Luminous City: A Manifestational Ontology of Smart City Planning and Construction

This book is an applied ontological treatise based on the Ontology of the Luminous Will. It discusses the fundamental basis, value boundaries, and methodological paths for smart city planning and construction. Its central concern is not whether smart cities can build more platforms, connect more data, or deploy more algorithms, but whether the differences of life within the city can be seen, borne, governed within admissible boundaries, and reorganized after structural exhaustion. The Luminous City is not a visual spectacle created by lights, screens, exhibition halls, or digital twin models. In this book, radiance has a strict ontological meaning: it refers to the process by which differences move from an unmanifest state into a visible, perceptible, discussable, and bearable state. The real question of smart cities is therefore whether manifestation is real, whether bearing structures are adequate, whether regulation has boundaries, and whether renewal remains possible. This book maintains a fundamental judgment: the city is not a machine, but a complex vessel through which differences are continuously manifested. Within the city exist roads, buildings, platforms, institutions, and algorithms, as well as bodies, memories, fears, care, desires, conflicts, ecological pressures, and public life. If a smart city focuses only on the former while obscuring the latter, it becomes an efficient system of concealment; only when the latter can enter structures of bearing can the city become a true Luminous City. In this book, will does not refer to a psychological subject or unified consciousness, but to the structural tendency by which differences within a constraint system persist without reverting to an unmanifest state. Radiance does not refer to visual brightness, but to the manifestational process by which differences enter a visible, perceptible, discussable, and sustainable state. This terminological restriction governs the whole book.