The enormous capacity and services demanded by billions of mobile and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, along with the associated environmental impacts from rising energy consumption drive the wireless network architecture shifting from the traditional rigid cellular model to a dynamic cell-free model. The distributed nature of cell-free wireless network provides unique opportunities for cooperative and collaborative networking techniques that can potentially lead to significant energy saving and performance gain. Further, this redefinition expects significant contributions including various aspects, ranging from the physical layer system analysis to the networking and computing protocols, of fully/partially random heterogeneous networks. This talk focuses on some aspects of the design and analysis of cooperative wireless networks based on the cell-free radio access architecture, e.g., smart cities.