The idea of 'smart cities' increasingly dominates much of the discourse about future urban development although there is little agreement on definitions or derivations for the term. In the UK there is an abundance of encouragement for cities to strive to become 'smart', with Government (e.g. Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS)), state agencies (e.g. Future Cities Catapult (FCC) and Innovate UK) and foundations such as Nesta all urging cities to embrace the growing market opportunities for collaboration with corporate technology providers. At the same time the term remains highly contested with a number of critiques warning of the dangers of civic leaders accepting the promises of global tech corporations, e.g. offering 'smart city in a box' solutions (IFTF, 2011; Townsend, 2013).Others, such as the American science fiction writer, Bruce Sterling, no stranger to depicting future dystopias, even suggest that much of what is being offered by these corporations is a conscious conspiracy to undermine democracy and human rights:Mutated forms of electronic sociality are arising. Some resemble the trade guilds once common in the days of feudal aristocracy. Others are 'smart city' machines that resemble the urban political party machinery that distributed protection and favouritism. At the flip of a switch, any 'smart city' can become a smart gated-community, fortress-like, secured and 'resilient'. (Sterling, 2014, 19)In spite of these critical voices the public profile of 'smart cities' and the tech corporations supporting them has never been higher, backed up by massive marketing campaigns and public events which offer cities an ever-growing array of tech driven solutions to economic, environmental and social challenges. Little of this is particularly new, however, as there has been a critical appreciation of the impact of technological change on economic and social life, particularly in cities, around the concept of the 'information society' for more than 30 years (Qvortrup, 1986). Urban policy makers have been considering ideas such as information cities, digital cities and intelligent cities since the early development of more open and commercial versions of the internet in the 1990s, including many urban initiatives, such as the Manchester Host network (1991), Digital City Amsterdam (1994) and Virtual Helsinki (1996). Alongside these developments a number of cities came together to form their own trans-European networks, including Telecities, set up as part of Eurocities in 1993, and the Inter-Regional Information Society Initiative (IRISI) in 1994 (ENoLL, 2015).Even the more proactive policy initiatives around ideas of local digital agendas, digital strategies and digital challenges have been embedded in many aspects of public policy for more than 10 years, from the 2005 strategy Connecting the UK: The Digital Strategy (Cabinet Office and DTI, 2005) to the 2010 Digital Agenda for Europe (European Commission, 2010a). What does seem to be different in what has emerged in the last five years is the scope and scale of the hype around the idea of 'smart cities'. In an increasingly globalised digital world it is perhaps not surprising that most, if not all, of the legacy of these earlier, often very disparate, initiatives have coalesced into one convenient, more generic label, of cities being, or wanting to be, 'smart'. Certainly the marketing and deployment budgets of the many corporates focusing on the smart cities market appear to have grown as exponentially as the number of smart products and services they aim to offer, now supported by global industrial networks, representing most of the largest corporate players, such as the Smart Cities Council (http://smartcitiescouncil.com/).In 1992 the adoption of the Agenda 21 programme by the UN included the idea of 'smart growth' and five years later in 1997 the American Planning Association included this concept within a regulatory framework (Ryser, 2014). …
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Mar 1, 2021
David Carter 
Open Access