"Smart" Cities

First read this article, a summary and critique of some current "smart city" projects.

The author unfortunately kind of skates around the main, fundamental problem with most of the projects he describes. They're completely antithetical to the way cities actually grow. Quite simply, you can't build a city. Maybe if your name is Stalin and you're relocating Soviet industry east of the Urals because the Nazis are invading you can make it work, but usually planned cities are failures. The successful cities, the ones that last centuries or millennia, grow from the bottom up. They aren't the work of some Master Planner, they're the result of thousands — millions — of individual decisions. 

I thought we'd settled that question back when Jane Jacobs was still around, but I guess some lessons have to be learned over and over. The sad thing is that the people learning the lesson aren't the ones who suffer when their planned cities fail, it's the people who have to live there.