Smart City Transcendent

Abstract

This paper provides a conception of the smart city which takes into account what the smart city brings into the world which is new and original.  This approach provides a means of dealing with the complex influences humans and digital systems will have on each other in the mature smart cities of the future.  I will first review traditional accounts of the smart city and derive from them the essential characteristics common to these visions.  I will then show how these characteristics can be best understood through Actor-network theory and construct an account of the smart city as an autopoietic system in which humans and devices are co-constituting actants.  Finally I shall develop this into an original conception of the smart city as a new type of thing - an “integrated domain.”