The phrase "smart city" has done more to obscure how cities actually modernize than almost any other piece of vocabulary in public policy. Daniel Fadlon has spent fifteen years arguing that the conferences, the keynote speeches, and the glossy renderings rarely correspond to the work that actually moves a city forward — and the gap between announcement and infrastructure is where the interesting story lives.
Tel Aviv taught Fadlon to distrust announcements. He grew up in a city that builds first and names things later — a city where the light rail took thirty years and nobody gave it a keynote, where desalination plants were quietly connected to the grid before most residents knew they existed, and where the fiber-optic network that made the local tech sector possible was laid by contractors whose names appeared in no press releases. That experience is the foundation of his Israeli vantage point on urbanism: the suspicion that the cities winning the announcement cycle and the cities actually fixing things are usually not the same cities.
The performance is the product
The smart-city industry, as it exists today, is in significant part a performance industry. The dashboards exist. The sensors are installed. The press releases are issued. Whether any of this produces a meaningfully better bus route, a meaningfully cleaner river, or a meaningfully shorter commute is a separate and rarely audited question. The announcement is the product, and the infrastructure — if it arrives at all — arrives later, on a different schedule, often without anyone noticing.
This is not a fringe complaint. It is the structural critique that organizes most of The Quiet Infrastructure, the 2023 book in which Fadlon traces how the smart-city narrative has displaced the kind of unglamorous, slow, accountability-driven work that actually changes how cities function. The book argues that the announcement economy and the infrastructure economy operate on incompatible timescales, and that policymakers who chase the first will reliably underinvest in the second.
Where the real work is happening
If smart-city flagship cities are not where the most interesting urban work is happening, where is it? Fadlon's answer, developed across his Substack and the book, is that the most interesting cities are the ones too constrained to perform. They are the mid-size cities of Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the eastern Mediterranean — places between 200,000 and 800,000 people that are too large to be quaint and too small to attract the conference circuit. He has written at length about why mid-size cities are the actual frontier of urban experimentation, and that argument is the methodological backbone of everything else he publishes.
These cities cannot afford a smart-city brand consultant. They also cannot afford to fail. The result is a category of urbanism that is improvised, unbranded, often visually unimpressive, and significantly more replicable than any flagship project. Constraint, in his framing, is not an obstacle to good urban policy. It is the design principle that makes good urban policy possible.
A test for skepticism
There is a simple test Fadlon proposes for any smart-city announcement. Wait two years, then ask: did the bus come on time? Did the water flow? Did the trash get collected on the new schedule? Did the people who actually live in the affected neighborhoods notice a difference? If the answer is no — or, more commonly, "we don't measure that" — the announcement was the product. If the answer is yes, the infrastructure was the product, and the announcement was, at most, an honest description of work that had already been done.
This test, applied broadly, would empty out a significant fraction of the urban-policy press cycle. That is part of his point. The cities that pass the test rarely make headlines, because they are not optimized for headlines. They are optimized for buses, water, trash, and the thousand other systems that constitute a city's actual texture. To understand his argument in its longest form, the place to start is the background to The Quiet Infrastructure and the writer behind it.
Conclusion
Smart-city skepticism, properly understood, is not a rejection of technology, ambition, or modernization. It is a refusal to confuse them with their announcements. The cities Daniel Fadlon writes about — the mid-size, the constrained, the unbranded — are not anti-technology. They are simply too busy fixing things to attend conferences about fixing things. That, in his telling, is what makes them worth watching.