One - Smart Cities, Digitisation, and the Environment

Summary

Imagine the following building: it is multi- functional, economically profitable, environmentally efficient, and marketable. It provides spaces for apartments, offices, parking, and exercise. It optimises the relation between the natural and built environment by utilising natural light and air circulation. It is self- sufficient, generating its own electricity and heating from within the building. Its design allows for safety, convenience, and easy mobility, being remotely monitored and controlled. Its unusual and striking appearance and its advanced technologies and operating systems increase its public visibility, and generate revenue for its owners, architects, and construction and service companies that support it. The building becomes an object of marketing, a tourist attraction, and a testimony to the success and trust- worthiness of its stakeholders.

Such a building would fit the description of many smart city projects that exist around the world today that claim to respond to two emerging concerns of urban living. First, urban centres are expected to further expand to accommodate an additional 2.5 billion people by 2050; and second, urban spaces face challenges brought by the multiple, layered, and often simultaneously unfolding crises of climate change, environmental degradation, pandemic, and geo- political conflicts. And yet, it might be surprising that the imaginary building just presented is based on the description of the Woolworth Building – the monumental skyscraper in New York City that was completed over a century ago, in 1913; and was the world's tallest building until 1930. The building ‘could generate up to 1,400 KW, lighting thousands of

bulbs, running ventilating fans and 850 exactly synchronised clocks, and rushing twenty- seven high speed elevators up and down the sixty storeys. The exhaust steam from electricity generation was used to heat the building’ (Calder 2022: 310– 311). Commissioned by Frank Woolworth, the founder of the Frank Winfield Woolworth company, the building was designed to be architecturally striking, extravagantly luxurious, and profitable. It was set to be a company headquarter that would demonstrate its success and attract tenants who could afford high rents and was called the ‘Cathedral of Commerce’. The building was heavily marketised, with a spending of $100,000 for its campaign and coverage by more than 200 newspapers worldwide already more than two years before its opening. The opening ceremony of the building showed off and added to its spectacular appearance.