![Sample our Geography journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5937/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Geography.jpg"})
Abstract
On 4 November 2011, the trademark ‘smarter cities’ was officially registered as belonging to IBM. This was an important milestone in a struggle between IT companies over visibility and legitimacy in the smart city market. Drawing on actor-network theory and critical planning theory, the paper analyzes IBM's smarter city campaign and finds it to be storytelling, aimed at making the company an ‘obligatory passage point’ in the implementation of urban technologies. Our argument unfolds in three parts. We first trace the emergence of the term ‘smart city’ in the public sphere. Secondly, we show that IBM's influential story about smart cities is far from novel but rather mobilizes and revisits two long-standing tropes: systems thinking and utopianism. Finally, we conclude, first by addressing two critical questions raised by this discourse: technocratic reductionism and the introduction of new moral imperatives in urban management; and second, by calling for the crafting of alternative smart city stories.
Acknowledgements
This paper is based on the research ‘Smarter Cities: New Urban Policy Model in the Making’, funded by the EU-COST Action ‘Living in Surveillance Societies’ (LiSS).
Notes
1 In this paper, we alternatively use the terms ‘smart cities’ and ‘smarter cities’. Both refer to the same idea and are often used interchangeably in the literature and online publications. The difference between the two is that ‘smart city’ is legally unprotected and can thus be used more freely or is interpreted and applied more widely while ‘smarter cities’, as we explain below, legally belongs to IBM and refers to the company's software and campaigns. We therefore use the term smart city to discuss existing literature and when tracing the origins of the smart city idea, while we use smarter cities when discussing IBM's campaign.
2 A ‘model’, etymologically, is a figure to be reproduced (Söderström and Paquot Citation2012, 41). See also developments below on urban models and the utopian planning genre.
3 As exact search parameters we used ‘smart! city’ allowing a search for all word combinations starting with smart and city (in newspapers only). There were 1952 matches, date of search: 5 September 2012.
4 The Adelaide project failed in 1997 due to a lack of investments leading to the fact that it eventually became an ordinary business park. For analyses of the Malaysian case, see: Bunnell (Citation2002), Lepawsky (Citation2005) and Brooker (Citation2013).
7 In 2001, Cisco started, together with the developer Gale International, to build the smart city of Songdo in South Korea and in 2010 founded the ‘Smart and Connected Communities Institute’ and the ‘Connected Urban Development Initiative’ where the company's research on urban technologies is being conducted. In 2011, Siemens decided to invest on a huge scale in a new Infrastructure and Cities division and its own version of smart urbanism. Microsoft entered the game in 2013 with its City Next initiative.
8 The site analyzed is the US site of the smarter cities campaign which is richest in information (www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/smarter_cities/overview/index.html and www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/thesmartercity/index_flash.html). Country-specific websites are slimmed down and translated versions of the US sites.
9 According to the market research company ABI (https://www.abiresearch.com/press/395-billion-will-be-spent-on-smart-city-technologi).
10 According to the market research company Navigant (www.navigantresearch.com/research/navigant-research-leaderboard-report-smart-city-suppliers).
11 See, for instance, http://www.navigantresearch.com/research/navigant-research-leaderboard-report-smart-city-suppliers
12 In IBM's words: ‘What makes a city? The answer, of course, is all three [pillars]’ (http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/smarter_cities/overview/index.html).
13 On its interactive site, IBM does not use the hierarchy of main and sub-pillars but uses a list of 11 individual pillars, but there are only minor differences in content (cf. http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/thesmartercity/index_flash.html).
14 The project started in 2010 (http://www-03.ibm.com/software/products/us/en/intelligent-operations-center/). Siemens's City Cockpit, first showcased in Singapore in 2009, is another variation of the same idea.
15 Speech given at USC Price, School of Policy Planning and Development in November 2011 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpFyQOW_ldQ).
17 Interestingly however, Cook (the company's above-mentioned systems thinker in chief) refers to Donella H. Meadows, lead author of The Limits to Growth, and author of a humanistic/environmentalist plea for systems thinking building on more elaborate complex systems theory (Meadows et al. Citation1972).
20 See, for instance: http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/smarter_cities/overview/index.html; http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/healthcare_solutions/ideas/index.html; http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/government/ideas/index.html
21 For Choay (Citation1997) there are two main traditions, the utopian one, that she calls the model, and ‘the rule’ for which urban planning is based on a set of generative principles and which finds its origin in Leon Battista Alberti's De re aedificatoria (1485).
24 See, for instance: http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/thesmartercity/communications/chapter3.html#!/0; http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/thesmartercity/traffic/index.html#!/1; http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/thesmartercity/airports/index.html#!/3
26 IBM manager, interview 13 February 2013.
28 For instance: http://www.smart-cities.eu/benchmarking.html
29 On the EU program, see: http://ec.europa.eu/eip/smartcities/
Additional information
Ola Söderström is Professor at the Institut de Géographie, Université de Neuchâtel.
Till Paasche is a lecturer in the Department of Geography at Soran University, Soran City, Kurdish Region, Iraq. Email: [email protected]
Francisco Klauser is Assistant Professor at the Institut de Géographie, Université de Neuchâtel. Email: [email protected]