Who Makes Decisions in the Smart City

Abstract

This article focuses on the widespread but vague concept of the smart city. The smart city is a visionary projection, around which are an eclectic ensemble of often contradictory theoretical attitudes and doctrines that link urban development with the development of technology, especially digital technology. We argue that the work of the British cyberneticist Gordon Pask on the theory of “aesthetically charged environments” sheds light on a key aspect of the problem of the smart city. Pask emphasizes the fundamental dependence of the problem of human control and emotional interaction with the urban, technology-saturated environment, which still remains a blind spot for most researchers of the smart city. A critical analysis of modern approaches to the smart city has shown that there are two crucial conditions for the success the smart city policy: 1) the increasing variety of algorithms and competition between technical devices; 2) not just total digitalization or the creation of a technological “framework”, but designing the city as a technological environment with a powerful emotional potential. The authors believe that the emotional and cultural-aesthetic dimension is only a barely outlined direction of future research on the smart city, digital technology, and engineering.