The Social Ontology of Smart Cities: Implications and Applications

Human caused environmental degradation has increased rapidly in the last century. Humans and human communities seem unable or unwilling to work together to halt or reverse the degradation. This dissertation contributes to addressing the problem by first identifying what sort of problem climate change is and then suggesting a novel way to think about satisfying the common knowledge condition for mobilizing collective action to address it. I begin by framing climate change in terms of coordination games, wicked problems, and common-pool resource problems. I problematize all three of these framings, but they all highlight the centrality of the common knowledge condition. I argue that smart cities, as a technologically-influenced method of city governance and management, can help to satisfy the common knowledge condition among groups as large as cities. Group agents are themselves a technology created by humans for human ends, and I argue that they are a valuable technology for responding to anthropogenic environmental degradation. I present my view of group agency, which expands on traditional views in two important ways: first, by pointing to a broader continuum of group minds (including the non-human) and, second, by emphasizing the importance of group emotions, affects, and cares (rather than relying merely upon rationality). Next, I develop an approach to a generalizable architecture of agency before describing a fourfold taxonomy of smart cities as group agents. Then, I provide descriptions of each level of my taxonomy, both conceptually and in practice, before assessing those levels according to my strategy for taxonomizing agency. The levels of my taxonomy are: the smart city, the sentient city, the agentive city, and the super organismic city. I apply my taxonomy of smart cities as group agents to real-world, climate challenges, demonstrating that each level has a use-case, before describing the method for applying my taxonomy to these various types and scales of problems. I close the dissertation by comparing my taxonomy to similar and/or related taxonomies, indicating that my taxonomy has purchase outside of the realms of smart cities and social ontology and thus potential for wider application both theoretically and practically.