Abstract
Smart cities are rapidly becoming the main form of urban development initiated in response to calls to address certain ills such as unsustainable cities. Often presented as rational responses to such challenges, there are affective dimensions which are political and impact their development in various places. We investigate these affective dimensions by using the concept of atmospheres -collective affects arising from encounters between places, actors, materialities and (hi)stories. Our work builds on the premise that acceptance of smart city initiatives relies on their supporter’s ability to disseminate compelling stories about smart urban futures. Atmospheres matter here because the stories that can be credibly told are not arbitrary – to be believed, urban stories must be embedded in and coupled to the materialities and affects of their environment.The aim of this paper is to investigate the deliberate cultivation of atmospheres by actors with urban remits, revealing how such atmospheres can become impactful mechanisms for selectively rendering cities amenable or refractory to different stories about smart urban futures. An in-depth case study of the English new town of Milton Keynes is presented to illustrate how atmospheres have been cultivated to selectively resist or reinforce the stories through which the smart city agenda is advanced. Narratives about rationality and data-driven efficiency were translated into specific versions of the future. The resulting encounters gave rise to atmospheres of reception, anticipation, innovation and progress through which urban spaces were rendered selectively receptive to specific forms of smart development in pursuit of local, contextually defined goals.
Highlights
Current ways of making cities and living in them are acknowledged to be unsustainable, with rapid urban transformation needed to avert environmental catastrophe (Yigitcanlar et al, 2019; Hodson et al, 2017)
We re-engage with the aim of this paper, which is to investigate the cultivation of atmospheres by actors with urban remits to reveal how such atmospheres can become impactful mechanisms for selectively rendering cities amenable or refractory to different stories about smart urban futures
Since to be credible stories must be embedded in and coupled to their environment, the main argument of this research is that urban atmospheres are impactful mechanisms for selectively rendering cities amenable or refractory to different stories about smart urban fu tures
Summary
Current ways of making cities and living in them are acknowledged to be unsustainable, with rapid urban transformation needed to avert environmental catastrophe (Yigitcanlar et al, 2019; Hodson et al, 2017). Through the careful cultivation of specific atmospheres, placeless stories about smart urban futures can be selectively resisted or embraced in pursuit of contextually defined goals. The aim of this paper is to investigate the deliberate cultivation of atmospheres by actors with urban remits, revealing how such atmo spheres can become impactful mechanisms for selectively rendering cities amenable or refractory to different stories about smart urban futures. The case study presents evidence of strategic cultivation of atmospheres since the foundation of MK in 1967, reveals how such atmospheres rendered the new town amenable to smart city approaches and shows how actors with urban remits were able to leverage atmospheres to engage in simultaneous complicity with and resistance to smart urban futures. We present the discussion and conclusions in part 5 and we suggest directions for future research
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