Beyond flatland: when smart cities make stupid citizens

Abstract The ‘smart city’—insofar as the concept has any definitive purchase—is really what I termed in my (2008) a ‘hyperspatial’ city. That is, its social world is not just connected, but hyperconnected. This means that the risks it generates are not just those of an everyday physical space, or even what was once termed a ‘cyberspace’, but perils with multidimensional properties—ones which go far beyond mass data-veillance, or the hacking of a home hub by tech-savvy burglars. For as McLuhan once warned, when citizens are multiply interconnected, the second order nervous system which emerges risks generating debilitation as much as facilitation, deformation rather than information and insecurity rather than security. In this paper I address the nature of this risk from two angles. First the way the advent of the smart city concept has also revealed a striking level of unpreparedness for managing everyday life and security within hyperconnected urban space. Given that cities have always been technologies rather than merely technologized, there are profound questions to be asked about why this latest evolution of our most successful tool for enabling mass proximity social organisation has been perceived to be so different from previous transitions. A second angle focuses more directly upon the metaphysics and ecology of the hyperconnected city. Utilising two key determinants of contemporary urban life, the virtualised economy and automated governance I consider whether life within the smart city may so reorder traditional ideas of security and the citizen that both are rendered obsolete.