Collapsed streets, jammed rivers of concrete, improvised decisions from distant desks. That’s how you live in a city that doesn’t think. A non-smart city is not only one that lacks sensors and data, but one that seems to be planned against its own inhabitants. Noise dominates, time slips away in traffic jams, and inequality becomes the urban pattern. While the concept of the smart city seduces with efficiency and technology, its nemesis reveals the opposite: disorder, exclusion and deterioration.
The city as a machine of frustration
By: Gabriel E. Levy B.
Rem Koolhaas, architect and urban planner, said that cities that grow without strategic thinking end up functioning as “machines of social frustration”. This sentence seems to fit with surgical precision in many cities of the twenty-first century that, although dressed in modernity, function as organisms disconnected from human needs.
The idea of the “non-smart city” can be traced back to the mid-twentieth century, when the car-centric urban model transformed landscapes and routines. Jane Jacobs, in Death and Life of Big Cities (1961), questioned the destruction of entire neighborhoods in the name of road progress, denouncing the replacement of street life by the noise of engines. His critique was an early warning about what happens when urban decisions ignore social complexity in favor of supposed efficiency.
For decades, cities in Latin America, Asia and Africa, under demographic, economic and political pressures, grew without comprehensive planning. The peripheral areas expanded without basic infrastructure, while the historic centers became highways disguised as avenues. In many of these cities, planning was not only improvised, but also responded to sectoral interests: construction companies, private concessions and technocrats more interested in maps than in everyday life.
The result: fragmented, segregated urban environments with a governance that does not converse with its inhabitants. It is not only a matter of the absence of technology, but also of the absence of vision.
“Where decisions ignore pedestrians”
A non-smart city is not only one that does not have sensors in its traffic lights, but also one that does not understand that its inhabitants walk, wait, breathe. In these urban territories, sidewalks become obstacles, public transportation is a punishment, and parks exist more as excuses in political discourse than as living spaces.
Take the case of Mexico City. Despite its recent advances, for decades its growth responded more to real estate interests than to sustainable mobility plans. Roads such as Periférico or Viaducto, built in the sixties, prioritized vehicular flow over any social or environmental consideration. Today, many areas of the Mexican capital suffer from the legacy of this vision: perpetual traffic, chronic pollution, and a public transportation network insufficient for the scale of the city.
In cities such as Nairobi or Cairo, public transport is dominated by informal operators who, although they meet immediate needs, do so outside of regulation. Traffic chaos is not an accident, but a symptom of the lack of urban governance. As Saskia Sassen pointed out, in her theory of “the global city”, many metropolises in the global south experience a paradox: they are key nodes in the global economy, but their infrastructures do not respond to their own citizens.
The absence of reliable data, participatory planning and political will feeds an urban model that marginalizes. Public investment is usually concentrated in megaprojects with no local utility, while popular neighborhoods are still without public lighting, drainage or road safety.
“The Price of Chaos: Cities That Make You Sick”
The most serious thing about a non-smart city is not its slowness, but its ability to make those who inhabit it sick. Studies such as the one published by The Lancet Planetary Health (2022) show how poor urban planning is linked to respiratory problems, chronic stress and cardiovascular diseases. Constant noise, exposure to smog, lack of green areas, and dependence on the car create a biologically hostile environment.
The city of São Paulo, for example, has one of the highest traffic congestion rates in the world. In 2019, residents spent, on average, more than 150 hours a year stuck in traffic. That waste of time isn’t just a logistical problem: it affects mental health, family dynamics, and economic productivity. According to the World Bank, the lack of integrated mobility systems represents millions of dollars in productivity losses annually in the main Latin American cities.
But the chaos is not only in the streets. In many non-smart cities, trash collection systems are spotty, water leaks common, and power outages routine. In Lagos, Nigeria, more than 60% of the urban population lives in informal settlements, without regular access to basic services. These conditions are not accidental: they respond to decades of absence of an integrating urban vision.
A non-smart city, then, is not only one that does not innovate, but also one that reproduces obsolete schemes, where improvisation and clientelism are more frequent than planning with data. They are cities that do not learn from themselves.
“Where you don’t learn from mistakes”
Let’s look at specific cases. In La Paz, Bolivia, the hillsides were filled with informal dwellings built without regulation. Every rainy season, the news reports record landslides that wash away entire houses. And although there are risk maps, settlements continue to multiply, a clear sign of planning that does not deter or propose habitable alternatives.
In Manila, Philippines, the drainage system collapses with each storm. Floods not only affect homes, but also the education system: schools that close for days, children that miss complete cycles. And meanwhile, infrastructure plans prioritize elevated highways for cars, without solving the basic problems of storm drainage.
In Buenos Aires, the construction of luxury towers in coastal areas such as Puerto Madero coexists with neighborhoods such as Villa 31, where thousands live in precarious conditions. The gap is not only economic, it is urban. The non-smart city does not equalize, but separates.
Even in cities in the global north, such as Los Angeles, the expansive growth model – based on suburbs and highways – has generated a chronic mobility problem. Public transport is scarce, the cost of housing is unaffordable in many areas, and spatial segregation is accentuated.
It is not a question of demonizing urban expansion, but of recognizing that the lack of comprehensive planning generates structural vulnerabilities. As Edward Glaeser warns in The Triumph of Cities, the problem is not that cities grow, but that they do so without collective intelligence.
In conclusion
A non-smart city is not simply a city without technology, but a city that forgets its citizens, that prioritizes the flow of cars over urban life, that improvises instead of planning. It is a city that repeats mistakes, that excludes those who need it most and that sickens those who inhabit it. Understanding how it works—and why it fails—is essential to building true urban alternatives.
References:
- Jacobs, J. (1961). The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Random House.
- Koolhaas, R. (1994). S, M, L, XL. Monacelli Press.
- Sassen, S. (2001). The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton University Press.
- Glaeser, E. (2011). Triumph of the City. Penguin Press.
- The Lancet Planetary Health, 2022. Study on urban health and pollution.
- World Bank. (2020). Urban mobility in Latin America and the Caribbean.
