Today’s smart city projects maintain their first-generation focus on technology, with data collection and monitoring dashboards helping public agencies improve service quality and consistency. Emerging technologies like AI, IoT, and machine learning are pushing smarteness to the frontiers of autonomy and virtual agency. At the same time, a next-generation narrative goes beyond bytes and cables to address sustainability, livability, and social justice.

While the new smartness softens its own technocratic edges, it offers no epistemic novelty. Scholarly critiques still implicate it in the misadventures of technocratic, managerialist, and pseudo-scientific policymaking, particularly the reduction of problem complexity to unduly simplistic terms. My present proposition extends these critiques to water.

https://www.water-alternatives.org/index.php/blog/smart

“Dry humor: aquathoritarian cities pretend to be water-smart.” Water Alternatives, 15 Nov 2023.