The smart city, mapped out as a system, is just urbanism
Wanted to share here a systemigram created several years ago but still relevant today titled "Smart City - A First look at complexity". The technique comes out of systems engineering but implementation is domain agnostic. A systemigram is a systems diagram you read like a sentence. The defining feature is the mainstay, a backbone thread running from a beginning node, top-left to an end node that captures the core narrative of the system. As presented, this is the "smart city" concept pertaining to city transformations and urbanism intersected with urban planning and systems science.
Urbanism is pitched at the systems and structural altitude. It sees the city from above, as flows, stocks, and feedback among domains. It is not the street-level, ethnographic urbanism of sidewalk life and lived texture. Both are urbanism. This one occupies the macro, relational register, the city as networked organism, which is the register where systems thinking and urbanism most naturally meet.
The smart city is represented as a full system with organized complexity, density as the engine, walkability as infrastructure and interconnectedness.
The center of gravity is the move from "Existing Cities" into "System of Systems." That is essentially Jacobs' claim that a city is a problem of organized complexity rather than a machine you assemble from parts. Hence no subsystem stands alone. Infrastructure, space, people, economy, knowledge, and governance are all interconnected, which is exactly how urbanism insists the city be understood: as an interdependent whole whose parts continuously co-produce each other, not as a stack of separable line items.
The city also exhibits as a process rather than object. "Transformation Concept," "Urban (Re)development paradigm," "retrofitted," "Existing Cities" all frame the smart city not as a thing to be built on empty ground but as the continuous remaking of a city that is already there and already inhabited. That is a deeply urbanist stance. The city is a palimpsest, never finished, always layering new logic onto old fabric.
The economic core is agglomeration thinking. People Systems feeding Jobs and Services, the entrepreneurial firms and training institutions concentrating human capital, the mainstay terminating in intelligent and competitive growth. This is the old urbanist intuition, the one running from Jacobs's Economy of Cities through the agglomeration tradition, that cities generate wealth and ideas because they pack people and activity into dense proximity and let them collide. In that reading, the ICT and instrumentation nodes are not gadgets. They are the new connective tissue, and "smartness" becomes a densification of interaction, proximity achieved through data rather than only through streets.
And it honors the social-spatial inseparability that urbanism treats as foundational. Spatial Goals like walkability and land use are tied to Social Infrastructure like housing, health, and education, which are tied to the people. The walkable neighborhood node in particular is a thoroughly urbanist token, a direct descendant of the Jacobs argument that the form of the street shapes the life lived on it.
What do you think?
Posted Jun 10, 2026, 4:24 PM UTC