Imagine a world without waste. A place where the train always comes on time, where streets are plowed before snow even stops falling, and watchful surveillance cameras have sent rates of petty crime plunging.

Never again will you worry about remembering your keys because your front door has an iris recognition system that won’t allow strangers to enter.

To some people, this kind of uber-efficient urban living sounds like a utopian dream.

But to a growing number of critics, the promise of the “smart city” is starting to seem like the stuff of nightmare.

Smart cities are loosely defined as urban centers that rely on digital technology to enhance efficiency and reduce resource consumption.

This happens by means of ubiquitous wireless broadband, citywide networks of computerized sensors that measure human activities (from traffic to electricity use), and mass data collection that analyzes these patterns.

Many American cities, including New York, Boston, and Chicago, already make use of smart technologies.

But far more radical advances are happening overseas. Masdar, in Abu Dhabi, and Songdo, in South Korea, will be the first  fully functioning  smart cities, in which everything from security to electricity to parking is monitored by sensors and controlled by a central city “brain.”

The surveillance implications of these sorts of mass data-generating civic projects are unnerving, to say the least.

Urban designer and author Adam Greenfield  wrote  on his blog Speedbird that this centralized governing model is “disturbingly consonant with the exercise of authoritarianism.”

To further complicate matters, the vast majority of smart-city technology is designed by IT-systems giants like IBM and Siemens. In places like Songdo, which was the brainchild of Cisco Systems, corporate entities become responsible for designing and maintaining the basic functions of urban life.

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