[scottishcow]

The author makes a rather arbitrary distinction between "dumb" and "smart" technologies - trains are now considered "dumb" technology? I live in Tokyo and that was never my impression, they're as smart as it gets and the infrastructure is constantly being updated with new tech as we speak. (My brother works for Japan Railways btw.)

It's as if the author (with a background in civil engineering not CS) deems everything that she has a good understanding of as "dumb", and everything she's relatively unfamiliar with as "smart", i.e., useless. While I'm no fan of projects like Google Quayside and wary of increasing corporate influence on urban policy, you can't point fingers at fringe ideas like smart garbage cans and use that to outright dismiss the role of IT in urbanism; we don't browse through weputachipinit [1] and conclude that all IoT is worthless do we. If she can look into things like Japan's earthquake notification system [2] and still claim that "smart" solutions don't add value to cities, then we can talk.

[1] https://weputachipinit.tumblr.com

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_Early_Warning_(Japa...

Perhaps I'm biased by my own experience here in Tokyo, but I feel that a lot of criticism against smart cities - while not at all without merit - smack of civil engineers, urban planners, architects and the like claiming territorial rights, attempting to keep "outsiders" like IT people stepping onto what has traditionally been their turf. We need less of such feudal mentality, and more interdisciplinary collaboration; more urbanists need to start speaking the language of IT and vice versa.