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Though it will only be launched on November 6th, New York-based writer and urbanist Adam Greenfield has released his latest pamphlet, "Against the smart city" in Kindle format on October 1st. Several people have shared the news in various newsfeeds and social media.

I just finished reading the 100-pager essay (I couldn't put it down) and feel like I was just smashed with a ton of bricks. Based on a semantic analysis of the various materials published around the idea of so-called "smart cities", Greenfield deconstructs the concept for what it is: a futurist account of a city governed by overspecified installations connected into channels of communications that aim at centralizing information in order to yield pre-determined "efficiencies" whose foundations are never to be discussed.

The essay is striking for its ability to consider the problem from a variety of angles, each of which is presented as inherently problematic in light of the vibrant, human-centric potential of technology-driven urbanistic development. It draws on a variety of sources including historical studies of modernism that complete the demonstration of how the rhetoric of the "smart city" has been governed by a few key players, "solution-providers" with little or no actual urbanistic background to justify their claims. 

This is assuredly my "book of the month", and if you have eight dollars to spare, please buy it. For the sake of the collective decisions we face politically, an informed debate about the nature of the concept is in good order. 

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