Detroit Imagines a Citizen-Led Smart City

The buzziest of buzzwords in urban planning is the “smart city”—a metropolis laced with wireless sensors that track everything from weather and water flow to gunshots and foot traffic. The sensing technology, already emerging in cities from Los Angeles to Singapore, might communicate with smartphones to help commuters get to work more smoothly, or send data to local authorities, who can use it to direct services like police, transit, and even trash collection.

Smart cities might be efficient, but most visions of the smart city put the government or corporations in charge of all this technology. Critics worry that cities may get too smart for their own good, reducing people to data-points and dollar signs, hyper-surveilled cogs in a great machine. “The citizens the smart city claims to serve are treated like infants,” complained architect Rem Koolhaas in 2014. “We are fed cute icons of urban life, integrated with harmless devices, cohering into pleasant diagrams in which citizens and business are surrounded by more and more circles of service that create bubbles of control.”