Over the past decade, much has been written about the potential of smart urbanism to bring about various and lasting forms of betterment. The embedding of digital technologies within urban infrastructures has been well documented, and the efficiencies of smart models of urban governance and management have been lauded. More recently, however, the discourse has been labelled ‘hegemonic’, and accused of developing a view of smart technology that is blinkered by its failure to critique its socio-political effects. By focusing on the case of Singapore’s ‘Smart Nation’ initiative, this paper embraces the paradoxes at the heart of smart urbanism and, in doing so, interrogates the tension between ideology and praxis, efficiency and control, access and choice, and smart governance and smart citizenship. It also demonstrates how such tensions are (re)produced through ‘fourthspace’ – the digitally enabled spaces of urbanism that are co-created, and that contribute to an expansion and diffusion of social and political responsibility. It ends by suggesting how such spaces have the potential to radically transform not just the urban environment, but also the role of government and citizens in designing urban futures.

In this article, we survey a growing body of literature within geography and other intersecting fields that trains attention on what inclusive smart cities are, or what they could be. In doing so, we build on debates around smart citizens, smart public participation, and grassroots and bottom‐up smart cities that are concerned with making smart cities more inclusive. The growing critical scholarship on such discourses, however, alerts us to the knowledge politics that are involved in, and the urban inequalities that are deeply rooted within, the urban. Technological interventions contribute to these politics and inequalities in various ways. Accordingly, we discuss limitations of the current discourses around inclusive smart cities and suggest a need for a nuanced definition of ‘inclusiveness’. We also discuss the necessity to further engage with critical data studies in order to ‘know’ what we are critiquing.

The paper reviews the corpus of research that attempts to explain the process of religious conversion, and explores the ways in which geographers can add new perspectives to the discourse. It argues that religious conversion is a phenomenon that goes beyond the reorientation of individual belief, and is instead a process of change that involves the (re)definition of self and other. Five conceptual frames are proposed – (1) conversion of space; (2) spaces of conversion; (3) spaces of negotiation; (4) the (im)mobile convert; and (5) the (dis)embodied convert – which are used to help define the geographies of religious conversion.

Existing religious economy models maintain that as religious regulation increases, levels of interreligious competition decrease. But new understandings of the market dynamics of religious oligopolies necessitate new understandings of religious competitiveness. A relational model of competitiveness using the case of evangelical Christianity in Buddhist-majority Sri Lanka is proposed. In Sri Lanka the informal religious economy is defined by competitiveness among evangelical Christian groups and, although not recognized by the state, is closely regulated. The focus in this article is on the scalar determinations of evangelical competitiveness, patterns of secrecy and subterfuge, the formation of strategic extra-group networks that enable competitiveness, and outcomes of a relational model. Three insights are offered that can be used as a starting point for further work on religious oligopolies, informal economies, and relational understandings of religious competition.

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