Smart cities: Whose intelligence? Structural inequities in tech-driven urbanism risk deepening exclusion and surveillance
Original framing: “Building the smart city: Promise, pitfalls and the people at its heart” — UN News
Smart city rhetoric mirrors 19th-century 'sanitary urbanism,' which used technology to justify racial segregation under the guise of public health. Apartheid-era South Africa’s 'group areas' and Haussmann’s Parisian boulevards both deployed infrastructure to control populations, foreshadowing today’s predictive policing and facial recognition systems. The continuity lies in treating cities as controllable spaces rather than living organisms shaped by power.
The smart city narrative is a Trojan horse for neoliberal urbanism, where technology is framed as the sole path to resilience while obscuring its roots in colonial control and surveillance capitalism.
Indigenous epistemologies and Global South innovations reveal that 'smartness' need not be synonymous with Silicon Valley tools—indeed, the most adaptive cities (e.g., Medellín, Kerala) thrive on low-tech, community-driven solutions. The crisis is not one of technology but of governance: cities must reclaim infrastructure as a commons, governed by those most affected by its failures. The path forward lies in dismantling the myth of neutral progress, replacing it with a pluriversal urbanism that centres repair, reciprocity, and reparative justice. Without this, smart cities will deepen the very inequities they claim to solve, transforming public space into a panopticon where the marginalised are both the subjects and the casualties of 'innovation.