Constructing the sustainable city: examining the role of sustainability in the ‘smart city’ discourse

ABSTRACT

The idea of the ‘smart city’ is increasingly central to debates on urban development and sustainability, and a host of cities are now pursuing ‘smartness’ as a way to improve energy efficiency, transport, and public services. However, existing research does not provide a clear picture of how this smart city agenda actually contributes to sustainability. The social science literature has been critical toward urban smartness, with most of the empirical research focusing on the politics of data-driven and entrepreneurial urbanism. This article seeks to contribute to this debate by empirically examining the role that sustainability plays in the smart city discourse. Its distinctive approach is to investigate how urban smartness and sustainability are framed by an authoritative institution (the European Union) and then to trace these framings down to a particular city (Stavanger, Norway). The data show that the smartness approach is strongly tied to innovation, technology, and economic entrepreneurialism, and sustainability does not appear to be a very important motivating driver. Nevertheless, the ‘sustainability component’ of the smart city agenda becomes clearer the closer we come to the city level.

KEYWORDS:

• Smart city
• sustainability
• European Union
• discourse
• contextualization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Håvard Haarstad is Research Professor at the Department of Geography, University of Bergen, Norway. His research interests are sustainable urban development and low-carbon energy transformations. His work has been published in a range of journals in geography and social science, including Progress in Human Geography, Political Geography, Geoforum, and Cities.

ORCiD

Håvard Haarstad http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2791-9282

Additional information

Funding

The research for this article was funded by the Bergen Research Foundation (the European cities as actors in climate and energy transformations project) and the Akademia agreement between the University of Bergen and Statoil (the ENTRANS project).