This article has been published by New Scientist.
NO MATTER what ambitious mayors and tech companies may tell you, cities have always been "smart" cities: evolving habitations with a huge appetite for powerful ideas.
From their earliest days, cities have not only concentrated power, whether religious, imperial or productive, but have self-consciously dramatised it too-in their towering buildings and straight streets, their marketplaces and monuments, their intellectual and political cultures. The bustle and grandeur of cities like Mecca, London, Paris and Jerusalem (or Beijing, Athens, Amsterdam and Rome) has persisted for over a millennium.
Today, national governments appear both distant from their citizens and ineffective in the face of global markets and other forces. So thinkers, policy-makers and activists are turning their attentions back to the city, that enduring polity within which the progress of the populace can be both imagined and realised, street by street, public arena by commercial district.
Do cities serve us best when they are dense and compacted, or dispersed and sprawling? How much of the "smartness" of a city comes from the technocratic brilliance of its planne...
This content is restricted to subscribers. If you have already subscribed, please log in. New users may freely register below.