The ubiquitous nature of smart agendas is both promise and cause of concern. We are interested in reflecting on this by exploring smart urban policy agendas and comparing these with insights from the arts. We suggest that the symbolic and imaginary nature of cinema and literature can offer interesting and important reflections for policy and research priority settings that aim to shape urban futures. The ability of cinema and literature to visualize less constrained future scenarios, provides important material for thinking about the paradoxes of progress, the main challenges related with the huge transformation of social organization and urban settings that many expect to result from advances in science and technology, central to the idea of 'smart'. In their symbolic dimension, filmic and literary representations are not only means of conveying cultural codes and values, but also powerful tools to construct strong visual settings. Dealing mainly with progress and technology, literary and cinematic imaginary futures tend to have an urban environment as their main setting. They provide not only the platform for alternative exploratory bases for urban scenarios, but also a powerful insight into the risks that humanity might face, in a medium and long-term. As Raben says: "the city as we might imagine it, (…) is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate in maps and statistics, in monographs on urban sociology, demography and architecture". (J. Raben, 1974) Our paper explores the warning signals that urban fictional scenarios provide, by presenting a wide range of risks and challenges that future urban development will bring. Among the artistic production of the last 150 years that explicitly takes place in future time, we select 64 texts (combining novels and films) according to the following criteria: relevance, quality, influence, regional diversity, thematic coverage (linked to the European idea of "Grand Societal Challenges"), and historical relevance. Content analysis techniques allow us to identify major patterns of concern relating to urbanization and the city – as portrayed in the 64 selected texts, and to compare these with the core defining aspects of 'smart cities' in policy discourse. We conclude identifying main areas of policy and research that may need strengthening in the light of this comparison.

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Futures; Fiction; Smart Cities; Urban