Dreaming of smartness

QC 20260223

Abstract

A number of complex and intersecting crises such as the approaching climate disaster, ageing populations, political instability and growing economic inequalities are predicted to challenge urban life as we know it. The capacity of cities to appropriately employ digital tools and technologies is often presented as a measure for tackling these crises. Over the latter two decades, such ambitions have typically been sought under the ‘smart city’ label, where cities aim to saturate urban space with smart technologies and sensing devices to optimize and streamline urban space, including its management, practices and people.

This thesis contributes to existing scholarship on smart cities with an empirical assessment of the complex processes of contextual negotiation that are undertaken as smart city initiatives ‘land’ in various localities. In doing so, the thesis provides indepth insights into the mobilization, implementation and motivation of smart city initiatives, and discusses potential implications for urban governance. Empirically, the research builds on multi-sited field work in Nottingham, Stavanger, and Stockholm undertaken between 2017 and 2021 – exploring how local actors negotiate and mobilize smart urbanism at sites of implementation. This is followed by an in-depth analysis of the smart city initiative in Stockholm based on empirical studies from 2020 and 2021, and focuses on the hopes, dreams, and anticipations that motivate local actors to pursue smart urbanism. Theoretically, the thesis draws on scholarship within assemblage urbanism, relational geographies, and utopian thinking. Smart city policies are approached as an added element into local assemblages, with potential for transforming existing spatialities by establishing and altering relations within urban planning and governance. Perspectives from speculative materialism are applied as the thesis excavates the ‘utopian elements’ (more or less holistically articulated ideas and visions about ideal urban futures) embedded within pursuits of smartness. Directing a lens at the utopian elements of the smart city enables a critical discussion of how contemporary cities are perceived as defective or inadequate, and how digitalization is understood as a relevant measure to remedy this. It also allows for scrutiny of what is perceived as (im)possible and (ir)rational to imagine within contemporary urban governance. In this thesis, this is done by operationalizing ‘Utopia as Method’, developed by sociologist Ruth Levitas.

Altogether, the thesis reveals that local actors have significant manoeuvring space when smart urbanism is mobilized and negotiated locally, resulting in the smart city initiatives in Nottingham, Stavanger and Stockholm being shaped largely by interests, ambitions, inclinations and relations at the local level. However, the thesis further demonstrates how ambitions currently giving directions to smart urbanism revolve around ideas of a future increasingly controlled and dictated by digital technologies, with insufficient attention to the limited, fragmented, and biased knowledge these tools produce.

Ultimately, the thesis illustrate that practices and pursuits of smart urbanism respond to concerns about the extent to which urban spaces will be able to maintain key functions and qualities in a fraught future. Yet, the results indicate that local actors have narrow visions of smart urban futures, idealizing the continuous monitoring and controlling of urban space, prioritizing knowledge that can easily be amassed, and increasingly handing over decision making authority to technological tools and private actors. Within these ambitions, smart urban futures emerge as expected continuances of the socio-political status quo – largely preserving contemporary urban spaces, with mundane technological upgrades to urban infrastructure and management. The thesis concludes that cities undertaking digitalization efforts should be less concerned with competitive pursuits of technological leadership, and more preoccupied with ensuring open and democratic debate about the end goals of urban digitalization.

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