Philosophy
Chandni Chowk thrives as a living, messy, and continually shaped city, while Songdo shows that fully planned smart cities lack human spontaneity and genuine dwelling. True urban life emerges in unplanned, contested spaces where people gather and shape their environment.
Consider two urban spaces separated by 4,000 kilometres and centuries of history.
Delhi’s Chandni Chowk emerged in the 17th century as a Mughal marketplace. Today, it is chaos to administrative eyes: narrow lanes that defy traffic rules, shops spilling onto streets, electrical wires creating impossible tangles overhead, vendors occupying every available surface. Planning logic sees only violations: illegal constructions, encroachments, congestion, inefficiency. But Chandni Chowk works. Millions navigate it daily. Economic activity thrives in its dense networks. Communities have shaped and reshaped it for 350 years through negotiation, conflict, and accommodation. It is illegible to the planner’s gaze precisely because it was made by living rather than by planning. Each generation adds layers: the spice market, the electronics bazaar, the wedding shopping district, without erasing what came before.
Songdo, South Korea’s smart city, represents the opposite philosophy. Built on reclaimed land from 2004 onwards, everything was designed before anyone lived there. Underground pneumatic tubes vacuum trash directly from apartments. Sensors monitor air quality, traffic, and energy use. CCTV cameras track movement throughout the city. Buildings communicate with each other. It’s perfectly legible: clean lines, clear zones, everything in its designated place. And yet visitors describe it as eerily empty. The cafes lack customers. Streets feel abandoned despite the infrastructure. Something about the perfection kills spontaneity. When everything is predetermined, there’s nothing to discover. No friction means no spark.
This isn’t just aesthetic preference. It is a philosophical divide about what cities are. Are they technical systems to be optimised? Or are they living, contested political spaces to be continuously negotiated?
Lefebvre argued that cities are fundamentally about oeuvre, collective creation, rather than product. A city is not a finished object delivered by planners and developers. It is an ongoing work, made and remade by inhabitants through countless daily acts of dwelling, claiming, and contesting. Songdo delivers product, perfectly realised, like Metropolis’s upper city, gleaming and complete. Chandni Chowk embodies oeuvre, always unfinished: messy, vital and alive. This pattern repeats globally. Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter versus its planned L’Eixample district. Cairo’s Islamic Cairo versus New Cairo’s compounds. São Paulo’s organic favelas versus its gated condomínios. Tokyo’s dense, organic Shinjuku versus its planned waterfront developments. Everywhere, the tension between planned legibility and lived complexity. Everywhere, the question: do we want cities that work like machines, or cities that work like living organisms?
The German philosopher Martin Heidegger made a distinction that illuminates this divide: the difference between building (bauen) and dwelling (wohnen). Modern societies excel at building: constructing infrastructure, erecting towers, laying roads, and creating systems. But dwelling is something else entirely. Dwelling means inhabiting a place in a way that cares for it, that understands oneself as part of its ongoing life rather than its master or consumer. To dwell is to be in relationship with a place, not just occupying it but participating in its being. Heidegger roots this in the German bauen, which originally meant both “to build” and “to dwell,” suggesting these were once understood as inseparable.
We have severed that connection. We build without dwelling. We construct spaces we never truly inhabit, passing through them without relationship, without care, without gathering. Lang’s Metropolis captures this perfectly: the workers don’t dwell in the machine rooms. They merely operate there, bodies synchronised to mechanical rhythms, no relationship to the space beyond function.
Heidegger’s concept of gathering (versammlung) is crucial here. Certain spaces gather a world into being around them. His famous example is a bridge: it doesn’t just span a river but gathers the landscape, creates relationships between banks, between town and countryside, between earth and sky. The bridge makes place happen where before there was only abstract space.
What gathers in a city? Rarely are the planned spaces: the empty plazas beloved by urban designers, the sterile parks that nobody uses. The gathering happens in unplanned spaces: railway stations at rush hour, morning markets, evening food stalls that transform footpaths into commons, the sidewalk chess games in Washington Square Park, the pickup soccer in Mexico City’s parks, the late-night roti canai stalls in Kuala Lumpur. These spaces work precisely because they weren’t designed to work in any prescribed way. They emerged through use, through negotiation, through people exercising their right to shape their city.
Mumbai’s Khau Galli near Chowpatty exemplifies this. Officially, it probably violates zoning regulations. But it gathers the city: students from nearby colleges, couples on evening walks, families on weekend outings, tourists, locals, rich and poor sharing temporary proximity over pani puri and bhel. The space succeeds through its very illegibility to administrative logic. Similar gathering spaces exist everywhere: the hawker centres in Singapore that the government tried to sanitise but couldn’t eliminate, the biergartens in Munich where hierarchies temporarily dissolve, the night markets in Taipei that take over streets, the Sunday mercados in Mexico City. These are where the city actually is, not in the planned civic centres but in these messy, contested, gathering spaces.
The smart city wants to eliminate them. Too uncontrolled. Too inefficient. Too illegible. But in eliminating mess, it eliminates the very possibility of genuine dwelling, of the city as something more than infrastructure to be consumed. It creates Metropolis: functional but not liveable, efficient but not humane.