The Sustainable Imperative—Smart Cities, Technology and Development

This paper investigates the relationship between the smart city concept and its applications that are heavily technologically focused. Using principles derived from political economy, it denies the “smart city” approach as an idealist/utopian solution to urban problems and focuses on what the smart city is. We also maintain that the smart city cannot be considered an independent force in urbanization. While the benefits of technology are undeniable, such technologies are frequently applied prior to establishing appropriate social and legal controls. We therefore focus on the sociopolitical dimensions of the debate and do this by compounding the smart city ideology with two other social constructs, namely the concept of “sustainable development” on the one hand and “natural capitalism” on the other. In combination, these three ideologies are mutually dependent. They promote a concentration of private capital and are perpetuated as ideological structures focused on capital accumulation rather than equality and social democracy. Following these trends, much research on smart cities appears to be compromised, and a new ethical approach is required. In conclusion, we suggest that the smart city concept and its implementation must realign itself to this objective if democratic principles founded upon social justice are to be promoted.

The Future as a Subject of Social Theory

The subject of this article is a critical analysis of the “concept of the future” as proposed by the British social theorist, John Urry (1946–2016). The author briefly examines the intellectual legacy of the sociologist and his contribution to the creation of a new social theory, pointing out that Urry’s books that were translated into Russian do not fully represent his scientific work, but reflect the later period of his research activity. What is the Future?was the sociologist’s last book and was published the same year he died: we can consider it as a kind of last will. This testament, however, reflects many aspects of the writings of the last sixteen years of Urry’s life. As Urry observes, he challenges the social sciences with his book because the social sciences are still not concerned the future as a subject of research, giving it to the mercy of futurology. This article gives an answer to the question of whether we can actually consider Urry’s book as such a challenge. The author argues that some kind of theoretical weakness is inherent in Urry’s concept. Thus, the sociologist calls for the theory of complex developing systems to help to analyze the future, but the conclusions he comes to do not have any heuristic value. However, as the author of the article notes, Urry’s book is valuable not as a theory, but as an attempt to talk about the future from the perspective of social philosophy and its focus on practice. On one hand, the sociologist uses rich empirical material when talking about utopias and dystopias such as fiction, cinema, publicistics, and reports of various organizations, as examples. On the other hand, when discussing such problems as 3D-printing, urban spaces without cars, climate change, dystopias, and so forth, Urry uses the method of scenarios in offering four scenarios for each phenomenon considered. These scenarios by themselves already allow us to imagine what the future might look like. The final chapter of the book is dedicated to a “low-carbon civil society” and the conceptualization of responsible-to-nature “natural capitalism.” The author of the article puts a special emphasis on this, considering that this concept should be supplemented by other ideas about the newest — digital — capitalism. Finally, the article considers the question of the relationship of Urry’s social theory with the theory of postmodernism.

At the Crossroads of Sustainability: The Natural Recompositioning of Architecture

It is widely acknowledged that the mantra of sustainability has triggered a fundamental reversal in the core of design practice: If the original purpose of architecture was to protect humans from the destructive actions of nature, today it should protect nature from the damaging actions of humans. But sustainable design is far from being a coherent body of fully totalized ideas: it has a broad spectrum of disputing interpretations that oscillate between the deterministic models of energy control and technological efficiencies, and the moralistic and romantic approaches that attempt to see in nature and natural processes a fundamental way to de-escalate the global urban footprint and its associated patterns of consumption. However, mainstream green design has been evolving by progressively absorbing the narrative of deep ecology. Nature has been being integrated into architecture literally, by inserting vegetation onto buildings; digitally, by bringing environmental data into the design process (climate records, wind streams, sun rotation and air flows are computed, modelled and effectually shape architectures), and transcendentally, by claiming that sustainable architecture nurtures “the existing and evolving connections between spiritual and material consciousness.” The acknowledgement of the inexorable affiliation between architecture and the environment is, of course, not exactly new. What is distinctive today is the reification of the role of nature in architecture as an ideological stance, now totally intertwined with state-of-art data processing and the market-driven tools brought by Natural Capitalism. This paper will examine emblematic “green” buildings produced by leading architects such as Pelli Clarke Pelli, William McDonough, Stefano Boeri, Norman Foster and BIG in the light of Tim Morton’s, Slavoj Zizek and Bruno Latour’s critique of nature. It will illustrate how, despite being able to successfully forge new creative freedoms by exploring hybridizations between the domains of design and science, sustainability’s self-righteous “naturalistic” narrative is enabling a vision of the architect as an “expert manager” focused on producing projects of ecologic “beautification” while assumed to be “saving the world,” effectively depoliticizing the architectural practice. Nevertheless, these examples attest that there is a vast and fertile field of ideas to be explored and in this regard it is important to underline that we are still in the embryonic outset of the engagement of architecture with sustainability.