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Smart City Narratives and Narrating Smart Urbanism

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Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts

Part of the book series: Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies ((GSLS))

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Abstract

Smart City has become a dominant narrative for the future of cities. Taking this framework as point of departure, the paper introduces Smart City Narratives as both utopian and dystopian storytelling, as contested stories of corporate interests of global ICT companies and entrepreneurial urban policies on the one hand and visions of sustainability and social justice on the other. The motivation is to discuss present changes in narrating urban spaces, with a special focus on the production and perception of urban space brought about by increasing access to and use of digital technologies and digitally connected infrastructures in cities. Apart from scenarios for future urban digitalization strategies, this includes giving attention to urban citizens, democratic citizenship initiatives, and rights to a digital city.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Some parts of this paper have been published prior to this in German in a book chapter: Sybille Bauriedl and Anke Strüver, “Raumproduktionen in der digitalisierten Stadt,” in Smart City. Kritische Perspektiven auf die Digitalisierung in Städten, ed. Sybille Bauriedl and Anke Strüver (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2018), 11–32; reprint with kind permission of Transcript Publisher. Copy-editing of the translation was assisted by Laura Cuniff.

  2. 2.

    Ola Söderström, Till Paasche, and Francisco Klauser, “Smart Cities as Corporate Storytelling,” City 18, no. 3 (2014): 307–320; see also Richard G. Hollands, “Will the Real Smart City Please Stand Up?” City 12, no. 3 (2008): 303–320; and Donald McNeill, “Global Firms and Smart Technologies: IBM and the Reduction of Cities,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 40, no. 4 (2015): 562–574.

  3. 3.

    For a critique, see James Evans et al. “Smart and Sustainable Cities? Pipedreams, Practicalities and Possibilities,” Local Environment 24, no. 7 (2019): 557–564; Maria Kaika, “‘Don’t Call Me Resilient Again!’: The New Urban Agenda as Immunology … or … What Happens When Communities Refuse to Be Vaccinated with ‘Smart Cities’ and Indicators,” Environment and Urbanization 29, no. 1 (2017): 89–102; Marit Rosol, Gwendolyn Blue, and Victoria Fast, “Social Justice in the Digital Age: Re-thinking the Smart City with Nancy Fraser.” UCCities Working Paper 1, 2019, https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/wkqy2 (accessed August 2, 2019); and Erik Swyngedouw and Maria Kaika, “Urban Political Ecology. Great Promises, Deadlock… and New Beginnings?” Documents d’Anàlisi Geogràfica 60, no. 3 (2014): 459–481.

  4. 4.

    Colin McFarlane and Ola Söderström, “On Alternative Smart Cities,” City 21, nos. 3–4 (2017): 312–328; Elke Rauth, Smart Tales of the City, 2015, https://www.eurozine.com/smart-tales-of-the-city/ (accessed July 28, 2019).

  5. 5.

    Anthony M. Townsend, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013); Michiel de Lange and Martijn De Waal, “Owning the City. New Media and Citizen Engagement in Urban Design,” First Monday 18, no. 11 (2013): 1–15; Dan Hill, On the Smart City; or, a ‘Manifesto’ for Smart Citizens Instead, 2013, www.cityofsound.com/blog/2013/02/on-the-smart-city-a-call-for-smart-citizens-instead.html (accessed August 2, 2019); and Alberto Vanolo, “Is There Anybody Out There? The Place and Role of Citizens in Tomorrow’s Smart Cities,” Futures 82 (2016): 26–36.

  6. 6.

    See Sybille Bauriedl and Anke Strüver, eds., Smart City—Kritische Perspektiven auf die Digitalisierung in Städten (Bielefeld: Transcript. 2018).

  7. 7.

    Summarized in Ayona Datta, “A 100 Smart Cities, a 100 Utopias,” Dialogues in Human Geography 5, no. 1 (2015): 49–53.

  8. 8.

    Joe Shaw and Mark Graham, eds., Our Digital Rights to the City (London: Meatspace Press, 2017).

  9. 9.

    Simon Marvin, Andrés Luque-Ayala, and Colin McFarlane, eds., Smart Urbanism. Utopian Vision or False dawn? (London: Routledge, 2016).

  10. 10.

    The comments in this paper refer exclusively to existing cities and do not address smart cities as newly developed towns.

  11. 11.

    Toru Ishida and Kathrine Isbister, eds., Digital Cities: Experiences, Technologies and Future Perspectives (Heidelberg: Springer, 2000).

  12. 12.

    Matthew Gandy, “Cyborg Urbanization. Complexity and Monstrosity in the Contemporary City,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29, no. 1 (2005): 26-49.

  13. 13.

    Söderström, Paasche, and Klauser, “Smart Cities as Corporate Storytelling”; McNeill, “Global Firms and Smart Technologies.”

  14. 14.

    Ishida and Isbister, eds., Digital Cities; Marvin Simon and Andrés Luque-Ayala, “Urban Operating Systems. Diagramming the City,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 41, no. 1 (2017): 84–103.

  15. 15.

    Marvin, Luque-Ayala, and McFarlane, eds., Smart Urbanism.

  16. 16.

    Söderström, Paasche, and Klauser, “Smart Cities as Corporate Storytelling,” 309.

  17. 17.

    Alberto Vanolo, “Smartmentality. The Smart City as Disciplinary Strategy,” Urban Studies 51, no. 5 (2014): 883–898 (894).

  18. 18.

    Swyngedouw and Kaika, “Urban Political Ecology,” 467.

  19. 19.

    Jamie Peck, Nik Theodore, and Neil Brenner, “Neoliberal Urbanism. Models, Moments, Mutations,” SAIS Review of International Affairs 29 (2009): 49–66.

  20. 20.

    Hollands, “Will the Real Smart City Please Stand Up?”; Evans et al., “Smart and Sustainable Cities?”.

  21. 21.

    Evgeny Morozov and Francesca Bria, Die Smarte Stadt neu denken, 2017, https://www.rosalux.de/publikation/id/38134/die-smarte-stadt-neu-denken (accessed August 2, 2019).

  22. 22.

    Hill, On the Smart City.

  23. 23.

    R. Kitchin, “The Real-Time City? Big Data and Smart Urbanism,” GeoJournal 79, no. 1 (2014): 1–14 (8).

  24. 24.

    On Airbnb gentrification, see Kritische Geographie Berlin, “Tourismus,” in Handbuch kritische Stadtgeographie, ed. Bernd Belina, Matthias Naumann, and Anke Strüver (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2018), 312–317.

  25. 25.

    See the example of Barcelona in Morozov and Bria, Die Smarte Stadt neu denken; Exner et al. 2018.

  26. 26.

    On platform capitalism, see Thomas Waitz, “Gig-Economy, unsichtbare Arbeit und Plattformkapitalismus,” Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaften 16 (2017): 178–183.

  27. 27.

    Shaw and Graham, eds., Our Digital Rights to the City, following Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003 [orig. 1970]).

  28. 28.

    Marvin, Luque-Ayala, and McFarlane, eds., Smart Urbanism.

  29. 29.

    Jennifer Gabrys, “Programming Environments. Environmentality and Citizen Sensing in the Smart City,” Environment and Planning D 32 (2014): 30–48.

  30. 30.

    Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Pantheon, 1978); The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979 (London: Picador, 2010).

  31. 31.

    On sensors and responsive spaces as ‘environmentalities,’ see Gabrys, “Programming Environments.”

  32. 32.

    Gabrys, “Programming environments,” 35, 42.

  33. 33.

    Gabrys, “Programming Environments,” 38.

  34. 34.

    Anke Strüver, “Am laufenden (Fitness-)Band,” in Kritische Perspektiven auf die Digitalisierung in Städten, ed. Sybille Bauriedl and Anke Strüver (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2018), 139–153; see also Vanolo’s “smartmentality” (Vanolo, “Smartmentality”).

  35. 35.

    Adam Greenfield, Against the Smart City (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2013).

  36. 36.

    See Hill, On the smart city; Shannon Mattern, “Interfacing Urban Intelligence,” Places Online Journal, 2014. https://placesjournal.org/article/interfacing-urban-intelligence (accessed June 2, 2018); and Hollands, “Will the Real Smart City Please Stand Up?”; Vanolo, “Is There Anybody Out There?”.

  37. 37.

    Mark Graham, “Neogeography and the Palimpsests of Place. Web 2.0 and the Construction of a Virtual Earth,” Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 101, no. 4 (2010): 422–436.

  38. 38.

    Sarah Elwood, Michael F. Goodchild, and Daniel Z. Sui, “Researching Volunteered Geographic Information: Spatial Data, Geographic Research, and New Social Practice,” Annals of the AAG 102, no. 3 (2012): 571–590, https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2011.595657 (accessed November 13, 2019).

  39. 39.

    Muki Haklay, “Citizen Science and Volunteered Geographic Information: Overview and Typology of Participation,” in Crowdsourcing Geographic Knowledge, ed. Daniel Z Sui, Sarah Elwood and Michael F. Goodchild (Berlin: Springer, 2013), 105–122.

  40. 40.

    See, e.g., http://www.solidarityeconomy.eu/susy-map.

  41. 41.

    Stefan Höffken, Mobile Partizipation. Wie Bürger mit dem Smartphone Stadtplanung mitgestalten (Lemgo: Rohn, 2015).

  42. 42.

    Townsend, Smart Cities, 25.

  43. 43.

    De Lange and de Waal, “Owning the City,” 4.

  44. 44.

    Hollands, “Will the Real Smart City Please Stand Up?” 62.

  45. 45.

    Alan Wiig, “The Empty Rhetoric of the Smart City: From Digital Inclusion to Economic Promotion in Philadelphia,” Urban Geography 37, no. 4 (2016): 535–553.

  46. 46.

    Söderström, Paasche, and Klauser, “Smart Cities as Corporate Storytelling,” 315.

  47. 47.

    Rob Kitchin, “Making Sense of Smart Cities. Addressing Present Shortcomings,” Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 8, no. 1 (2015): 131–136 (133).

  48. 48.

    Morozov and Bria, Die Smarte Stadt neu denken, 10.

  49. 49.

    Kitchin, “Making Sense of Smart Cities,” 133; see also Kaika, “‘Don’t Call Me Resilient Again!’”.

  50. 50.

    Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution.

  51. 51.

    Shaw and Graham, eds., Our Digital Rights to the City; Joe Shaw and Mark Graham, “An Informational Right to the City? Code, Content, Control, and the Urbanization of Information,” Antipode 49, no. 4 (2017): 907–927.

  52. 52.

    Colin McFarlane, “Towards More Inclusive Smart Cities?” in Beware of Smart People. Redefining the Smart City Paradigm Towards Inclusive Urbanism, ed. Jörg Stollmann et al. (Berlin: Universitätsverlag der TU Berlin, 2016), 89–94; Morozov and Bria, Die Smarte Stadt neu denken; David Harvey, Rebel Cities. From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2013).

References

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  • Elwood, Sarah, Michael F. Goodchild, and Daniel Z. Sui. “Researching Volunteered Geographic Information: Spatial Data, Geographic Research, and New Social Practice.” Annals of the AAG 102, no. 3 (2012): 571–590. https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2011.595657.

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  • Exner, Andreas, Livia Cepoiu, and Carla Weinzierl. “Smart City Policies in Wien, Berlin und Barcelona.” Kritische Perspektiven auf die Digitalisierung in Städten, edited by Sybille Bauriedl and Anke Strüver. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2018. 333–344.

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    Google Scholar 

  • Gabrys, Jennifer. “Programming Environments. Environmentality and Citizen Sensing in the Smart City.” Environment and Planning D 32 (2014): 30–48.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gandy, Matthew. “Cyborg Urbanization. Complexity and Monstrosity in the Contemporary City.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29, no. 1 (2005): 26–49.

    Google Scholar 

  • Graham, Mark. “Neogeography and the Palimpsests of Place. Web 2.0 and the Construction of a Virtual Earth.” Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie 101, no. 4 (2010): 422–436.

    Google Scholar 

  • Greenfield, Adam. Against the Smart City. Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2013.

    Google Scholar 

  • Haklay, Muki. “Citizen Science and Volunteered Geographic Information: Overview and Typology of Participation.” In Crowdsourcing Geographic Knowledge, edited by Daniel Z Sui, Sarah Elwood, and Michael F. Goodchild. Berlin: Springer, 2013. 105–122.

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  • Harvey, David. Rebel Cities. From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2013.

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  • Hill, Dan. On the Smart City; or, a ‘Manifesto’ for Smart Citizens Instead. 2013. www.cityofsound.com/blog/2013/02/on-the-smart-city-a-call-for-smart-citizens-instead.html.

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  • ———. “Critical Interventions into the Corporate Smart City.” Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 8, no. 1 (2015): 61–77.

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  • Höffken, Stefan. Mobile Partizipation. Wie Bürger mit dem Smartphone Stadtplanung mitgestalten. Lemgo: Rohn, 2015.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ishida, Toru, and Kathrine Isbister, eds. Digital Cities: Experiences, Technologies and Future Perspectives. Heidelberg: Springer, 2000.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kaika, Maria. “‘Don’t Call Me Resilient Again!’: The New Urban Agenda as Immunology … or … What Happens When Communities Refuse to Be Vaccinated with ‘Smart Cities’ and Indicators.” Environment and Urbanization 29, no. 1 (2017): 89–102.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kitchin, Rob. “The Real-Time City? Big Data and Smart Urbanism.” GeoJournal 79, no. 1 (2014): 1–14.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kitchin, Rob. “Making Sense of Smart Cities. Addressing Present Shortcomings.” Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 8, no. 1 (2015): 131–136.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kritische Geographie Berlin. “Tourismus.” In Handbuch kritische Stadtgeographie, edited by Bernd Belina, Matthias Naumann and Anke Strüver. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2018. 312–317.

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  • Lefebvre, Henri. The Urban Revolution. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003 (orig. 1970).

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  • Marvin, Simon, and Andrés Luque-Ayala. “Urban Operating Systems. Diagramming the City.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 41, no. 1 (2017): 84–103.

    Google Scholar 

  • Marvin, Simon, Andrés Luque-Ayala, and Colin McFarlane, eds. Smart Urbanism. Utopian Vision or False dawn? London: Routledge, 2016.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mattern, Shannon. “Interfacing Urban Intelligence.” Places Online Journal. 2014. https://placesjournal.org/article/interfacing-urban-intelligence.

  • McFarlane, Colin. “Towards More Inclusive Smart Cities?” In Beware of Smart People. Redefining the Smart City Paradigm towards Inclusive Urbanism, edited by Jörg Stollmann et al. Berlin: Universitätsverlag der TU Berlin, 2016. 89–94.

    Google Scholar 

  • McFarlane, Colin, and Ola Söderström. “On Alternative Smart Cities.” City 21, nos. 3–4 (2017): 312–328.

    Google Scholar 

  • McNeill, Donald. “Global Firms and Smart Technologies: IBM and the Reduction of Cities.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 40, no. 4 (2015): 562–574.

    Google Scholar 

  • Morozov, Evgeny, and Francesca Bria. Die Smarte Stadt neu denken. 2017. https://www.rosalux.de/publikation/id/38134/die-smarte-stadt-neu-denken.

  • Peck, Jamie, Nik Theodore, and Neil Brenner. “Neoliberal Urbanism. Models, Moments, Mutations.” SAIS Review of International Affairs 29 (2009): 49–66.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rauth, Elke. Smart Tales of the City. 2015. https://www.eurozine.com/smart-tales-of-the-city.

  • Rosol, Marit, Gwendolyn Blue, and Victoria Fast. “Social Justice in the Digital Age: Re-thinking the Smart City with Nancy Fraser.” UCCities Working Paper 1. 2019. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/wkqy2.

  • Shaw, Joe, and Mark Graham, eds. Our Digital Rights to the City. London: Meatspace Press, 2017.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. “An Informational Right to the City? Code, Content, Control, and the Urbanization of Information.” Antipode 49, no. 4 (2017): 907–927.

    Google Scholar 

  • Söderström, Ola, Till Paasche, and Francisco Klauser. “Smart Cities as Corporate Storytelling.” City 18, no. 3 (2014): 307–320.

    Google Scholar 

  • Strüver, Anke. “Am laufenden (Fitness-)Band.” In Kritische Perspektiven auf die Digitalisierung in Städten, edited by Sybille Bauriedl and Anke Strüver. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2018. 139–153.

    Google Scholar 

  • Swyngedouw, Erik, and Maria Kaika. “Urban Political Ecology. Great Promises, Deadlock… and New Beginnings?” Documents d’Anàlisi Geogràfica 60, no. 3 (2014): 459–481.

    Google Scholar 

  • Townsend, Anthony M. Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia. New York: W. W. Norton, 2013.

    Google Scholar 

  • Vanolo, Alberto. “Smartmentality. The Smart City as Disciplinary Strategy.” Urban Studies 51, no. 5 (2014): 883–898.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. “Is There Anybody Out There? The Place and Role of Citizens in Tomorrow’s Smart Cities.” Futures 82 (2016): 26–36.

    Google Scholar 

  • Waitz, Thomas. “Gig-Economy, unsichtbare Arbeit und Plattformkapitalismus.” Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaften 16 (2017): 178–183.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wiig, Alan. “The Empty Rhetoric of the Smart City: From Digital Inclusion to Economic Promotion in Philadelphia.” Urban Geography 37, no. 4 (2016): 535–553.

    Google Scholar 

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Graz, Graz, Austria

    Anke Strüver

  2. European University of Flensburg, Flensburg, Germany

    Sybille Bauriedl

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  1. Anke Strüver
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  1. Joseph Carlebach School Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

    Martin Kindermann

  2. University of Flensburg (EUF), Flensburg, Germany

    Rebekka Rohleder

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Strüver, A., Bauriedl, S. (2020). Smart City Narratives and Narrating Smart Urbanism. In: Kindermann, M., Rohleder, R. (eds) Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55269-5_10

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