Smart Cities and Spatial Plans
Abstract: The ancient story of city planning and city-building represents, inter alia, their socio-economic and technological development. Philosophy assigns planning to the category of ‘human action’. Nevertheless, it is observed that, at the level of urban planning, ‘human construction’ becomes the dominant paradigm. Consequences thereof are apparent in everyday reality, but also in spatial plans, whether blueprints or official policy: Spatial plans fail to sufficiently reflect technological progress including the ‘smart wave’, let alone initiate the creation of conditions for its planned utilization. This correlates with poor management of land, and a needlessly high degree of expected damage and losses. Focusing on the elimination of root causes of the present condition, this paper notes that in spatial policy planning, land is often perceived as a chip on the political table, and spatial plans as means of political compromise between relevant actors. The anthropocentric criteria applied to this process do not respect the principle of solidarity with apperceived forces of natural change, and do not create conditions for sustainable development. In this respect, the contemporary relevance of classical-era urban planning is recognized. Science and technology in the service of dynamic but cultivated progress through the creative expertise of human activity constitute an impetus that is put into use within an entire spectrum of mechanisms and tools of social development, one of which is spatial planning. The unsustainable trends in contemporary spatial planning demand corrective measures. The first, and apparently most simple, step would be the re-introduction of legally required expert assessment of the process of planning. The paper concludes by calling for a higher degree of expertise in the process of creating spatial plans, since the expertise is, in general terms, related to exploring and exploiting the irreplaceable role of the phenomenal quantity of purposefulness, which is not a human invention.
