Abstract
Critical commentaries have often treated the smart city as a potentially problematic ‘top down’ tendency within policy-making and urban planning, which appears to serve the interests of already powerful corporate and political actors. This article, however, positions the smart city as significant in its implicit rejection of the strong normativity of traditional technologies of planning, in favour of an ontology of efficiency and emergence. It explores a series of prominent UK smart city initiatives (in Bristol, Manchester and Milton Keynes) as bundles of experimental local practices, drawing on the literature pointing to a growing valorisation of the ‘experimental’ over strong policy commitments in urban governance. It departs from this literature, however, by reading contemporary ‘smart experiments’ through Shapin and Schafer’s work on the emergence of 17th-century science, to advance a transhistorical understanding of experimentation as oriented towards societal reordering. From this perspective, the UK smart city merits attention primarily as an indicator of a wider set of shifts in approaches to governance. Its pragmatic orientation sits uneasily alongside ambitions to ‘standardise’ smart and sustainable urban development; and raises questions about the conscious overlap between the stated practical ambitions of smart city initiatives and pre-existing environmental and social policies.
Highlights
The international rise of ‘smart city’ policy-making has been widely documented
What is the relationship between the smart city and traditional processes of urban planning and management? One line of enquiry into this question identifies a problematically technocratic tendency in discourses through which large technology companies have promoted the smart city
It is accepted that these three examples collectively indicate the ‘cutting edge’ of smart urbanism in the UK, we propose that certain similarities observable across the three cases are indicative of broader contemporary UK trends
Summary
What is the relationship between the smart city and traditional processes of urban planning and management? One line of enquiry into this question identifies a problematically technocratic tendency in discourses through which large technology companies have promoted the smart city. The present article, approaches the UK smart city as a body of practices emerging at local level, typically located only on the fringes of mainstream institutional power. Its significance as a ‘technology of power’ (Foucault, 1991) is not inferred from its tangible ‘top-down’ effects on urban space or bodies, but rather in its status as a paradigmatic symptom of broader, ongoing attempts to reshape modernist governance rationalities. The article explores the possibility that the smart city challenges, rather than merely enhances, more conventional planning and policy mechanisms to address social and environmental problems
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