“Smart” Discourses, the Limits of Representation, and New Regimes of Spatial Data

Abstract

As "smart" urbanism becomes more influential, spaces and places are increasingly represented through numeric and categorical data that has been gathered by sensors, devices and people. Such systems purportedly provide access to always visible, measurable and knowable spaces, facilitating ever-more rational management and planning. Smart city spaces are thus governed through the algorithmic administration and categorisation of difference, and structured through particular discourses of smartness, both of which shape the production of space and place on a local and general level. Valorization of data and its analysis naturalizes constructions of space, place, and individual that elide the political and surveillant forms of techno-cractic governance on which they are built.This article argues that it is through processes of measurement, calculation, and classification that "smart" emerges along distinct axes of power/knowledge. Using examples drawn from the British Home Office's repurposing of charity outreach maps for homeless population deportation and the more recent EU EXIT document checking application for European citizens and family members living in the UK, we demonstrate the significance of Gunnar Olsson's thought for understanding the ideological and material power of smartness via his work on the very limits of representation. The discussion further opens a bridge towards a more relational consideration of the construction of space, place, and individual through the thinking of Doreen Massey.

Equality in the City: Imaginaries of the Smart Future

“…Dublin residents are taught to read the space of the Docklands as an up-and-coming business district where future innovations are meant to take hold and where smart city technologies can be prototyped on the bodies that move within that space. This image, one that flattens and homogenizes individual experiences and future imaginaries for the sake of deriving a superficially calculable whole (Dalton et al 2020), impacts decisionmaking, development, prioritization and governance of the space.…”

Public views of the smart city: Towards the construction of a social problem

“…concerning local, social, economic and spatial inequality) unaddressed (cf. Dalton et al, 2020;Datta, 2018;Fainstein 2000;Joss et al, 2017;Kitchin, 2015;Mattern, 2017;Odendaal, 2021;Shelton and Lodato, 2019).…”

Critical geographies of smart development

“…Amoore (2020) argues that algorithms are politicoethical propositions about how to live, systems that do not just organise information, but also define what can be seen, collected, and acted upon. In this vein, smart is not merely a technical descriptor, but also a powerful discourse that obscures the uneven promises and pitfalls of the digital (Dalton et al, 2020), while presenting technology as a universal solution to a broad array of problems (León & Rosen, 2020). Here, we use the term ‘smart’ both to describe the enhanced capacities of networked infrastructures that transect rural–urban geographies, and to link them to political projects of development that rely on a logic of technology‐enabled modernisation.…”