What makes a smart city? Can technology alone help build cities of tomorrow? Interventions are needed to enable local communities to use information technology in shaping their environments, says Rohan Shivkumar

Speaking about smart cities, Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas said that the traditional trinity of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ have been replaced in the 21st century by ‘comfort, security and sustainability’. Thus the older, traditional cities — where one met strangers — were painted as a lost cause. It was here that danger, corruption, fear, crime and all kinds of darkness lurk. The ‘Smart City’, it seemed, lay in a space of infinite light. As a propaganda piece, it was perfect.

This techno-utopian imagination is not new to urban planning and architecture. To consolidate their claim over being the professionals most capable of managing the rapidly growing urban landscape, planners and architects — especially over the last century — have often made a case for the mathematical and rationalistic justification of their plans. Multitudes of data have been collected and processed though varied analytical systems to arrive at probabilities and projections of the future of cities. Cities and neighbourhoods have been built in the misplaced faith that, if we understand the math, it will be automatically an ideal place for living. The cities that emerged because of this were banal, joyless and often completely inaccessible for most of the Indian urban population.

The fundamental belief that shaped this outlook was that people’s lives, desires and aspirations can be understood through a mathematical model. The failure of this idea of planning dots the contemporary world. Perhaps the most notorious example known to architects is the demolition of the Pruitt Igoe housing projects in St Louis, Missouri. A high-rise complex of slab-like buildings set in a landscape to house the urban poor was demolished a few years after they were built, as they were perceived to be centres of crime and corruption. This contrast between the supposed order that lies within a techno-utopia and the impossibility of pinning down real life and desires has been a common theme in literature and films over the past century; whether it is George Orwell’s 1984 with the all-seeing and all-knowing Big Brother or Jacques Tati’s French classic Playtime where the bumbling Monsieur Hulot encounters an alienating and cold modernist Paris where everything is in it’s right place; or Peter Weir’s The Truman Show whose world of perfection lies within a protected bubble that the hero has to break out of to experience reality.