From Smart-Only Cities Towards Humane and Cooperative Hybrid Cities
Abstract
O P / P O SIT I O N S The Smart-Everything Paradigm From Smart-Only Cities Our working and living environments are increasingly deter- mined by what I call the “Smart-Everything” Paradigm (Streitz Towards Humane and 2019), where every artifact and service must now be “smart.” “Smart” is applied to our phones, our T Vs, our cars, and to our cit- Cooperative Hybrid Cities ies. Unfortunately, the corresponding developments are mainly technology-driven and do not take users’ needs and preferences into account. The promotion of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) dominates too many developments, trig- gers expectations, and creates claims for a questionable future. Smart cities provide telling examples of these trends. This contri- bution outlines the challenges of “smart-only” cities and proposes approaches and characteristics of humane and cooperative cities by resetting the priorities and putting humans first. One can consider an environment to be “smart” if it enables certain self-directed (re)actions of artifacts that are based on continuously collected information about artifacts, the people present, their activities, and their overall context. For example, “Designing complex systems a space can be “smart” by gathering and exploiting information requires juggling a variety of about which