Smart urban living in Singapore? Thinking through everyday geographies

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the experience of individuals in urban spaces retrofitted with smart technologies. Drawing upon work on everyday life, I explore how people encounter smart technologies such as sensors and surveillance cameras in the home and neighborhood spaces. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with public housing residents in Singapore, I argue that most people’s engagements with smart technologies are more nuanced than conventional evaluations of smart urbanism that are either “good” or “bad”. On one level, some individuals are unaware that these technologies are at work in their everyday spaces. On another level, while there are those who are complicit in reproducing state-sanctioned rhetoric of smart urbanism as “efficient”, there are equally others who reject these technologies and their discourses. Beyond demonstrating how smart technologies are reconfiguring urban socio-spatial relations, this paper highlights the value of “the everyday” in understanding the politics, pervasiveness and preponderance of smart urbanization.

KEYWORDS:

• Smart urbanism
• everyday geographies
• technology-society relations
• experience
• Singapore

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Tim Bunnell, the editor, and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Pseudonyms are used in this paper to ensure the anonymity of my respondents. Basic information about my participants will be provided in the following way: (Name, Gender/Age Range).