Trying to force all chaos into order through top-down planning and engineering is a mistake, especially when talking about urban renewal or smart cities. From Anthony Townsend in the Economist:

“Rather than design and build a smart city like a mainframe, what if we built it like the web?

More than a century ago, debates over urbanisation during the Industrial Age asked this same question. In contrast to the precise technocratic order of Howard’s Utopia, Patrick Geddes, a Scottish biologist, promoted ‘conservative surgery’ to heal cities. Growth and decay were natural processes—but just as man had tamed the land, the avid gardener believed, we could cultivate the city. Geddes’s bottom-up view of urban revitalisation presaged today’s zeal for crowdsourcing. He didn’t think it would work without the full participation of every citizen.

Geddes’s vision is alive and well in the smart city movement. Yesterday’s grandiose blueprints and their tech-industry contractors are yielding to a bustling planet of 500,000 municipalities, which are home to millions of start-ups, NGOs and civic hackers. In the style of combinatorial innovation that, according to Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian, drives the creation of value on the internet, participants in these civic laboratories are patching together bits of open-source code, government data and consumer hardware to craft bespoke solutions to local problems. Websites like Barcelona-based CityMart, a kind of Amazon for smart-city solutions, show that these efforts are creating software and strategies that can be traded globally.

The case for more participation in building the smart city goes beyond innovation. Bubble-era smart-city launches are over; post-stimulus austerity in cities throughout the world has turned mayors from profligate spenders to penny pinchers. Currently, financing large-scale smart-city efforts with risk-filled, messy public-private partnerships is the only viable strategy. But new schemes for crowdfunding civic improvements will increase citizens’ ability to finance their own designs by passing the hat.”