Is this a smart city? Narratives of city smartness and their critical assessment

Panel: 4. Mobility, transport, and smart and sustainable cities

This is a peer-reviewed paper.

Authors:
Andreas Huber, Eifer - European Institute for Energy Research, Germany
Ines Imbert, European Institute for Energy Research, Germany

Abstract

Smart Cities have been repeatedly suggested as a solution leading to resource efficient, low carbon cities. However, up to now the term Smart City has remained a fuzzy concept, which is only vaguely defined. This article shall contribute to a better understanding of the term. Based on the results of a media analysis and a small number of expert interviews with representatives from European cities, city associations and consultancies, it is argued that the Smart City concept does not provide a specific new normative orientation. Instead, our data analysis revealed three process-related dimensions of Smart Cities: 1) the way of collecting, processing and connecting available information through information and communication technologies (instrumental dimension), 2) the rules and processes of defining objectives and actions for future city development (administrative dimension) and 3) the reorganization of interaction patterns between city stakeholders, that is a multi-stakeholder, participatory, experimental, and “co-creative” transformation processes (governance dimension). We critically discuss these conceptual foundations, namely its idea of technically “optimizing” cities (1st dimension), its slightly naïve expectations towards transversal urban planning structures (2nd dimension), and its harmonic, uncontroversial picture of city transformation processes, where power struggles appear to be largely absent (3rd dimension). All in all, we argue that the Smart Cities concept as revealed by our data has a strong utopian bias which neglects the hurdles of real life urban transformations.