Includes bibliographical references and index.

Acknowledgements 005 --
Introduction: A New Urban Ideal 009 --
Spatialised Intelligence 011 --
Technology, Space and Politics 015 --
Chapter 1: The Advent of the Smart City, from Flow Management to Event Control 023 --
Defining the Smart City 024 --
Self-Fulfilling Fictions 030 --
The Sentient and Sensory City 037 --
Massive Quantities of Data 046 --
What Happens 052 --
Chapter 2: A Tale of Two Cities 067 --
Neocybernetic Temptation 069 --
The Cyborg-City Hypothesis 078 --
Spontaneous City, Collaborative City 083 --
The Digital Individual 091 --
Chapter 3: Urban Intelligence, Space and Maps 105 --
Augmented Reality and Geolocation 106 --
Towards Three-Dimensional Urbanism 110 --
A New Relationship to Infrastructure 119 --
The Stakes of Representation 124 --
A New Aesthetic 138 --
Laboratories of Public Life in the Digital Age 140 --
Conclusion: The Challenges of Intelligence 145 --
The Limits of All-Digital Solutions 146 --
The Necessary Diversification of Scenarios 149 --
Public/Private 153 --
From Event to History 154 --
Bibliography 158 --
Index 162 --
Picture Credits 167 --

Illustrations : --
Aerial view of the Smart City Campus project , Barcelona , Spain , 2014 The smart city ideal represents an important component of the urban strategy of Barcelona. It entails the revitalization of a former industrial area through the creation of a campus bringing together businesses, universities and other players involved in urban technology and innovation 10 --
Looking at smartphones, Kivus , Democratic Republic of Congo , 2012 From highly industrialized to developing countries, smart cities are fundamentally about people. This explains the essential role played by mobile phones and particularly by smartphones in their rise 11 --
Human and iCub robot, Institut des Systemes Intelligents et de Robotique ( ISIR ), Université de Paris VI , 2013 The iCub has been designed to act like a baby. Its purpose is to explore how human cognition develops by learning in the same way a child would. The search is typical of the rapid progress being made in robotics and artificial intelligence 12 --
Henry Howe, ‘Map of the Submarine Telegraph between America & Europe’, 1858 The collapse of space has been among the most enduring myths of the industrial age. In the mid-19th century, the telegraph was already supposed to have abolished distance. The same has been said of the Internet in its early stages of development. We are now beginning to realize that what is happening is rather a hybridization between physical and electronic spaces 14 --
Screenshot from ‘ Nokia City Lens ’, Nokia’s augmented reality application uses the phone’s viewfinder and Nokia’s mapping platform to give information regarding the nearby shops, cafés and restaurants of interest. Smartphones have been instrumental in the development of augmented reality 15 --
Eric Fischer , map of New York with the location of pictures posted on Flickr by locals and tourists between 5 and 10 June 2010 Blue dots correspond to pictures taken by locals, red to pictures taken by tourists, yellow ones are by unspecified authors. Whereas their physical structure has not yet changed, cities are deeply transformed by the proliferation of online content that seems to endow them with a new form of life 17 --
Ari Ofsevit, map showing the speeds between the docking stations of the bike-sharing system Hubway in Boston, Massachusetts, 2012 Mapping has become a key practice in order to visualize and understand the massive quantities of data produced by cities today. Maps suggest innovative ways to manage and use the various urban infrastructures, from energy grids to bike-sharing systems 18 --
IBM Rio de Janeiro Operations Center, 2014 This emblematic realization of IBM for the city of Rio de Janeiro is permeated by a distinct neocybernetic inspiration. Its aim is to manage crucial aspects of urban life, including major events like the final match of the 2014 football World Cup, in real time 19 --
OpenStreetMap mapping party at the Stamen Design office in San Francisco, 26 April 2014 Collaborative enterprises like OpenstreetMap often organize ‘parties’ in which people are teamed up to gather and input data. A real party with food and drinks usually follows 20 --
Living PlanIT, concept plan for PlanIT Valley, Portugal, 2010 Located in the north of Portugal and conceived by the company Living PlanIT, the developer of an urban-oriented software platform, PlanIT Valley seeks to offer a model for the city of the future and serve as a laboratory for smart technologies 25 --
Living PlanIT, energy mix scheme for PlanIT Valley, Portugal, 2010 Among the ambitions of the project is an energy scheme combining various sources, solar, wind, and hydraulic, along with anaerobic digestion. Smart and sustainable are considered as almost synonymous 26 --
Cover of Albert Robida’s Le Vingtieme siècle: la Vie electrique, Librarie Illustree (Paris), 1892 On the eve of the 20th century, the French Illustrator Albert Robida depicted all sorts of spectacular applications of electricity to everyday life, sometimes visionary, sometimes imbued with irony 28 --
Albert Robida, Telephonoscope, from Le Vingtieme siècle: La Vie electrique, 1892 More than a century before the development of massive open online courses ( MOOCS ), Robida imagined the development of networked distance learning through the use of the telephonoscope, a machine conceived as an extension of the telephone in the domain of image transmission 29 --
Screenshot of the “ Foursquare “ United States website, 2015 A local search and discovery service launched in 2008, Foursquare had some 45 million registered users by the end of 2013. Users can post reviews, recommendations and ratings of venues, thus promoting a more participative approach to the city 30 --
Screenshot of the Citizens Connect application developed for the City of Boston, Massachusetts, 2015. Through this type of application designed for smartphones, citizens can experience a more personalized relationship to municipal services and contribute to the welfare of their city 32 --
Pervasive computing according to Siemens, 2004 The proliferation of connected devices is among the consequences of the development of ubiquitous or pervasive computing. It allows objects such as bulletin boards to exchange information with mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets 33 --
An early Google Glass prototype, 2011 Despite the lukewarm reception of the Google Glass, wearable computing devices are amongst the most promising directions of development of ubiquitous computing. In the near future, traditional screens may lose their hegemonic position as interfaces with the online world 34 --
Screenshot of the ‘ Thingful “ search engine, 2015 On ‘ Thingful ‘ you can search the Internet of Things by locations, types of connected objects and ownership. With the proliferation of such objects, which are often wirelessly connected, the Internet is becoming both more and more spatially present and marked by the rise of people - to – machine and machine - to – machine communication 35 --
Captain John Anderton, played by the actor Tom Cruise, using a tactile interface in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, 2002 Minority Report is typical of the strong relationship between fiction and the development of cutting- edge digital technologies. The self-fulfilling nature of these technologies is to a large extent responsible for these relationships 36 --
The ‘eye’ of the HAL 9000 computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A space Odyssey, 1968 The red camera eye of HAL (for Heuristically programmed ALgrotihmic computer) remains to this day one of the most powerful images of the seduction and dangers of artificial intelligence. In the case of smart cities, such a centralized system has relatively little chance of being implemented, despite the strong neocybernetic stance of some o0f those involved in their development 37 --
Electronic road pricing gantry in Singapore, 2005 Road pricing to regulate automobile traffic in congested metropolises has become common. In Singapore, vehicles are identified by an electronic device known as an Invehicle Unit. In Stockholm, where a congestion tax has been implemented permanently since 2007, identification is based on automatic number – plate recognition 38 --
Google self- driving car prototype, 2014 The future of urban automobile circulation could very well lie in the development of automatic vehicles like those tested by Google 39 --
SENSEable City Lab, MIT, ‘ Trash Talk ‘ project, Seattle, 2009. The experiment led by the SENSEable City Lab reveals the sometimes extremely complex itineraries of discarded objects on their way to recycling or final disposal. It contributes to the development of new field of research on how to improve the ecological footprint of cities 40 --
Smart food waste disposal in Daegu , Susengu , South Korea , 2015 With these food disposal units to those tested in Seoul, each user of the system pays according to the disposal costs of their food waste. Besides financial fairness, the aim is to make citizens feel more responsible for their behavior and its impact on the environment 41 --
Smart parking sensor platform devised by Libelium, 2011 Sensors buried in parking spaces detect the arrival and departure of vehicles. The information is conveyed to system integrators to offer comprehensive parking management solutions 42 --
Installation of a smart electricity meter in France, 2011 Linky, the meter promoted by EDF, France’s foremost electricity supply company, is intended as a first step towards a better management of the electricity grid 42 --
Connected boulevard project in Nice, France, developed with cisco Systems, 2013 The data collected on the boulevard are sent to the city computing centre (the cloud on the left) before being displayed on the city dashboard (figure in the centre). They also feed an open date portal (on the right) 43 --
Herzog & De Meuron, de Young Museum, San Francisco, 2003 Typical of the ‘ return of ornament ‘ in architecture, the envelope of the museum seems to blur the boundary between sight and touch with it’s dots that evoke the Braille alphabet 45 --
UN studio, Galleria Department Store façade, Seoul, South Korea, 2004 Another instance pf the retur of ornament in architecture. The changing colours of the glass discs of this façade respond to the dynamics of atmospheric conditions. They are intended to induce pleasurable sensations in the passers-by and shoppers 46 --
Office dA, BanQ Restaurant, Boston, Massachusetts, 2008 Gastronomy represents an essential dimension of the smart city. High-end restaurants have become strategic assets in the competition to attract members of the ‘creative class ‘ in order to promote a knowledge-based urban economy 47 --
Elkus Manfredi Architects, mage of an ‘active street’ , 2013 The image was used by MITd during a zoning [etition. It is not intended to represent actual building designs but to convey the overall ambience of the new Kendall Square district. Numerous shops, cafés and restaurants contribute to the animation of the street 48 --
IBM, Infographic on ‘Turning data into insight’ , 2013 The document is part of a promotional campaign for IBM’s SmartCloud and Smarter Cities Intelligent Operations Software. One of the objectives of the latter is to provide a dashboard that enables better decisions to be made for cities by tapping into big data. Such an ambition carries with a distinct neocybernetic connotation 49 --
Joan Serras and James Cheshire, ‘ Mapped: Everyday Bus Trips in London’ The wider and redder the lines, the more buses running along them. Timetable data from over 22,00 London bus stops were used to create a representation emblematic of the new type of urban visualization made possible by using a very large data set 50 --
Jay Forrester, “Life cycle of an urban area 250 years of internal development, maturity and stagnation’ 1969 Jay Forrester’s Urban Dynamics (MIT Press ( Cambridge, MA ), 1969) was among the first ambitious attempts to model urban evolution over the long term. Some of the conclusions reached by Forrester, such as the damaging effect of building low cost housing, proved highly controversial. Equally unappealing for many was the prospect of long-term urban stagnation. For its author, these somewhat counterintuitive results proved the fecundity of urban modelling, a belief shared by many proponents of big data mining 51 --
Jean Charles Alphand, map of the sewers of Paris on 1 January 1889, Les travaux de Paris 1789-1889, Paris , 1889 More than any other 19th century metropolis, the new Paris planned and built by Haussmann and his engineers appears as a networked city where flow management played an essential role 52 --
Screenshot of the Sytadin website at 2:45pm 22 January 2015 Sytadin offers real time traffic information on Paris an its region. It signals ongoing roadworks and accidents 53 --
Cover of Paul Virilio’s Ce qui arrive, Actes Sud (Arles), 2002 In the exhibition an catalogue entitled Ce qui arrive (literally ‘ what happens ’), Virilio developed an interpretation of the contemporary city based on the importance attached to devastating events such as accidents, ecological catastrophes and terrorist attacks. The public paid particular attention to this interpretation, in the immediate aftermath of the 11 September attacks of 2001 54 --
Cargo plane crash in Amsterdam, Netherlands, 4 October 1992 The crash of a cargo plane belonging to the Israeli airline El Al on the Bijlmermeer neighborhood of Amsterdam killed 43 people. Because of its spectacular character, the accident was among those referred to by Virilio in Ce qui arrive 55 --
The Metropolitan Police Special Operations Room in London, 2007 A bank of television monitors displays images captured by CCTV cameras. In London, video surveillance does not only represent a means to monitor what happens. It is also a part of more wide-ranging scenarios regarding the future of the city as a place where globalization goes hand in hand with security to ensure a better quality of life 57 --
‘Paris Plages’, a view of the banks of the Seine near the city hall in Paris, 2002 ‘ Paris Plages ‘ is typical of the importance accorded to all kinds of celebrations and festivals in the elaboration of long term urban scenarios 57 --
Factory Fifteen, a possible future skyline of London, 2011 Other key elements of many London scenarios for the future include the strong presence of high-rise buildings that conjure up a European version of the Shanghai district of Pudong, as well as various elements of green infrastructure 58 --
View of a control room of the SAGE system, 1959 On the screens of the SAGE system, one of the very first large scale computer networks, operators could monitor events and situations related to the defense of North American airspace 59 --
The command centre of NORAD still from John Badham’s WarGames, 1983 On the screens of the command centre,a nuclear war simulation game played between the NORAD mainframe and the main protagonist of the film, a high school student who has hacked the NORAD computer network. Only the computer does not know the difference between simulation and reality 60 --
Screenshot from the Ubisoft video game Watch Dogs, 2014 Aiden Pearce, the hero of the game, checking his smartphone. The smartphone is an essential component of the game. It enables Pearce to hack into various devices, linked to the city’s central operating system 61 --
Cover of Edmund Callis Berkley’s Giant Brains, or Machines that Can Think, John Wiley & Sons ( New York ), 1949 The rise of cybernetics and the development of the computer were inseparable from the emergence of a reductionist attitude leading to an interpretation of life as information processing 69 --
Joel Kinnaman in the title role in José Padilha’s RoboCop remake, 2014 The hero of the RoboCop franchise, a severely wounded policeman who becomes a superhero thanks to a series of protheses that transform him into an almost invincible warrior, is emblematic of the success met by the figure of the cyborg in Hollywood pop culture. Although he has been programmed by his creators to be obedient like a machine, RoboCop succeeds in maintaining a certain degree of freedom. His character symbolizes the resistance of the human mind to the enslaving power of unbridled technology 70 --
The command centre of NORAD< Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, c 2005 Less dramatic than the movie set used in the 1983 film WarGames, the real NORAD command centre is nevertheless typical of a space in which the world is perceived through the lens of information, as an endless stream of events and scenarios that only cyborg-like creatures can fully master. The Cold War saw a multiplication of such spaces in parallel with research aiming at a more efficient coupling between humans, information systems and machines 71 --
Melville Campbell Branch, conceptualized outcomes of continuous city planning, from Continuous City Planning: Integrating Municipal Management and City Planning, John Wiley & Sons (New York) , 1981. The notion of continuous city planning’ developed by Melville Branch owes much to the cybernetic ideal of efficient steering. The analogy between city planning and the task of a pilot is further reinforced by a presentation in which the resulting evolution of the city appears as a trajectory on a background reminiscent of a radar screen 72 --
Melville Campbell Branch, city planning centre for Los Angeles, from Continuous City Planning, John Wiley & Sons ( New York ), 1981 Imagined in the 1960s for Los Angeles, Branch’s city planning centres. In this enclosed space, the city appears as an information-driven system 73 --
Project Cybersyn, general view of the Operations room, Santiago de Chile, 1973 This futuristic space designed to manage the Chilean economy featured white fiberglass swivel chairs, somewhat reminiscent of science-fiction spaceship seats, and a series of screens displaying crucial information on the state of the country. The room was destroyed in 1973 after the coup d’etat that overthrew the government of Salvador Allende 74 --
IBM Rio de Janeiro Operations center, 2010 Rio Operations Center appears as a distant successor of Cold War control rooms. On the screens, what happens in the city is displayed in order to trigger the appropriate response. The entire facility seems to be conceived as an instrument of rational steering in the purest cybernetic vein 75 --
Screenshot from the Maxis video game SimCity Social, 2012 The different versions of SimCity all rely on a neocybernetic urban vision in which players have to adjust key parameters correctly in order to ensure the harmonious growth of their city 76 --
University of Tokyo professor Takao Someya displays the world’s lightest and thinnest flexible integrated circuits and touch sensor system at a press conference in Tokyo on 24 July 2014 Much thinner than Biostamp, this flexible electrical circuit weighing less than a feather could enable the implantation of sensors inside the body. The device can be used to monitor all sorts of physical data, such as body temperature and blood pressure as well as electronic pulses from muscles or the heart 81 --
Flash mob dancing at Sergerls Torg for Gay Pride, Stockholm, 3 August 2012 Flash mobs are emblematic of another type of smart city in which digital technology would serve as a platform enabling urban spontaneity 83 --
Opposition supporters talk neat graffiti referring to the social networking site Twitter in Tahrir Square in Cairo, 5 February 2011 A photograph that conveys the role played by social media in recent political and social uprisings such as the Arab Spring 84 --
People gathered on the Tahrir Square in Cairo on 9 February 2011, to demand the resignation of President Mubarak Hundreds of thousands of people gathered on Tahrir Square at the climax of the Egyptian Revolution against President Hosni Mubarak. Throughout the events, the occupation of public space went along with the intensive use of digital media 85 --
Eric Fischer, OpenStreetMap GPS trace density in and near Europe, April 2012 The picture shows the density of geographical information regarding Europe that had been posted on OpenStreetMap in April 2012. Countries such as Germany and the United Kingdom appear as especially active 86 --
OpenStreetMap mapping party in Milton Keynes, 16-17 May 2009 The document shows the traces left by the various contributor to the mapping party. Each one of them was equipped with a GPS receiver with recording capability. The aim of the party was to add in the road network of the town, as well as a number of points interests such as pubs and major retail buildings 88 --
Screenshot of the Waze website, 2014 Members of the Waze community or ‘Wazers’ can alert other users of the application to speed traps, accidents, traffic jams, and even the best petrol prices by placing notifications over a simple, community-edited map 88 --
Interior of FabLab, Lucerne, Switzerland, 2015 ‘Fab labs’ like this one, located in a loft space on the campus of the Lucerne University of applied Sciences and Arts, offer the possibility to make use of equipment such as 3D printers, laser cutters and milling machines, to turn ideas into reality. One of the ambitions of this type of place is also to foster exchanges between users, thus promoting a collaborative vision of work and leisure 89 --
Photomontage with activists affiliated to Meu Rio carrying signs that read ‘Quem Nao Vota Pela Educacao Nao Merece O Meu Voto’ – those who don’t vote for education do not deserve my vote Education for everyone is among the causes defended by Meu Rio. Since its launch in 2011, Meu Rio has successfully mobilized an online community to promote goals ranging from the fight against corruption to environmental protection 90 --
Female face with lines from a facial recognition software program From fingerprints and retinal scanning to facial recognition, individual identification for security purposes represents a thriving business for all sorts of hardware and software companies 92 --
Security camera detects the movement o0f traffic on the rooftop of a skyscraper Surveillance cameras have become as common in cities as traffic lights. They monitor individuals as well as all sorts of other phenomena such as automobile traffic 93 --
Police surveillance in Monterrey, Mexico, 18 December 2014 Surveillance cameras are monitored by members of the Fuerza Civil ( Civil Force ) police unit during a media presentation at the police academy in Monterrey, in order to show the police model that the Mexican federal government wants to promote across the entire country 94 --
Cover of the Lowell Offering, January , 1845 A monthly periodical, the Lowell Offering published works of poetry and fiction by the young female workers of the Lowell, Massachusetts, textile mills of the early American industrial revolution. Modern industry did not only enslave workers. It offered possibilities of emancipation to some of them, including to the Lowell ‘ factory girls ‘ 95 --
Stephan Gerhard, Patric Hagmann, Jean- Philippe Thiran, Connectome Mapping Toolkit, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Laussane and Universite de Lausanne, Switzerland, 2010 A connectome is a comprehensive map of the neural connections in the brain. In Lausanne, a team has been working on an open source framework to analyze and visualize connectomes. At this fundamental level, the contemporary subject appears as inherently multiple, network or environment like 96 --
Somalia Facebook: Gephi visualization of the more than 1,000-friend Facebook Network of a young Somali woman living in Nairobi, Kenya, in 2012 In the digital age, the diversity of online connections in which we are engaged echoes our inner multiplicity 97 --
Young Asian girl with nose and lip ring and tattoo The division of the self along multiple channels of online communication finds its counterpart in the reaffirmation of one’s unique identity through means that include distinctive marks such as piercings and tattoos 98 --
An experimental LinkNYC connection point or ‘Link’ New York City, 2014 LinkNYC aims to replace the ageing network of public pay telephones in New York City by ‘Links’, iconic connection points offering wireless technology. Links will enable free phone calls everywhere in the US. They will provide a touch-screen tablet interface and digital displays for advertising and public service announcements 107 --
Augemented reality terminals showing a reconstitution of the church of Cluny, Cluny, Burgundy, France, 2011 The abbey church of cluney, one of the largest Romanesque churches ever built, was almost completely destroyed at the beginning of the 19th century. In cooperation with the engineering school Arts et Metiers ParisTech, the city of Cluny has tested the use of augmented-reality terminals enabling visitors to visualize the church as it was prior to its destruction 108 --
Large Kurgan, ‘You Are Here’ project, nice points, two lines, and five letters, stationary and mobile GPS receiver on roof above Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 1 September 1995 Using GPS technology, artist Laura Kurgan began to explore the moving threshold between physical and digital made possible geolocation in the mid 1990s 109 --
Daniel Belasco Rogers, ‘All My Journeys in Berlin 2003-2013’ , 2013 With this type of enterprise using again GPS technology, the map of the city becomes profoundly autobiographical 110 --
Solar-powered Soofa bench, 2014 Digital Technology and augmented reality have already begun to transform street furniture. The bench not only enables the charging of smartphones; it also senses its surroundings to provide information about environmental conditions such as air quality 111 --
eTree prototype by Sologic installed in the Ramat Hanadiv park, Zichron Ya’akov, Israel, 2014 Designed by artist Yoav Ben-Dov, the eTree appears both as a sculpture with its metal tubes that imitate the branches of a tree and as a piece of urban furniture that connects to the digital world 112 --
Foster + Partners, Masdar City masterplan, Abu Dhabi, UAE, 2008 A sustainable and smart new town designed for 45,000 to 50,000 people in Abu Dhabi, Masdar appears as the inheritor of a long tradition of grid street plans, form Ancient Greek colonies to 19th century American cities 113 --
General view of Songdo International Business District, Incheon, South Korea Traditional urban references are equally present in Songdo, from a system of pocket parks based on the design of Savannah, Georgia, to canals like those of Venice. Built on 600 hectares (1,500 acres) of reclaimed land along the Yellow Sea, the city aims to be a model for sustainable city scale development. One of its objectives is to reach 40 percent of water recycling and 76 percent of waste recycling and 76 percent of waste recycling by 2020 114 --
High rise buildings along Songdo main park, Incheon, South Korea, 2013 Central Park in New York is clearly a reference here. The quest for smart and sustainable cities has not yet given birth to radically new urban forms. View of Jodhpur, Rajasthan, Indie, 2011 With the possible abandonment of two-dimensional regularity, the development of smart cities could eventually lead to the rediscovery of the spatial complexity of traditional vernacular urban forms 116 --
OMA, The Interlace, Singapore, 2009 Stacking is among the techniques that enable contemporary architects to imagine a different, more intricate mode of living in cities. With the Interlace, the aim was the conceive the development as a three dimensional network of housing and social spaces integrated with the natural environment 117 --
Julien de Smedt, Shenzhen Logistic City, 2006, general view and interior perspective Gigantism is not necessarily the most salient aspect of this project, even if its proposed 1,111 meters of height would have dwarfed the 828 meters of the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai. The ambition to design a truly three dimensional city is perhaps more significant. Equally revealing is the accent put on interior public spaces somewhat reminiscent of the ambience of gallerias and shopping malls, as if the future of the city were to be both interiorized and privatized 119 --
Bill Dunster, BedZED, London, 2002 BedZED, for Beddington Zero Energy Development, was among the very first large-scale communities designed to achieve zero carbon emission. Using far less energy than a conventional development, it is based on an ideal of self-sufficiency that challenges the conventional development, it is based on an ideal of self- sufficiency that challenges the conventional approach of the city based on interdependency 120 --
Core eco cycles of the Hammarby Sjostad Model A former harbor area in Stockholm, the Hammarby Sjostad area has been transformed into an eco friendly city quarter since 1990. Form energy production to water consumption, and from heating to waste management, the emphasis is put on local synergies rather than systematic dependence upon larger urban networks 121 --
View of countdown clock sign at Lorimer Street station, Brooklyn, New York City Subway, 2013 The ability to know in real time when the next trains are to arrive opens up new possibilities for travelers 122 --
Velib bicycles in Paris, 2011 Digital Technology is instrumental in the workings of the new self-service vehicle systems that are spreading all over the world. A trip can now include a segment on the metro or the bus ad another riding a rented bicycle or car 123 --
Boarding for a Bridj bus to downtown Boston from Brookline Massachusetts 2014 The traditional interpretation of urban transport systems as networks is being challenged by services such as the Boston area Bridj buses, the routes of which do not follow fixed patterns but adapt to the overall rhythms of the city as well as to customers’ demands through data mining and smartphone interface 124 --
Public works Operations Center, Rock Hill, South Carolina, 2011 In facilities like this one, what happens in urban infrastructure such as the water supply network and water treatment plants can be monitored in real time. The map displayed on the right screen on the wall goes hand in hand with various diagrams and charts that document how systems are running 126 --
SENSEable City Lab, MIT, Real Time Rome project, 2006 The image, a still from an animation, shows the phone calls places in Rome during a concert given there by Madonna on 8 August 2006. Such a top down visualization is also typical of the increased blurring of boundaries between mapping and surveillance 126 --
Cityzenith demo of new release of the 5D Smart City data visualization platform in Barcelona, Spain, November 2014 A cloud based software, the Cityzenith platform aims to map the massive amounts of data created by cities. In Barcelona, the implementation of the platform will dovetail with the city’s effort to develop its own mater database in order to improve communication among municipal agencies 127 --
Screenshot of the iSee tool developed by the Institute for Applied Autonomy, 2015 The application allows the user to determine which itinerary is the best between two locations in Manhattan to avoid as much as possible being tracked by video surveillance cameras 128 --
Laura Kurgan, ‘Architecture and Justice, Million Dollar Blocks ‘ project, 17 ‘million dollar blocks ‘ in Brownsville, Brooklyn, based on data from 2003 Started in 2005, the ‘ Million Dollar Blocks ‘ project uses data visualization in an innovative an militant way to foster reflection on the American penitentiary system and some of its underlying urban causes. The map presents itself as an inversion of the usual cartography of criminal hot spots by mapping the home addresses of people admitted to prison 129 --
Laura Kurgan ‘ Architecture and Justice, Million Dollar Blocks ‘ project, prisoner migration patterns, Brooklyn, New York, based on data from 2003 Another striking visualization, this time of the migration between home and prison of people living in Brooklyn. On this matter, Kurgan evokes the ‘ mas disappearance and reappearance of people in the city’ 130 --
Guy Debord and Asger Jorn, ‘ The Naked City ‘ 1957 This map illustrates the Situationsts’ approach to the city, or ‘ psychogeography ‘. According to its authors, the arrows represent slopes that link different ‘unities of ambience ‘ in Paris’. They correspond to the natural tendencies of urban subjects to drift from one place to another. Blurring the distinction between subjective and objective, this reading of the city fosters a new understanding of its structure 131 --
Screenshot of the ‘Strasbourg 2028 ‘ website, 2015 Based on the Carticipe platform, ‘ Strasbourg 2028’ enables inhabitants to post on the map suggestions to improve their city. The dark blue dots regard mobility improvements, the light blue ones public space improvements, the red ones buildings, the purple ones sports and culture, and finally the orange ones are related to the economy commerce and tourism 133 --
Christian Nold, ‘East Paris Emotion Map’, April 2008 Claiming the heritage of Situationist urbanism, Christian Nold produced this map of the north east of Paris by equipping 18 local people with a special ‘bio mapping tool’ of his invention, which measured their degree of emotional arousal along a series of itineraries. The map aims to reveal a new geography of the city combining its physical organization with the emotional load attached to certain places 132 --
3d model presenting the draft new district of Maurepas Gayeulles. 3D data city of Rennes. 3D software component by Dassault Systemes, 2015 Couple with 3D visualization, digital urban cartography enables municipal authorities to better present projects to their citizens. In France, the city of Rennes, in Britanny, has been a pioneer of this use of maps 134 --
Criminal Justice Policy Research Institute, Portland University, map showing the spatial distribution of street robberies in Portland, Oregon, between 2009 and 2013 Displaying sensitive information, crime maps are inherently political. They constitute key instruments in many contemporary assessments of the problems that plague cities. They often have a direct impact on real estate values 136 --
Noise Map of Reykjavik, Iceland, produced by the Environment agency of Iceland, 2014 equally politically sensitive is the information displayed on noise maps. In many cities, their publication has been delayed for political reasons 137 --
Keiichi Matsuda, ‘ Augmented (hyper) Reality ‘ production drawing, 2009 London based designer Keiichi Matsuda’s explorations of the perspective opened by augmented reality involve a series of aesthetic effects including the luring of the distinction between 2D and 3D representations, transparencies and superimpositions 139 --
The Cen Data Centre, near Geneva, 2008 Contrary to what expressions like ‘ the cloud ‘ suggest, digital sources possess a strong material side. The largest research facility in Europe, CERN was also the place where the World Wide Web was invented 146 --
Ghanaians working in agbogbloshie, Ghana, 23 March 2011 A suburb of Accra, Agbogbloshie is one of the places where sued electronics end up. Waste processing includes health-damaging practices such as burning 147 --
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Campus, Cambridge, Massachusetts Des[ite its appeal, the ‘ knowledge economy ‘ epitomized by places such as Silicon Valley or Cambridge, Massachusetts cannot be the only model for imagining the development of smart cities 149 --
Fracois Ascher, ‘ tunnel effects ‘ between distant highly developed urban districts, from Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin (eds), Splintering Urbanism, Routledge (London and New York ) , 2001 Through communication infrastructures, distant urban districts, for instance the City of London and Wall street of New York, may appear closer to one another than these districts are to their immediate surroundings. Such ‘ tunnel effects ‘ challenge traditional modes of urban governance 150 --
B + H Architects, SmartCity Kochi, Kochi, Kerala, India, 2015 Located at approximately 11kilometers (7 miles) from downtown Kochi is a special economic zone oriented towards the development and use of information technology. In addition to its economic and technological components, the project aims to provide its inhabitants with all the amenities of modern urban life 151 --
Mobile phone use in India : Dharavi ,Mumbai , 25 October 2011 Smart cities in rapidly developing countries like India should build on the abilities of their youths. Even in slums, like here in Dharavi, the use of smartphones has become quite common 152 --
The Las Vegas Strip at night, 2012 a place emblematic of our contemporary urban condition. On the strip, something is constantly happening, but the overall impression is that of an everlasting present 154 --
Aido Rossi ‘ La Citta Analoga ‘ ( The Analogous City ) 1976 With this famous collage, the Italian architect Aido Rossi (1931-1997) reminds us that history and collective memory, composition and superimposition, harmony and conflict are constitutive of the city as we know it. The city appears as a palimpsest of interventions of all kinds. Smart cities cannot be conceived all at once; they must allow for similar processes of accretion 155 --

As cities compete globally, the Smart City has been touted as the important new strategic driver for regeneration and growth. Smart Cities are employing information and communication technologies in the quest for sustainable economic development and the fostering of new forms of collective life. This has made the Smart City an essential focus for engineers, architects, urban designers, urban planners, and politicians, as well as businesses such as CISCO, IBM and Siemens. Despite its broad appeal, few comprehensive books have been devoted to the subject so far, and even fewer have tried to relate it to cultural issues and to assume a truly critical stance by trying to decipher its consequences on urban space and experience. This cultural and critical lens is all the more important as the Smart City is as much an ideal permeated by Utopian beliefs as a concrete process of urban transformation. This ideal possesses a strong self-fulfilling character: our cities will become 'Smart' because we want them to. This book opens with an examination of the technological reality on which Smart Cities are built, from the chips and sensors that enable us to monitor what happens within the infrastructure to the smartphones that connect individuals. Through these technologies, the urban space appears as activated, almost sentient. This activation generates two contrasting visions: on the one hand, a neo-cybernetic ambition to steer the city in the most efficient way; and on the other, a more bottom-up, participative approach in which empowered individuals invent new modes of cooperation. A thorough analysis of these two trends reveals them to be complementary. The Smart City of the near future will result from their mutual adjustment. In this process, urban space plays a decisive role. Smart Cities are contemporary with a 'spatial turn' of the digital. Based on key technological developments like geo-localisation and augmented reality, the rising importance of space explains the strategic role of mapping in the evolution of the urban experience. Throughout this exploration of some of the key dimensions of the Smart City, this book constantly moves from the technological to the spatial as well as from a critical assessment of existing experiments to speculations on the rise of a new form of collective intelligence. In the future, cities will become smarter in a much more literal way than what is often currently assumed. --

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (ebrary, viewed November 5, 2015).

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