One aspect of a "smart city" is a system to constantly monitor a lot of data streams about its residents and use that data to allocate the city's resources more efficiently in real time or better plan future upgrades to city infrastructure.

This obviously raises a lot of surveillance concerns. Some of it could be done in a manner that respected people's privacy, with, for instance, extensive algorithmic anonymization of data and strict limits on what data is permanently recorded, but that requires a lot of trust and oversight and, I think, the benefits are likely not worth the risk of having that data collection system in place.

Another aspect of a smart city is enhanced local participation through e-governance, making it easier for people to know about, suggest, and weigh in on policies impacting their homes and communities. This aspect could be implemented without any kind of surveillance apparatus and has some appealing qualities imho.

So, you know, it depends on what benefit you're talking about.

Yes.

First, use closed-loop systems whenever possible, so they can act independently and no data is ever collected.

Second, when closed-loop systems are not enough to provide the desired effect, only use sensors that make it physically impossible to collect data that can be disambiguated. Nothing should ever be deployed that can be used to identify an individual with a firmware or software update.

Third, if it can't be done in either of those ways, don't do it. There are certain conveniences that are only possible with surveillance, but they are just that, conveniences, and I think that the vast majority of "smart" things can be done in the top two ways.

“CIA didn’t like that”

Project Cybersyn

It sounds like a technical problem but it is a political one. You need an entity that is independent from the malicious actors wanting to use surveillance for control. Once you have that, giving that entity able to manage all aspects without bleeding private information is a technical problem, but if you don't have one to begin with, it is without hope.

If some people have the right to enter any building and any computer to sniff data without restriction, you can't have privacy. It is a political problem.

You will never get to zero surveillance, surveillance capitalists will find ways, but if you make regulations that require all data to be properly anonymized and limited, demand open source and open hardware for everything, and develop programs to make things auditable and inspectable, you can keep the surveillance corruption to a probably quite small minimum. Over time though, even this system will become corrupted and the surveillance will quietly grow, unless society makes it a priority and a non-negotiable. And it's not clear society ever will make it a priority or non-negotiable. People will trade away their privacy so easily. So in the long term, maybe not.

It's too darn convenient to use technology to surpress a population. Any crisis, intentional or not, politicians will use it to that end.

I think we could use a combination of zero knowledge proofs (zkp), fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), trusted execution environment (TEE) if done very carefully, and/or secure multi-party computation (MPC)

I'm probably forgetting other techniques that could be used to keep inputs, outputs and computation privacy preserving while still being unable to abuse it or deanonymize the dataset

I mean. In a limited scale. The problem with surveillance is other humans and wanting to use the data for personal uses usually personal gain. Some theoretical abstract neutral ai that does not care about sex or propriety or whatnot it would not be so bad. If the laws were also sane that is.

Could you explain what you think the benefits of a smart city are, compared to a dumb city built for humans rather than for cars or capital?

What benefits are you thinking of?

Yes.

Yes. It’s purely a matter of choice and regulation

Doesn't 'smart' implies the action of 'monitoring' whatever is being 'smarted', in order to be able to react to any event concerning that whatever?

So, data would be collected. The nature of data being to be processed, information would then be gathered about that whatever. And then, people and society being what they are, said data will be used to gain some edge.

It's a bit like imagining that, unlike all the others, one would remain a nice guy even if becoming a billionaire. That won't happen. Such levels of fortune implies to be merciless... no matter how generous one can also be.