The Unfinished Lampposts: The (anti‐) Politics of the Amsterdam Smart Lighting Project

Abstract

Smart city projects across the world are invested with the ideal that smart technological innovation smoothly negotiates the objectives, interests, and moral orientations of many different stakeholders. This article explores the politics of this ideal of “smart seamlessness” by taking a close look at the unfolding of the Amsterdam Smart Lighting project undertaken by a consortium of civic, academic, and corporate partners at a square in Amsterdam Southeast. This project envisioned the “smartening up” of lampposts on the square by making them real‐time adaptive to local conditions. As these plans were only partially realized due to a multitude of institutional, cultural, and material frictions, the materiality of the perpetually “unfinished smart lampposts” was subject to a constant interplay of shifting understandings regarding their social, political, and technological significance. Whereas the formal narrative of the project suggests this process of meaning‐making to be fully inclusive, producing “learnings” for all participants, the article contrasts this strategic and explicit inclusivity with the implicit “action orientation” (Haughton et al. 2013) of the project. While the Smart Lighting project’s narrative explicitly gestures toward open and inclusive innovation, it produced more implicit and subtle markers of exclusion that alienated those participants unfamiliar with the jargon, style, and pace of market‐oriented forms of spatial development.

Controversing the datafied smart city: Conceptualising a ‘making-controversial’ approach to civic engagement

“…Furthermore, Marres (2007: 764) proposes to shift our understanding of controversial issues as purely discursive to becoming object-oriented ‘things’ (‘matters of concern’ in Latourian terms). For instance, in discussions about the future of smart cities, public concerns often revolve around particular objects, spatially situated in specific urban contexts – from the small, like the data-gathering ‘smart’ lamppost (Zandbergen, 2020) to the extra-large, like the now retracted Toronto Waterfront plan.…”

Introduction: The Political Materiality of Cities

“…In addition to buildings, technical devices are another important category of political materiality, affording legitimacy to specific visions of urban development, as Dorien Zandbergen and Laura Kemmer demonstrate in their contributions to this issue. In her research on Amsterdam, Zandbergen (2020) shows how corporate and municipal government actors hoped that specific "smart city objects" would allow their interests to appear aligned with those of civil society actors, smoothing over the contentious politics of the urban landscape in which these objects were to be embedded. Based on the case of the "Smart Light" project developed by the Amsterdam Smart City network, Zandbergen's article explores how sensor technologies-enlisted in the public-private production of a "responsive city"-afforded multiple visions of urban politics.…”

“…For the lampposts' public-private proponents, the technology legitimized their vision of Amsterdam's future as a city located at the forefront of global economic competitiveness, combining inclusive innovation and public participation within a progressive policy of local regeneration. The imagined affordances of these "smart" objects, built on their alleged "adaptivity," included not only their lamppost functions, but also the promotion of "minute-to-minute democracy" (Zandbergen 2020). The lampposts' materiality initially afforded the alignment of two distinct and potentially conflicting urban political projects: a more local one linked to the socio-economic revitalization of a deprivileged Amsterdam neighborhood, and a more global aspiration to "an urban future in which constant learning, feedback, and civic negotiation are central to urban decision-making" (Zandbergen 2020).…”

“…The imagined affordances of these "smart" objects, built on their alleged "adaptivity," included not only their lamppost functions, but also the promotion of "minute-to-minute democracy" (Zandbergen 2020). The lampposts' materiality initially afforded the alignment of two distinct and potentially conflicting urban political projects: a more local one linked to the socio-economic revitalization of a deprivileged Amsterdam neighborhood, and a more global aspiration to "an urban future in which constant learning, feedback, and civic negotiation are central to urban decision-making" (Zandbergen 2020). In the end, however, the project was cancelled, following conflicts tied directly to the material design of the sensing technology.…”

“…While the smart lampposts never materialized in anything like the form that was initially promised, the actors involved still shared a consensus that the project has produced multiple, positive types of learning. Ultimately, Smart Light's development legitimized an anti-political type of urban vision, in which the tensions between different urban futures were rendered invisible (Zandbergen 2020).…”