Who Controls the Smart City? From Machines of Loving Grace to a Democratic Transformation from Below

In this paper, I argue that smart cities instantiate a form of what Herbert Marcuse called “technological rationality”: that is, the process whereby substantive political questions are reduced to ostensibly “neutral” questions of efficiency or cost-effectiveness. Unfortunately, I argue, technological rationality coheres poorly with the necessarily inefficient deliberative and aggregative procedures upon which the legitimacy of democratic systems is premised. Considering that incompatibility, we need to reconceptualise what smart cities are and how they function. These technologies, I argue, need to undergo what Andrew Feenberg calls a “democratic transformation from below”; a transformation whereby citizens can bring smart technologies under collective control, thus preserving the legitimacy of democratic systems. This democratic transformation gives the polis an opportunity to recognise and discuss the affordances that smart technologies offer—and, by extension, an opportunity to collectively and systematically address the philosophical question of what a city can and should be.