Another City Is Possible: Alternatives to the Smart City with Adam Greenfield

• Design & Architecture

The Architectural League’s Urban Omnibus and IDEAS CITY present Another City is Possible: Alternatives to the Smart City with Adam Greenfield. The idea of the “smart city” enjoys considerable intellectual currency at the moment in the popular media as well as conversations in architecture, urban planning, and local government. In this talk, Adam Greenfield will argue that these discourses offer a potentially authoritarian vision of cities under centralized, computational surveillance and control: overplanned, over-determined, and driven by the needs of enterprise. What might some more fruitful alternatives look like? How can we design urban technology that responds to our needs, demands, and desires? Above all, how might we inscribe a robust conception of the right to the city in the technological systems that will do so much to define urban experience in the twenty-first century?