Dosya
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Long essays, thought through in questions and written with their sources.

Dosya · an essay series

Smart Cities, in Questions

A lit stage and rows of mostly empty chairs in front of it; black-and-white photograph.
The conference hall. Smart City Expo World Congress, Barcelona, November 2019.

I have been hearing the vocabulary of smart cities for a long time. Recently I asked myself how much of what I thought I knew I actually knew; the answer was what I had learned on a three-day visit to a fair in 2019.

I came back from that fair with a suspicion: the part on show was the easy part, and the hard part had been swept under the carpet — at least, that is what I thought. I still have my notes from those days; I built this series on them.

Today I have ten questions in mind. I know their order, but not their answers, nor where the answers will take me.

  1. What is a city, really?
  2. What kind of problem is a city?
  3. What did “smart” promise, and who promised it?coming
  4. What is a digital twin: a map, a model, or a mirror?coming
  5. What feeds the twin? Whose data is it?coming
  6. Can the twin foresee the city's future?coming
  7. Who decides: planners, algorithms, or residents?coming
  8. Where does seeing the city turn into watching people?coming
  9. What actually worked, and how do we know?coming
  10. What does AI change, and what does it leave unchanged?coming

The first question is different from the others; I asked it out of curiosity alone. The last one will make me think about how artificial intelligence might affect what I learn on the way to the ninth.

One loop, taken from my Barcelona notes, ties all the questions together: notice, decide, respond.

The fourth, fifth, and sixth questions are about digital twins, but the series is not about digital twins. A digital twin is one of the important things that come to mind when someone says “smart city”.

I have tried to build every answer the same way: first the honest answer, then the best technique we have today, then an example with a name. Every claim is tied to a note, and every note gives the sentence from the source in the source’s own language.

As you read, please bear in mind that I am not a smart-city expert — but that I have been on the side that designs the technologies in question.

For the whole series, I had help from the Thinking Studio I built and from Claude. Emel Okay’s and Özgür Yüksel’s feedback improved it; at the end of each essay I say who read it. The decisions and the mistakes are mine.

The order matters; I begin with the first question: What is a city, really?