Placebo urban interventions: Observing Smart City narratives in Santiago de Chile

Abstract

The implementation of the Smart City (SC) model in Santiago, Chile has not heralded any significant interventions in terms of scale, urban impact, amount invested, technological innovation or architectural design. Instead, material interventions have been small and have had little more than a superficial impact upon the perceptions of citizens. The significance of observing ‘Smart’ interventions in Santiago involves analysing their implementation under a provincialising lens in order to observe the way local experience transforms monist ways of thinking about SCs. Based on ethnographic observation of an SC intervention (in Paseo Bandera, Santiago de Chile), four principles of intervention were identified: democratisation of the city, spatial appropriation by citizens, social and technological innovation and local and territorialised interventions. These principles help to identify the intervention as an urban placebo, which the article argues works through the fictions of effective interventions and urban image improvement that seek to participate in worlding practices whilst, in reality, very little is being improved or effectively addressed in the city. Paseo Bandera SC intervention presents a narrative of modern, sustainable and technologically advanced urban planning in the form of specific material interventions, when in fact it involves very little modernity, sustainability or technology, and is little more than a continuation and evolution of the neoliberal urban model that exists in Chile.

Smart cities: Between worlding and provincialising

“…This theme holds true across geographical contexts. In Santiago, Chile, Jirón et al (2021) highlight the tension between a desire for situated (provincialised) urbanism and global smart city ideals, showing that the outcome of ‘award-winning’ smart city initiatives is merely placebo urban interventions that emulate world-class cities with reproduced but locally untenable aesthetics. Chang et al (2021) argue that the smart city is employed as a political strategy for urban regime transition through the example of Taipei’s Ko administration, demonstrating the way the worlding project of smart urbanism, embedded in a global landscape of fast policy, takes on local character as it is mobilised within local urban regimes.…”

“…All of the articles account for power relations in different ways. Across the articles, we see different analyses of power, with explorations of subjects ranging from neoliberal governmentality (Breslow, 2021) to splintered and uneven development and the digital divide (Jirón et al, 2021; Mouton, 2021; Spicer et al, 2021) and growth machine politics (Chang et al, 2021). This is familiar terrain for analyses of smart urbanism and smart cities projects, yet each article has its own conceptualisation within the worlding and provincialising frames.…”

Latin American smart cities: Between worlding infatuation and crawling provincialising

“…SC initiatives in Santiago are minor in scope, impact, investment and visibility (Jirón et al, 2021). SC is implemented through a narrative of possibilities that smartness can provide to the city in terms of commercial prospects, innovation and citizen participation.…”

¿Qué hay detrás de las intervenciones urbanas? Elementos históricos para develar las racionalidades urbanísticas en Chile

“…Finalmente, destaca una lógica aún incipiente pero con potenciales de crecimiento sobre todo por su alto nivel de divulgación, la que que podría identificarse como "Smart Cities", donde se promueve un conjunto de ideas para transformar las ciudades a partir de innovaciones tecnológicas tanto en la generación de información como en la eficiencia de las mismas. Pese a no estar ampliamente discutida ni implementada, son los actores privados los más interesados en la difusión de dicha reciente tendencia (Irazábal & Jirón, 2020;Jirón et al, 2020).…”

“…La práctica concreta del Urbanismo puede observarse a través de sus intervenciones urbanas, las cuales funcionan como materialización de modelos de ciudad, normas, herramientas de planificación y narrativas urbanas (Jirón et al, 2020), elementos que, al articularse, operan como "racionalidades urbanísticas", es decir, un conjunto de estrategias que orientan la transformación urbana y respaldan y justifican diversas formas de hacer ciudad.…”