Smart Cities

3What Makes a City Smart?

The word “smart” is often associated with technological systems. Any system that self-regulates on the basis of a retroactive phenomenon is qualified as smart, similar to a thermostat. Intelligence is defined as the ability to modify one’s behavior according to the result following an action. This regulation occurs empirically following the principle of induction, meaning that we infer similarity from similarity. This is the white swan principle: after noting that N swans are white, I infer that all swans are white. This principle will lead the system to make “more of the same”, for example, a thermostat undertaking certain actions to attain the desired temperature. However, the system can enrich its operation by integrating theoretical resources – which do not come from empirical experience – which can lead to another way of doing something, in this case, because the digital introduces another possibility of doing things and regulating the urban system. This is the principle of deduction, which goes from a theory to practice.

The smart cities movement introduces new theories that modify traditional regulations of urban operation, based on the fact that the empirical regulation system only leads to reproducing unsatisfactory situations. Innovation in that case, if there is any, is entirely exogenous, meaning that it comes from outside of the urban system. This is the whole point, from a marketing strategy perspective, of attaching an ideological aspect ...