https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_city https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_city There is some uncertainty about what the concept means to some people still,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_city https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_city There is some uncertainty about what the concept means to some people still, but basically it's an Orwellian Neoliberals dream. AFAICT the idea is that Smart Cities wire up as much as they can to central decision making capabilities - this would include human intelligence about the residents living in the city including how happy they are, how much waste they produce, electricity they consume, where they go to collect mass traffic patterns, etc. The idea here is that the cities will be able to response to emergencies and opportunities better because they can act as one city immediately. Smart cities presumably can capture individual innovation, but also collective data for collective decision making, and machine/computer information. The difficulty here lies in the fact that it is supposed to then be owned and operated by private individuals. There is not really a mention of a vote - smart cities are independent of governance structure. The pitfall is that modern senses of the importance of 'efficiency' may lure some into thinking that having the intelligence/data and a well greased economy are enough to understand the underlying population's preferences (on the whole, behavioral economics has proven this false). That's not to say getting some real and real-time data about an entire city isn't an exciting prospect.