New Book! Digital Technologies, Smart Cities and the Environment: in the Ruins of Broken Promises by Adi Kuntsman

We are delighted to announce the release of Digital Technologies, Smart Cities and the Environment: in the Ruins of Broken Promises by our member Adi Kuntsman with Liu Xin. They discuss how smart cities- intended cities of ecological prosperity through the use of hi-tech equipment, are rooted in broken promises as the ecological benefits cannot be delivered through the use of technology.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live surrounded by robots and hyper intelligent technology? In this book Kuntsman and Xin explain that this is not the exciting future we expect it to be.

Kuntsman and Xin begin by questioning how can smart cities be intended as a solution for environmental crises when the technologies used to run smart cities are so environmentally destructive? This book approaches that question from a critical angle, examining how the normalisation of technologically enabled environmental harms has been re-marketed as the solution to the very problem they create. This is first done reconceptualising smart cities as areas with extreme efficiency at the intended outcome, opposed by eco-cities which reject hyper-efficiency instead for the prioritisation of ecological wellbeing. This oppositional exploration sets the tone for the book by providing broken promises- or perhaps promises never intending to be delivered as the framework to analyse who are these smart cities intending to benefit.

This question is first answered by drawing attention to how technologies role is becoming immaterialised- we know technology exists but it is becoming less and less visible, especially to those situated in the Global North. They use the example of surveillance to illuminate how digital aspects of surveillance are brushed off, whether to normalise them or to continue perpetrating them. Similarly, while digital environmental harms are undeniably present, these harms are often rebranded in a way that paints an inaccurate depiction of these harms with terms such as the cloud relying heavily on greenwashing. Kuntsman and Xin argue that digital and socio-political harms are irreversibly intertwined so immaterialised digital harms must be brought into conversations about wider ecological harms as without this acknowledgement specifically within the impacts of smart cities, these promises will continue to be broken.

This book is a must read for those who want to know more about the digital impact contributing towards ecological failures.

Available here: https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/smart-cities-and-the-environment