanly enough.
What gets missed
What gets missed when we follow the conference circuit is scale. Most of the world's urban population does not live in Singapore or Amsterdam. It lives in cities between 200,000 and two million people — cities that cannot afford the vendor contracts that make smart city deployments possible, that do not have the tax base to sustain complex technical systems, that are working in languages and regulatory environments that international case studies do not address.
This is the territory that The Quiet Infrastructure tries to map. Not the flagship deployments that generate conference talks, but the unremarkable, unglamorous work of building and maintaining urban systems in conditions of constraint. The work that happens when there is no announcement, no press conference, no platform — just a problem and a city that needs to solve it.
The alternative
I am sometimes asked what the alternative to the smart city announcement is. The question assumes that the announcement is the problem — that if cities could announce things more accurately, more humbly, more honestly, the problem would be solved. I do not think this is right.
The alternative is not better announcements. It is less announcement. It is the work done before there is anything worth announcing. It is the infrastructure that serves residents without asking them to pay attention to it. I have written elsewhere about what I call quiet infrastructure — the systems that do not require belief or attention or patience. This is what I mean. Not the absence of ambition, but ambition that expresses itself through delivery rather than declaration.
The light rail that finally arrives after thirty years of delays is not quiet infrastructure. But once it arrives, and once people ride it, and once it simply works — day after day, without ceremony — it becomes quiet. The announcement recedes. The thing takes over. That is the direction I am interested in.