The future of smart cities in an Era of Surveillance and social engineering

How technology is transforming cities into living organisms that shape human society.

What if the city of the future wasn’t just a place where we live, but a system that lives us?

Last week, I found myself envisioning a world where surveillance and control mechanisms were no longer external intrusions but intrinsic features of everyday life. It wasn’t just cameras on every corner or sensors tracking movement—it was something deeper: a seamless integration of technology into the fabric of human existence.

This vision left me with a pressing question: what role will cities play in the age of digital transformation and mass surveillance? Will they remain expressions of human ingenuity, or will they become tools of control, shaping our behavior as much as we shape them?

Let’s explore this together.

What Do We Mean by “City”?

Traditionally, a city is understood as a human settlement shaped by urbanization—the process of concentrating people, structures, and resources in a specific area to enable commerce. At its core, a city is a physical hub for social and economic aggregation.

Over the past decade, however, the narrative has shifted. We no longer talk about cities in the conventional sense but rather about “smart cities,” or as they’re called in Italian, comunità intelligenti (intelligent communities). The term, much like any other buzzword, has been overused to the point of exhaustion, but it remains a concept worth exploring.

There’s no universal standard for what constitutes a smart city. Real-world examples are still scarce, and those that exist vary widely. The idea originally stemmed from the desire to use ICT technologies to make urban development more sustainable and reduce air pollution.

Sensors, Cameras, Automation, Augmented Reality

Lately, the concept of smart cities has evolved significantly. The early focus on sustainability and urban development has broadened into something much larger.

Today, smart cities touch every aspect of urban life: the economy, tourism, mobility, healthcare, energy management, education—even how people experience the city, through innovations like augmented reality.

The same technologies driving the Fourth Industrial Revolution—cloud computing, IoT, big data, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and automation—are also the foundation of modern smart cities.

Back in 2016, Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, captured the essence of this revolution at Davos:

“The Fourth Industrial Revolution doesn’t just change what we do but also who we are. Those who don’t embrace the change risk being left behind. […] Everything will change: business models, competitiveness, and the ways governments devise frameworks and policies to foster this progress for citizens' benefit. […] This isn’t a revolution confined to one field but one affecting many. […] It’s so pervasive that it even impacts our identity.”

While Schwab didn’t specifically reference cities, his message makes it clear: this revolution is so all-encompassing that it will inevitably reshape urban spaces as well.

The City as a Tool for Social Engineering

Thanks to technology, cities—once mere physical hubs of economic and social exchange—are morphing into tools of economic, social, and behavioral planning.

In a fully realized smart city, governments and local authorities won’t just provide services or enforce laws; they’ll become managers of every facet of urban life.

It’s a dream come true for social engineers and a governmental mirror of surveillance capitalism: billions of data points violently (and non-consensually) harvested through the monitoring of actions, behaviors, and relationships.

We’re not quite at the level of simulation games, where players, acting as virtual mayors, micromanage every detail of the city while tracking citizen reactions in real-time. But we’re heading there. The goal is clear: to transform local governments into control rooms capable of real-time decision-making that reshapes cities—and their inhabitants—on the fly.

The Sensing City

One cultural movement has taken this concept even further, coining the term sensing city to replace smart city. This idea comes from Carlo Ratti and the MIT SENSEable City Laboratory, where he serves as director.

The distinction between smart and sensing cities is subtle but significant.

A sensing city is envisioned as a “living organism” where all its components—buildings, streets, bridges, and natural elements—respond dynamically to human interactions in real time.

In Ratti’s words:

“This is an old dream of architecture that goes all the way back to Michelangelo, who, it’s said, struck his finished sculpture of Moses with a chisel, shouting, ‘Perché non parli?’ (‘Why don’t you speak?’) That feeling really expresses our desire as architects to create living, responsive systems that exist outside and apart from ourselves.”

I’ll admit, some of the MIT lab’s projects are genuinely fascinating. For example, one initiative in the city of Bolzano (Italy) uses augmented reality on cable cars to enhance tourism by providing real-time, useful information to visitors unfamiliar with the area.

Projects like this, which positively impact people’s lives, are hard to criticize. Other projects, however, raise red flags.

Bozenblimp: A Double-Edged Sword

Take the Bozenblimp, also in the city of Bolzano, in Italy. This project envisions a small airship capable of pinpointing people in real-time, even in remote locations like mountains, forests, and valleys, using highly precise GPS. The idea is to create a delivery system that can transport goods directly to tourists and locals—even at 2,000 meters altitude—while they sip grappa in a mountain lodge.

On the surface, it sounds innovative. But creating a network of airships capable of tracking anyone with pinpoint accuracy, even in natural, remote areas, carries significant risks—especially when such technology is controlled by the government.

Ethical Dilemmas: when technology nudges behavior

Let’s move to another project, implemented in Spain, that raises even bigger ethical concerns.

This initiative aims to solve the problem of waste sorting. How do you encourage people to sort their waste correctly? Enter behavioral economics. A gamified system, powered by RFID and a mobile app, tracks every item thrown into recycling bins and rewards users with points for accurate sorting. These points can then be converted into money via the app.

At first glance, this might seem harmless. But accepting such systems comes with ethical implications. Allowing the government to influence and “optimize” individual behavior through incentives, nudging, or penalties opens the door to the standardization of thought and action—all in the name of an efficiency defined by a select few.

Who decided the state should worry about making humanity more “efficient”?

Is it humans who live the city—or the city that lives humans?

As Schwab noted, the Fourth Industrial Revolution isn’t limited to industry like its predecessors. It’s a global, cross-sectoral phenomenon that reshapes everything, including how we conceive of cities, citizenship, and governance.

It’s no coincidence that in 2019, the World Economic Forum, in collaboration with the G20, launched the Global Smart City Alliance. The alliance aims to create a policy framework for guiding the development of smart communities worldwide.

Let’s be clear: there’s no grand conspiracy here (yes, I know the WEF gets a bad rap). The alliance’s white paper, written with Deloitte, is just a collection of high-level recommendations on integrating ICT technologies into urban spaces. Lots of buzzwords, little substance.

Still, what should concern us isn’t the content of the alliance but its very existence.

From the dawn of civilization, cities have been the product of human ingenuity and collaboration—a reflection of individual needs and creativity. That’s why no two cities are alike.

But if cities become the focus of global political alliances aimed at “efficient governance,” they risk ceasing to reflect the individuality of their inhabitants. Instead, they’ll become manifestations of the visions of a handful of social engineers.

The risk of an inverted paradigm

Here’s the most chilling part: if cities evolve into systems capable of shaping themselves, fueled by data forcibly extracted from their inhabitants, we risk flipping a fundamental human paradigm.

No longer will humanity shape reality in its image. Instead, artificial realities will shape humanity—using automated decision systems, profiling, and behavioral incentives.

In the smart city of tomorrow, individuals won’t be the protagonists. They’ll become mere components of a new collective organism—a faceless mass of people and automated systems locked in an endless feedback loop.

Surveillance, both physical and digital, will no longer be an unwelcome outsider but an extension of the “social contract” someone signed on our behalf. It will serve as a tool for economic and social planning to create a perfect world… for someone’s idea of perfection.

I’m no Luddite. I love technology because it reflects human intellect and drives our evolution. But I’m also convinced that the risk of building an inescapable cage around ourselves is growing ever larger.

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