Some thoughts on Ralf-Martin Soe, Luiza Schuch de Azambuja, Kalle Toiskallio, Marko Nieminen & Michael Batty (2021): Institutionalising smart city research and innovation: from fuzzy definitionsto real-life experiments, urban research & practice, 2021

Keywords:

• smart city
• fuzzy concepts
• critical empirical research
• social imagination

The article ‘Institutionalising Smart City Research and Innovation’ consists of three parts, which are only very loosely connected to each other: 1) a complaint about the inconsistent use of the term ‘smart city’, 2) a survey of established global research centres dealing with smart cities, and 3) a presentation of the research and practice activities of the FinEst Centre for Smart Cities, a Tallinn-based recently founded EU-funded organisation for research and innovation to which most of the authors belong. The author’s basic idea is to bundle the scattered smart city discussions by looking at the work of ‘actual smart city research actors’, claiming that ‘understanding these actors can help to reason the smart city as a concept’. Since I find my fundamental discomfort with this approach astutely articulated in Kitchin’s commentary, I would like to touch on two points in particular.

The productive nebulosity of the smart city (and other) concept(s)

There is hardly a contribution to the smart city debate that does not begin with the undisputable observation that there is no uniform definition of the term. Arguably, „smart city“ has become one of the most prominent global urban concepts – already in 2012, it has overtaken the ‘sustainable city’ in terms of occurrence in scientific literature (de Jong et al. (2015), 29, 36). Outside of academia, numerous players from the state, the private sector and civil society are also actively involved in the smart city debate, and arguably even more important in shaping it. As a consequence, the discourse today is unmanageable and can probably only be overviewed with the help of bibliometric methods, if at all.

Obviously, “smart city“ is a concept to which a vast variety of actors, institutions and networks can, want or feel obliged to relate, affirmatively or critically. With the multiplicity of agendas and perspectives involved, the range of smart city understandings also grows; the term inevitably becomes blurry. What geographers Werth and Marienthal (2016, 720) note about the terminus gentrification also applies here: ‘It is popular because it is polyvalent, and it is polyvalent because it is popular.’ Today, „smart city“ can quite safely be counted among the ‘empty signifiers’ to which a wide variety of meanings can be assigned; in this sense, Wiig (2016, 547) calls it ‘a vacant rhetorical device able to be filled with any number of comparable or conflicting definitions’.

However, it is a misunderstanding to see this automatically as a problem. Quite the opposite is true: It is precisely the vagueness or ambiguity of a concept that makes it connectible and hence productive. Rhetorical counter-question to the authors: Is there any concept of greater social or political relevance that is characterized by conceptual clarity and rigor? Literary scholar Gurr (2021, 126f) even accredits the characterizing ambiguity of such plans or programs with the ‘social function’ of fostering social connection: ‘By allowing more diverse groups of stakeholders to find points of identification, narratives with a certain fuzziness and indeterminacy, those which leave room for interpretation and negotiation, are more rather than less socially binding than precise narratives, and thus more conducive to generating social cohesion and to canvassing public support’.

We can therefore conclude that only open enough concepts are able to spark debate and open new lines of policy, planning and research, and, like it or not, we have to concede that ‘smart cities’ obviously does the trick. Against this background, I contend that we should reverse the perspective and take the softness of concepts like ‘smart city’ (or ‘gentrification’) no longer as a problem to be solved through academic effort, but rather as a necessary quality of any concept that sets out to unfold social impact and meaning. And the latter is what then urgently needs to be researched and debated.

Critical empirical research and social imagination

With these remarks, I therefore expressly do not want to claim that the concept of the smart city is innocuous – on the contrary. Buzzwords in particular do require critical reflection. For discourses are translated into concrete and practical plans, projects and measures, as not only the countless smart city funding programmes show. Under the label of „smart city“, comprehensive and far-reaching interventions into the social and spatial fabric of the cities are purposefully undertaken.

For even if the ‘hype term’ smart city will certainly fade out or even away at some point, the material and symbolic changes instigated in its name will shape urban life for a long time to come. We therefore have to look closely at the different meanings attributed to „smart city“ in each case. Instead of lamentation, we need critical empirical research and political debate.

This is also urgent because there are significant normative and practical political issues at stake in smart city visions and projects, especially from a planning perspective. Dealing with smart city concepts inevitably raises the question of which kind of city we actually want to live in. The groundwork for the city of tomorrow is being laid today. ‘Ultimately it comes down to a basic social and political choice. What will we use the multifaceted and sometimes contradictory affordances of digital technology for?’ (Mitchell 2000, 82) Despite all (often quite ambivalent) efforts to involve smart citizens (Blom and Zandbergen 2015), this question has so far been answered mainly by corporations and governments, i.e. top down. Accordingly, as noted by many scholars and activists, digital technology is deployed primarily in order to reaffirm and optimize entrepreneurial, competitive, growth-oriented and often neoliberal urban policies and governance. Ratti and Claudel (2016, 31), however, emphasize that there is no necessity for the ‘digitally integrated city’ to be engineered in this sense. On the contrary, ‘ubiquitous computing’ could also be used in a ‘more human-centric’ and ‘empowering’ way: ‘What if the same mechanisms of smart optimization allowed people to take ownership of their city and make improvements that only residents could dream up?’ A digital city could be programmed towards many goals; which ones will be pursued is a matter of social negotiation processes. ‘A traffic system of autonomous cars could be optimized for maximum throughput, or for maximum sharing within social networks, or for maximum novelty and surprise.’ (ibid., 35)

For such questions to be openly posed and debated at all, broad and significant ‘bottom-up’ movement by active and engaged citizens, civil society groups, and other key stakeholders capable of exerting political pressure would be required. Since such a powerful movement is not yet in sight, urban research and practice projects that stimulate social imagination and ask for alternative visions for the smart city are all the more needed. Soe et al. conclude that ‘larger-scale smart city studies should be built on real-life problems, even the wicked ones’. Here is a short, unfinished list of very concrete and urgent concerns that I think meet both criteria: privacy, anonymity, surveillance, data sovereignty and control, citizen participation and co-creation, gig-economy, social inequality and justice … But in the end, it always will boil down to the question of the ideals and objectives toward which the smart city can and should be (re)conceived, (re)designed and (re)programmed. It would be great if the FinEst Centre and the numerous other academic centres could put (also) such questions at the center of their work.

Disclosure statement

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