A Critical Reappraisal of the Smart City: The Rise of the Wise City

Background and Purpose: The smart city has emerged as a response to the challenges of rapid urbanization, emphasizing advanced information and communication technologies (ICTs) to improve the quality of life and foster sustainability. Yet, a narrow focus on efficiency often overlooks social, cultural, and ethical dimensions. This study critiques the technology-driven orientation of the smart city paradigm and introduces the “wise city” as an alternative model that integrates humanity, justice, and meaning with technology. Most studies highlight the role of technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), and 5G-enabled big data analytics in enhancing infrastructure and management. However, scholars point to shortcomings including conceptual ambiguity, weak justice orientation, and vulnerability to market-driven logics. The lack of a unified definition also allows political and economic exploitation, while a technology-dominated discourse risks soft domination and social conformity. In summary, the smart city discourse prioritizes technological and economic considerations over human and ethical concerns. A critical rethinking of its theoretical and philosophical foundations is required, with emphasis on human dignity, spatial justice, and sociocultural sustainability. This approach paves the way for transitioning from the smart city to the wise city, a city where technology serves humanity and meaning.
Methodology: This study is fundamental and exploratory, aiming to clarify concepts, identify fundamental challenges, and develop a conceptual framework for the “Wise City.” In the first step, a systematic review of the scientific literature was conducted to extract the key conceptual, operational, technological, social, and governance-related challenges associated with smart cities. In the second step, fifteen experts were purposefully selected using the snowball sampling technique, and data collection continued until theoretical saturation was achieved. In the third step, the collected data were analyzed using the Fuzzy DEMATEL technique to determine the causal–effect relationships among the identified challenges. Finally, the results were integrated within a critical discourse framework, leading to the development of the “Wise City” model as a human-centered, ethical, and meaning-oriented alternative to the technology-driven smart city paradigm.
Findings and Discussion: Using the Fuzzy DEMATEL method, the study analyzed and prioritized the challenges of the smart city across ten primary dimensions. The analysis revealed that challenges such as "conceptual and philosophical critiques," "erosion of human agency," "institutional and financial capacity," and "governance and policymaking" are among the most influential factors and serve as structural drivers for other challenges. In contrast, components such as "social justice," "citizen participation," "public education," and "cybersecurity" primarily appear as outcomes. The results indicate that critically interrogating the conceptual foundations of the smart city and attending to its causal and intermediary layers are prerequisites for effective and sustainable solutions. In this regard, the proposed alternative model of the "wise city" is introduced as a human-centered, ethical, and holistic framework. Emphasizing wisdom, meaning, justice, and social responsibility, this model repositions technology as a tool for human flourishing and ecological sustainability and offers a conceptual alternative to address the crises of the contemporary city.
Conclusion: The findings revealed that the core challenges of the smart city are rooted less in technical and infrastructural dimensions and more profoundly in philosophical, conceptual, and institutional levels. The dominance of a technology-driven perspective, while enhancing efficiency, has simultaneously led to inequality, the erosion of human agency, and environmental crises. In response, the alternative model of the “Wise City” was proposed, founded on participatory governance, social justice, and meaning-oriented development, in which technology is regarded as an ethically grounded tool serving human flourishing. The pillars of this model were redefined across six domains: people, economy, governance, environment, mobility, and living and the transition toward it was identified as a strategic necessity for addressing contemporary urban crises.
Keywords: Critical Discourse, Fuzzy Dematel, Human-Centeredness, Smart City, Wise City