A fire fighting helicopter drops water as the Palisades fire grows near the Mandeville Canyon neighborhood and Encino, California, on January 11, 2025 (AFP / Patrick T. Fallon)

Los Angeles fires spark 'smart city' conspiracy theories

As a string of wildfires hit Los Angeles County, social media users spread claims that authorities purposefully set the blazes to encourage the development of so-called "smart cities." While America's second-largest city does have long-term plans to implement digital technologies to improve services, experts say the claims have no merit and that razing neighborhoods would not accomplish these goals.

"And then I find this document and it all begins to connect the dots. You have a fire, things burn down, you rebuild it and you make it a smart city," says a January 9, 2025 X post with thousands of interactions.

"And you have the government, the insurance agents and the electric companies all into it together."

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Screenshot from X taken January 16, 2025

The same claim has circulated elsewhere on X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, Bluesky, Rumble and Gettr.

The posts are the latest describing conspiracy theories linking natural disasters to smart city plans that frequently crop up in the United States and Canada.

Several wildfires near Los Angeles have claimed more than two dozen lives and billions of dollars in property damage. The largest of the two, which have enveloped neighborhoods in the Palisades and the nearby city of Pasadena, were spurred on by destructive high winds as firefighters attempted to limit their spread.

The posts claim officials and investors set the fires to make room for a "smart city," an urban planning concept that uses a wide range of technology to monitor traffic patterns, electricity and utility consumption and criminal activity to improve public services and cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Other users conflate smart cities with "15-minute cities," a different philosophy that involves rezoning cities to place most day-to-day amenities, such as shops, parks, medical services and schools, within walking distance of residential areas.

SmartLA 2028

In December 2020, city officials announced an infrastructure investment plan called SmartLA 2028, which proposes using technology to monitor electricity usage, integrating city services onto a mobile app and installing sensors that can alert emergency services to potential crimes and housefires (archived here).

Los Angeles is due to host the Summer Olympics and Paralympics in 2028, spurring hopes that the city will be able to ease its notoriously dense traffic, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve emergency services. 

The plan does not call for razing entire neighborhoods or rebuilding portions of the city from scratch. Instead it focuses on efforts including installing devices to monitor traffic patterns and gathering data on air quality, crime, road conditions and other things to help improve local services.

"Technology enables the City of Los Angeles to efficiently and ethically improve the quality of life for our residents, businesses, and visitors," Ted Ross, chief information officer for the City of Los Angeles, says in a video explaining the strategy (archived here). 

The SmartLA 2028 plan also only applies to the City of Los Angeles and does not outline a scheme for the rest of the county, which includes other fire-affected cities such as Pasadena.

AFP reached out to Ross for further information, but a response was not forthcoming.

Disaster recovery is expensive

Susan Winter, the associate dean of research at the University of Maryland (archived here), said causing destruction is not a "rational way to approach urban planning."

The cost to the government to rebuild areas devastated by fires could quickly surpass the economic benefits of adding smart technology to those regions, she noted.

Winter added that city planners have worked to address some public concerns about smart technology infringing on residents' privacy by anonymizing gathered data and restricting where information is stored to reduce the risk of a breach.

"There's nothing in that city of Los Angeles plan that looks at all shady or nefarious to me," she said on January 13.

Several home and fire insurance companies have scaled down or entirely withdrawn their operations in California amid concerns over the frequency of climate change-fueled disasters in the region, reportedly leaving thousands of Los Angeles residents without private home insurance ahead of the fires. The State of California created an insurance carrier of last resort for homeowners unable to secure private insurance that offers more limited coverage options.

The carrier reportedly could face losses of as much as $24 billion due to the Los Angeles fires, while total property damage could surpass $250 billion.

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Homes smolder near the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, California on January 9, 2025 (AFP / JOSH EDELSON)

Hussam Mahmoud, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Colorado State University (archived here), said US cities have been investing in systems designed to spot wildfires early to prevent them from spreading too widely. 

"I highly doubt that anyone would say, 'let's wipe the area by doing this,'" he said on January 14.

Investigators are still attempting to uncover what caused the fires. Lawsuits have placed some blame for the Eaton fire on Southern California Edison for failing to de-energize its equipment. However, there is no evidence government agencies deliberately sparked the infernos.

AFP has debunked other claims about the Los Angeles fires.

This story has been updated to add metadata.
January 31, 2025 This story has been updated to add metadata.

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