Smart Cities and the Network Society: Toward Commons-Driven Governance

Abstract

Since the launch of technology-driven infrastructure projects like IBM’s Smart Planet and Cisco’s Smart Communities, interest in smart city planning has grown substantially. Spanning a wide range of discussions on urbanization, the concept of the smart city overlaps a wide-ranging discussion on contemporary socioeconomic development. Despite its expanding influence, however, there is little consensus on the precise meaning of a smart city. While for some, the smart city refers to advances in sustainability and green technologies, for others, it denotes the deployment of information and communication technologies (ICTs) as next-generation infrastructure. One reason for the ambiguity is that the concept of the smart city means different things to different disciplines. Indeed, the push for smart cities has introduced a host of social policy concerns linked to neoliberal urban planning. Advancing on a corporate discourse that reimagines ICT platforms as cybernetic management systems, smart cities are now advertised as the future of globalization. Building on a critique of this discourse, this chapter focuses on a third strand in the discussion on smart cities. Linking rising demands for participatory democracy to ongoing discussions on smart cities, I explore the political ramifications of network technologies for reshaping democratic government.