"The progress is important, but the urban revolution must focus on humanizing them."— El PAÍS Retina

The Internet of Things (IoT) has given rise to a new concept of urban planning. Smart cities rely on information and communications technologies (ICT) to make everything work more efficiently and orderly. However, there are now voices that deny that the digital component is the center of this revolution.

“Technology fever borders on the absurd in some cases. Smart city conferences are often a marketplace for pre-cooked technology,” says Luis Alonso, an architect and researcher at the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States. Alonso asserts that every city is different and that technology isn't always necessary to innovate. In his group, City Science, they don't like the labels smart, sustainable, digital, or green. “They're very overused terms and limited to a fraction of what a city should be.”