The Limits of the Smart Sustainable City

Abstract

The ongoing and escalating urbanisation has resulted in a situation where a majority of people worldwide live in cities. Cities stand for a substantial part of the world GDP and are often lifted as possible drivers of sustainable development. However, the city has limitations and vulnerabilities. Cities depend on resources flowing into the city and increasing populations strain their land use. Climate change threatens cities with sea-level rise, heat waves and extreme weather events. Transforming cities into Smart Sustainable Cities by incorporation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) is becoming a recurring proposed solution to these limitations and challenges. The two main areas where ICT are envisioned to function for this are i) as part of the city's infrastructure for monitoring, efficiency and automatization of processes, and ii) as an enabler for sharing of both information and goods among citizens, expectedly leading to more sustainable urban lifestyles. However, there are several limits to the realisation of the Smart Sustainable City. Manufacturing, implementation and maintenance of its digital infrastructure hold environmental risks and require human and natural resources. Furthermore, there are issues of increased vulnerability of the city due to increased complexity. Already now, the (global) flows that the city depends upon to thrive, are to a large and increasing extent possible due to - and dependent on - ICTs working without disturbances. Considering the fragility of these systems, both physical and virtual, is the Smart Sustainable City a desirable or even feasible path? We suggest that while ICT may be useful for making cities more sustainable, we need to be heedful so as not to make the city even more vulnerable in the process. We suggest that we should make sure that the ICT systems simply assist the cities, while maintaining analogue backup in case the ICT shuts down; that we should build more resilient ICT systems with higher backward compatibility; and that we should acknowledge increasing complexity as a problem and strive to counteract it.