Anticipatory logics of the smart city’s global imaginary

Abstract

The smart city encompasses a broad range of technological innovations which might be applied to any city for a wide variety of reasons. In this article, I make a distinction between local efforts to reshape the urban landscape, and a global smart city imaginary which those efforts draw upon and help sustain. While attention has been given to the malleability of the smart city concept at this global scale, there remains little effort to interrogate the way that the future is used to sanction specific solutions. Through a critical engagement with smart city marketing materials, industry documents, and consultancy reports, I explore how the future is recruited, rearranged, and represented as a rationalization for technological intervention in the present. This is performed amidst three recurring crises: massive demographic shifts and subsequent resource pressures, global climate change, and the conflicting demands of fiscal austerity that motivate the desire of so many cities to attract foreign direct investment and highly skilled workers. In revealing how crises are pre-empted, precautioned, and prepared for, I argue that the smart city imaginary normalizes a style and scale of response deemed appropriate under liberal capitalism.

Keywords:

• smart cities
• the urban age
• anticipation
• risk

Acknowledgements

My thanks to all those who provided encouraging feedback on this paper: Ruth Fincher, Mary Gilmartin, Brendan Gleeson, Aphra Kerr, Sam Kinsley, Rob Kitchin, Cian O’Callaghan, Rebecca King O’Riain, and Ben Singleton, as well as the two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

The research for this paper was funded by a European Research Council Advanced Investigator Award, “The Programmable City” [ERC-2012-AdG-323636].