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ABSTRACT
Governments and companies across the globe are promoting smart cities, and their developments usually reflect both globally shared ideas and locally specific agendas and implementations. This paper examines the smart cities of Singapore and Seoul – two key global cities in Asia with legacies of state-led developmentalism. It discusses the two cities’ latest smart city endeavors, trajectories, and policy motivations. In particular, it explores the role of smart city policy in governments’ local and global agendas for development and argues that the two acclaimed cases can be interpreted as globally-oriented neo-developmentalist smart cities. In doing so, this paper also explains that the typically assumed developmentalist feature becomes much more complicated as it intermixes with the global cities’ international outlooks and aspirations as well as the changing demands from citizens in the post-developmental era.
Highlights
I examine the two ‘actually-existing’ global smart cities in Asia.
I explore the role of smart city policy in local and global agendas for development.
Singapore and Seoul reflect globally-oriented neo-developmentalist smart cities.
Singapore and Seoul are not hardware-driven developmentalist smart cities.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 For example, in 2018, Singapore and Seoul ranked second and third, respectively, in the smart city ranking by the Eden Strategy Institute, and ranked sixth and seventh in the IESE Business School ranking.
2 According to the AT Kearney Global City Index 2020, Singapore ranked ninth and Seoul ranked seventeenth among 151 cities ranked worldwide.
3 Instead of ‘smart city,’ U-City (or Ubiquitous-City) was a commonly-used term in Korea during the 2000s.
4 Nonetheless, the smart city winter does not equate to the cessation of national plans. Korea’s U-City Act was enacted in 2008, and until 2013, the U-City plan focused on physical infrastructure developments in the form of new towns. From 2014 onwards, the U-City plan was revised to include existing cities and began to promote information and data infrastructure. Yet, between 2010 and 2016, only one new U-City project was developed in Korea (Hwang, Citation2020), and even under the second revised Act, the development of smart services in existing cities has been rather lacking (MOLIT, Citation2019). In 2017, however, President Moon Jae-in announced the smart city as Korea’s economic growth engine amid the imminent Fourth Industrial Revolution, igniting a new interest in smart cities. The U-city plan was revised again in 2017, now renamed the Smart City Act.
5 In particular, Digital Global Seoul 2020 launched in 2016 under Mayor Park – who sought after the transformation towards citizen-centric urban governance – had two out of its main four pillars emphasizing the social component (i.e. Social Seoul City and Digital Social Innovation); the other two pillars are Diginomics and Global Digital Leader.
6 Please see www.smartnation.sg for more details.
7 For an explanation of regionalizing domestic economy as a development strategy in Singapore, see Yeung and Olds (Citation1998).
8 SMG also exported TOPIS to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam in 2016, and its Tax High-Tech System to Colombo, Sri Lanka in 2018.
9 In particular, during Mayor Park’s regime that underscored citizen participation and empowerment, SMG greatly promoted open data and smart apps that foster communications with citizens (Zhou et al., Citation2016).
10 SMG considers that the well-known domestic high-tech corporations, such as Samsung, LG, etc., can equally provide what is offered by global high-tech companies. With its strong domestic IT capacity, SMG is not under pressure to buy foreign companies’ smart solutions (J. Hwang, personal communication, March 18, 2021; K. Kwon, personal communication, March 21, 2021).
11 In addition to SK planet providing the necessary IT infrastructure for Bukchon, SMG also worked with KT – Korea’s largest telecommunications company – when developing bus routes for its late-night owl bus services. KT provided its big data of cell-phone users to be analyzed to optimize public bus routes targeting late night travelers in the city.
12 For example, smart apps similar to the Seoul Smart Complaint Reports app can be found globally in Singapore, New York, Los Angeles, Mumbai, etc.
13 Although further detailed studies are required, Hong Kong government’s latest comprehensive smart city plan claiming to be people-centric (Li, Nam, & Khoo, Citation2020), and Taipei’s attempt to use smart city as a strategy to strengthen its city diplomacy and to showcase local companies’ smart technologies for export (Wu, Citation2020) seem rather promising in relating them to this type of smart cities found in Singapore and Seoul.