Elaborating the urbanism in smart urbanism: distilling relevant dimensions for a comprehensive analysis of Smart City approaches

ABSTRACT

Over the last decade, Smart City has increasingly become a popular urban policy approach of cities in both the Global North and Global South. Such approaches focus on digital and technology-driven urban innovation and are often considered to be a universal solution to varied urban issues in different cities. How Smart City policies operate in contemporary cities is being examined in the emerging, but still underdeveloped, academic field ‘smart urbanism’. The considerable consequences of Smart City strategies call for critical engagement with the rationale, methods, target group and implications of Smart City approaches in different urban contexts. The aim of this paper is to further such critical engagement by distilling dimensions absent in current smart urbanism. We do so by exploring both the academic field of critical urbanism and smart urbanism and through that develop our contributions to the smart urbanism debate from existing theoretical and conceptual approaches within critical urbanism. We distilled three dimensions that require further development to facilitate a comprehensive analysis of what Smart City policies mean for contemporary urban life: (1) the acknowledgement that the urban is not confined to the administrative boundaries of a city; (2) the importance of local social-economic, cultural-political and environmental contingencies in analysing the development, implementation and effects of Smart City policies; and (3) the social-political construction of both the urban problems Smart City policies aim to solve and the considered solutions. As such, we argue that there is a lack of consideration for ‘the urbanism’ in smart urbanism.

KEYWORDS:

• Smart City
• smart urbanism
• critical urbanism
• Global South
• cities
• urban policy

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful for the useful comments of anonymous reviewers of a previous version of this paper. In addition, they would like to thank Dennis Rodgers, participants of the Smart + Green panel series at the AAG 2016 and colleagues of the GPIO urban reading lunches for inspirational discussions and insights which have been critical to the development of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Hebe Verrest is Human Geographer and Assistant Professor in International Development Studies at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research, University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on medium-sized cities, particularly The Caribbean. Leading in her work is a focus on exclusion and inequality, which comes back in more specific themes that she conducts research on: urban governance, spatial planning, digital technologies, climate change, livelihoods and entrepreneurship [email: [email protected]].

Karin Pfeffer is a Geographer and Full Professor in Infrastructuring Urban Futures at the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente. Her fields of interest are the generation of information from different spatial data sources in urban areas using GIS and remote sensing, and how information is used in urban planning and governance. Specific topics include urban poverty and spatial inequalities, geo- and digital technologies, and urban governance [email: [email protected]].

ORCID

Hebe Verrest http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2812-4155