Smart as a Global Vision? Exploring Smart in Local District Development Projects

Abstract

This article studies local enactments of "smart" in and through visions of six smart district development projects. We show that smart cities' framings of the future are inevitably diverse, emerging from local assemblages consisting of a wide array of heterogeneous elements that translate global imaginaries of the smart city to meet local specificities, needs and agendas. We demonstrate that visions may describe the process of district planning and design, the materiality of the envisioned district and the governance of the district; and that smart visions may play three distinct rolesthey may act as mobilizers, instrumentally (i.e. as tools to achieve specific sociotechnical goals) and to exclude alternatives. Knowledge forms a key constituent of smart visions, and acts to include some while excluding others. We therefore suggest that further research should focus on the political and controversial construction and use of knowledge in visioning processes.

Deliberating the knowledge politics of smart urbanism

“…First, with regard to the role of knowledge politics across all stages of such projects, we observed that choices with important future implications for the potential effects on the socio-material urban fabric of a smart experiment are continuously made, for example with regard to problem formulations, methods of data collection and analysis, reporting and communication, critique and validation, translation between settings and circulation, and applications in institutional practice and decision-making (de Hoop 2020; also see Chilvers and Kearnes 2016). However, in the projects that we observed, open deliberation on these issues only happened occasionally, and often in the form of a specific event, like a kick-off brainstorm meeting with multiple stakeholders, as we have seen in the Utrecht Slimcity project (de Hoop et al 2019), or with regard to specific aspects of the project's and technology's design, as we have seen in the GammaSense project in the Netherlands ( . Instead, we argue that deliberation should be a continuous endeavor and on the agenda of multiple moments of interaction before, during and after the project.…”

“…Inclusive multi-stakeholder engagement requires resources, time, and the motivation to persevere, especially when difficulties or unexpected events arise (Evans et al 2019). For example, in the Slim City project in Utrecht (de Hoop et al 2019), outcomes were expected within a predefined time-frame of 10 weeks, which led to conflicts between actors who wished to speed up the process, typically those that had to report back to their organizations, and actors who felt the need for more in-depth deliberation. Hence, we propose that an active effort should be made on the part of major players such as government authorities, company representatives etc., to include people and perspectives that are currently being de Hoop et al Urban Transformations (2022) 4:6 excluded.…”

“…Especially in district planning, such as in the SlimCity project, future residents are difficult to target. And if they were included, like in Brainport Smart District in Helmond, it was difficult for them to oversee repercussions or contribute alternative options (de Hoop et al 2019). Planning deliberations later, however, makes it difficult to still adapt the project to issues voiced during such deliberations.…”

“…Very few Dutch citizens deliberated the development of the GammaSense tool to measure gamma radiation in the Netherlands, because at the time, they were not concerned with the risk of being exposed to gamma radiation (de Hoop 2020). In contrast, in the city of Utrecht, citizens concerned with the development of a high-density smart neighborhood near their homes unsolicitedly and loudly engaged with the knowledge politics around the city's calculations on the project (de Hoop et al 2019). Furthermore, what aspect is put up for deliberation -ranging from deliberating what a smart technology collects data on, how, and for what purpose, to deliberating only one of these aspects or choosing between a small set of pre-selected options (de Hoop 2020) -also played a critical role in shaping the associated knowledge politics deliberations.…”