Smart City Discourse Research Articles

“Open data means business”: Infrastructural and economic implications of opening up data in smart London

Around 2009–2010, opening up public data was a governmental strategy in the UK, as part of the implementation of the Transparency Agenda, based on the assumption that unfettered access to government data would inexorably lead to transparency, accountability and participation. Following this conjecture, and in an attempt to create an alternative to the corporate-driven smart city discourse, the Greater London Authority prioritised open data in its initial smart city plans to facilitate a ‘citizen-centred’ smart city. However, subsumed within the digital economy, open data was eventually promoted and implemented primarily for its lucrative potential to create new businesses, rather than prioritising the aspirations of transparency and participation. In this article, I explore the implications of this shift and the nature of open data- driven smart city making by focusing on a transport app, Citymapper that is built on open data released by Transport for London (TfL). By closely studying the app's product development process to generate profit together with its struggle to raise funding through venture capital and crowdfunding, I arrive at two main arguments. First, I argue that open data driven smart city making in London was a form of experimentation instead of a formal and rigid planning as it saw open data as an end in itself without much understanding of what this process would lead to in practice. As such, the case of Citymapper shows that the contingent process of opening up public transport data meant opening up public infrastructure in the city. Second, by examining the app's unsustainable business models and detailing its struggle to maintain revenue and profitability, I outline how open data-driven products are ultimately subsumed within the logic of platform capitalism rather than creating an alternative digital economy.

Smart City and Energy: A Bibliometric Review of the Smart City and Smart Energy Concept from the Perspective of the Bioclimatic Approach

Smart Cities have emerged as a promising approach for transforming urban living into more sustainable and resilient systems through technology-driven innovations and data-driven governance. Despite its growing implementation and diffusion around the globe, many questions surrounding this topic have emerged. Many critics have emerged since its first conceptualization in the first decade of the current century. Smart Cities have been criticized for their utopian objectives and the security, safety, people’s freedom, and privacy within these systems. There are also capitalistic and neoliberalism-related critiques. Other critiques also highlight the current climate cost of Smart City initiatives. In the context of those critiques, bioclimatic and passive strategies might provide an interesting evolution of the concept but seem to be left in the background. This paper aims to contribute to the understanding of the linkages between environmental design approaches and the Smart City discourse. The contribution will explore to which extent bioclimatic and environmental design principles are present in the Smart City discourse and what the patterns are inside the current literature. The methodology of the research included a quali-quantitative analysis of the body of literature in Scopus and a bibliometric analysis using the VOS Viewer tool.

To what extent are Dutch citizens' interests and rights protected by ethical guidelines for smart cities?

Over the past two decades, the notion of smart cities has become increasingly popular to solve the complex problems that cities are facing. To deal with the ethical implications of smart cities, the Netherlands face a proliferation of ethical guidelines, principles, and manifests. However: To what extent are Dutch citizens' interests protected by ethical guidelines? This study answers that question using a critical discourse analysis. This exploratory analysis uncovers unnoticed themes in the ethical discourse on smart cities and offers recommendations to strengthen the protection of citizens. Together, the ethical guidelines that are selected represent at least five major cities in the Netherlands. This study finds that the ethical guidelines support the Smart City discourse in which: data is seen as a promise for the future, citizens' interests are not central and public-private governance is pre-supposed in the digital public space. Indeed, the ethical guidelines overlook how Big Data analytics transforms ways of governing, which is described as ‘algorithmic governmentality’. Therefore, if guidelines want to commit to the protection of citizens' interests, this study encourages them to review their guidelines in a Big Data context. However, as ultimately only laws and regulations can ensure the protection of citizens' interests and rights, future research is encouraged to look into the restructuring of the legal system.

BIOMETRIC CITIZENS in smart cities

Abstract This article addresses the socio-cognitive conceptualizations of the notion of ‘citizenship’ within the space of smart cities. It discusses how smart cities expos are endowed with ideological bearings that mark a shift in these conceptualizations. This ideological shift is explored in the policy releases of Barcelona expo media centre 2019/2020 as retrieved from the Smart City Expo World Congress website. The framework accounts for the socio-cognitive aspects that are brought to the smart expos’ discussions, reframing it within the paradigms of Posthumanism and neoliberal urbanism. It is found that citizenship within smart city discourse is characterized by series of subjugating conflations between biovalues and biometrics, the body, technology, and the city and the citizen. These subjugations are discovered by contesting the metaphors of CITIZEN-FOCUSED URBANISM, VULNERABLE CITIZENS, and TECHNOLOGICAL SOLUTIONISM with their reframed counterparts of BIOMETRIC CITIZEN, INFRASTRUCTURE CITIZENSHIP, and TECHNOLOGICAL PATERNALISM.

Beyond the smart city: a communications-led agenda for twentyfirst century cities

Abstract Digital media technologies, from networked sensors to large video screens and mobile devices, have become pervasive urban infrastructure in the twentyfirst century. The dominant framework for understanding the integration of digital technology into urban space has been smart city discourse. In this article, I will argue that this framework, as it has so far been articulated, is inadequate to maximizing the social potential of digital urban infrastructure. Digital urban infrastructure not only changes how cities look, but how they function as social settings. I will propose the ‘communicative city’ as an alternative framework for thinking about digitally mediated cities. The communicative city offers an opportunity to consider networked urban space as a test case in which key problematics of contemporary globalized media are materially instantiated. It is the frontier zone at which everyday experiences of embodied media and new forms of communicative agency collide with powerful logics of tracing and tracking, and the widespread deployment of new forms of automation and machine learning as techniques of urban governance.

Beyond the technology-centric and citizen-centric binary: Ontological politics of organizing in Translation of the Smart City Discourse in India

Smart city (SC) experts in India often center-stage citizens as an alternative to a technology-led transformation. A substantial body of literature on smart cities sustains this resultant binary between techno-centrism and citizen-centrism. Mobilizing ANT sensibilities, we generate an ethnographic narrative on how the smart city discourse has translated into everyday processes of city administration and urban governance in India. Our account unmutes more-and-other-than-human actants—event-stage, glossy publications, ceremonial awards, conference producers, and decision-makers—in the translation of SC discourse, with following effects: the uncertainties in the translation process are foregrounded which potentially destabilize center-staged actor identities; and the work of heterogeneous actants in articulating the citizen as the center of their efforts is revealed, thereby de-naturalizing the binarized reality. Furthermore, when unmuted, more-and-other-than-humans spell out their ongoing collaborations and negotiations and generate a nuanced reading of the clashes and accommodations made in the process of translating SC discourse in everyday settings of city administrations. These effects lead us to emphasize the translation of SC discourse as an uncertain socio-material process proceeding through episodic clashes and tentative accommodations. They also invite a conceptual expansion of translation as constitutive of the ontological politics of organizing, which insists on attending to ongoing collaborations and negotiations among more-and-other-than-humans that compose organizational realities. Thus, we address critical organization and management studies’ concerns regarding ANT’s alignment with its objectives by locating politics in the performance of, and interference into, the multiple realities that are being enacted through practices that assemble experts, decision-makers and non-humans.

The effect of the pandemic on European narratives on smart cities and surveillance.

This article presents an analysis of European smart city narratives and how they evolved under the pressure of the COVID-19 pandemic. We start with Joss et al.'s observation that the smart-city discourse is presently in flux, engaged in intensive boundary-work and struggling to gain wider support. We approach this process from the critical perspective of surveillance capitalism, as proposed by Zuboff, to highlight the growing privacy concerns related to technological development. Our results are based on analysing 184 articles regarding smart-city solutions, published on social media by five European journals between 2017 and 2021. We adopted both human and machine coding processes for qualitative and quantitative analysis of our data. As a result, we identified the main actors and four dominant narratives: regulation of artificial intelligence and facial recognition, technological fight with the climate emergency, contact tracing apps and the potential of 5G technology to boost the digitalisation processes. Our analysis shows the growing number of positive narratives underlining the importance of technology in fighting the pandemic and mitigating the climate emergency, but the latter is often mentioned in a tokenistic fashion. Right to privacy considerations are central for two out of four discovered topics. We found that the main rationale for the development of surveillance technologies relates to the competitiveness of the EU in the global technological rivalry, while ambitions like increasing societal well-being or safeguarding the transparency of new policies are nearly non-existent.

A Performative Response to Sites of Surveillance: The Gorilla Park Project

The key interlocutor for this project is Gorilla Park, an irregular shaped parcel of land located on a disused railway track, in a Montreal neighbourhood called Marconi-Alexandria, currently a rapidly gentrifying quarter of the city. The uneven development in this part of the city is, in part, due to the increasing presence of Big Data and Smart City start-up companies. The politics of the smart city discourse are deeply entangled with ideas of the ‘right to the city,’ and brings into question: who is the smart city for? What is a smart city? Current trends towards connectivity and mediated urban environments are generally predicated upon a ‘digital agenda,’ wherein the privileged position of smart and intelligent technologies is being furthered. In this exposition one of our aims is to problematize urban sites of surveillance through performative and sonic experiments. Due to the global pandemic, however, we began to collaborate remotely and work with the documentation of our temporary occupation and in-situ exploration of Gorilla Park. As such, this exposition foregrounds an unfolding and iterative approach to artistic research that focuses on performative methods of urban research taking place in contested city sites; foregrounding the experimental use of bespoke sound devices and 360˚ video recordings, to situated methods such as walking, and hacking Google Earth imagery.

Authoritarian Smart City: A Research Agenda

Despite the prevalence of smart city discourse across many disciplines, governance systems, and policy-making bodies, its conceptual foundations are based either on semi-/democratic political constellations or deemed apolitical. This research agenda highlights the embeddedness of any smart city agenda within a more extensive political regime. Furthermore, the research agenda focuses on the authoritarian socio-technical imaginaries and their role in shaping smart city policies, implementation, and governance. The research agenda also highlights the research on authoritarian surveillance and its interconnection with authoritarian smart city conceptualisation. Furthermore, it offers three research areas for authoritarian surveillance: authoritarian practices in democratic contexts, the use of surveillance technologies for maintaining autocratic power, and authoritarian structure and governance of platform corporations. Finally, similar to critical voices in critical data studies and the field of information and communication technology for development, the research agenda aims to demystify the prevalent assumption of the good smart city that fixes all injustices that socio-political endeavours have not achieved. It argues that every technologically enabled tool or platform reflects the political constellations in which it is embedded and affects and produces new socio-technical interlinkages that could never be apolitical.

Developing a Smart and Sustainable Campus in Singapore

Singapore intends to become a “Smart Nation” through the use of smarter technologies and sustainable means to enhance the quality of life of its inhabitants. Universities are also increasingly seen as places of innovation of new smart and sustainable technologies, provincializing ideas and debates; serving as a testbed for local experimentation. Hence, to determine the status of developing Singapore universities as smart and sustainable campuses, this paper first discusses the role of Singapore’s Smart Nation initiative in relation to the development of smart and sustainable universities in Singapore. In particular, NTU’s development as a smart and sustainable campus. Secondly, a conceptual framework is developed to assess NTU as a smart and sustainable campus by understanding the prevailing dimensions of the smart city discourse. Through a detailed survey and ethnographic field study method conducted on NTU Campus, the study finds that the university has been rapidly deploying smart technologies to enhance students’ learning environment and university residents’ everyday quality of living through technology and sustainability initiatives. This paper contributes meaningfully to the development of smart campuses worldwide and brings an Asian university perspective to the existing research on smart and sustainable campuses.

Smart city re-imagined: City planning and GeoAI in the age of big data

This paper aims to engage with the ongoing debates on the role of planning in future smart cities, to make a case for a reconceptualization of the technocentric notion of the smart city, and to elevate the position of city planning within the smart-city discourse. The central argument made is that the smart city could exploit the synergies between city planning and three techno-scientific domains including Big Data, Geographic Information Science and Systems, and Data Science—which collectively constitute an emerging field known as Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI)— to meet four overarching policy goals: 1) to enhance the efficiency of urban services and functions; 2) to improve quality of life for all urban citizens; 3) to address the pressing societal, ecological and economic challenges that could plague urban systems on different levels; and, 4) to contribute to the production of spatial data, information and knowledge on human-urban dynamics. In addition, the paper defines a human-centered conceptual framework illustrating how the cross-pollination between city planning and the three techno-scientific fields could enhance the planning practice and accomplish the smart-city policy goals. The methodology employed in this study entails a systematic review of the literature. In addition to discussing the latest achievements as well as the progress made on the nexus of city planning and GeoAI, the paper also highlights the barriers to the application of GeoAI in the planning, design and management of smart cities and identifies potential avenues for future research.

The Polyopticon: a diagram for urban artificial intelligences

Smart city discourses often invoke the Panopticon, a disciplinary architecture designed by Jeremy Bentham and popularly theorized by Michel Foucault, as a model for understanding the social impact of AI technologies. This framing focuses attention almost exclusively on the negative ramifications of Urban AI, correlating ubiquitous surveillance, centralization, and data consolidation with AI development, and positioning technologies themselves as the driving factor shaping privacy, sociality, equity, access, and autonomy in the city. This paper describes an alternative diagram for Urban AI—the Polyopticon: a distributed, polyvalent, multi-modal network of synthetic intelligences. It posits that fourth industrial revolution technologies change the political, social, and psychodynamic relationships of sentience and witness in the city, shifting the effects of watching and watched beyond the exclusive domain of top-down surveillance and discipline. The Polyopticon poses a more expansive and ambivalent spectrum of possibilities for Urban AI scenarios, one that undermines the totalizing, singular, and cerebral notion of intelligence that so often characterizes Urban AI and smart city critiques.

Urban utopia or pipe dream? Examining Chinese-invested smart city development in Southeast Asia

With increasing public–private partnership and international cooperation in smart city development across the Global South, Chinese firms are poised to take advantage of growing business opportunities, a situation that few studies have examined. This empirical case study of the Forest City, a Chinese-invested greenfield smart city project in Iskandar Malaysia, begins to fill that gap. This megaproject represents the coming together of overlapping economic development interests of the local authorities and the profit motivations of the Chinese investor. However, the project’s use of the ‘smart city’ discourse contrasts with the reality of limited technology adoption. Its visibility and considerable socio-economic and environmental impacts also sparked opposition from affected local stakeholders and criticism from political leaders. This prompted the Chinese investor to change business practices and enhance corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts to mitigate risks and ensure project continuity, yet their effectiveness is limited. The study confirms the underlying tensions in the smart city discourse, where economic development and profit imperatives risk running counter to social and environmental sustainability. It also contributes to scholarly understanding of Chinese overseas investments, illustrating the host country’s agency and how better Chinese CSR practices offer the potential for risk mitigation.

Towards Culture-Aware Smart and Sustainable Cities: Integrating Historical Sources in Spatial Information Infrastructures

This article addresses the integration of cultural perspectives in the smart city discourse and in the implementation of the UN Agenda 2030; it does so specifically with respect to land patterns and land use. We hope to increase the ability of relevant stakeholders, including scientific communities working in that field, to handle the complexity of the current urban challenges. Culture is understood here in the broadest sense of the word, including the values and conceptualizations of the world, and the modes of technological creation and control of the environment. This concept of culture varies among stakeholders, depending, in particular, on their activities, on the place they live in, and also depending on their scientific background. We propose to complement existing targets that are explicitly related to culture in the UN and UNESCO agendas for 2030, and introduce a target of culture awareness for city information infrastructures. We show that, in the specific case of land patterns and land use, these new targets can be approached with historical data. Our analysis of the related core functionalities is based on interviews with practitioners, draws on insights from the humanities, and takes into account the readiness of the existing technologies.

Understanding and Acceptance of Smart City Policies: Practitioners’ Perspectives on the Malaysian Smart City Framework

Whilst a plethora of research exists on the smart cities and project performance evaluations, only few studies have focused on the smart city policy evaluation from the perspective of its acceptance by practitioners. This paper aims to generate insights by evaluating the smart city policy through a developing country case study—i.e., Malaysia. This study employed a questionnaire survey method for data collection and analyzed the data by using Fuzzy Delphi analysis. A group of 40 practitioners was gathered in a focus group discussion through purposive sampling. The main objectives of this survey were to identify the understanding and acceptance levels of the seven smart city domains and respective strategies that are outlined in the Malaysian Smart City Framework. The results disclosed that the practitioners possessed divergent levels of understanding and acceptance in terms of smart city domains. The study participant practitioners accepted all understanding and acceptance objectives of smart economy, living, people, and governance domains (expert agreement 75–92% and threshold d value 0.123–0.188), but rejected all objectives for both smart environment and digital infrastructure domains (expert agreement 55–74% and threshold d value 0.150–0.212). Along with this, acceptance of smart mobility was also rejected (expert agreement 56% and threshold d value 0.245). The findings reveal that considering all opinions expressing dissensus is essential when building more inclusive smart city strategies. This study contributes to the smart city discourse as being one of the first in capturing professional practitioners’ understanding and acceptance on a national level smart city policy by applying the Delphi method in the smart city context. Most importantly, the study informs urban policymakers on how to capture the voices and perspectives of the general public on national and local smart city strategy and initiatives.

Organizing a sustainable smart urban ecosystem: Perspectives and insights from a bibliometric analysis and literature review

Cities struggle to enhance their sustainability by fostering their smartness, i.e. their ability to use advanced technologies and resources in an intelligent and integrated way to achieve a socially and environmentally viable economic growth. The transition towards urban ecosystems has been proposed as a practical solution to merge smartness and sustainability in the smart city discourse. However, little is known about the recipe for implementing and organizing a sustainable smart urban ecosystem. The bibliometric analysis and interpretive narrative review presented in this article found some contrasting perspectives on the approaches that should be embraced to run a viable smart urban ecosystem, shedding light into the manifold attributes of sustainable urban smartness. The research findings suggest that the viability of smart urban ecosystems relies on the ability of focal actors to implement a techno-bureaucratic governance model which relies on an integrated policy framework that accounts for the tripartite social, economic, and environmental challenges faced by cities. Citizen-centredness and greenness are the core values that embed urban smartness. Such values are useless if not backed by community engagement. Further developments should be targeted to unravel the role of datification and computerization in underpinning the collective intelligence of smart cities for the purpose of urban sustainability.

Policing the future, disrupting urban policy today. Predictive policing, smart city, and urban policy in Memphis (TN)

ABSTRACT Significant resources and efforts have been devoted, especially in the USA, to develop predictive policing programs. Predictive policing is, at the same time, one of the drivers of the birth, and the ultimate material enactment of, the anticipatory logics that are central to the smart city discourse. Quite surprisingly, however, critical analyses of the smart city have remained divorced from critical criminology and police studies. To fill this gap, this article sets out the first critical, in-depth empirical discussion of Blue CRUSH, a predictive policing program developed in Memphis (TN, USA), where its implementation intersects long-term austerity for urban policy. The article, first, shows that there is no evidence of Blue CRUSH’s capacity to prevent crime, thus adding empirical material to skepticism over the role of predictive policing as a policy solution in the first place. And, second, it argues that, rather than making crime a matter of technological solutions, predictive policing shifts the politics therein – in short, it contributes to the expansion of policing into the field of urban policy at the same time as it disrupts present police work. These takeaways allow to further the critique of the salvific promises implicit in the smart city discourse.

Everyday urbanisms and the importance of place: Exploring the elements of the emancipatory smart city

Two of the most striking features of smart city discourses are the centrality of technology as a driver of transformational change and the strange ‘placelessness’ of its visual narrative. Whether envisaged in Kenya or Singapore, the commercial smart city is represented as a ‘city in a box’, seemingly capable of solving complex social issues through algorithms and technical innovation. Recently a robust literature has emerged that is critical of the techno-determinism inherent in smart city discussions. This paper expands on this critique by arguing that by solely focusing on the material dimensions of technologically informed urban change, devoid of context, we miss an opportunity to uncover an important moment in contemporary urbanity. By foregrounding the human dimensions of technology appropriation and the interface with livelihoods in their particular spatial contexts, this paper consciously decentres the dominant smart city discourse by arguing for the foregrounding of local dynamics. This paper rejects the universalisms embedded in smart city promises and argues that by provincialising the idea of smart urbanism, opportunities are presented for understanding the true markers of contemporary urbanism. Critical debates on the smart city, and by extension the need to consider smart urbanism contextually and as an infrastructure, relationally, together with the conceptual insights provided by postcolonial science and technology studies, contribute to a proposed frame for researching the ongoing dynamic between contemporary urban life and technological innovation. Empirical vignettes from urban Africa are used to illustrate the multiple dimensions of the interface between livelihoods and technology appropriation.

Assessing the ASEAN Smart Cities Network (ASCN) via the Quintuple Helix Innovation Framework, with Special Regard to Smart City Discourse, Civil Participation, and Environmental Performance

ABSTRACT The smart city movement (SCM) is spreading globally with increasing velocity. With its international allure, it has generated a burgeoning body of international literature, much of which forms what the current study refers to as a ‘normalised discourse’. The international literature also includes a growing body of criticism that addresses hazards associated with this normalised discourse. The current study labels the collective product of this criticism as identification of the ‘normalised problematics’ of the SCM. In 2018, Singapore announced that 26 cities would form the ASEAN Smart Cities Network (ASCN). This article assesses the ASCN in terms of the SCM discourse and its normalised problematics through the Quintuple Helix frame of innovation economics. Our analysis suggests that the authoritarian nature of some ASEAN countries has serious implications for participatory and therefore socio-ecologically sustainable urban planning and governance, for the ASCN projects specifically, and for similar national and regional projects globally.

Actually-existing sociality in a smart city

This paper explores the forms of sociality that are implicit in discussions about a range of smart projects in one actually-existing smart city. Current scholarship on smart cities focuses almost entirely on their digital infrastructure and on the figure of the ‘smart citizen’. This paper argues that smart city projects also emerge and develop through specific understandings of the social. The paper explores understandings of smart sociality by analysing nearly sixty interviews with a wide range of actors involved in smart city projects in the UK city of Milton Keynes. Implicit in those interviews are three overlapping but distinct forms of smart sociality, which the paper terms sociological, neoliberal and cybernetic. The paper argues that it is important to engage both empirically and theoretically with these three understandings of the social in relation to smart, because they suggest that the reconfiguration of human activity assumed in smart city discourses is more diverse than most current scholarship acknowledges. The paper concludes by arguing that if this diversity is to become a critical resource, urban scholarship must give more empirical and conceptual attention to cybernetic forms of sociality in particular.