Smart About Cities

The current discourse on urban planning is imbued with the concept of the smart city. The smart city is based on innovative urban planning, which itself is based on smart technologies that not only make cities safer and cleaner, but also (and especially) more efficient. But is this actually making cities any better? In this book, Maarten Hajer and Ton Dassen (PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency) argue for 'smart urban planning', thereby providing a counterweight to the uncritical embrace of the smart city. Smart urban planning aims at finding solutions to what twentieth-century urban planning forgot: the metabolism of cities, i.e. the wide variety of incoming and outgoing flows that connect urban life with nature. This metabolism is visualized in 50 infographics, giving us answers to questions such as: what do cities live off of? How much water, food, construction materials, and other materials do they use? What amount of those materials do they dispose of? How effective is the metabolism? This book makes an appeal for 'globalnetwork urban planning', in which technology is not a panacea but instead is anchored in social innovations.