Smart contradictions: The politics of making Barcelona a Self-sufficient city

Abstract

In recent years, the Smart City has become a very popular concept amongst policy makers and urban planners. In a nutshell, the Smart City refers to projects and planning strategies that aim to join up new forms of inclusive and lowcarbon economic growth based on the knowledge economy through the deployment of information and communication technologies. However, at the same time as new urban Smart interventions are being designed and applied, insufficient attention has been paid to how these strategies are inserted into the wider political economy and, in particular, the political ecology of urban transformation. Therefore, in this paper we critically explore the implementation of the Smart City, tracing how the 'environment' and environmental concerns have become an organising principle in Barcelona's Smart City strategy. Through an urban political ecology prism we aim to critically reflect upon the contradictions of the actually existing Smart City in Barcelona and how Smart discourses and practices might be intentionally or unintentionally mobilised in ways that serve to depoliticise urban redevelopment and environmental management. The paper stresses the need to repoliticise the debates on the Smart City and put citizens back at the centre of the urban debate.

Are People Responsive to a More Sustainable, Decentralized, and User-Driven Management of Urban Metabolism?

“…While top-down and technocratic approaches failed to meet many sustainability targets [10][11][12], "the roles of civil society has been not properly recognized in providing urban services (-)" [57]. Recent and increasing literature is exploring the outcomes of community-driven experiments [21,28,[32][33][34] and behavioral aspects of people-centered and user-driven sustainability transitions [23,58].…”

“…New digital technologies can be employed to serve this purpose [10]. The top down, technocratic focus on energy systems, mobility, and resource efficiency led by the ongoing smart city discourse runs the risk of neglecting the human element when addressing urban sustainability [10][11][12]. Such tensions and contradictions, generated by the principles and practices contributing to urban sustainability, reveal the need for aligning similar, although diverging, concepts (and related practices) and stakeholder involvement in long-term processes commonly conceived as "sustainability transitions" [13][14][15][16][17].…”

Climate change and cities: problem structuring methods and critical perspectives on low-carbon districts

“…Urban political ecology, based partly on work from scholars in the Marxist tradition, seeks to understand the workings of power through discussing the infrastructure, networks and flows which 'naturalise and hide the socio-ecological relationships that make urban life possible' (March & Ribera-Fumaz 2014).…”

The Variegated Economics and the Potential Politics of the Smart City

“…In Ireland, in 2010 Dublin's municipality announced a partnership with IBM, leading to the establishment of the Smarter Cities Technology Centre with the purpose of promoting initiatives aimed at making cities 'more connected, sustainable and intelligent'. In Southern Europe, the epicentre of the Eurozone crisis, the most significant example is perhaps that of Barcelona, where since 2009-10 the city's Ajuntament (the municipality) has been at the forefront of smart city initiatives, acting as an organizer of international events (smart city fairs and exhibitions) as well as promoting public-private partnerships in which powerful economic actors have been involved, particularly multinational firms in the ICT sector, such as the abovementioned IBM, Cisco, Siemens and others (MARCH and RIBERA-FUMAZ, 2014). In Italy, local governments across the country heavily hit by budget cutbacks and the reduction of state funding have endeavoured to obtain support from private economic actors in the pursuit of innovative projects of urban environmental management.…”