Urban Imaginaries & The Smart City. Madness or Visionary?

When studying the relation between technology and society, we often tend to ask: what is the impact of a new technology on our society.

Yet, we can also turn that question around: what is the impact of our society on the development of new technologies. How do we imagine our technologies to work for us in our society? And more importantly: what kind of a normative world vision lurks behind these imaginations.

After all, even though, technology is often presented as a kind of ‘magic’ that makes our lives easier, it's more than just a neutral problem solving tool. In this talk De Waal will look at a range of historic urban ideals, varying form the mad to the visionary, from the 19th century Boulevard to Archigram and connect these with our current debate on the smart city.