SMART CITY EXPO WORLD CONGRESS 2014

EQUILIBRIUM vs. CONCORD:

GOVERNANCE AS POETICS

Bruno R. Zazo
Professor Instituto San Jos de Humanidades
Professor Universidad Francisco de Vitoria

KEYWORDS: entelechy, concord, nature, natural, harmony, equilibrium, truth, economy,

convergence of interests, divergence of interests, freedom, disenchantment, political, politicized,
social justice, virtue, telos, community, collective, State, economicism, Political Economy.
ABSTRACT
Being the city the most natural (although an artefact) environment for humans, the way of their
realization as beings, a smart city would be the city that develops its nature in the smartest way: the
city that understands better its purpose as a city and the city that, hence, better administers its
available means to reach its ends. The smartest city is the most human one.
After politics was monopolised by the State, and with Capitalism, the new religion, proved as a
failure, our civilization will end in a fracas unless we discover and formulate the truths of the
convivence: those generally accepted notions that define what the moral behaviour is and that,
altogether, compound the common good.
Only a society that is conscientious of its common good has the possibility to live harmonically in
coherence with it and manages adequately the resources to articulate unitarily, beautifully, truly and
goodly its convivence. This will be the [real] smart city. The rest are highly advanced cities in
technical terms but, lacking a telos, they become mere mechanicistic and inhuman cities, prone to
conflict, collision and collapse.

Date: June 2014

SMART CITY EXPO WORLD CONGRESS 2014

EQUILIBRIUM vs. CONCORD:

GOVERNANCE AS POETICS

Bruno R. Zazo
Professor Instituto San Jos de Humanidades
Professor Universidad Francisco de Vitoria

AN UNBALANCED AND UNLIVEABLE WORLD

While we (cities, businesses and entrepreneurs, research centers, universities and other public or
NGOs) meet at this Smart City Expo World Congress to share our innovative ideas, studies, visions
and solutions, what scholars denominate the First World is collapsing outside. The Great
Moderation effects have nearly banished, and social unrest is growing. A sequence of collapses1,
interventions and structural fractures housing markets, monetary markets, US financial system,
large fiscal deficits, and crisis of public debt- is showing that the financial and economic paradigm,
the last resort to found the Western civilization, is not capable anymore of sustaining this socio
political system anymore.
USA has resigned from its identity time ago2, and its financial system is trying to conceal its
continuous failures behind an always wilful and exciting economy. The European Union, meanwhile,
is suffering more than US, due to its lack of an historical and natural consensus that the Americans
share and that would be necessary to sustain the Union. After the May 2014 elections, many scholars
are describing the Union as an entelechy: , as Aristotle referred to the being that has its
telos in itself, that has no (energeia) to develop, no potency. It seems that the perpetuum
mobile Union (the super-pragmatic artefact that employs thousands of public workers, harmonises
fiscal policies, produces thousands of pieces of regulation and marks the amount of milk to be
produced by each country) is seriously at odds. Hence, and after 8 years of general crisis that have
depressed the spirit of the Europeans, political experts are very worried with the increase of antiEuropeism or Euroescepticism, which is simply an antagonistic political movement that opposes to
the European troika and judges the European project as an unrealistic and inhuman venture, distant
from people real needs and desires. While Europeists called this disenchantment populism, the
stigmatized Le Pen rejects not Europe, but the Soviet European Union and a reader of the Financial
Times writes3:
() My Chambers dictionary defines a populist as someone who believes in the right and ability of the
common people to play a major part in governing themselves. It is understandable that advocates of
Brussels centralist government should regard this as a term of abuse but why do you all continue to
portray populism as some sort of extremist and undesirable activity?

In the meantime, the Second World vacillates between loyalty to its historical uterus financially and
politically booming pair: Russia and China- or the incorporation to the failed European Union project.
On the other side, countries of the Third World are following their own and slow path: either aligned
with one of the empires (USA, Russia or China) or bravely isolated.

LAPAVITSAS, Costas, Profiting without producing. How finance exploits us all, Verso, New York, 2013.
KAGAN, Robert, Poder y debilidad, Taurus, 2003.
3 May 29, 2014, Why not praise populism?, Mr Stephen Hazell-Smith, Penshurst, Kent, UK.
1
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As Thibon4 writes, the paradox of the current scenario is that we are living, simultaneously, a
marvellous expansion of the human possibilities (technical progress has brought millennial novelties;
never before human dignity was so massively mentioned; peace was never ever before so built)
and a clear human regression in terms of suffering (two world wars and many other confrontations
everywhere, a terrible financial an economic crisis only comparable to that of 1929), inequality,
aggression and human conflicts.
Never before tried mankind so hard to reach an equilibrium and never before was so far from
reaching it. Progress, instead of the bridge to somewhere, is our new prison: while before the lack of
means impeded humanity to reach its goals, now those abundant means have superseded human
goals. Abundance of education has provoked ignorance; abundance of food provokes scarcity and
food price bubbles. Technique is generating more and more black swans and virtual economies that
produce nothing; last but not least, money (formerly a unit of account and value) is being printed
everywhere and without ant respect for the corresponding wealth it should represent, through
several manners of quantitative easings and asset repurchases. The next bubble is the debt bubble.
1. Where is this disorder, chaos and disarray coming from? Has it affected the model of city?
This will be the first item we will confront.
2. How, on the First World, can we live together again? How could we restore a political trust to
sustain communal human living? Can we prevent a global confrontation? Can we live
harmonically in our cities? This will be the second item we will address.
3. And how, from the Smart City Expo World Congress series, could be regularly addressed this
issue? This will be our last point of analysis.
This world, this First World, is unbalanced and is impossible to govern, as many politicians are
realising. Violence is spreading and people as Angela Merkel cannot travel around without thousands
of policemen protecting her.
Collapse is imminent unless we substantially change our strategic approaches to reality. Our Smart
City Expo World Congress could be the occasion to debate and take account of these realities and an
unbeatable observatory to look for solutions. We are convinced, with Thibon, that only those who
feel responsible for their own ruin will be able to save themselves. It only makes sense to cry on the
ruins of our civilization if we have the solid purpose to build it (a better one) again.

A MUTILATION OF NATURE IN THE ORIGIN OF THE DISARRAY

Do we share, as humans, a common purpose, like the musicians of an orchestra share the purpose of
playing the best individual music for the shake of the symphony? Do we have, as humans, a common
good to attain? Or, on the contrary, we humans have just to play our individual music, as loud and
free as we can, no matter if it harmonises with the other sounds, as the final noise will be in
equilibrium? Is there a common good or the common good is simply the crumb that we leave after
we have attained the individual goods? Are we a community of persons or a collective of individuals?
Is the city the mere precipitate of the individual (ego-ist) purposes, or has it a proper purpose to
which its members must contribute? Do we attain individual perfection through political convivence
and we live together because we are forced to? Aristotle defends the natural essence of the city:
Every state is a community of some kind, and every community is established with a view to some
good; for mankind always act in order to obtain that which they think good. But, if all communities

THIBON, Gustav, and LOVINFOSSE, Henri, Solucin Social, Editorial Tradere, Madrid, 2011, p. 41.

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SMART CITY EXPO WORLD CONGRESS 2014

aim at some good, the state or political community, which is the highest of all, and which embraces all
5
the rest, aims, and in a greater degree than any other, at the highest good.

A smart, a clever, bright city would be especially that that behaves in the smartest way, in the most
intelligent manner: the city that understands better its purpose as a city and the city that gets to
achieve the best of its citizens; the city that, therefore, and as a consequence of its selfunderstanding (its auto conscience), better administers its available means to reach its ends. This is
so if we admit that the city-polis is the natural environment for men and the natural result of the
political nature of humans (in fact, according to Aristotle, the polis is indeed prior to its polites). Id
est, that the man is naturally social and that his good consists in knowing his telos and tending to it.
This teleological paradigm was definitely (I would state that Occam and Descartes started the
attempt) interrupted in the XVII century, and never recovered again as the dominant paradigm.
Hobbes (preceded by Machiavelli) and together with Spinoza and Locke, founded the modern
political philosophy, and henceforth suspended the Aristotelian conception of the natural finality and
perfection of human beings (and that of the city). Under his [very pessimistic] conception of nature6,
Hobbes purpose is to make life simply livable, and not much more: mankind occupation will be to
administer the daily duties of life, not to discuss anymore about the telos of life. Man is not anymore
a zoon politikon: he is a rational animal, indeed, but not anymore a political being. Lacking a political
telos as his natural behavour, man has not to be virtuous anymore: he simply has to be, to survive, to
feed himself.
The finall Cause, End, or Designe of men, (who naturally love Liberty, and Dominion over others,) in
the introduction of that restraint upon themselves, (in which wee see them live in Common-wealths)
is the foresight of their own preservation, and of a more contented life thereby; that is to say, of
getting themselves out from that miserable condition of Warre, which is necessarily consequent (as
hath been shewn) to the naturall Passions of men, when there is no visible Power to keep them in
awe, and tye them by feare of punishment to the performance of their Covenants, and observation of
7
these Lawes of Nature set down in the fourteenth and fifteenth Chapters.

Due to an extremely terrified theory8 motivated by the unstable surroundings (civil wars and an
aggressive and controlling Puritan9 conception of politics), Hobbes was forced to simplify politics and
to reduce it to a mere administration; and also delegated natural freedom in the State successor of
the polis. This way, from a natural form inserted in every being and signaling its natural telos, we
ended into a mechanical natural law that just puts beings into movement. From a teleological
nature to a mechanical nature, where the State is justified by the natural initial violence of mankind.
And from then onwards the role of the State would be to limit and to pacify the [bellicose] human
nature, via domination on behalf of the terrified [violent] citizens. From now on, politics is the role of
the State that will, trying to affect every realm of individual existence, artificially politicize every
single part of life. Never before was life less political and so politicized. Never before the notion of
nature was so depressed, consisting in pure brutality to be domesticated: this is politics. This is
Modern politics. And this reduced mankind to an only purpose in life: self-preservation, a pure
natural impulse10. Not anymore virtue and politics had again a part in the articulation of the public
life. Actually, the public realm was monopolized by the State, as well as any other duty except for the
procurement: the only remaining responsibility of the citizen. The purpose of the State will be the
repression of the individual talent, the equalization of citizens to control them. This, and the social
5ARISTOTLE,

Politics, Book One, Chapter I.

Virtue is attainable only by a few. It would seem that Hobbes is more aristocratic than Aristotle indeed.
7 HOBBES, Thomas, Leviathan, ch. 17, The Project Gutenberg EBook of Leviathan.
8 It would be worth analyzing the role of negative emotions in the formulation of modern political theories.
9 WALZER, Michael, La revolucin de los santos, Katz editores, Buenos Aires, 2008.
10 At this respect, it is worth analyzing the role of the bio ideologies in the development of this issue.
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SMART CITY EXPO WORLD CONGRESS 2014

justice commonly admitted (the justice that abolishes the differences among men), are twin
brothers.
As a consequence of this existential reduction, for the last four centuries the Western world and its
citizens have lived under the lowest level a human being can live: the economicism, the ideology that
sees every reality as a pure object of administration. Governance is economicism in the
administration of politics by the State; Social democracy is the parallel to economicism in the
administration of the Welfare State; and Socio-capitalism is the administration of finance for the
economical realm. In the end, everything is economical. In the end everything is quantity. Quantities
must counterweight each other, while qualities (aborted by the State) complement each other.
[T]he acids of individualism have for four centuries eaten into our moral structures, for both good and
11
ill.

Acritically accepted that everything is economic and subject to measure (what cannot be measued
does not exist) and that the Political Economy monopolizes the public life, this economicism is finally
a dogma: we could state, with Benjamin, that we now live in new religious epoch:
One can behold in capitalism a religion, that is to say, capitalism essentially serves to satisfy the same
worries, anguish, and disquiet formerly answered by so-called religion. The proof of capitalisms
religious structure as not only a religiously conditioned construction, as Weber thought, but as an
essentially religious phenomenon still today misleads one to a boundless, universal polemic. We
cannot draw close the net in which we stand. A commanding view will, however, later become
possible.
[...]
Christianity in the time of the Reformation did not encourage the emergence of capitalism, but rather
12
changed itself into capitalism.

Once the dominant paradigm is the economy (and once politics is completely monopolized by the
state), the political decisions will be a matter of choice between utilitarian goods: pure management
and administration, as the common purpose of the community is purely materialistic. Socialism
where the manager is a central institution- or Liberalism where, apparently, individuals manage
their freedom to do whatever they desire (not the good) themselves- are the two faces of the same
coin. This is not convivence, but mere coexistence: a conglomerate of situations managed by an
administration of situations. And from the Aristotelic scientific polis (the polis that looks for its truth)
we ended into the technical city (the city that simply manages resources: human, material,
physical)
Being concord the political virtue by antonomasia, we should question whether this system is really
political and drives really to concord: probably it does not. The real failure of the system is not that it
has not managed to spread equality among people, but that it is connaturally faulty as its strength
the industriousness of mankind- is its weakness: 99 per cent of employees would quit their jobs
immediately were they assured to be paid monthly their actual salaries. This is the complete
inhuman disaster where we live. This is our system.
Full of zombie workers13, and slave under political states, the financial and economic system (i.e.:
what today is the political system, and what has been, for four centuries, the only remaining
principle that rules our convivence and our cities) is mortally wounded: our civilization is agonizing
MACINTYRE, Alasdair, After virtue. A study in moral theory, University of Notre Dame Press, 1984, p. 266.
BENJAMIN, Walter, Capitalism as Religion, 1921, Volume VI of his Collected Writings (in German).
13 BARRAYCOA, Javier, El trabajador intil: reinventando el proletariado, SCIRE, 1999.
11
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under a lack of purpose, and the phantom of violence is wandering again. This is the origin of the
actual disorder: a lack of purpose due to the wrong assumption that the nature of mankind is purely
economic. A mutilation of humanity that, as a system, does not fructify into life. Such an economy
kills, says Pope Francis14.
Our civilization, our smart city, needs reflect and to study its nature again and, as a consequence, to
reformulate its purpose and its functioning, as the theologically economic purpose opulence- not
only will not be attained, but has also proofed false and lethal. This constitutional reformulation of
ends and means could be a valuable task for a congress such as this Smart City Expo World Congress
or for a network of smart cities.

A COMPROMISE WITH TRUTHS AS THE RECOVERY OF HARMONIOUS CONVIVENCE

Where do we start from? By formulating again our natural purpose, our telos. What do we want from
life? What do we live for?
Without this initial truths one cannot live. According to Julin Maras15, most of the evitable human
evils those that depend on human conduct and not from the structure of reality- come from a bad
relationship (ignorance or aggression) with truth. Both freedom and concord are signals,
consequences of truth, and when truth is problematic or absent at all, both freedom and concord
become so.
It seems that the task is not easy. The general impossibility to solve the global disarray by formulating
truths comes from the problematic relation of society with truth, derived from a wrong
understanding of the Weberian concept of disenchantment (Entzauberung). While demythification of
political life is a rational and reasonable requisite of our postmodern world, without truth (especially
without political truth in the case of smart cities), no one can live and concord becomes impossible.
The sequence that goes from the absence of mythical or religious explanations of reality to the
disappearance of any truth from the public sphere is not logical at all. Lack of political truth is not
rational, but rationed: it is an unnatural mutilation in the political body. Therefore, there is a deficit, a
deformity. Leaving to every individual the definition of what is true promotes the chaotic society we
live in, incapable to connect its different members and subject to punishment as the only articulating
strength. On the contrary, no matter if it is hard to reach the truth, let us dialogue and discover the
truth together:
When they meet together their perceptions are quite good enough, and combined with the better
class they are useful to the state (just as impure food when mixed with what is pure sometimes makes
the entire mass more wholesome than a small quantity of the pure would be), but each individual, left
16
to himself, forms an imperfect judgment.

The truths that show the ends of mankind have been expelled from the public debate, actually
monopolised by lobbies, mass media and governments. Means have superseded ends as the political
arena. As a consequence, politics, the mutual understanding of each other, has turned into an
impossible.

POPE FRANCIS, Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, 53.

MARAS, Julin, Tratado sobre la convivencia. Concordia sin acuerdo, Martnez Roca, Barcelona, 2000, p.9.
16 ARISTOTLE, Politics, Book Three, Chapter XI.
14
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() modern politics cannot be a matter of genuine moral consensus. And it is not. Modern politics is
17
civil war carried on by other means.

Being the only remaining truth that we are a consumer society something acritically accepted since
the late seventeenth century- reduces the smart city to a community of consumers, which is not a
sufficient scheme to articulate communal living, as consumption drives to aggression: it is based on
economical goods, and these goods need that natural world, social institutions and individual
behaviour are re-ordered to be as efficient and effective as possible. 18 The logic of the exchange is
not creative, but exhaustive: is a zero-sum game that affirms that private vice drive to public virtue. It
is the law of the jungle.
The urgent task of the smart city would be to formulate its nature and the purpose of its being. We,
the citizens of the smart cities, have to dedicate our most primary and intense efforts in the
formulation of social and political truths of our communities, those truths that are solid enough for
people to adhere, so a community is formed again. No matter the amount of time, human and
financial resources dedicated to this task: this is the fundamental, the constitutional task for the
smart cities of the futures. The new rationality that is to be discovered lies on the necessity of a truth
to support our common existence. Aristotle gives one:
These are conditions without which a state cannot exist; but all of them together do not constitute a
state, which is a community of families and aggregations of families in well-being, for the sake of a
perfect and self-sufficing life. Such a community can only be established among those who live in the
same place and intermarry. Hence arise in cities family connections, brotherhoods, common sacrifices,
amusements which draw men together. But these are created by friendship, for the will to live
together is friendship. The end of the state is the good life, and these are the means towards it. And
the state is the union of families and villages in a perfect and self-sufficing life, by which we mean a
19
happy and honorable life.

What is political truth? Quoting Adam Smith, I would say that it is not from their regard to their own
interest, or from their regard to the law, or from their regard to a utilitarian calculation, that men do
not habitually kill, rob and sexually assault each other; it is from a moral order that commonly
recognises in the other a dignity and a value as worthy as ours and that deserves, for the sake for
the common good and the meaning of life, to be respected and nurtured as we ourselves deserve it.
It is from righteous self love that we love each other. What keeps us together and loving each other
is the primarily political truth, and concord is its symptom. As a matter of anecdote, probably the
human species is the one that comes to live with fewer resources: the one that is more needy when
born. Probably humans are the species that have to care more of their offspring: humans are the
animals that give more. And humans are the animals at the top of the pyramid in development
terms What is properly human: fighting or giving? What is more human, a law-of-the-jungle
economy or a gift economy?
Does it work as a truth? No matter. Let us keep on dialoguing. Because without this previous
dedication to look for the truth of our convivence, no communal living and no political articulation
will be feasible. The police status we inhabit, dedicated to the repression of individual behaviours
that are not (cannot be) social, shows the failure of the city and imposes a private truth (that of the
State) privately attained by the representatives (who are mandated to do so every four years). A
community with no truth is a city with no possible social behaviour apart from the spontaneous
interactions of individuals to obtain their own good, often an enemy of the common good.

MACINTYRE, Alasdair, After virtue. A study in moral theory, University of Notre Dame Press, 1984, p. 253-4.
GOODCHILD, Philip, lessons at the Systematic Theology Seminar, Nottingham University, May 2014.
19 ARISTOTLE, Politics, Book Three, Chapter IX.
17
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On the contrary, this desired social behaviour that would be capable to look for the truth and to
articulate a harmonic convivence is no other that what Aristotle referred to as virtue: the virtue or
the path that conducts the community to its good, to its common good, which is never the mere
aggregation of individual goods. Would we have the courage to formulate what the common good
is? Yes indeed, and we could attach again to the Aristotelic definition of good, and this means the
good life.
() the Aristotelian tradition can be restated in a way that restores intelligibility and rationality to our
20
moral and social attitudes and commitments.

THE VIRTOUS CITY REQUIRES POETIC GOVERNANCE

Once the essence, the truth, the nature of the city, has been formulated or discovered, the purpose
is clear and the community has a clear identity (itself in its perfect form, its potency) to look for. No
other things are doing, in a very preliminary way, cities such as New York, London or Barcelona:
strengthening its identities through common shared truths as a means to do politics and,
consequently, increasing concord between their inhabitants, those that share the same telos as a
future project. We are embarked in what MacIntyre refers to as a practice:
By a practice I am going to mean any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative
human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying
to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that
form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of
21
the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.

Hence, the virtue (and its morality) searches for the realization of the purpose, of the identity, of the
self of the group:
A virtue is an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable use to
achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from
22
achieving any such goods.

This task (or energeia) has to be facilitated and channelled by governance. Governance is not
anymore the technical and herculean effort to keep together what cannot and does not want to be
together. The capacity of a city to attain its [now] common purpose brings hope and social easiness,
as the community can try to be what really ought to be. Social justice is, henceforth, not a question
of material resources or equalization, but of the capability of a community to attain its own self, its
telos, and the ease that the social and political structures provide to the inhabitants to pursue their
own self, their own telos, their own good (in coordination with the common good). Here we do not
find anymore a divergence of interests, as the common good articulates the particular interests and
subordinates them to the common interest. Suddenly, both politics and economy become feasible.
As Bavister says,
Enlightenment thought, rejecting tradition and teleology, set itself the task of moving from the is of
human nature to the ought of moral rules and principles.
() there is now also the possibility of re-establishing meaningful (that is to say, authoritative and nonarbitrary) moral debate between persons, which would depend upon re-establishing the essential link
MACINTYRE, Alasdair, After virtue. A study in moral theory, University of Notre Dame Press, 1984, p. 259.
MACINTYRE, Alasdair, After virtue. A study in moral theory, University of Notre Dame Press, 1984, p. 187.
22 MACINTYRE, Alasdair, After virtue. A study in moral theory, University of Notre Dame Press, 1984, p. 191.
20
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between is, ought and telos. This project is initially articulated via three key concepts: practices,
23
narrative unity and tradition.

In the virtuous city the virtue of the citizen and the virtue of the good man coincide. The subject
Educacin para la ciudadana becomes redundant24, as all education is addressed to the
citizenship, to the education of good citizens whose own good does not collide against the common
good. As the city has its own good, the common good (that coincides with its potency), the task of
politics and politicians (not anymore a caste, as every citizen is now political) lies in the search and
realization of this common good. And the city survives if it educates citizens for the city: moral
citizens. Actually, as Robert P. George says,
One of the main purposes if not the main- of any political community is making men moral.

25

As poetics imitates reality (imitating it, but not as a historical fact, but as a future ideal26: here lies the
notion of Aristotelic verisimilitude, that prefers rationality to factuality, science instead of technique)
and shows what reality should be, governance must reflect what the telos and reality, what the truth,
of the city are. The virtuous city is the city that invests its time and resources in the comprehension
of its nature and in the ways to reach its nature, its purpose. Social works will be those works that
help the city, the community, to attain its perfection, its purpose. Governance is not anymore a
technical management of the city, but a poetical science that discovers possibilities according to the
being:
Whence it may be further inferred that virtue must be the care of a state which is truly so called, and
not merely enjoys the name: for without this end the community becomes a mere alliance which
differs only in place from alliances of which the members live apart; and law is only a convention, 'a
surety to one another of justice,' as the sophist Lycophron says, and has no real power to make the
27
citizens.

The virtue that can be found in the community when it meets and dialogues and deliberates has
driven to some scholars such as Martha Nussbaum28 to affirm that political participation of the
citizen is in itself a good or an intrinsic good, without which human life becomes incomplete. So the
political task becomes the priority.
The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the
people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living
together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be. "Wherever you go, you will be a polis":
these famous words became not merely the watchword of Greek colonization, they expressed the
conviction that action and speech create a space between the participants which can find its proper
29
location almost any time and anywhere.

Not forgetting that concord is nor unanimity neither agreement, but the disposition to dialogue to
reach the truth, a truth that is always contained in a story, in the common story of the community.
The discovery of this common story is the historical memory and this memory opens the city to real
politics. According to MacIntyre, we find a narrative unity of a human life, as actions only make sense
as part of some possible narrative: a narrative form for human life that is a quest. The quest for its
good.
BAVISTER-GOULD, Alex, Alasdair MacIntyre: What Hope for Politics?
At this respect, it is worth mentioning the Delors Report and its promotion of education as a learning to live together.
25 GEORGE, Robert P., Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality, Clarendon Press, 1995.
26 ARISTOTLE, Potica, Istmo, 2002.
27 ARISTOTLE, Politics, Book Three, Chapter IX.
28 NUSSBAUM, Martha C., The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, Cambridge University Press,
2001.
29 ARENDT, Hannah, The human condition, The University of Chicago Press, 1958, p. 218.
23
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The virtues therefore are to be understood as those dispositions which will not only sustain practices
and enable us to achieve the goods internal to practices, but which will also sustain us in the relevant
kind of quest for the good, by enabling us to overcome the harms, dangers, temptations and
distractions which we encounter, and which will furnish us with increasing selfknowledge and
30
increasing knowledge of the good.

SOME PRACTICAL THINKING FOR A HARMONIC SMART CITY

Some practical thoughts, derived from the precedent assertions, that could define a poetic of
governance, would be:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.

Welfare or wellbeing?
What is an intelligent society?
How do we empower people?
How do we create bonds?
How do we educate our citizens? How should we articulate the education in the city?
What projects should we finance?
What is to venture?
What is resilience?
What is economy for?
Are the technologies fomenting real politics or technical politics?

REFERENCES
Arendt, Hannah, The human condition, The University of Chicago Press, 1958.
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Date: June 2014