Wolfgang Lehrner Medineo Tunis © Wolfgang Lehrner

Too Smart City

By Wolfgang Lehrner

No one can find what will work for our cities by looking at […] suburban garden cities, manipulating scale models, or inventing dream cities. You’ve got to get out and walk. Walk, and you will see that many of the assumptions on which the projects depend are visibly wrong. […] The citizen can be the ultimate expert on this; what is needed is an observant eye, curiosity about people, and a willingness to walk.

Jane Jacobs, Downtown is for People, 1958
What makes a city smart cannot be defined by its technological progress alone. How do you measure the soul of a city, the kind of urbanism that Jane Jacobs fought for, with lively neighborhoods and sidewalks and meeting places that inspire meaningful interaction between their citizens?  

How can we use the "Smart City" mindset to be most beneficial to the arts and culture in our global cities? From a creative point of view, a city should not be smarter than you are. Culture is only smart if it has the ability to surprise and it manages to keep secrets.

Looking for life-hacks 

A life hack is any trick, shortcut, skill, or method that increases productivity and efficiency, in all walks of life. The term was primarily used by computer experts who suffer from information overload or those with a playful curiosity in the ways they can accelerate their workflow in ways other than programming. How can we use this way of working to explore new territory? 

Looking for getting lost  

Losing your phone/way might be the best thing happen to you to explore new ground in a smart city. 

It is the art of using smart devices while not loosing yourself, the challenge to switch between 0 and 1, the analog and the digital, the global and the local, the virtual and real life – on and off. A hand-held GPS device won't, for instance, provide a sense of community.
 

You must throw away the ladder after you have climbed up on it.

Wittgenstein, Tractatus
Looking for the space in-between 

Born with wanderlust, excessive city walks are my preferred art practice, referring to the fact that all cities are multi-layered and unique, but nevertheless form an interacting whole – and this is also the way how Too Smart City comes together: Too much information, too much possibilities, too much photographs and film shots that, like a puzzle, only form the bigger picture when put together. 

A city is not a machine - it is an organic structure that works good enough, but is also open to the constant changes and uncertainties of real life. To end up with an other Jane Jacobs quote:
 

By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.

Jane Jacobs