By Kris Hartley
Smart cities are not water-smart. To unpack this proposition, we must first consider how they are conceptualized. In a 2018 article, Vu Ming Khuong and I define smart cities as "the institutionalized and integrated application of smart technologies with a digital age mindset to the tasks and challenges of urban management" (p. 849). This is a first-generation definition of smartness.
Today's smart city projects maintain their first-generation focus on technology, with data collection and monitoring dashboards helping public agencies improve service quality and consistency. Emerging technologies like AI, IoT, and machine learning are pushing smarteness to the frontiers of autonomy and virtual agency. At the same time, a next-generation narrative goes beyond bytes and cables to address sustainability, livability, and social justice.
While the new smartness softens its own technocratic edges, it offers no epistemic novelty. Scholarly critiques still implicate it in the misadventures of technocratic, managerialist, and pseudo-scientific policymaking, particularly the reduction of problem complexity (Homer-Dixon, 2011) to unduly simplistic terms. My present proposition extends these critiques to water.
Water-smartness fails in two ways
Water-smartness fails in two ways: (i) mistargeting policy commitments (i.e., 'doubling down' by strengthening existing efforts and perspectives) and (ii) neutralizing societal agency. First, smartness does the same things but faster and cheaper (see Hartley and Kuecker (2020) on smart water management). It offers only the impression of novelty while optimizing old policy approaches and justifying deeper commitment to techno-rationalist logics.
For example, autonomous sensors monitoring water flow and quality, infrastructure conditions, and customer usage provide granular detail about operational issues but make no novel imposition on existing governance paradigms. This epistemic double-down confines measurement of policy problems and solutions to a technical scope. Moving the needle on ring-fenced metrics also gives the illusion of progress while making transformational change seem unnecessary.
Like water down a drain, this epistemic loop tends towards a narrower and faster vortex, bolder with successive waves of technology and impervious to alternative epistemics that sever its logic-chain. The resulting moral hazard breeds a risky belief that technological advancements will always outpace the growing unsustainability of human behavior.
At its logical apex, water-smartness perpetuates the narrative of a Cartesian nature-culture split in which natural phenomena are viewed as affronts to human reason. An example is the portrayal of floods as shocking catastrophes rather than naturally expected events. Narratives like 'rebuild stronger,' 'don't let nature win,' and 'we shall not be moved' [1] often dominate post-flood political discourse and peddle false technocratic promises to communities searching for hope. Even the term 'land reclamation' (in reference to replacement of water with land) laughably suggests that nature once stole land from humans. Perhaps 'land clamation' is a more apt term.
Aquathoritarian policy narratives transform natural settings into existential battlegrounds and rally communities with a defiance that has no sensible target. This water-as-enemy perspective intensifies infrastructure for collection, piping, and removal – now accelerated by datafication, mechanization, and technical innovation. Listening to nature about where and where not to locate human settlements is a better long-term strategy than using technology to artificially force sustainability where it does not exist.
The second way water-smartness fails is that it neutralizes agency. Fortified by the command-and-control logic of techno-rationalism, smartness helps governments and knowledge brokers discursively frame water crises (e.g., floods and droughts) as technical failures in prediction and preparation.
In a 2021 BBC article about flooding in Germany and heat waves in the United States,[2] a former UK Meteorological Office scientist stated "we should be alarmed because the IPCC (climate computer) models are just not good enough. (We need) an international centre to deliver the quantum leap to climate models that capture the fundamental physics that drive extremes. Unless we do that we will continue to underestimate the intensity/frequency of extremes and the increasingly unprecedented nature of them."
While this sentiment reflects the urgency of the climate crisis, its underlying logic implies that technology double-down is the only sufficient response – even as anomalous data and repeated human failures suggest deeper causes. With water-smartness dwelling on infrastructural, technical, and technocratic issues, solutions are epistemically bounded while societal agency and pushback are crowded out by elite political, advisory, and corporate expertise.
The sidelined public is left to passively hope for better technological performance and more committed technocratic policymaking. What should airplane passengers do but simply trust the pilot? There is no agency here. Oppressor epistemologies present techno-rationalist logics as the only 'common sense,' marginalizing potentially valuable societal and alternative wisdoms that are accessible only through participatory and collaborative action.
Re-thinking epistemic double-down
Smart city technologies ("boys and their toys"; Kosovac, 2021) mostly do what they promise: economize data collection and analysis while improving data granulation and timeliness. Definitions of smartness offered by major corporations reflect this expectation: "an urban area that uses information technology to improve its services, while optimizing operation and minimizing costs" (Veolia Group[3]) and "using digitalization to create future-viable, self-optimizing, sustainable urban communities where people love to live, work, and learn" (Siemens [4]).
What political and economic interests sit behind this seemingly benevolent rationalism? I call on scholars to use water-smartness as a discursive setting for asking who benefits and whether technocratic legitimacy is durable amidst systemic disruption. Answers to these questions could explain the peculiar and counterproductive policy interest in overlaying new technologies onto legacy thinking. Critical reflection that changes how society thinks about water is possible only beyond the narrow epistemic confines of instrumental rationalism (dressed as smartness).
In the meantime, off-the-shelf and heuristic policy solutions to complex water problems remain the politically comfortable strategy. A trickle of progress is just enough to encourage more of the same, while teacup victories are declared and celebrated (e.g., digitization, denser data, and investment efficiency [5]). Lingering performance gaps justify disingenuous technocratic gestures that fall intentionally short of destabilizing the economic status quo. Every privileged actor wins – politicians, technocrats, and corporations – for now.
Ultimately, no epistemic liberation is found in smart water or aquathoritarianism. Society must confront the possibility of a systemic disruption that forces the old policy epistemic and its smart clothing into a hard self-reckoning. This eventuality is what Glen Kuecker and I (Hartley et al., 2019) call the 'liminal state.' More enlightened approaches would shun atomistic and incremental interventions, instead embracing holistic and fluid paradigms that recognize the mutual embeddedness of human and natural systems.
The prospects of epistemic dissonance and emergence, and their impact on water governance, may be laughed off – perhaps even by some readers of this journal. I welcome the debate. These prospects are at once frightening and promising, so imaginative scholars should be open to their opportunities and lessons.
References
Hartley, K. and Kuecker, G. 2020. The moral hazards of smart water management. Water International 45(6): 693-701.
Hartley, K., Lim, N. S. W. and Tortajada, C. 2021. Policy note: Digital feedback-based interventions for water conservation. Water Economics and Policy 7(01), 2071004.
Hartley, K., Kuecker, G. and Woo, J.J. 2019. Practicing public policy in an age of disruption. Policy Design and Practice 2(2): 163-181.
Homer-Dixon, T. 2011. Complexity science. Oxford Leadership Journal 2(1): 1-15.
Kosovac, A. 2021. 'Boys and their toys': how overt masculinity dominates Australia's relationship with water. The Conversation. May 11. https://theconversation.com/boys-and-their-toys-how-overt-masculinity-dominates-australias-relationship-with-water-158772
Venugopal, R. and Yasir, S. 2017. The politics of natural disasters in protracted conflict: the 2014 flood in Kashmir. Oxford Development Studies 45(4): 424-442.
Vu, K. and Hartley, K. 2018. Promoting smart cities in developing countries: Policy insights from Vietnam. Telecommunications Policy 42(10): 845-859.
Photo Credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/water_alternatives/30514324657
[1] http://www.beacon.org/We-Shall-Not-Be-Moved-P1128.aspx
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-57863205
[3] https://www.veolia.com/en/resources/smart-city
[4] https://www.siemens.com/global/en/industries/urban-communities/smart-cities.html
[5] https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=933286