Making sense of smart cities: addressing present shortcomings

Abstract

This commentary characterises and critiques research on smart cities. I argue that much of the writing and rhetoric about smart cities seeks to appear non-ideological, commonsensical and pragmatic. More critically orientated scholarship, while making vital conceptual and political interventions, presently has four shortcomings that inhibit making sense of and refashioning the smart city agenda: the lack of detailed genealogies of the concept and initiatives, the use of canonical examples and one-size fits all narratives, an absence of indepth empirical case studies of specific smart city initiatives and comparative research that contrasts smart city developments in different locales and weak collaborative engagement with various stakeholders. These shortcomings are elaborated, accompanied with suggestions for addressing them.

Smart Cities: Towards a New Citizenship Regime? A Discourse Analysis of the British Smart City Standard

“…Scholars interrogate the relationship between smart city projects and neoliberalism, particularly concerning the corporatization of city management and technocratic governance (e.g., Greenfield, 2013;Townsend, 2013;Söderström et al, 2014;Vanolo, 2014;Calzada and Cobo, 2015;Hollands, 2015;Kitchin, 2015); draw attention to the effects of urban surveillance and digital governance facilitated by "big data" (e.g., Graham, 2012;Gabrys, 2014;Kitchin, 2014;Rabari and Storper, 2015); query the claim that smart cities necessarily contribute to sustainable development (e.g., Gargiulo Morelli et al, 2013;Viitanen and Kingston, 2014;; lastly, highlight the apparent hype surrounding smart city initiatives driven by marketing campaigns focused on finding uses for new technologies (e.g., Saunders and Baeck, 2015). Throughout, questions have emerged about how to (re)cast the smart city with greater public, local inflection or, as Saunders and Baeck (2015) suggest, "rethinking smart cities from the ground up."…”

How to Become a Smart City: Learning from Amsterdam

“…In the literature produced to date, there is an evident lack of explicit and holistic procedures that can be used to guide the actors involved in the development of smart city strategies towards successful results (Abdoullaev 2011;Angelidou 2014;Chourabi et al 2012;Frei et al 2012;GSMA et al 2011;Hollands 2008;Komninos 2011;Nam and Pardo 2011b). This consideration is valid for any type of city, whether small, medium, or large in size, precisely as observed by Kitchin (2014): "presently [research on smart cities] has four shortcomings [including] an absence of in-depth empirical case studies of specific smart city initiatives and comparative research that contrasts smart city developments in different locales". Only a few examples of procedures can be found in scientific publications, but they are characterized by a low level of detail and come mainly from the gray literature produced by the corporate sector (Dirks et al 2010;Berthon and Guittat 2011;Clarke 2013).…”

Thinking about Smart Cities: The Travels of a Policy Idea that Promises a Great Deal, but So Far Has Delivered Modest Results

“…. the global networked city of dispersed, highly interactive economic nodes linked by massive networks of airports, highways, and communications"; this contrasts with what Rob Kitchin [5] noted in 2015, that the origins of the smart city should not be found solely in the search for technological utopias. With these two thoughts in mind, there has been a transition from creating a city whose foundations are computers and microelectronics to one where cities add technology to the already standing infrastructures to allow them to grow efficiently.…”

“…Albert Meijer notes in his analysis of 51 recently published articles that, in over a third of recent articles on smart cities, the smart city is not defined [5]. Nor, in most cases, is there an explicit perspective on how the smart city should be governed.…”