No smart cities and they fail – dozens of alt causes including exclusion

A big reason for the disconnect between smart city potential and reality is the fact that smart cities are where the digital world blends, but can also collide, with the non-digital world. Non-digital issues such as legacy governance, social justice, politics, ideology, privacy and financial elements that are not so smart, efficient or resilient when smart-city planning starts can become large factors. Any one of these elements can pose a challenge in and of itself and grow to monstrous proportions when combined with other longstanding problems in a city. Imagine the entanglements that existing public and private industries must go through to implement a single smart city project, let alone numerous projects such as smart lighting, smart transportation, smart buildings and the like to actually make a more complete smart city. Bill Gates’ effort is notable because Belmont is a blank slate to be built from the ground up.