Smart cities have smart organised people at the centre

An article by Neil Jameson on the Common Purpose website about Smart Cities, prompted me to write a response.

In defining the concept of a smart city, Mr. Jameson asks us to not forget the people in them. Fair enough. People are always more important than places. It is people who make places, and not the reverse, despite the emotions of identity and belonging that permeate our social worth.

He talks about how such people should be well educated, secure, and fulfilled, as well as being engaged and involved in city governance. There is a middle class elitism to this, and an implication that access to such qualities is easy. He was not just talking voting, or being consulted, but he references how people should organise to ensure their interests are taken seriously. He suggests that organised people initiate, challenge, create and craft their own future, whereas disorganised people simply observe and comment. He describes governance initiation as liberating, adding that we cannot leave this to paid officials or politicians. All I can say to this, given experiences in the field, is that has no idea how difficult it is to influence civic change, how protective civic power is of their fiefdoms.

He observes that a smart city is one with a central place for the organised, or as the ancient Greeks would say 'the Polis'. This encourages people to organise, respect diversity and welcome challenge. He adds that a smart city is one where key institutions of Civil Society are healthy, and work together for the common good.

All this is entirely reasonable in the context of a liberalist philosophical inquiry.

But:

as the eminent British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion said "man is a group animal at war with his groupishness"; thus identifying the need that man has to both belong, and be apart. This is perhaps one of the most profound single sentences ever written in the 20th Century, as it defines in just ten words, what it is like to be human. We have choices, but at the same time experience the tensions of choice, and the consequences of our choices. We self organise ourselves within this concept, and within our wider social groups. Its how we define choice, and is both positive and progressive and negative an regressive as it combines hopes and fears on how we might live.

Self-organisation, whether task defined or otherwise is no easy thing. It requires learning and un-learning. It is ever present in the now and is emergent. It lacks boundaries and is dynamic. It is a change concept and as such is fragile.

Civic Authority, on the other hand, is none of these things. It is based on control ideologies. It is dependent, fearful of change, resistant, and non-dynamic.

If a committee had been formed to organise civilisation, or to strategise natural selection, neither would have happened. These social and natural concepts emerged, before a time of writing, or social sciences, or indeed any human knowledge of what we call science. They self-organised, and evolved within unplanned, open ended, systems that were both incremental and revolutionary at the same time. There was no plan, no need to have “pre-learnt” and no goal objectives, albeit both seem to have attracted to natural efficiency.

Smart cities need an open mind to such radical ideas, and the Polis is one such metaphor for potential success. It does after all imply conditions of self-organisation. But it also implies cultural organisation, within which humans have a natural tendency to lead, pair bind, follow, and scapegoat.

At the same time we should recall that another derivative of the word Polis is the noun “police”, which is also used as a verb as in “to police”.This is how it is increasingly used to describe how a state imposes order on a society. The word Polis also gives rise to the word "policy", which in modern parlance references the strategic objectives of civic bodies in doing “what is best for us.” What eve "best" is and whatever "us" might be. And if we reference us, we must surely reference "them". So the concept of the Polis is not necessarily as simple as that outlined by the well meaning, Mr. Jameson.

Finding words that are antonyms to Polis is not easy. Polis is commonly used to define order, a municipality, or citizenship. The opposite implies a lack of order, non municipality, or non citizenship. Literal interpretations of this might include the words anarchy, ruralism, or outcast.

Which bring us back to Bion and the idea of being of the group and separate from it? This is indeed smart. We can be both. This is indeed the smartest of institutions.