With SA showing symptoms of joining the worldwide clamour to establish “smart cities”, where the public toilets flush in harmony with the traffic lights, is it impertinent to ask what will happen with the old, “dumb” cities we’ve already got? Will we be better off with smart cities, given that many of our cities and towns are as far from the urban utopias sketched by futurists, as Siyabuswa is from Singapore? Or will we get lucky and build cities so smart that they run themselves — in spite of the ANC?..