Abstract
ABSTRACTDespite its growing ubiquitous presence, the smart city continues to struggle for definitional clarity and practical import. In response, this study interrogates the smart city as global discourse network by examining a collection of key texts associated with cities worldwide. Using a list of 5,553 cities, a systematic webometric exercise was conducted to measure hit counts produced by searching for “smart city.” Consequently, 27 cities with the highest validated hit counts were selected. Next, 346 online texts were collected from among the top 20 hits across each of the selected cities, and analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively using AntConc software. The findings confirm, first, the presence of a strong globalizing narrative which emphasizes world cities as “best practice” models. Second, they reveal the smart city’s association—beyond the quest for incremental, technical improvements of current urban systems and processes—with a pronounced transformative governance agenda. The article identifies five critical junctures at the heart of the evolving smart city discourse regime; these shed light on the ongoing boundary work in which the smart city is engaged and which contain significant unresolved tensions. The paper concludes with a discussion of resulting implications for research, policy, and practice.
Highlights
Following in the footsteps of the sustainable city, the smart city has turned ubiquitous, heralding an advanced global urban future
Significant effort was required to design a robust methodology consisting of two main parts: first, capturing the global discourse network using the logic of the online search engine,4 to harvest a representative set of texts associated with cities worldwide; and second, treating the compiled corpus to a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses with the help of AntConc (Anthony, 2016), a freeware tool for corpus linguistic research, using custom-made coding categories
The 27 cities identified through the online search process are part of a much larger smart city discourse network, they occupy a central place as measured by their URL scores
Summary
Following in the footsteps of the sustainable (or eco) city, the smart city has turned ubiquitous, heralding an advanced global urban future. Its ubiquity manifests itself in the transnational circulation of smart city concepts and policies as well as the rapid proliferation of on-the-ground initiatives across regions in both the Global North and South (e.g., Caragliu et al 2014; Datta 2015; Watson 2015; Karvonen et al, 2018). Within this context of a globally mobile phenomenon, an essential aspect of the smart city is its discourse: it shapes concepts and programs, and is a key means by which ideas S.
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