Are the new towns really smart?

In the twenty-first century, a lot of New Towns projects have been announced, due to the increase of the world population and its relocation in urban centres. This phenomenon has made it possible to conceive new approaches to urban planning, many of them related to smarter and eco-sustainable strategies. Today, the list of brand new towns is wide. We can consider them as examples—more or less concrete—of the current state of the art on these issues. The paper wants to speculate on these questions by dealing in the first part with the phenomenon of New Towns, focusing above all on those that claim to be “Smart Cities”. In the second part, we will analyse in depth a case study that embraces both the concepts of New Towns and Smart Cities: Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates. As we argue at the end of the paper, the concrete development of Masdar City has not brought the expected results. Nevertheless, we can look to Masdar City as an interesting case study that adds an extra piece to the construction of the smart city of the future, an experiment that served to push the boundaries of research on these issues further.