In the opening credits of The Jetsons, George Jetson glides through Orbit City, where technology has freed humanity from the drudgery of everyday life. The show offered a comforting fantasy in 1962; a city built on technological infrastructure that could dissolve urban problems altogether.
Six decades later, as real cities rush to install sensors in sidewalks, automate public services, and convert daily life into continuous streams of data, that fantasy has returned as policy. Yet, what is emerging looks less like freedom and more like control, as these infrastructures risk deepening inequality and concentrating power in institutions that are neither elected nor accountable. Even modest, efficiency-based visions of smart urbanism carry serious political risks. Under the language of optimization, even seemingly innocuous technologies designed to manage traffic, waste, energy use, and public services end up generating unconsensual detailed records of how people live, move, and assemble. Once these infrastructures exist, the real question becomes not if the data will be used, but who will use it, and to what extent.
In a political climate marked by rising technocratic governance and right-wing populism, the answer is increasingly troubling. Personal data, therefore, becomes a political weapon; enabling the criminalization of those who diverge from dominant racial, sexual, and ideological norms. This article does not reject technological development outright but rather, urges a re-evaluation of what is at stake when cities trade public oversight and human rights for the idea of efficiency.
Smart Cities were initially imagined as the next logical step in urban development; highly efficient environments where technological systems could improve sustainability, public services, and daily life. Some of the goals were to embed information and communication technologies directly in the cities to monitor and manage human activity in real time. In this model, traffic congestion would be eased by systems that automatically redirect flows based on live data; waste collection would become more efficient through bins equipped with sensors that alert sanitation crews when full; and street lighting would be controlled by motion detection rather than remaining constantly on. These systems were not only intended to increase convenience for residents but also to reduce long-term public spending on staffing and maintenance. For cities, the promise of lower costs and greater efficiency, paired with the image of innovation and environmental responsibility, made smart city technologies appear practical and forward-thinking.
However, this pursuit of efficiency creates an unavoidable dependency as most municipalities lack the technical capacity, expertise, and capital to build or maintain this smart infrastructure independently. As a result, they become reliant on powerful private corporations– such as Alphabet and, more recently, META– to design, implement, and manage the infrastructure of smart city initiatives. Due to this influence, these companies determine what qualifies as innovation, which problems warrant attention, and what kinds of solutions are required. This dependency shifts authority from publicly accountable institutions and toward private actors whose primary obligation is not the public good, but for profit.
These technologies developed by corporations with close ties to political actors do not operate in a vacuum. They reflect the interests and ideologies of those in power, and in doing so, they reproduce and entrench structural inequalities. The right to privacy, equality, and freedom of assembly become structurally compromised. Predictive policing offers a stark example of how smart city systems transform inequality into a governing logic.
When algorithmic cameras are trained on biased historical arrest data, they encode decades of racially targeted policing as objective truth. Neighbourhoods once over-policed are labeled ‘high risk,’ legitimizing further surveillance and reinforcing cycles of criminalization. These local surveillance systems become nodes in vast intelligence networks through corporate partnerships like the LAPD’s collaboration with Palantir, which transforms municipal surveillance into a direct pipeline feeding citizen information to the Department of Homeland Security. Scholars describe this phenomenon as digital redlining; the use of technological infrastructure to sort, marginalize, and punish based on markers of social vulnerability. Naturally, this logic isn’t confined to police databases. Even something as mundane as automated garbage collection can be technologically repurposed to flag ‘irregular’ households.
When infrastructure is used to track movement and association, rights such as privacy, equality, and freedom of expression may remain formally enshrined in law, but their practical enforcement becomes diluted by constant surveillance. As a result, smart cities not only make life more efficient but also rearrange the balance of power between citizens, corporations, and municipalities. What looks like convenience is, for many, a loss of anonymity, safety, and political agency.
For NATO, this loss of privacy raises concerns as an alliance built to defend democratic societies cannot ignore member states– like Spain, Germany, Canada, and the United States–adopting surveillance technologies that erode the civilian trust essential to democratic legitimacy. It is therefore imperative that we reconsider the appeal of a city that runs more ‘efficiently’ if that effectiveness comes at the cost of making marginalized communities easier to monitor, control, and silence.
Image credit: Poster of 1984 is Now Paste on Street Post (2020) by Markus Spike via Pexels.
Disclaimer: Any views or opinions expressed in articles are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the NATO Association of Canada.
