There continues to be strong interest in the question of the smart city from all quarters — though perhaps, if my sense of things can be trusted, the tide is beginning to turn toward more grounded considerations, if not outright skepticism as to the ostensible benefits. One of the things I construct as a sign of this tidal shift is the slow but gathering interest more mainstream media outlets have in presenting alternate perspectives on the subject. Here we see no less august a newspaper than the Economist looking to do just that. I hope you enjoy this record of our brief conversation.

What, in a nutshell, is your primary objection or critique to the current discourse surrounding “smart cities” and Big Data related to urban planning and service delivery?

My main beef with the discourse of the smart city is that it was generated, and has almost exclusively been developed, by organizations and individuals that have no particular understanding of cities or their dynamics. They have zero — and I mean zero — familiarity with the canonical works of urbanist literature, and very little in the way of considered practical experience that might help them correct for this deficit of book knowledge.

I remember being a little stunned to learn that a very senior member of Cisco’s connected cities team, who was proposing to intervene in the dynamics of urban neighborhoods, had never even heard of Jane Jacobs. I watched slack-jawed as he carefully took down the name of Death and Life of Great American Cities, like a dutiful if rather grindy student, prepping for finals. I mean, good for him — he wanted to learn. I wager, though, that you’d feel a trifle uneasy in the presence of someone preparing to undertake surgery without having gone to medical school, especially if they were asking you to admire the handle on the kitchen knife that constituted their only equipment for the task.

There’s a mildly amusing Dunning-Kruger aspect to it, but then you remember that these organizations are playing with peoples’ homes and livelihoods and lives. If that kind of arrogant self-assurance coupled with cluelessness isn’t disqualifying, then I don’t know what would be.

Is it possible for developers in “new” cities like Masdar or Palava in India to be able to comprehensively map out how the city will work and anticipate its problems, or does a city need to already exist in order to properly understand how to deploy smart city technology?

What saddens me is that we’ve been down this road before — time and time again, in fact, in the latter part of the twentieth century. We know how this story ends, and it isn’t pretty. There’s a reason why Corbusian total planning is thoroughly discredited.

Understanding why top-down total planning doesn’t, and can’t, produce vital human communities from scratch is something that smart-city enthusiasts might have gleaned from even a cursory review of the urbanist canon. Having apparently forgotten our own (recent!) history, however, we’re now perforce condemned to repeat it.

Does Big Data have any productive role to play in urban planning or service delivery?

Sure it does. But whatever its functional utility, [that use] cannot be had without cost. The task of determining the precise nature of the trade-offs involved, and of deciding whether or not the community wants to shoulder that cost in return for benefits now or in the future — as I’m always saying, these are things that can only be decided in a specific locale, and with reference to a specific set of circumstances. Like any other technology that’s brought to bear on public life, the deployment of analytics founded in so-called Big Data needs to be subject to processes of democratic accountability. And I don’t see that happening in very many places at the moment.