“Build it and they will come”? A critical examination of utopian planning practices and their socio-spatial impacts in Malaysia's “intelligent city”

Transforming City Governments for Successful Smart Cities

“…Without going into much detail, it is reasonable to imagine that the smart city concept party stems from the overlapping and assembly of these two concepts of 'intelligent city' and 'smart growth' McFarlane 2011;Allwinkle and Cruickshank 2011) and, not surprisingly, the expression 'smart city' has been literally used in some former publications related to the two concepts (Arun 1999;Brooker 2012). …”

From ‘wannabe’ Silicon Valley to global back office? Examining the socio‐spatial consequences of technopole planning practices in Malaysia

“…These planners reduced Cyberjaya's urbanity to a hybridised utopia of part science park and part garden city -an exclusive work paradise for technocratic elites whereby its uniform composition, rational arrangements of space and symbolic architectural form are designed to place it in the cultural and territorial 'ideal' of technopoles (Wakeman, 2003). As acknowledged in research interviews with MDEC and the JBPD, localised features were consciously erased, or downplayed, as Cyberjaya was deliberately designed to assert the physicality of a new Malaysian modernity (Brooker, 2012). The ostentatious steel and glass office entrances of the corporate campuses serve to differentiate Cyberjaya from the surrounding areas, and superficially mark its space as 'modern', which inadvertently masks the expanding power of MNCs over non-sovereign territory.…”

City of Rents: The limits to the Barcelona model of urban competitiveness

“…There is already a considerable critical literature on urban competitiveness and the KBE‐related issues introduced above, approaching the matter variously from the vantage point of cultural, socioeconomic and socio‐spatial analysis (e.g. Peck, ; Wilson and Keil, ; Krätke, ; Brooker, ; Rodaki, ). Our analysis adds to this literature, but does so by adopting a different theoretical point of departure — that of Marxian value theory and the approach to understanding the urban process pioneered by Harvey in particular.…”