New Towns to Smart Cities

How do different settlement patterns and ideals respond to and shape the process of urbanization?

In recent years, Smart Cities have challenged urban discourse. Their ostensible intelligence derives from digital infrastructures – data collection, algorithmic calculation, socio-technical platforms – and they promise a world of efficiency, health, environmental management and continuous connectivity. The Smart City provides smoother social and physical interactions, at local and global scales. Yet, Smart City sceptics interpret the monitoring of humans, materials and environments as biased and intrusive surveillance, privileging global financial and political elites. Nevertheless, others argue that “smartness” offers a vision of collective good, a new kind of happiness.

Earlier, across the second half of the 20th century, settlements called New Towns ostensibly offered improved community life. They deployed new modes of governance, new delineations of land, property, and site, new forms of neighborhood and social interaction, new scales of housing, commerce and industry, and the expansion of transportation and infrastructural systems. They took on a variety of forms under very different economic and political regimes, confronting industrialization, regionalization and colonization. Shaped by Garden City, Regionalist and Modernist (CIAM) principles of legible social order, the New Towns also offered happiness.

Smart Cities and New Towns are/were planetary in scope, with ideas and techniques exported, imported, and transformed. Both are/were adopted and interpreted by professional organizations, international academic and financial institutions, political leaders and government agencies, and non-governmental organizations. Both are strangely undergirded by utopian socialism and liberal/neoliberal developmentalism, driven by extraction and growth. Both are linked to technologies of control, particular and shifting economic relations, and both are a little boring.

The criteria of New Towns and Smart Cities have blurred. Many older New Towns thrive, and many have adopted new immigrants, informal economies and new political systems. In Asia, New Towns in recent decades are undergirded by Smart City technologies.

In this seminar, we will examine New Town and Smart City theories and practices and conduct case study and comparative analyses to understand. We seek not to map the success or failure of any particular enterprise but understand New Towns and Smart Cities have grappled with the “perfectibility” of human settlement and the provision of happiness.