Do Smart Cities Make Us Smarter ?—Philosophical Discussion on Over-Dependence on Smart-Phones in Our Cities

In the recent decades, the term “smart city” has become more and more popular among researchers across a number of disciplines such as town planning, environmental studies, transport engineering and computer science. Most of the attention has been given to the application of technology into making our city more adaptable, sustainable and comfortable. However, we would like to raise a small question here amidst this wave of enthusiasm: Is smart city making us smarter, healthier and more active in other non-technological social aspects? Research attention given to topics with a pretext of “smart” has been growing in the last decade within higher education institutions as well as the society as a whole. Researching on any aspect with a pretext of “smart” is appealing these days because it is easy to get funding due to relatively clearly-defined deliverables of research outcomes in terms of technological advancement to be achieved from the study. On the other hand, how ordinary people should adapt to these fast moving “smart city” development so as to make our society more livable and amiable is a relatively less appealing topic as the deliverables are more difficult to define and measure. Hence, this aspect is usually relegated to a lower priority in most research agendas. In this paper, our objective is not to refute the importance of smart city concept. This paper is not an empirical analysis on the drawback of some smart city applications. We fully understand and appreciate the importance of smart city technologies to the various needs of urban development in any city. We wish, however, to raise the concern that smart city is developed to make human beings a more livable environment, but at the end, it is also human behaviour that determines how “livable” a society can be. In this paper, we will focus on the issues pertaining to the growing popularity of smart-phones which have become an indispensable part of our life in the development of smart cities. In this presentation, we would like to point out that while development of technological advancement for the sake of building smart cities is important and inevitable, more attention should also be given to the social responsibility of the general citizens in using these smart phones for the purpose of enjoying smart city outcomes. If smart cites are to be designed to make us smarter, we should be able to behave and live in a smarter way than before. By focusing on the use of smart phones in our cities, we would like to show that in reality, due to over-indulgence in these smart cities applications, the outcome could be the opposite, until we have learned to live in the smart way.