Actually-existing sociality in a smart city

Abstract

This paper explores the forms of sociality that are implicit in discussions about a range of smart projects in one actually-existing smart city. Current scholarship on smart cities focuses almost entirely on their digital infrastructure and on the figure of the ‘smart citizen’. This paper argues that smart city projects also emerge and develop through specific understandings of the social. The paper explores understandings of smart sociality by analysing nearly sixty interviews with a wide range of actors involved in smart city projects in the UK city of Milton Keynes. Implicit in those interviews are three overlapping but distinct forms of smart sociality, which the paper terms sociological, neoliberal and cybernetic. The paper argues that it is important to engage both empirically and theoretically with these three understandings of the social in relation to smart, because they suggest that the reconfiguration of human activity assumed in smart city discourses is more diverse than most current scholarship acknowledges. The paper concludes by arguing that if this diversity is to become a critical resource, urban scholarship must give more empirical and conceptual attention to cybernetic forms of sociality in particular.