Smart cities of the future? My contribution to Future Everything´s Smart citizens book

Yesterday Future Everything made available their new publication, Smart citizens (download here) edited by Drew Hemment and Anthony Townsend. As they present it:

The publication is a series of 23 short essays that offer a snapshot of international thought on the potential offered by engaging in open governance and empowering bottom-up social and business innovation. It provides a global perspective on how cities can create the policies, structures and tools to engender a more innovative and participatory society.

Contributors from several fields of knowledge and practice, ranging from urbanism to interaction design, address different approaches to how to take back the idea of smart cities from a citizen perspective exploring how to understand what bottom-up innovation can mean in a networked society. I was invited to share my own contribution with an article titled Smart cities of the future? (it had a subtitle, It is already happening, that has vanished for editorial reasons; short titles) and I am amazed to be part of such a a list of people I admire and trust what they say concerning this topic or I have met these years (Dan Hill, Adam Greenfield, Anthony Townsend, Martijn de Waal, Mark Shepard, Michael Smyth, Mayra Madriz, Susa Pop,...). Great line up, for sure.

Writing it was a good chance, as I explained, to summarize in a short piece some of my positions on smart cities, and the basic message is: mainstream proponents are focusing too much on yet-to-come solutions for the future when, in fact, the change is happening right now on a different scale and perspective that smart cities renderings are able to show. The tight maximum of words makes my essay generalistic somehow, but I hope it underlines the main idea about acknowledging the kind of digitally-driven real social innovation processes that can make smart cities something meaningful for people. I am currently working on an extended version I hope I can share soon, whatever the final format is.

Here is the table of contents and enjoy the reading because this collection encompass thoughtful positions on how we can create opportunities to engage every citizen in the development and revitalisation of the smart city:

Here Come the Smart Citizens
Drew Hemment, Anthony Townsend
The Tortoise Needs to Cross Many Chasms
Michael L. Joroff
Recuperating the Smart City
Adam Greenfield
What’s So Smart About the Smart Citizen?
Mark Shepard, Antonina Simeti
Networked Specifism: Beyond Critical Regionalism
Carlo Ratti, Matthew Claudel, Antoine Picon, Alex Haw
To Know Thy City, Know Thyself
Anthony Townsend
The City with 20 Million Brains
Benjamin dela Peña
“You have the presence of someone” The Ubiquity of Smart
Nancy Odenadaal
Including Informality in the Smart Citizen Conversation
Lea Rekow
Critical Design : A Mirror of the Human Condition in the Smart City
Michael Smyth
Smart Cities of the Future?
Manu Fernandez
2025 Eutrophia
Aditya Dev Sood, Namrata Mehta
Design Rules for Smarter Cities
Frank Kresin
Smart Citizens need Smart Government
Léan Doody
Open Data and Beyond: How Government can Support a Smarter Society
Paul Maltby
Internal Activists – Catalysts for Smartness All Around
Katja Schechtner
Implementing Civic Innovations: A Political Challenge
Mayra Madriz
The Power of Civic Imagination
Jake Dunagan
Connecting Cities and its Citizens Through Artistic Urban Media Scenarios
Susa Pop
Open Data: From ‘Platform’ to ‘Program’
Martijn de Waal
Citizen Engagement in Smart Cities
Catherine Mulligan
Smart Citizens Make Smart Cities
Dan Hill
A Manifesto for Smart Citizens
Frank Kresin