The successful contemporary city is frantically engaged with building and showing off yet another super-star building, a modern cultural venue or innovative science park, competing for funds, fame and international visibility. Once in a while, each city must come up with either a new or renovated museum, concert hall, mall or Olympic stadium, business centre, or at least dozens of new cafes, restaurants, shopping centres, fancy venues for the successful creative and financial classes.

Meanwhile, the middle class (the service-providing citizens) sees itself more and more deprived of access to affordable rentals and social housing, healthcare services, cut off from a too expensive cultural industry which might have initially attracted them to the city, as a place for emancipation and self-realisation. Deskilling keeps plaguing western labour market, with the exception of the design, information technology (IT), sales and finance sectors where highly specialised knowledge and skills still promise comfortable revenues and access to a good quality of daily life. The smart city (which at its core is an IT-business based solution, having as main aim a financially profitable and highly performant information system, in which citizens are merely users and providers of data) is being widely advocated and implemented by major tech corporations as the solution to all urban problems, including societal. From smoothing traffic flows to enhancing safety, providing citizens with global merchandise, education and personal communication, all of these at the fingertips, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, digital technologies claim to have solutions for everything. Like the magnificent cloth of the emperor, the most refined layer of this infrastructure is its wireless network, elegant like a spider web, organised in literally invisible clouds.

A little less invisible, yet hidden from everyone's eyes, are villages built for the mega servers that store the big data, the satellites used for collection and transmission of data and the immense web of submarine cables on the floors of the world's oceans. What is seductively visible and what makes the illusion work, are the gadgets that we, the users who feed the machine, are employing: our watches, mobile phones, tablets, laptops and desktops ~ all designed to fit our human need for activity, communication, aesthetics, belonging and acceptance. In other words, unlike the magic cloth of the emperor, the smart layer made of information technology dressing up the contemporary city is not entirely invisible. Our gadgets are designed to look almost like jewellery, making sure we not only accept, but even desire them.

In most public transportation means, symbols indicate available free Wi-Fi services, next to signs informing us about the presence of surveillance cameras. The smart city gives its dwellers free access to internet, in exchange for data and privacy. What would happen to this ever-growing assemblage if we'd stop feeding it? Who makes the rules for waving this fabric to which we all keep adding a thread or two?