The paper aims to provide both a radical critique of the “smart city” as a techno ideological apparatus that through data analysis and algorithmic forms of governmentality tends to colonize space and time, and an attempt to reframe the very concept of intelligence within the smart cities. Two concepts are presented as tools for such a reframing: locality and idiom, where the first is conceived as openness of meaning generated by a territory, while the latter analysed through a paradigmatic Irish example (Friel’s play Translations), prepares the ground for the pars construens of the paper. The claim, built by intertwining a set of authors (Ricoeur, Grice, Derrida, Stiegler), is that of passing from smartness and digital network s to the “real smart cities” which aim should point to the development of differential and collective intelligence (noodiversity).
