What are sustainable cities, and can we build them? I put my Institute Fellows’ decades of experience together with the content of this fine conference, and conclude: (1) A sustainable city will attend equally to innovation, to human opportunity and dignity, and to the Earth. (2) Cities are not yet doing that. (3) There are obstacles.

Finding a path forward depends on diving deeper into these three seemingly obvious statements. It’s said that “Things are the way they are because they got that way.” So let’s recap how history brought newer city initiatives to the present day.

Miss and do-over

Japan’s 1980s effort to build research cities on greenfields – “Technopolis 1” – created sterile urbanizations no one wanted to live in. This was partly due to contractors, who made their money pouring concrete but knew little about how people like to live. Plunking down some public art, street markets, and other amenities fixed things for a while: This was Technopolis 2. Families moved in. Innovation flourished.

Then came Smart City 1, and what a great opportunity that was for contractors to lay cable – without asking what smart services city residents wanted, while in fact imposing unwanted surveillance of city life. Smart City 2 efforts try to remedy this, building on bottom-up citizen dialog.

In Technopolis 1 and Smart City 1, city officials, largely ignorant of the science and technology involved, handed the reins over to contractors. (Contractors who of course care about people, but do put profit first.) That’s no way to run cities!

Innovation, environment, humanity

Smart city is about efficiency; Technopolis is about messy, inefficient innovation. The two concepts are somewhat at odds. Yet by virtue of throwing off less waste, efficient operations put less stress on the Earth, and green innovation ultimately does the same. So there’s room for the two philosophies to reconcile, on the environmental front. They haven’t, yet.

What about the third leg of sustainability – people? Our hopes for a people-oriented city are: High social cohesion and inclusiveness; spaces that are pleasant for work, family, and transit; and elimination or transformation of jobs that are psychologically or chemically toxic.

These will be achieved by social engineering and wise use of the technology. Two examples: In neither Taoyuan, Taiwan, nor the new city of Songdo in Korea will you see American-style residential garbage cans. Songdo features 24-hour garbage chutes in apartment building basements. They convey the refuse to a central municipal waste facility. Ecological, but it affords few chances to meet neighbors. In Taoyuan, neighbors gather on the sidewalk at appointed times on collection day, tied garbage bags in hand, chatting as the truck broadcasts its approach with a loud and annoyingly repetitive Beethoven passage. It’s easy to see which procedure builds sociability and mutual aid.

Plans for smart infrastructure in Austin, Texas, will restrict surveillance to robots, autonomous vehicles, and the like; People in Austin will not be surveilled. Contrast this with plans for Neom University in Saudi Arabia, where all humans will be surveilled, all the time. One wonders how the university will retain faculty and students.

Additional urban concepts have arisen, and if not already sunk, are struggling: Eco-city, 15-minute city, innovation districts. Reasons for their difficulties are complex, but can be boiled down to their attending to at most two of the sustainable city’s three legs, while ignoring the third.

We’ll be wrong again

This history means that whatever consensus emerges from the conference, no matter how ingenious and well-meaning, will probably prove to be wrong. The question then becomes: If the wrong model is implemented, how to recover from later finding that it’s wrong?

Anyone who’s experienced an ERP installation in a corporation knows the ERP freezes the company’s procedures and makes the company less able to differentiate itself from other companies. Customizing and updating the ERP can be ruinously expensive. In the same way, a one-size-fits-all smart city system can harm a city’s distinctive culture, and the cost of modifying a wrongly designed system could devastate a city’s budget and the mayor’s chance of re-election.

Our survey of many countries’ views toward smart city reveals skepticism about the ability of smart city systems to handle their cities’ ongoing and fundamental transformations: From manufacturing to service industries, massive and rapid urbanization, worsening digital divides and wealth disparities, and flips to and from democratic and authoritarian governance. Centralized smart city systems have trouble dealing with new technologies of a decentralizing nature, like electric microgrids.

A best-case, but seemingly long-horizon scenario would involve highly flexible smart city control systems. Long-horizon, because I believe nothing of the sort exists yet. Another long-horizon problem is the powerlessness that many populations feel, vis a vis the imposition of smart city systems. That feeling could take generations to remedy.

An alternative would be a collection of partial control systems. These would constitute a loose and contradictory mess – reminiscent of tools for the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – part centralized, part decentralized. These would reflect citizens’ aspirations more than their satisfactions. But they might encourage participatory city-building, and show (again, just perhaps) that “muddling through” can be an optimal solution.

Works informing this essay

Sheridan Tatsuno, The Gaiapolis Strategy (2023) https://www.amazon.com/Gaiapolis-Strategy-Designing-Resilience-Renaissance/dp/B0B4XBHV9S

D.S. Oh, F. Phillips, and A. Mohan (eds.) Smart City 2.0: Strategies for City Development and Innovation. World Scientific, Singapore, 2023.Luca Mora, What makes the smart city sustainable? https://www.linkedin.com/posts/lucamoraphd_smart-sustainable-cities-activity-7308194860975480832-OslC?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAACpugBQDBezXWgsdqi_etSjB4hSP1epP0

SmartZero City Conference, Taipei, 2025. https://smartzerocity2025.x-events.co

H. Linstone and F. Phillips, “The Simultaneous Localization-Globalization Impact of Information/Communication Technology.” Technological Forecasting&Social Change, 80 (2013), 1438-1443.

Fred Phillips is Visiting Professor at SUNY Stony Brook, and President of TANDO Institute. He is Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of the international journal Technological Forecasting&Social Change, and the 2017 recipient of the Kondratieff Medal, awarded by the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is a Fellow of PICMET, the Portland International Center for Management of Engineering and Technology. His latest books are What About the Future? (Springer 2019), Smart City 2.0 (World Scientific 2023), and Learning and Teaching Aikido (World Scientific 2021).