The Digital City

Media and the Social Production of Place

Germaine R. Halegoua

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781479882199
• eBook ISBN:
  9781479864027
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Shows how digital media connects people to their lived environments

Every day, millions of people turn to small handheld screens to search for their destinations and to seek recommendations for places to visit. They may share texts or images of themselves and these places en route or after their journey is complete. We don't consciously reflect on these activities and probably don't associate these practices with constructing a sense of place. Critics have argued that digital media alienates users from space and place, but this book argues that the exact opposite is true: that we habitually use digital technologies to re-embed ourselves within urban environments.

The Digital City advocates for the need to rethink our everyday interactions with digital infrastructures, navigation technologies, and social media as we move through the world. Drawing on five case studies from global and mid-sized cities to illustrate the concept of "re-placeing," Germaine R. Halegoua shows how different populations employ urban broadband networks, social and locative media platforms, digital navigation, smart cities, and creative placemaking initiatives to turn urban spaces into places with deep meanings and emotional attachments. Through timely narratives of everyday urban life, Halegoua argues that people use digital media to create a unique sense of place within rapidly changing urban environments and that a sense of place is integral to understanding contemporary relationships with digital media.

1

The Smart City

Strategic Placemaking and the Internet of Things

Debates about the smart city as innovative or disruptive have gained momentum as more cities that claim to be “smart” are built or retrofitted across the globe. Proponents of smart-city development emphasize the role of technology in “smart growth,” improved public service, efficiency, entrepreneurial competitiveness, and quality of life.1 However, suspicion about the “datafication” of urban processes, the monitoring and surveillance of urban populations, and the eagerness of municipal governments to regard information and communication technologies as “solutions” for perceived urban problems fuel these debates. A striking addition to smart-city conversations is the global trend of planning, designing, and constructing a city from scratch with extensive digital communications networks and infrastructures in mind.

Several examples of smart-from-the-start cities have emerged over the past decade, from South Korea’s extensive network of ubiquitous cities, or U-cities (cities that universally embed ubiquitous computing opportunities into the built environment), to Neom in Saudi Arabia, Konza Techno City in Kenya, and Dholera in India. These “cities of the future” don prefixes such as “smart,” “intelligent,” “digital,” and “ubiquitous” to indicate their distinction from less digitally integrated and data-driven urban environments. In some cases, digital media technologies and infrastructures are designed even before buildings, roads, and other municipal services are conceived or break ground. In all cases, the populations that will utilize these buildings and networks have yet to move in. As a result, professionals are charged with the burden of constructing these cities as “places” anew without the participation or input of residential communities.

Michael Batty summarizes the smart-city debate, in part, as such: “There is a sense, but only a sense, in which the form of the city is being divorced from its functions.”2 There is this sense of divorce because it is undoubtedly difficult to imagine and explain how the installation of sensors and infrastructure and the collection of data about almost every aspect of everyday life will transform the city. But it is no more than a sense because of the strategic placemaking efforts on the part of smart-city developers to construct these locations as attractive places to be lived in in meaningful ways.

This chapter identifies and critiques some of the ways in which planners, developers, municipal officials, and technology designers deploy and narratively construct digital infrastructure and digital media in order to reproduce smart-from-the-start cities as unique, inhabited, user-friendly urban places instead of abstract “spatial fixes” for advanced capitalism. My analysis focuses on how discourses and understandings of place are inscribed in the design and implementation of smart-city technologies, the construction of the built environment, and the decisions around the branding and promotion of the city as a social space. Based on press releases, legal documents, scholarly and popular literature, and interviews conducted with smart-city executives, architects, and technology developers, this chapter offers an analysis of the processes and challenges of constructing a smart-from-the-start city as an urban place.

The examples presented in this chapter highlight re-placeing as a series of top-down, strategic placemaking practices and ideologies that attempt to create a sense of place for target audiences rather than doing so in dialogue with pre-existing communities. Although placemaking is often understood in terms of engagement or citizen participation, re-placeing the smart city resembles an imposition or dictation of the qualities of place. In these examples, planners and developers utilize digital media discourses and infrastructures to create a sense of place for future residents within urban spaces that are currently under construction. While these specialized zones are still abstract entities in the process of becoming actually existing locales, the people and organizations responsible for their existence attempt to exploit “new media” to generate a sense of uniqueness and character for these cities on the rise. The places that have been created reveal certain myopic understandings of urban space and urban life and of how practices of re-placeing do not necessarily adhere to typical models of placemaking in terms of interaction between planners and residents. In addition, this case illustrates that reproducing a space as a familiar place of dwelling does not always yield an inclusive or socially stimulating environment.

The following sections focus on the physical and discursive development of three highly publicized smart-from-the-start cities—Songdo, Masdar City, and PlanIT Valley. In addition to exploring the outcomes and potential outcomes of smart-city development, this chapter begins with imaginations and rhetorical blueprints for these cities and concludes with a discussion of how processes of re-placeing are strategic and simultaneously construct and misunderstand the city as a field of care. In particular, this chapter focuses on practices of re-placeing by transnational developers and state governments in the making of global cities with imagined inhabitants. The placemaking processes analyzed in this chapter highlight that in the social production of smart cities, the showroom and demo space in addition to the screen and the street become active sites of re-placeing.

Common Characteristics and Discursive Constructions

In January 1995, coinciding with the steady rise of the term “smart” as a descriptor of cities and technologies, New York Magazine published an article about the etymology of the word “smart” and its changing meaning over time within the English language. The author notes that to the Brits the term refers to people and artifacts that are “modish” and “so relentlessly with it” but that the word also “contains a flick of the lash at those of us who don’t qualify.”3 In American parlance, smart connotes “an active and engaged intelligence” that is different from brilliant, clever, brainy, or bright. The Oxford English Dictionary of the 1990s supported this interpretation, adding that smart meant “capable, adept, quick at devising, learning, looking after oneself or one’s own interests.” Unlike other forms of intellect or knowledge, smart is practical; it’s applied on the ground; it’s about utilizing information and surrounding stimuli for one’s benefit, assessing a situation and available resources, and manipulating them to one’s advantage. As the article is careful to note, to be smart requires “the stamina to be perpetually on and in full command . . . fast thinking, good memory, adaptability, nerve, and a feel for the moment.”4 It is out of this etymological context that the term and concept of “smart city” is popularized. However, as a concept and term, “smart city” was used well before its 1990s incarnation.

Preceding the mid to late 1990s, a “smart city” referred to a city that was fashionable, attractive, or fast-paced and applied to sophisticated, complex, expansive metropolises that served as centers or switching points for economic, political, or cultural activities. Some articles referred to the smart cities of the 1940s as “nerve centers” or technologized coordinating centers for the flow of goods, services, communications, and people.5 Cities referred to as “smart” at the beginning of the 1900s, like Chicago, New York, Paris, London, and Singapore, also implemented technologies that networked people and places in ways that afforded more efficient services to residents or convenient exchange across urban space: subway systems, highway systems, telephone lines, and waste management and utility systems. The residents who lived in these cities were said to share similar qualities with the cities themselves: they were en vogue, intelligent movers and shakers, on guard and one step ahead with fingers on the pulse of progress. Smart citizens were often contrasted to “country bumpkins,” who were framed as constitutive others in their lack of access to knowledge, culture, speed, and progress.

Throughout the 1990s, particularly in the late 1990s, there were numerous articles published in academic, popular, and trade journals that described the “smart city” as a “cybercity,” “information district,” “telecity,” or “city of bits,” cities where “new media become woven into the fabric of urban life.”6 These articles also referenced the development of specific urban areas such as media districts or media quarters, televillages (“telecottages” or “wired villages” were also common terms), international business districts, electronic villages, and silicon alleys. In regard to what the integration of digital media into the everyday routines of smart-city residents might feel like, one newspaper article about Japanese efforts to create smart cities imagined:

On the way home from work, a businessman will learn from a computer in his car where traffic is heavy and take a different route. With a hand-held control, he will then unlock the door of his house, turn on the lights and start the water for his bath. A housewife will use a computer to pay the bills, take a history course, flip through on-screen store catalogs, order products, buy theater tickets and get a dog license.7

The shifting meaning of “smart city” along these lines united urban planning and urban renewal with media technologies and practices and strategies for incorporating digital and mobile information and communication technologies (ICTs) within urban environments and urban life. In particular, new and expanded digital infrastructures like fiber-optic networks or broadband Wi-Fi in public spaces and ICTs fitted to preexisting transportation, communication, and utility infrastructures like smart meters, sensors, and video cameras were defining elements of 1990s smart cities.

The smart city is part of the trajectory in the ongoing evolution of the future of cities as envisioned through the lens of urban management and planning. Taylor Shelton, Matthew Zook, and Alan Wiig note the resemblance of current smart cities’ technoscientific efforts toward cost-efficiency and entrepreneurism to past models and rhetoric of urban growth in times of austerity.8 Amy Glasmeier and Susan Christopherson note that imaginations of the 1980s future city envisioned “intelligent,” globally and internally networked urban spaces that utilized extensive and innovative transportation and communication infrastructures to enable rapid and cost-effective mobility and high-speed data transfers.9 The value of speed, flexibility, and technology-oriented management in cultivating market-driven systems of urban competitiveness, which was also prominent in urban studies and planning literature of the 1980s, is read as foundational to more contemporary conceptions of the smart city. Rob Kitchin and others have positioned the smart city as an incarnation emanating from (among other origins) a shift toward neoliberal entrepreneurship within city management that shaped later visions of the globally competitive city, the sustainable city, and Richard Florida’s brand of creative city.10

IBM, one of the technology companies leading smart-city development in the early 2000s (including Cisco and Siemens), uses “smart city” to describe “how various public services and infrastructure projects can be enhanced with information technology and data analysis.”11 Industry press outlets and urban and technology developers who are in the business of designing smart cities and implementing the technologies that make them smart note that these urban forms are defined by their ability, innovativeness, and agility in integrating intelligent devices of the Internet of Things in urban development and planning.12 In all cases, smart cities are defined as places where digital media is aggressively integrated as infrastructure, software, and hardware; information is regarded as a necessary resource for coordinating technologies and actions; and data is collected, analyzed, and shared in the service of city management and responsiveness. In corporate documents, IBM elaborated on these essential qualities of the smart city as three Is “instrumented,” “interconnected,” and “intelligent.”13

At present, smart cities and the people who plan them are categorized as visionary, but definitions and characteristics of smart cities vary. Scholars repeatedly use the term “nebulous” to describe the contemporary smart city as they sift through promotional materials that make disparate claims about the value and purpose of these cities. Vito Albino, Umberto Berardi, and Rosa Maria Dangelico have noted that the definition and use of the term “smart city” vary wildly as do the metrics for measuring “smartness” and the success of these urban spaces.14 Being smarter might mean that the city knows more about itself and can adjust accordingly—that the city becomes more intelligent. Success might refer to the way a city gathers, analyzes, and utilizes information about itself. However, the authors note that the connotation of smart city has shifted from merely meaning that digital infrastructure and ICTs have been implemented in a city but that these ICTs are intended to optimize every urban system with the goal of enhancing everyday services and quality of life for its residents.15 Smart-city development is bookended by a drive toward competitiveness through optimized efficiency, sustainability, and entrepreneurial incubation by being programmed and programmable, constantly collecting, analyzing, and making changes based on information. This conception positions contemporary smart cities within an extensive history of city management where municipal actors aim to make rational, informed decisions about urban space to maintain order and efficiency and foster economic growth and competitiveness in global and regional markets through technological and scientific developments.16

As Shelton, Zook, and Wiig, acknowledge, smart-from-the-start or greenfield cities built from scratch tend to be the exception rather than the rule.17 Instead the authors recognize that most smart cities are mature cities that are retrofitted to be smart. I agree with Shelton, Zook, and Wiig that smart-city policies for actually existing cities are often “assembled piecemeal, integrated awkwardly into existing configurations of urban governance and the built environment.” It is also important to recognize that the reason for this inelegant fit is that smart-city implementers unflinchingly adhere to dominant, corporate-driven imaginations of what a smart city should be and what information and communication technologies and data-driven and quantitative measurement systems can do for a city. Much of this imagination has been concretized through prominent and expensive smart-from-the-start developments in places like Songdo, PlanIT Valley, and Masdar City and has been circulated by a handful of technology-oriented corporations, industry consortiums, and early-adopter planners and city governments that participate in the maintenance of this imagination. Particularly revealing of dominant smart-city ideologies are the metaphors and understandings of the city that circulate within smart-city development materials—what these visions evoke and what they leave out. In the following section, I draw on promotional materials, internal documents, and conversations with smart-city developers to elucidate foundational elements and reiterated metaphors that indicate how practitioners and managers envision smart cities as concept and place.

Imagining Smart Cities in Practice

Technology designers, urban developers, and municipal officials often hail smart-city environments as advanced and upgraded in terms of safety, efficiency, transportation, economic development, sustainability, and overall responsiveness to urban structures, patterns, and demands. In all cases, digital infrastructure, software, and human-computer interaction is “baked into the master plan and initial design” from the outset.18 Trade publications for urban planning practitioners publish resources and debates about how to leverage big data gathered through smart-city technologies, mobile phones, surveys and census reports, and municipal websites for planning decisions.19 Articles featured in these publications inform planners and developers about the potential of wireless networks, cloud computing, and the Internet of Things to achieve smart-city goals. Cities that aren’t yet smart, particularly large-scale cities, are recognized as spaces that might not be collecting or processing data effectively to make their cities more productive, pleasurable, and efficient.

In urban planning literature, the smart city is seen as an outgrowth and response to “new urbanism,” or efforts to make dense, highly populated urban centers more “livable,” “green,” sustainable spaces that will support “smart growth.” The linkage comes from the idea that the “key to sustainability is information,” that by collecting and analyzing data about ongoing processes and interactions within urban environments, municipal organizations can make more informed decisions about how to regulate urban space.20 By measuring elements like water and energy consumption, pollution...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Smart City: Strategic Placemaking and the Internet of Things
• 2. The Connected City: Digital Infrastructure and Urban Transformation
• 3. The Familiar City: Navigating Space as Place
• 4. The Social City: Belonging, Social Media, and the Spatial Self
• 5. The Creative City: Digital Media in Creative Placemaking
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix: Timeline of Google Fiber in Kansas City, 2010–2015
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author