Draft:History of smart cities

For the article on smart cities see: Smart city

Concepts and failures

Although smart cities in their modern manifestation are a new concept, utopian visions of how we could physically organise society and our cities can be found as early as the 16th century. Thomas More’s Utopia, a fictional island society in the New World is a landmark depiction of the future. Based around the challenges affecting urban England in the early 16^th century, Utopia “manifests itself as a future state of affairs that stands in opposition to war, oppression, and in justice, by proposing a new social structure based on common ownership.” Others include Edward Bellamy’s own utopia based on the struggles of industrial 19^th century United States which depict a world without a modern capitalistic system and instead a world of universal employment and total equality.

Other earlier concepts originate from architecture and planners. One of the earliest concepts of what we can now refer to as a smart city came in the form of the Garden Cities, envisioned by Ebenezer Howard. In reaction to overpopulation and industrial pollution, garden cities were envisioned as compact towns "surrounded by rolling green belts and populated by self-contained and self-sufficient communities." They would grow into the countryside from cities, with the belief that this connection between cities and rural environments would set the ground for new developments and lifestyles, and allow more sustainable urban planning policies with the potential to end urban poverty. However, the garden city experiments have only failed, being incapable of building truly self-sufficient communities and properly aiding the needs of low-wage workers. Furthermore, its financial model was not conducive to attracting sufficient financial investments.

However, despite their drawbacks, the ideals of the garden city movements did not disappear. Figures like Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles Edouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier were also stimulated by similar visions of the future.  

Le Corbusier’s revolutionary Radian City city plan revolved around the idea that the unsustainable development patterns and shortcomings of 19^th century cities could not evolve into modern cities for the 20^th century, and instead that cities should be build anew. “These are the main features of the Radian City, which rises from a regular layout and a highly organised zoning system composed of the following parallel areas: satellite towns for hosting special functions, such as government buildings; the business center; railroad station and air terminal; hotels and embassies; housing areas segregated by income, which are split between middle-class apartments in monolithic skyscrapers or luxury high-density living arrangements and six-story buildings and modest accommodations for lower-income residents factories; warehouses; and heavy industry.” Le Corbusier felt that “the city of today is dying because it is not constructed geometrically. To build on a clear site is to replace the accidental layout of the ground, the only one that exists today, by the formal layout. Otherwise nothing can save us. And the consequence of geometrical plans is repetition and mass-production And as a consequence of repetition, the standard is created, and so perfection."

However, attempts to replicate his vision in the real world failed. Studies of Chandigarh, a new city build developed in the 1950s around Le Corbusier’s Radian City, was by the 1980s an ‘incubator of poverty and injustice, uncovering the limitations of the utopian vision proposed by Le Corbusier. The project has been accused of having a “profound misunderstanding of human nature,’ a lack of concern for the lifestyle habits, and a misguided assumption that a one-size-fits-all design can fulfil everyone’s needs.

Approaching cities with a new models was also the goal for Frank Lloyd Wright with his vision of Broadacre City. He believed that innovation and technologies would allow humans to leave industrial cities and adopt rural, lower-density settlements in more natural environments. It was meant to ‘reestablish the symbiotic relationship between human beings and natural environments.’

The projects conception began in 1924, building on similar foundations and philosophical principles as Howard’s garden city. They shared the same: “rejection of the big city, the same populist antipathy to finance capital and landlordism, and same anarchist rejection of big government, the same reliance on the liberating effects of new technologies, and the same belief in the homesteading principle and the return to the land." His goal was to assign each family an acre of land, and to move away from the vertical movement of cities upwards in the form of skyscrapers.

Although he was never given the opportunity to build his city, critics comment that the US’s suburban expansion in the 1940s satisfies some of Wright’s ideals. However, as this has evolved and people move further away from cities, there have been some unsustainable consequences of land fragmentation, including: disrupting wildlife and biodiversity, hydrologic systems, and energy flows, decreasing agricultural productivity, increasing cost of public service provision and greater investment in the construction of roads. Furthermore, research has shown that residents who belong to sprawling areas are likely to weigh more, do less exercise, and are more likely to have high blood pressure.

Although valuable in providing insight into the development and shortfalls of the concept of smart cities, these attempts demonstrate that the sustainable urban development which these “utopian visionaries like Wright, Howard and Le Corbusier were so passionately trying to reach cannot materialize through simplistic sets of universal rules and standards, because they will always fall short of understanding the complexity of urban life.” “For as many commenters suggest, approaching sustainable urban development by using autocratic and top-down visionary schemes can produce nothing but the illusions of a universal panacea for urban problems.”