The Ambivalences of Smart Cities

Introduction

Specialists in topics related to culture have not failed to point out and discuss the effects of transformation that the digital revolution is causing in human life. One of the themes that stands out is human life in urban environments. In fact, in the last twenty years these environments have incessantly incorporated new technological devices aimed primarily at making the existence and mobility of citizens more reasonable. These transformations in urban life started to receive the denominations of sentient cities or also smart cities. Among the fields that have become more dependent on a coherent informational organization that facilitates urban mobility is the field of tourism. It is, therefore, a field that implies not only the installation of circuits of new technologies, but also implies a knowledge of the influence that intelligent organizations play today in urban life, especially for those who, in the position of visitors, seek in tourism the expansion of their knowledge about cultural diversity and its histories and tradition.

Considering that smart infrastructure and superstructures have become integral parts of contemporary cities, particularly those that stand out for their tourist potential, the objective of this article is to bring to the discussion the different facets that smart cities present, while highlighting the contradictions inherent to intelligence in the datafication stage of life in which we find ourselves today. The discussion is justified as a basis for tourism to be thought and carried out in the direction of sustainability, a goal to be reached unconditionally.

The topic of smart cities began to emerge in the 2000s to become a constant today. The reason for this lies not only in the disproportionate growth of megalopolises and in the continuous emergence of new metropolises, but also in the growing expansion of the internet in domestic, public, corporate and governmental spaces, and its corresponding incorporation into the necessary material infrastructure of cities. In fact, cities are getting smarter as algorithmic information processing capabilities are embedded, taking root, and spreading throughout urban infrastructure.

The field on which, in principle, the development of smart cities depends is the field of governance and government administration. Thus, e-governance and politics 2.0 refer to ubiquitous services of government, citizen engagement and participation, involving, for example, government semantic information services and ontologies. Today, most systems are computerized, and the population is increasingly connected to different media and social networks, which results in gigantic volumes of data that imply collection, storage of information and integration of many sources and technologies. For this, the technology park must be robust with a view to identifying and classifying essential information for decision-making.

If, on the one hand, urban intelligence has become inevitable for the management and administration of government services, on the other hand, all this constitutes a true apotheosis of the society of control and surveillance, as conceived by Gilles Deleuze (1992). This is precisely the theme that has occupied the thinking of critics of culture, because, although it is undeniable that the entry of artificial intelligence in the most diverse human activities (cities governance included) brings benefits, it precisely intensifies the processes of control and surveillance. Therefore, what follows aims at reflecting on the ambivalences of smart cities, in what is gained and in what is given blindly to obtain these gains.