From the accidental to articulated smart city: The creation and work of ‘Smart Dublin’

Abstract

While there is a relatively extensive literature concerning the nature of smart cities in general, the roles of corporate actors in their production and the development and deployment of specific smart city technologies, to date there have been relatively few studies that have examined the situated practices by which the smart city unfolds in specific places. In this paper, we draw on three sets of interviews ( n = 114) and ethnographic fieldwork to chart the smart city ecosystem in Dublin, Ireland. We examine how the four city authorities have actively collaborated to frame a disparate and uncoordinated set of information and communication technology-led initiatives, what Dourish terms the ‘accidental smart city’, into an articulated vision of Dublin as a smart city. In particular, we focus on the work of ‘Smart Dublin’, a shared unit established to coordinate, manage and promote Dublin’s smart city initiatives and to drive new economic development opportunities centred on corporate interventions into urban management and living. Our analysis highlights the value of undertaking a holistic mapping of a smart city in formation, and the role of political and administrative geographies and specialist smart city units in shaping that formation.

Smart urbanism and smart citizenship: The neoliberal logic of ‘citizen-focused’ smart cities in Europe

“…Smart cities, then, have emerged as the latest, tech-led phase of the entrepreneurial city (Hollands, 2008;Shelton, Zook and Wiig, 2015), through which private interests seek to capture public assets and services by offering technological solutions to urban problems (e.g., congestion, emergency response, utility and service delivery). Dublin in Ireland illustrates this phasing, adopting ideas of entrepreneurial planning in the 1990s, the creative city discourse in the 2000s, and finally the smart city in the 2010s (MacLaran and Kelly, 2014;Coletta, Heaphy and Kitchin, 2017). While setting appropriate goals for cities via systems of urban benchmarking, the neoliberal smart city aims to attract foreign direct investment, offering areas of the city as testbeds to pilot new technologies, fostering innovative indigenous start-up sectors or digital hubs, and attracting mobile creative elites.…”

Smart regions: insights from hybridization and peripheralization research

“…The actions of regional stakeholders, their cooperation and network strategies as well as power relations are important for understanding different dynamics of digitalization processes and their particular spatial implications. Unfortunately, most studies on smart regions refer to top-down planning without taking into consideration the everyday life of individuals or other social aspects (Coletta, Heaphy, & Kitchin, 2019). Regional actors are reduced to users of digital technologies and most efforts are put into supporting the acceptance of those technologies rather than analysing local needs, abilities and agency.…”

“…For example, in Vienna, residents are not (yet) directly represented in the smart city urban working groups, but are being informed through public relations and social media (Beirat für Raumentwicklung, 2018, p. 31;Giffinger, 2016). This also applies to the smart city concept of Dublin where citizens are addressed as potential beneficiaries of the smart city, but did not act as participants, cocreators or decision-makers (Coletta et al, 2019). In reality, only few citizens actually participate in defining the goals and concepts of spatial development (Bauriedl, 2018;Exner, Cepoiu, & Weinzierl, 2018) in smart regions.…”

Rhythm-making, halfway ethnographies and ‘city heartbeats’

“…Automation produces a sort of obliteration of time and knowledge: work happens "live": the real-time videos from the 380 cameras all over the city are not stored, SCATS collects the data from counting the cars and automatically generates statistics to adjust timing without human oversight. Rather than temporal feed-back from specific pacesetter, we have a rhythmic "feed-around" from multiple beats, which may also contribute to phenomena of accidental urbanism (Coletta et al, 2017).…”

“…The initiative (www.smartdublin.ie) involves the four Dublin Local Authorities: Dublin City Council, Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown City Council, Fingal City Council, South Dublin City Council. It consists of a mix of datadriven, networked infrastructure to foster economic growth, entrepreneurship and citizen-centric initiatives(Coletta et al, 2017) …”