Introduction

The historical beginnings of smart cities can be traced back to early computational models such as Jay W. Forrester’s Urban Dynamics research with MIT’s Urban Systems Laboratory (1969), large-scale data gathering and analysis initiatives such as the Community Analysis Bureau in Los Angeles (1974), or projects that expanded network infrastructures such as De Digitale Stad in Amsterdam (1994). Contemporary smart cities combine predictive computational modelling, decentralised data gathering, a sophisticated technical infrastructure and algorithmic management by big tech. One of the earliest large-scale experiments in smart governance was Salvador Allende’s project Cybersyn. In the early 1970s, after nationalising 150 industries, the democratic socialist government of Chile decided to reorient their production towards social needs. To accomplish this, Allende’s team replaced the ‘invisible hand of the market’ with a transparent central system that fostered intra-scalar decision making through direct worker participation and autonomy for each factory’s management, while holding a fast-track for the government to take control in the case of an emergency.

Cybersyn sought to replace managerial elites by responding to the question of management with the help of communication technology and cybernetics facilitated by a low-tech infrastructure. An amalgam of CYBER-netics and SYN-ergy, the project emerged from the need to consolidate production of goods with consumer demand in order to construct simulations of the market. The Chilean chief engineer Fernardo Flores, with the help of British cybernetics engineer Stafford Beer, designed a ‘nervous system’ that used real-time data from 400 telex machines placed on sites of production and logistical points connected to a single IBM mainframe computer positioned in the government’s control room (Medina 2014). Allende’s goal was to build a decentralised economic system as a way to re-engineer socialism into a smoother, less bureaucratic governmental system than the Soviet Union’s. The system was designed to create a balance: a fit between labour power, consumer satisfaction, energy use and productivity, with goals reoriented towards efficiency of production and distribution of goods but not maximum profits. It created a centralised government operating on a decentralised infrastructure and an economic system that was simultaneously governed by the workers, the factory managers and the group of engineers and politicians operating within the control room.