Replicating European smart cities?

Claudia Mendes

doi:10.14512/tatup.30.1.17

Abstract

The paper unpacks the notion of “replication” within the European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities from two perspectives: The first focuses on the rationale of replication as laid out in the mission statement and integral to its vision of a European smart city market and interrogates the term borrowed from laboratory science. The second turns to replication in practice and explores how replication work, rather than providing standardized technological solutions, has harmonized the vocabulary of replication narratives, creating repositories of modularized descriptions of solutions for knowledge exchange and inspiration. The conclusion draws attention to how the focus on describing technical details precludes a more fundamental or even public debate on measures, and how the apparent failure to create a mass market for smart city technologies results in an increased access to “soft policy options,” making the European smart city an increasingly governable entity.

Highlights

In 2012, the European Commission initiated the European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities (EIP SCC)
As many different actors and institutions have been involved in drafting the mission statements this is not about these actors’ individual usages, but rather about what the rhetoric of the replication rationale achieves in practice: it helps producing an imaginary, in which local specificity is overcome, or at least sufficiently reduced, to allow concrete technological solutions to be replicated in different cities across Europe and create a market for smart city technologies
Uneven geographies of replication and standardisation The logic of replication as enacted in the EIP SCC raises serious concerns regarding the political economy of who gets to experiment, assess potential risks of and set standards for such technologies; and who is supposed to adopt to the lighthouse cities’ model. This concern becomes more pronounced when we look at the specific geography entailed by the EIP SCC: as part of Horizon2020 framework program (FP), the main instrument of European Union (EU) innovation policy, funding is allocated on a competitive basis

Summary

Introduction

In 2012, the European Commission initiated the European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities (EIP SCC). Bringing together participants from tech industry, transport and energy as well as research institutions with representatives of local authorities, the partnership’s goal was to formulate a mission statement for a European smart city strategy, issued in 2013 as the Strategic Implementation Plan (EIP SCC 2013) and translated into a Horizon 2020 work program by 2014/15 (European Commission 2015).

Results

Conclusion