The Smart City - City of Knowledge

“We’re on the verge of a historic moment for cities”1 “We are at the beginning of a historic transformation in cities. At a time when the concerns about urban equity, costs, health and the environment are intensifying, unprecedented technological change is going to enable cities to be more efficient, responsive, flexible and resilient.”2

Fascinated by the idea of urbanism as a science, that systematically organizes all elements of life in infrastructures of flows; Otlet was convinced to work with Van der Swaelmen, who already planned a world city on the site of Terveuren near Brussels in 1919.3 For the first time two notions of different practices started to match. Namely a environment ordered and structured according to principles of rationalization and taylorization.

“By improving urban technology, it’s possible to significantly improve the lives of billions of people around the world. […] we want to supercharge existing efforts in areas such as housing, energy, transportation and government to solve real problems that city-dwellers face every day.”4

Parallel to that Corbusier developed in 1922 his theoretical model of the Plan Voisin, which he developed further with a case study for 3 million inhabitants in Paris. In the publicatoin Urbanisme from 1925, he argues that the city is a result of a directed labor. Since labor falls under processes of taylorization, the city becomes it's main apparatus in terms of distribution and organization of flows. As Schmale, the scientist in human factors and ergonomics describes: With the means of labor division and intensification of working processes, unnecessary movements and the waste of physical energy that does not serve the efficiency of labor should be excluded.5 Up to the smallest element, modernism propagated a new form of living which would ensure greatest efficiency. As the Wohnmaschiene, Corbusiers famous housing project Unité d'habitation, the distribution of elements is purely shaped according to man's needs. The premise which underlies this notion, is that man's needs and desires can be determined, normalized and standardized in advance following geometrical models of objectivity.

“making transportation more efficient and lowering the cost of living, reducing energy usage and helping government operate more efficiently”6 “Knowledge to predict in order to govern.” was the title of a schematic programmation which Otlet used to describe the 1925 published article Mundaneum. Le nouveau Palais mondial organisé en Centre intellectuel international. The Mundaneum meant to be the center piece organizing collections of the Universal Documentary Archives, the international Bibliographic Catalogue. Here an encyclopedic collection of books, documents and scientific objects were supposed to be categorized, structured, normalized in order to constitute a “permanent and complete representation of the entire world.”7 Instead of designing spatial plans, Otlet limited himself to organizatorial schemes which would represent the institutional structures in a diagrammatic manner reducing the complexity to its schematic essence. SAME graphics urbanisme P. 176. In the description Otlet was not only referring to modernist metaphors of spatial organisation. But also sharing a common vocabulary with Le Corbusier's most important manifesto Vers une architecture (1923) and Urbanisme (1924) “Both men did frequently use similar terms such as plan, analysis, classification, abstraction, standardization and synthesis, not only to bring conceptual order into their disciplines and knowledge organization, but also in human action.”8