Smart Cities and Green Growth: Outsourcing Democratic and Environmental Resilience to the Global Technology Sector

Abstract

Climate change and advances in urban technology propel forward the 'smart city'. As decision makers strive to find a technological fix, smart city strategies are often based on technological orthodoxies which are conceptually and empirically shallow. The motivation behind this paper is to address the conceptual adolescence which relates to the wholesale digitisation of the city by pursuing a twin argument about the democratic and environmental consequences. The authors draw on interdisciplinary theory and insights from urban studies, infrastructure, informatics, and the sociology of the Internet to critique the way the 'smart city' is taken forward. It is concluded that private firms market smart city services and solutions based on an ideological legacy of 'ubiquitous computing', 'universal infrastructure', and 'green technology'. Based on evidence from three UK cities-Manchester, Birmingham, and Glasgow-it is argued that the underlying principle of future city strategies is to expand the market for new technology products and services to support 'green growth' with disregard for their wider impacts.For citizens, becoming a consumer of the technologies is often presented as progressive 'participation' or 'empowerment' with unknown or hidden consequences both political and environmental. The city systems become a digital marketplace where citizen-consumers' participation is increasingly involuntary and the hegemony of global technology firms is inflated. What follows is that the city's 'intelligent systems' are defined through a digital consumer experience that has inherent biases and leaves parts of the city and its population unaccounted for. This renders the city less resilient in the face of future social and climatic risks.

Diversifying and de-growing the circular economy: Radical social transformation in a resource-scarce world

“…Increasingly, using such technologies is presented as a form of progressive participation or empowerment wherein (primarily) urban(e) citizens are recast as ethical / green consumers. However, this reading of the rise of the online SE hides a number of less-than-positive political and environmental consequences (McNeill, 2015;Viitanen & Kingston, 2014). That is, as well as long-standing concerns about equity of access and use to internet services, under this version of the SE we are all required to be 'smart cit-izen-consumers , compelled to be technologically literate Soderstrom et al whilst having little control over the nature and content of our online sharing interactions (Vanolo, 2014).…”

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."…”

Competitive urbanism and the limits to smart city innovation: The UK Future Cities initiative

“…As Viitanen and Kingston (2013: 13) argue, 'the smart city political economy constructed around ''green growth'' provides powerful levers of control for the technology elites that regulators appear ill prepared to reign in'. There is also disquiet about the power and investment choices of technology providers and disregard for the 'unknown or hidden consequences' (Viitanen and Kingston, 2013: 1) of the smart city. Concerns persist that the smart city is little more than a marketing label (Hollands, 2008) or a hollow urban imaginary in search of meaning.…”

“…The smart city is a 'technical solution to political and environmental issues' (Gabrys, 2014: 44), a potential 'technological fix' (Viitanen and Kingston, 2013).…”

“…Smart city literature has a keen interest in the role of technology and service providers in creating markets for smart city products and determining pathways for smart city transition (Batty et al, 2012;Chin et al, 2010). As the private sector is assumed to be at ICTs' cutting edge, it has an unrivalled position in influencing urban experiments (Viitanen and Kingston, 2013) ' (IBM, 2010).…”