Smart Cities as Control Cities

Summary

The rise of smart cities has been marked not only by rapid technological innovation but also by a deepening entanglement with systems of surveillance, control, and governance. These surveillance infrastructures in urban contexts are not merely the product of digital transformation or urban planning trends but also the outcome of converging developments in military doctrine, predictive policing, and neoliberal urban restructuring. The global diffusion of smart city technologies—from US policing software to Chinese-built safe city infrastructures—illustrates how these systems are deployed in service of both domestic control and transnational influence. The securitization of urban life following 9/11, and, later, the COVID-19 pandemic, has expanded and normalized the use of surveillance technologies under the dual logics of protection and efficiency. Yet, these developments disproportionately affect racialized, gendered, and marginalized communities, often under the guise of safety and modernization. Despite mounting critiques, the vision of the smart city continues to evolve and proliferate—increasingly animated by artificial intelligence. These emerging paradigms extend rather than displace the surveillance logics, power asymmetries, and techno-solutionist ideologies embedded in earlier smart city models. While they promise seamlessness, efficiency, and autonomy, they also deepen risks of privatized governance, opaque decision making, and intensified sociospatial inequalities—often under the guise of innovation. As such, the smart city’s future lies not only in its technical affordances but in its political orientation: whether it continues to serve as a tool of control and capital accumulation, or whether it can be reimagined through democratic, inclusive, and justice-oriented urban imaginaries.