Smart City Planning

This article reflects on the challenges for urban planning posed by the emergence of smart cities in network societies. In particular, it reflects on reductionist tendencies in existing smart city planning. Here the concern is with the implications of prior reductions of complexity which have been undertaken by placing primacy in planning on information technology, economical profit, and top-down political government. Rather than pointing urban planning towards a different ordering of these reductions, this article argues in favor of approaches to smart city planning via complexity theory. Specifically, this article argues in favor of approaching smart city plans holistically as topologies of organized complexity. Here, smart city planning is seen as a theory and practice engaging with a complex adaptive urban system which continuously operates on its potential. The actualizations in the face of contingency of such potential are what might have the city evolve over time, its organization, its wholeness, and its continued existence being at stake from moment to moment.