The smart city and its publics: insights from across six UK cities

Abstract

In response to policy-makers’ increasing claims to prioritise ‘people’ in smart city development, we explore the publicness of emerging practices across six UK cities: Bristol, Glasgow, London, Manchester, Milton Keynes, and Peterborough. Local smart city programmes are analysed as techno-public assemblages invoking variegated modalities of publicness. Our findings challenge the dystopian speculative critiques of the smart city, while nevertheless indicating the dominance of ‘entrepreneurial’ and ‘service user’ modes of the public. We highlight the risk of bifurcation within smart city assemblages, such that the ‘civic’ and ‘political’ roles of the public become siloed into less obdurate strands of programmatic activity.

Keywords:

• smart cities
• future cities
• UK
• assemblage theory
• public
• publicness

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Corrigendum

Acknowledgements

This study was undertaken at the University of Westminster with financial support from ESRC grant ES/L015978/1. Youri Dayot was Visiting Fellow from the University of Grenoble.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.​

Notes

1. The two terms (‘smart city’, ‘future city’) are complementary and often used interchangeably, especially in the UK national policy context (see e.g. BSI 2014, 3; also; Joss, Cook, and Dayot, forthcoming). It is beyond the scope of this paper to delve into the conceptual interrelationship of these recent policy terms in more detail.

2. A fuller list of the key documents and links to relevant web pages consulted has been made publicly available on the lead author’s ResearchGate web pages: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert_Cowley.

3. More detailed descriptions of many of the individual activities and bodies analysed in the present research may be found in the ‘grey literature’ (see e.g. Caprotti et al. 2016; Woods et al. 2016).

4. With the exception of some concerns in Glasgow about the use of facial recognition software in the city’s CCTV system, linked to the Operation Centre (Sunday Herald 2014; Aitchinson 2015).

Additional information

Funding

This study was undertaken ​at the University of Westminster, as part of the ESRC-funded project ‘Smart Eco-cities for a Green Economy: a Comparative Study of Europe and China’ (grant ES/L015978/1).