Global firms and smart technologies: IBM and the reduction of cities

Abstract

The development and spread of ‘smart city’ technologies, policies and practices is now an important element of contemporary urban governance, given the role of powerful global firms such as IBM, Siemens and Cisco in their authorship. Developing a relational ontology of global ‘smart city’ firms, the paper explores the origin and development of IBM's pervasive and influential Smarter Cities strategies. The paper argues that for IBM, Smarter Cities represents an attempt to solve three strategic problems that face the firm: how to maximise its stored knowledge and ensure its labour costs deliver significant added value; how to construct new sectoral and geographic markets for this knowledge; and how to reduce, standardise and simplify the object of that knowledge – the city – as a scaleable commodity. To illustrate these issues, the paper first explores the strategic direction of IBM from being a loss‐making computer hardware manufacturer, to an information technology consultancy, identifying the role of acquisitions, city partnership, and research and development in that process. Second, it identifies how IBM has constructed a market for city or municipal services within its suite of vertical specialist markets. Third, it describes the relationship between the marketing, modelling and visualisation practices that reduce and simplify urban problems for solution through the sale of proprietary software packages, consultancy services and hardware to their clients in city government. The paper concludes by arguing that the future of smart cities is inextricably linked to the internal knowledge organisation of a small number of global technology firms.