Conclusion
The challenges our cities and societies have been facing in the age of global crises— environmental, economic, or social—have encouraged urban planners, architects, environmentalists, and policymakers to become passionate about new urban paradigms as potential panacea (Perveen et al., 2017; Yigitcanlar et al., 2017). As stated by Kunzmann (2014: 9), urban paradigms are urban dreamscapes, full of wishful thinking about better urban worlds. In the beginning of the twenty-first century, the sustainable city, the eco-city, the compact city, the creative city, the knowledge city, the slow city, the resilient city, and more recently, the smart city concept have received considerable academic interest, and attention among media and local governments, searching for popular visions for urban development in times of globalization. Consequently, being “smart” is on the urban agenda of many cities across the globe with strong support from global technology and development companies—e.g., IBM, Cisco, Samsung, LG, ARUP, Schneider Electric, Siemens, Microsoft, Hitachi, Huawei, Ericsson, Toshiba, Oracle (Yigitcanlar, 2016; Alizadeh, 2017). On the one hand, for many scholars, smart cities are seen as the immediate future, where smartness is perceived as a characteristic of city systems responding to opportunities, challenges, and unknown consequences (Albino et al., 2015). In contrast, sceptics argue that the smart cities movement should be considered with great caution as “large corporations are exerting significant influence in the era of smart in pursuit of goals that may not strongly align with those of urban planners concerned with social and environmental sustainability as well as economic prosperity” (Lyons, 2016: 1).
