Città in gioco: verso una critica dell'urbanizzazione cibernetica

The article proposes a critical interpretation of cybernetic urbanization processes highlighting, on the one hand, the close relationship between Smart City and municipal neoliberalism, and on the other, the idiosyncrasy between technological determinism and the complexity of urban systems. In the first part, the Smart City is described as a strategy of financial accumulation, an instrument of political governance governmentality and a rhetoric of ecological modernization. In this perspective, the city is configured as a socio-technical and symbolic apparatus aimed at strengthening the processes of commodification of the city, at spreading a competitive ethic in political governance and at proposing an ideological correlation between information technologies and environmental sustainability. In the second part, the explicative analogy of city building simulators (CBS) is used to criticize the prevailing mentality in Smart City design (which is based on a reductionist vision of social change) and the to semplify the complexity of urban systems through an idea of government-democracy and passive citizenship. The conclusions highlight the need for an empirical approach that embraces the Smart City in its everyday phenomenologies, able to capture how digitization at the urban level is producing new dynamics of alienation, but also appropriation of social spac