Green and Smart Visions of Urban Futures

This chapter discusses urban greentopia. Although there is a growing consensus that future cities ought to be smart and green, a diffused rhetoric tends to conflate urban smartness with greenness. While there indeed are elements of convergence of great potential, smart and green cities are in fact very different from each other in terms of the values they pursue, the ways in which these values are pursued, the agents that are involved in and valorized by the pursuit, and the ideas of city and citizenship that they embrace and foster. This chapter articulates and discusses convergences and discrepancies between urban smartness and urban greenness as presently understood and practiced.