The past decade—or even longer—has been full of all sorts of variations of “smartness.” Smart cities are likely at the forefront of this trend, while it concerns multiple scales of technological solutions and even solutionism, as many would argue. Whether we have reached peak smartness of corporate and public hype is to be decided (after all, massive new projects such as the NEOM in Saudi Arabia are marketed as “smart,” too), but the repercussions of particular ideas about the technological city and its political economy of data-driven operations continue, not least in terms of discourses of climate change, sustainability, and “resilience.”
Beyond the production of enthusiastic discourse about the combined forces of smartness and sustainability, several books and projects in architecture and urbanism have started to tackle the issue over the past years. This concerns especially the focus on urbanism. Beyond glitzy tech promises—but also beyond the usual critical theory...