Marie Veltz, Jonathan Rutherford, Antoine Picon, "Smart Urbanism and the Visibility and Reconfiguration of Infrastructure and Public Action in the French Cities of Issy-les-Moulineaux and Nice" (original) (raw)
Caprotti & Cowley 2019 Varieties of Smart Urbanism
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2019
The paper analyses the varieties of smart urbanism to be found in the contemporary urban landscape in the UK. In so doing, it builds on and extends two currently dominant sets of critiques of the smart city: those that call into question its technocratic and top‐down modes of governance, and those that describe the smart city as an empty signifier. The paper makes sense of the UK's variegated local smart urban practices by tracing the emergence of a national, state‐led cultural economy of smart urbanism. Based on an analysis of smart‐city programmes in 34 UK cities, we identify two broad discursive logics through which varieties of smart urbanism are produced and performed. First, the invocation of crisis forms a discursive foundation on which place‐specific logics are based. Second, sets of what we term variegated logics are differently combined to build on the “foundational story” of crisis in the construction of local smart agendas. We discuss three of these variegated logics: the city portrayed as technological simulacrum; the focus on specific sectoral activities; and a chameleonic tendency to envelop previous eco‐urban agendas into smart urbanism. By making these logics visible, the paper opens up a new critical space for debate about alternative future pathways that smart cities might take.
Developing a critical understanding of smart urbanism?
Urban Studies
Smart urbanism is emerging at the intersection of visions for the future of urban places, new technologies and infrastructures. Smart urbanism discourses are deeply rooted in seductive and normative visions of the future where digital technology stands as the primary driver for change. Yet our understanding of the opportunities, challenges, and implications of smart urbanism is limited. Research in this field is in its infancy, fragmented along disciplinary lines and often based on single city case studies. As a result, we lack both the theoretical insight and empirical evidence required to assess the implications of this potentially transformative phenomenon. Given the significant implications of smart urbanism there is an urgent need to critically engage with why, how, for whom and with what consequences smart urbanism is emerging in different urban contexts. The aim of this review is to unpack the different logics and rationales behind smart urbanism discourses and proposals, and in this way understand the ways by which imaginaries of urban futures are currently being constructed, along with their socio-technical and political implications for future research priorities.
Municipalities' understanding of the Smart City concept: An exploratory analysis in Belgium
Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 2018
The Smart City is a fuzzy concept, which integrates numerous characteristics, components and dimensions. These characteristics are challenged in the academic literature, especially the technocentric approach and the central position of private companies. Moreover, the lack of proper conceptualisation pushes cities to claim themselves 'smart'. Finally, there are few rigorous analytical or statistical analyses of the concept and its application to territories. Therefore, this paper studies how Belgian municipalities understand the concept of Smart Cities in 2016. Based on the groundwork of literature on Smart Cities and the results of a survey of 113 Belgian municipalities, a typology of four understandings of the Smart City (technological, societal, comprehensive and non-existent) is elaborated. The results also show that municipalities with no understanding of the Smart City concept or with a technical understanding are mostly located in small and rural municipalities. This could be a sign of rejection of the phenomenon in this context. Conversely, medium and large-sized municipalities mostly develop a societal or comprehensive understanding. Therefore, this study highlights a dichotomy of understanding and acceptance of the concept of the Smart City between peripheral (rural and small size municipalities) and central municipalities (urban, medium and large size municipalities).
Urban performance currently depends not only on the city's endowment of hard infrastructure ('physical capital'), but also, and increasingly so, on the availability and quality of knowledge communication and social infrastructure ('human and social capital'). The latter form of capital is decisive for urban competitiveness. Against this background, the concept of the 'smart city' has recently been introduced as a strategic device to encompass modern urban production factors in a common framework and, in particular, to highlight the importance of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in the last 20 years for enhancing the competitive profile of a city. The present paper aims to shed light on the often elusive definition of the concept of the 'smart city'. We provide a focussed and operational definition of this construct and present consistent evidence on the geography of smart cities in the EU27. Our statistical and graphical analyses exploit in depth, for the first time to our knowledge, the most recent version of the Urban Audit data set in order to analyse the factors determining the performance of smart cities. We find that the presence of a creative class, the quality of and dedicated attention to the urban environment, the level of education, multimodal accessibility, and the use of ICTs for public administration are all positively correlated with urban wealth. This result prompts the formulation of a new strategic agenda for smart cities in Europe, in order to achieve sustainable urban development and a better urban landscape.
2018
The era of the smart city has arrived. Only a decade ago, the promise of optimising urban services through the widespread application of information and communication technologies was largely a techno-utopian fantasy. Today, smart urbanisation is occurring via urban projects, policies and visions in hundreds of cities around the globe. Inside Smart Cities provides real-world evidence on how local authorities, small and medium enterprises, corporations, utility providers and civil society groups are creating smart cities at the neighbourhood, city and regional scales. Twenty three empirically detailed case studies from the Global North and South – ranging from Cape Town, Stockholm and Abu Dhabi to Philadelphia, Hong Kong and Santiago – illustrate the multiple and diverse incarnations of smart urbanism. The contributors draw on ideas from urban studies, geography, urban planning, science and technology studies and innovation studies to go beyond the rhetoric of technological innovation and reveal the political, social and physical implications of digitalising the built environment. Collectively, the practices of smart urbanism raise fundamental questions about the sustainability, liveability and resilience of cities in the future. The findings are relevant to academics, students, practitioners and urban stakeholders who are questioning how urban innovation relates to politics and place.
The 'actually existing smart city'
Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 2015
This paper grounds the critique of the ‘smart city’ in its historical and geographical context. Adapting Brenner and Theodore’s notion of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’, we suggest a greater attention be paid to the ‘actually existing smart city’, rather than the exceptional or paradigmatic smart cities of Songdo, Masdar and Living PlanIT Valley. Through a closer analysis of cases in Louisville and Philadelphia, we demonstrate the utility of understanding the material effects of these policies in actual cities around the world, with a particular focus on how and from where these policies have arisen, and how they have unevenly impacted the places that have adopted them.
Cities-Laboratories of Smart Urbanism
“Cites are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and city design. This is the laboratory in which city planning should have been learning and forming and testing its theories”, Jacobs (1961). The process of changing the city during the transition from socialism to capitalism is taking place now, for the first time in the history of urban development. Books, texts in periodicals and other literature on the subject are rare, and their authors are mainly sociologists, urban geographers, economists, and in very small numbers urban planners and architects. Great cities have their own rules. They grow at a rate which is computed by number of people increasing per hour. Little cities of a few tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of people give the impression that they still can be "comprehended with an ordinary dictionary". Cities in countries of the former Yugoslavia have up to 300 000 inhabitants, with the exception of Zagreb, Belgrade, Skopje and Sarajevo. That is why in this region we have to concentrate on how to teach on sustainable architecture and urbanism in small cites. „Towns, suburbs and even little cities are totally different organisms from great cities. We are in enough trouble already from trying to understand big cities in terms of behavior, and imagined behavior, of towns. To try to understand towns in terms of big cities will only compound confusion”: Jacobs (1961). Bearing in mind the above learning outside the classroom from our own good practice should be our commitment. “The way we design our streets, open spaces, public buildings and neighborhoods will give shape to urban society for a long time to come”: Gehl in Rogers and Power (2000).