Future Urban Smartness: Connectivity Zones with Disposable Identities

We tie the Smart Cities concept to the On-Life human-centered vision. The need to provide citizen-focused empowering visions of smart cities planning and development is very much needed, especially when a post-COVID environment requires urban growth “resets” within stringent sustainability limits. Our selected case studies describe some of these current challenges. Two novel utopian visions of technology are proposed: urban “cold spots” and “disposable identities.” The aim is to safeguard human digital rights in the digital smart urban sphere: our cherished freedom of expression, privacy, autonomy, and civic assembly. The chapter has three parts, the limits of smartness; the IoT, 5G, and 6G technology developments of cyber physical systems; and the need to choose a suitable form of identity management. Authors bring together their intradisciplinary approach.