We have long complained about “smart” everything, writing in praise of dumb homes, dumb boxes, and dumb cities. We are not going to do that anymore: The use of the word dumb is ableist. We are also not alone in complaining about the silliness of “smart.” Writing in Yale 360, Jim Robbins explains why the luster on once-vaunted smart cities is fading and looks at some of the smart city proposals on the boards and in the dumpster. He quotes Boyd Cohen, a professor and climate strategist at EADA business school in Barcelona, about what has to come first:

Easy! And not really dissimilar from what I have concluded: The single biggest factor in the carbon footprint in our cities isn’t the amount of insulation in our walls, it’s the zoning.

Robbins notes there are some smart city ideas that are useful, including smart pollution sensors in London that show polluted spots to be avoided, although it seems getting rid of the dirty vehicles that are the source of the pollution would be more sensible. Or smart garbage bins that signal when they are full, although getting rid of single-use waste that is what is mostly filling those garbage bins might be more logical in these times. Or “smart parking” systems that advise drivers where there is an open space when we might suggest getting rid of cars. In summary, almost every smart solution listed here is fixing a problem that could be solved in a simpler, low-tech way instead of adding a layer of complexity and “smart.”

Instead, we have to peel back the layers and get back to basics.

Civil engineer Shoshana Saxe made the same point in an op-ed for The New York Times—titled “What We Really Need Are Good ‘Dumb’ Cities” in print and “I’m an Engineer, and I’m Not Buying Into ‘Smart’ Cities” online—that was critical of the now-canceled “smart” district proposed for Toronto by Sidewalk Labs.

So did Amanda O’Rourke of 8-80 Cities in her article “Smart Cities are Making Us Dumber.” She wrote:

Amy Fleming went there in The Guardian in “The case for … making low-tech ‘dumb’ cities instead of ‘smart’ ones.” Fleming wrote:

We Need Cities Done Right

Here are a lot of very smart people praising “dumb” cities, in a negative reaction to the word “smart.” We spent some time around our virtual water cooler trying to come up with a non-ableist alternative to “dumb” and the best we could come up with was “simple.” But that is the wrong approach. As Robbins points out, the bloom is off the “smart city” rose. We don’t need to look for opposites and antonyms. We should be positive about cities done right.

Architect Michael Eliason has been writing a lot about urban design lately on his new website Larchlab, so we asked him for his opinion about smart cities. He tells Treehugger:

In a recent post, “What’s the right way to build in a climate crisis,” I tried to lay out the plot of cities done right:

  • Density done right: As I noted in The Guardian about the Goldilocks Density: “Dense enough to support vibrant main streets with retail and services for local needs, but not too high that people can’t take the stairs in a pinch. Dense enough to support bike and transit infrastructure, but not so dense to need subways and huge underground parking garages. Dense enough to build a sense of community, but not so dense as to have everyone slip into anonymity.”
  • Height done right: As architect Piers Taylor noted, “Anything below two stories and housing isn’t dense enough, anything much over five and it becomes too resource-intensive.”
  • Design done right: As Eliason noted, we have to change our building codes to permit more flexible designs. “Many are the smaller, fine-grained urbanisms that make for great cities we talk about so often,” he wrote. “They can be family-friendly, with a diversity of unit types, and are both space and energy-efficient.”
  • Upfront and operating carbon done right: As Emily Partridge of Architype notes: “By using materials which use less energy to produce and are made from natural materials, such as timber and recycled newspaper insulation, instead of steel, concrete and plastic insulations.”

And of course, we have to end with the best urbanist tweet ever, coming on 10 years old, as Taras Grescoe notes: