ABSTRACT
The smart city breaks down into several threads that are militated towards the construction of a cohesive grand narrative, or an ideology of intelligence. This ideology constructs itself along three axioms: the economic, the political, and the spatial. Increasingly, however, the driving mythology behind the application of sensorial intelligence is scaling up from the personal injunction to consume differently to an ecological argument that smuggles the smart city’s teleological efficiency in to the conversation. Amalgamated and executed on the scale of a street, a neighborhood, a district, or a city, the smart city operates on the principles of what Orit Halpern calls “test bed urbanism. At the current stage, though the groundwork is being laid piece by piece, there is, at the same time, a general tendency towards monopolization. If New York under de Blasio represents one approach, then Singapore represents another: state as sensorial monopoly.
