Abstract
• Globalisation of smart cities involve mobile policies and cosmopolitisation. • There is a lexical change from digital to smart city in South Africa since 2009. • Lexical change is more than rhetoric and indicative of a digital neoliberalisation. • Processes at local level are more variegated due to municipal autonomy. This paper explores how the smart city phenomenon becomes nearly ubiquitous in countries and cities around the world. Drawing on policy mobility studies and cosmopolitisation – defined as globalization from within – it focuses on the roll-out and take-up of smart city narratives and interventions in South Africa since 2005. Based on a media analysis on national and local scales, the paper shows that the smart city effect is an entangled phenomenon. Generally speaking, it consists of a lexical glue that holds together processes of data-driven neoliberalisation of urban governance. However, at municipal level we observe more variegated effects of reverse-scale policymaking, labelling and territorialisation where the smart city appears as a more-than-mobile but also as a more-than-local urban policy.
Published Version
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