The kind of problem a smart city is

Abstract

Digital technologies not only alter the material fabric of cities, but condition and constrain the complex networks of trust that emerge among neighbours and strangers as they engage one another in shared civic spaces. In this sense, a media ecology of the city would borrow from studies of urban sociology, political economy and cybernetics to reconsider what ethical implications smart technologies would have when sown into the fabric of an urban environment. This article introduces Jane Jacobs’s urban theory as a complexity approach to media ecology that provides insight into how urban environments, as media of communication and commerce, cultivate the ethical character of social relations among neighbours and strangers. It is argued that Jacobs’s urban theory provides sufficient ground for figuring the ethical implications of highly integrated and ubiquitous digital technologies within the organized complexity of urban environments and offers an alternative way of cultivating urban ecologies of communication.