New and Not so New Ideal Communities

“Smart city” is a concept stemming from a frightful dream, where centralised control and coordination spreads to unprecedented details of the environment and people’s lives, a society free of unpredictability and irrational urges. A smart city, as it has been defined by technology companies and city management obsessed with data and technocracy, is based on the freedom of possibilities, but this is the freedom of institutions. 

In comparison, a cultural, or cultured city focuses on the people. It supports individual freedom and at its best, is civilised and based on a humanist world-view. In a cultural city, human activities are not universal, but they stem from specific traditions. They are an expression by our communities, of our time, and possess the ability to create diverse new traditions and individual appropriations of various concepts – for example, technology. This human messiness, cultural relativity, locality and adherence to time, challenges the smart city.

What could then be a cultural smart city?

What is the technology that best helps to take care of old traditions and create new ones – supporting exploration for contemporary, valuable human life?  – Could this speculative pursuit be about bringing the ideal, utopian dimension back to the design of cities? 

• It might have technology in the service of people. The new technologies would be tools for new tribes, for culturally motivated artefacts and spaces. They can increase social cohesion and make life more meaningful. 
• It should be able to build psychological assurance to people and help to understand that their interests and activities are supported. It would sustain a life, where one is not machine-like, or only motivated by facts – but a life with art, fashion, architecture, music, entertainment, expressions and feelings. 
• It might stem from the imaginative aspects of technological pragmatism in support of cultural creation.
• It might be based on the utopian dimension of technology, where technology is a frame or a feeding ground for new, better life. 

Accordingly, we might need to expand our understanding of technology to accept its social construction and the systemic nature of our environment, where efficiency and rationality are only some of the motivations and interests of people ...and rarely the most crucial ones. One proof about the inherent social relativity is the inevitable downside of technological utopias – the deployment of technology resulting in paradoxes that simultaneously increase and reduce freedom. This is clearly visible not only in the addictive and depriving effects of social media, but also in the dystopian undertone of smart cities displayed in science fiction. The open-ended technology of smart cities requires open-ended humanism, social self-organisation, in order to be both smart and cultural.

There are many examples of open-ended humanism in the study and practice of technology and modern material culture: 

• The philosopher Johan Huizinga’s interpretation of the social human being – homo ludens – appropriates the concept of games at the roots of culture.
• The social scientist Michel de Certeau researched the importance of personal, unprogrammed uses of functional objects and places.
• One example of the transgressive occupations of resistance towards oppressive technologies is the democratisation of technology in the generously defined hacking, or DIY as it was earlier called.
• Hackable City is a grassroots urban collaborative, which opposes top-down smart city paradigms.
• Benedict Anderson’s The City in Transgression is a book that reveals the potential for new spatial self-organised networks that counter the existing dominant urban models of capital and property.

Taking technology to one’s own hands and combining that with utopian community development has actually been tried in history. There are compelling examples of rather coherent cultural smart cities in history – as well as in contemporary urban design already.

Early industrial villages

These philanthropic factory towns have been marvellous combinations of technological progress with idealist and utopian humanism:

• In Claude Ledoux’s Salines Royales in Arc-et-Senans (1775), the role of an architect was to be a social engineer.
• Rober Owen’s New Harmony in Indiana (1827) was an experimental model of a utopian society - a superior social, intellectual, and physical environment.
• James Finlayson’s factory area in Tampere, Finland (1837), provided all services for the cotton industry’s community from cradle to grave.
• Charles Fourier’s Phalanstery in Guise (1859) was a combination of a kind of luxury hotel and a modern shopping-mall, providing an elegant setting in which to engage in the harmonious co-existence of work, education and leisure along principles of sexual liberation, co-operative organisation, women's liberation and enhanced human interaction.
• Port Sunlight (1888) for the Lever company near Liverpool was based on Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of To-morrow. It is a beautiful “Smokeless Slumless City”.
• Olivetti’s Human City in Turin from the 1930s built a harmony between private and public life, work and home for the employees and their families.

The role of smart technology in these early industrial villages included new production facilities, construction materials and techniques and is thus not directly comparable to today’s more immaterial ‘smart’ technology (such as sensors, mobile phones and electronic communication networks). However, those projects for ideal industrial communities were also pursuits to enhance interaction between human beings and the consumer society. Even for the 18th and 19th century visionaries Ledoux and Fourier, it was necessary to design optimal circumstances to not only work, housing and commuting, but also for free-time. They wanted to define a new kind of culture for the proto-modern industrial society. This idealism linked to the new role of consumers – seen especially in Fourier’s work,was in many ways more advanced than the contemporary fixation with user interaction. Diminishing people to the role of users neglects crucial cultural aspects in life. Naturally, too overwhelming corporate power in cities is also a threat expressed in science fiction. These historic examples have however been limited and humanist in their emphasis on local wellbeing.

University and corporate campuses as cultural smart cities

Contemporary campuses continue the aims of historic industrial villages – whether they are university or corporate campuses. They often pursue the idea of an ideal community, where innovation and comprehensive notions on civilised culture are combined. Today’s campuses support interior collegiality as self-contained – and often self-organisable – mini-universes. For example these tendencies related to cultural, smart urbanism can be recognised:

• City within city – Novartis campus in Basel is a workplace neighbourhood with an intense urban atmosphere, liveable outdoor places and recreational in-between spaces.
• City within suburb – the existing and newly planned extension of Facebook campus in Menlo Park creates an enclosed, walkable, free of charge urban environment for employees with plentiful amenities. 
• Regenerated liveability – DTU’s campus regeneration in Lyngby and Aalto university’s urban renewal in Espoo are based on proximity to free time services and the mix of functions and user groups. Additionally, NTU, Caltech, ETHZ and MIT pursue hybrid spatial programming nowadays.
• Common ventures of universities, cities and companies attract the most talented knowledge workers and students in natural environments with social density, for example at Centrale Supélec.
• Creative districts for the creative and multidisciplinary economy and culture cultivate authenticity at post-industrial sites, for example, CCS in Detroit. Frequent public events are part of the development of the LA Arts District in downtown Los Angeles with SCI-ARC, where new design and creative fields show in all scales of the artisanal city development.
• Building communal identity through a social hotspot has been the core concept of Harvard’s Smith Campus Center Renovation.
• Stimulating collaboration, productivity and welfare in open campus supports users activities at NTU (Singapore) and UC Berkeley. Città Studi Sustainable Campus is a collaborative project by Politecnico di Milano and Università degli Studi di Milano to transform the city’s university district into an exemplary part of Milan, increasing the quality of life and environmental sustainability through the active involvement of researchers, students and local inhabitants.

Today’s campus development is one of the most visible vehicles for progressing urbanism. As many early industrial communities were based on the idea of combining humanist and technological advances, campus development projects do that today. They combine culture to smartness and give space to local, tech-savvy open-ended humanism.

To find out more about the project, download the paper here: