Smart Urbanism

Utopian vision or false dawn?

Simon Marvin, Andrés Luque-Ayala, Colin McFarlane, Simon Marvin, Andrés Luque-Ayala, Colin McFarlane

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138844230
• eBook ISBN: 9781317549321
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Smart Urbanism (SU) – the rebuilding of cities through the integration of digital technologies with buildings, neighbourhoods, networked infrastructures and people – is being represented as a unique emerging 'solution' to the majority of problems faced by cities today. SU discourses, enacted by technology companies, national governments and supranational agencies alike, claim a supremacy of urban digital technologies for managing and controlling infrastructures, achieving greater effectiveness in managing service demand and reducing carbon emissions, developing greater social interaction and community networks, providing new services around health and social care etc. Smart urbanism is being represented as the response to almost every facet of the contemporary urban question.

This book explores this common conception of the problematic of smart urbanism and critically address what new capabilities are being created by whom and with what exclusions; how these are being developed - and contested; where is this happening both within and between cities; and, with what sorts of social and material consequences. The aim of the book is to identify and convene a currently fragmented and disconnected group of researchers, commentators, developers and users from both within and outside the mainstream SU discourse, including several of those that adopt a more critical perspective, to assess 'what' problems of the city smartness can address.

The volume provides the first internationally comparative assessment of SU in cities of the global north and south, critically evaluates whether current visions of SU are able to achieve their potential; and then identifies alternative trajectories for SU that hold radical promise for reshaping cities.

1 Introduction

Andrés Luque-Ayala, Colin McFarlane and Simon Marvin

DOI: 10.4324/9781315730554-1

Smart urbanism is emerging at the intersection of visions for the future of urban places, new technologies and infrastructures. Promoted by international organisations, the corporate sector and national and local governments alike, the dominant vision is of the meshing of intelligent infrastructure, high-tech urban development, the digital economy and e-citizens. Discourses around smart urbanism are deeply rooted in seductive and normative visions of the future where technology stands as the primary driver for change. This novel form of urbanism, it is argued, provides a flexible and responsive means of addressing the challenges of urban growth and renewal, responding to climate change, increasing resilience, promoting sustainable economic growth and building a more socially inclusive society (European Commission, 2013b). Yet our understanding of the opportunities, challenges and implications of smart urbanism is limited. Research in this field is still at an early stage, fragmented along disciplinary lines (e.g. Hollands, 2008) and often based on single-city case studies (e.g. Mahizhnan, 1999; Bakıcı et al., 2013). As a result, we lack both the theoretical insight and empirical evidence required to assess the implications and potentially transformative consequences of how smart urbanisation is emerging in different urban contexts. This book critically addresses what new capabilities are being created, by whom and with what exclusions; how these are being developed – and contested; where this is happening, both within and between cities; and with what sorts of social and material consequences.

The aim of the book is to unpack the different logics and rationales behind smart urbanism discourses and proposals, and in this way to understand the ways by which imaginaries of the future are currently being constructed along with their socio-technical and political implications. The contributors explore the implications of the deployment of smart technologies and discourses in the city, their possible splintering or integrating natures, and their real potential for the delivery of the promise and the possibility of imagining alternative urban futures through the means unlocked by smart urbanisation.

Smart Urbanism_ Utopian Vision or False Dawn? pursues its aims and ambition through three objectives. First, by developing an interdisciplinary conceptual approach for the analysis of emerging digital and smart forms of urbanisation. The book examines how smart urbanism is currently conceptualised within urban studies, identifying areas for agreement, dialogue and dissent. We consider what theorisations of the co-constitution of social and technical systems offer for the conceptualisation of the intersection between digital technologies, utopian computational narratives and the city.

Second, by generating new knowledge about the forms, dynamics and consequences of smart urbanism in an internationally comparative context. Existing work on smart urbanism is in its infancy, confined to particular disciplines and single cases. There is a lack of comparative analysis and a dearth of knowledge about the range of urban contexts within which forms of smart and digital urbanisation are emerging internationally. Such an extensive analysis of smart urbanism is required in order to analyse where, why, how, for whom and with what implications.

Finally, by analysing how specific urban conditions enable and constrain transitions towards smart urbanisation and support the co-production of alternative pathways. Understanding the potential and transformative implications of the transition to the smart and digital city, and the possibilities for creating alternative – more sustainable and socially inclusive – pathways requires the intensive examination of how smart urbanism is produced and reproduced in particular urban contexts. Far from being passive backdrops, cities variously complicate, enable, disrupt, resist and translate smart urbanism.

Rationale for the book

A new language of ‘smartness’ is reshaping debates about contemporary cities, along with a new set of programmes and practices that are intent on realising smart urbanism. This is visible in the importance given to ‘smart cities’ in the various strategic urban future pathways devised by the UK and the European Union (e.g. European Commission, 2013a; HM Government, 2013), the development of ‘smart city initiatives’ in Asia, Australia, the US and elsewhere (e.g. Government of India, 1999, 2014; United States Congress, 2009) and the emergence of dedicated teams aimed at developing business opportunities in smart urbanism projects within global engineering, telecommunications and utilities companies such as IBM, Cisco, Toshiba, Google, General Electric, Hitachi and others. Smart urbanisation is projected, often following normative or teleological approaches, as a solution brought to the present to deal with a series of urban maladies, such as issues of transport congestion, resource limitation, climate change and even the need to expand democratic access.

Taken together, these new drivers and programmes are creating a new lexicon through which the development of cities is being forged – smart cities, smart infrastructure, smart meters, smart buildings, smart districts and smart grids. While often radically different in ambition and scope, the shift from conventional to smart logics is accompanied by new expectations of network flexibility, demand responsiveness, green growth, new services and connected communities. These expectations, in turn, are driving investments and reshaping policy priorities leading to the accelerated roll-out of smart urbanisation globally.

Yet the potential, limitations and broader implications of this transformation have not been critically examined. Existing research in the field has focused on the technical, engineering and economic dimensions of smart systems (Al-Hader et al., 2009; Paskaleva, 2011). This research tends to have a ‘problem-solving’ focus (Caragliu et al., 2011), concerned with achieving optimal outcomes for smart systems under current technical, political and market conditions (Chourabi et al., 2012; Komninos et al., 2013) and with limited critical analysis (Hollands, 2008).

This lack of critical evaluation, compounded with an emphasis on technological solutions that disregard the social and political domains, is a vital omission. Evidence from the analysis of previous interventions in urban systems, including the development of grid-based infrastructures (Hughes, 1983; Nye, 1999), modernist urban planning (Sandercock and Lysiottis, 1998) and new urbanism (Harvey, 1997), suggests that cities play a critical role in the development of these technological transitions, unfolding an inherently complex and contested process – which often fails. At the same time, urban studies has tended to neglect the material, technological and environmental dimensions of cities (Monstadt, 2009), though there is growing interest in the political ecologies and cyborgian nature of cities (Gandy, 2005; Heynen et al., 2006), the politics of urban infrastructures (Graham and Marvin, 2001; McFarlane and Rutherford, 2008), the dynamics of urban sustainability and low carbon transitions (Bulkeley et al., 2014) and emerging forms of ‘digital urbanism’ (Crang and Graham, 2007). The ways in which the social, economic and political potential of smart urbanism is fundamentally produced with and through technologies remains beyond the reach of social science perspectives.

Within this context, a critical assessment of smart urbanism is needed. From one perspective, smart urbanisation may serve to further deepen the splintering of urban networks that dominated the last part of the twentieth century for many cities (Graham and Marvin, 2001), creating deep divides between those with access to ‘smart’ and those without. Alternatively, in some guises, smart urbanism may serve to promote more ‘community’, ‘civic’ or ‘metropolitan’ forms of urban life and resource provision (e.g. Map Kibera, n.d.; SENSEable City Lab, n.d.). Internationally comparative research is critical in order to develop a nuanced understanding of how and why this varies across urban contexts. Understanding these processes will enable us to consider the current trajectories of smart urbanism and to examine its potential in cities where it has yet to become established. The limits of current disciplinary approaches mean that addressing the critical challenges of smart urbanism cannot be achieved without a step-change in thinking that combines critical insight across disciplines and places.

The emerging landscape of critical research around smart urbanism

Whilst a systematic and critical examination of emerging forms of smart urbanism is long overdue, critical scholars within geography, computer science, architecture, urban studies and media studies have long unpacked the interface between computing, information communication technologies (ICT) and the city. Rich research agendas on the role of ICT in the production of urban space have been developed around the notions of cybercities (Boyer, 1992; Graham and Marvin, 1996; Graham, 1999, 2002, 2004), digital cities (Ishida, 2000), ubiquitous computing (Galloway, 2004, 2008) and urban informatics (Burrows, 2009; Foth, 2009; Foth et al., 2011). The primary concerns of these literatures are diverse, ranging from an evaluation of the role of code and software in shaping the city and its politics (Amin and Thrift, 2002; Thrift and French, 2002; Graham, 2005; Kitchin and Dodge, 2011) to an analysis of the impact of Wi-Fi and wireless technologies in shaping the urban experience (Forlano, 2009; Middleton and Bryne, 2011) and an examination of the broader implications of digitally enabled urban environments capable of ‘sensing’ (Crang and Graham, 2007; Shepard, 2009). The implications of ICT and urban media technologies for the promotion of democratic expressions in the city and the constitution of notions of the public are a common concern within this body of literature (Crang, 2010; de Waal, 2011; Powell, 2011), pointing to the key mediating role of digital technologies in reshaping our understanding of the city.

Engaging directly with narratives around smart and intelligent cities, an initial wave of social science research focused on their potential as systems of innovation and knowledge circulation (Komninos, 2002, 2008). Through the use of analytical models emphasising the development of partnerships between academia, business and government, smart cities have been seen – through a limited critical lens – as technological spaces where ICT operates as a key input towards regional innovation and economic development (Leydesdorff and Deakin, 2011; Caragliu et al., 2011). These highly normative and ‘problem-solving’ perspectives position the smart city as ‘a strategic device to encompass modern urban production factors in a common framework, [… highlighting] the importance of Information and Communication Technologies’ towards urban competitiveness and ‘urban wealth’ (Caragliu et al., 2011: 65). Over the past few years, a further practical and conceptual development of ideas around smart cities has added several layers of complexity to this already rich research landscape, which we examine here through three themes: the politics of smart cities; smart urban capacities and capabilities; and the emergence of novel ways of knowing t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• About the authors
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter credits
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Smart cities and the politics of urban data
• 3 IBM and the visual formation of smart cities
• 4 The smart entrepreneurial city: Dholera and 100 other utopias in India
• 5 Getting smart about smart cities in Cape Town: beyond the rhetoric
• 6 Programming environments: environmentality and citizen sensing in the smart city
• 7 Smart city initiatives and the Foucauldian logics of governing through code
• 8 Geographies of smart urban power
• 9 Test bed as urban epistemology
• 10 Beyond the corporate smart city? Glimpses of other possibilities of smartness
• 11 Conclusion
• Index