Smart Cities, Between Utopia and Experimentation

While elsewhere in this dossier Carlos Moreno shows how the “smart city” represents a new paradigm for utopian thought, Jean-François Soupizet goes into detail here on what smart cities actually are today. After a historical reminder of the origin of this fashionable concept, he analyses the many –technological, organizational, political etc.– issues inherent in the data worked on by cities and in the so-called “smart” management of that data. He then outlines various ongoing experiments relating to smart cities, before examining a series of questions that are crucial to the thinking about them: are smart cities useful, do they optimize partnerships, do they improve local governance? The future of this new urban model will surely depend on answers to these questions and on the capacity of smart cities to open up to all their stakeholders.