Unplugging: Deconstructing the Smart City

Abstract

This paper explores the subtle notion of unplugging to critically analyze the technological determinism of the Smart City. This exploration suggests that being digitally connected should not be perceived as gaining social capital. This article critiques the assumptions of the Smart City and proposes a ten-dimension conceptual framework. The first section of this article explores hyperconnected societies and how unplugging could be beneficial. The main subjects, Digital Natives, are discussed in the second section of this article. The third section is a decalogue on deconstructing the Smart City, and the final section presents key ideas and questions for future analysis.

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."…”

Knowledge-Perception Bridge of Green-Smart Integration of Cities: An Empirical Study of Hong Kong

“…As identified by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), six potential areas of green cities, namely energy, land use and transport, housing and buildings, water resource management, solid waste management, and green goods and services, all contribute to a "healthier local environment and urban attractiveness" [86]. These aspects, however, require a progressive use of technological advancement [18,53,87,88] and nature-culture interaction [27] in attempt to an environmentally sustainable form of development [89].…”

“…From the perspective of urban development path, each of these themes is a broad developmental frame that contains its own attributes or aspects of concern, such as energy, waste, food supply, environmental quality, and governance, among others [20,36]. These aspects have constituted their own area of research vigorously (e.g., [7,[14][15][16][17][18]37]), but the accumulation of knowledge mainly brought about practice and policy discussions from an expert-led and top-down understanding of the areas of interests in green city and smart city, respectively. There is yet an exploratory study on how people perceive and interpret the underlying attributes of these city themes together.…”

“…There are numerous scholarly discussions and empirical studies that have shown an overlap and an integration of "green" and "smart" in various aspects of city development [12,13], especially in the context of energy supply and consumption (e.g., [14]) or other innovative uses of technology (e.g., [15][16][17][18]). These initiatives were all connected to the vision of sustainable development in cities [6,11].…”

Dis-locating innovation : amphibious geographies of creative reuse and alternative value production

“…These include, yet are not limited to, the treatment of radical self-sufficient communities (Pickerill and Maxey, 2009;Van Assche et al, 2013), precarious infrastructures (Amin, 2015;Morales et al, 2014) and grassroots solutions for sustainable development (Davies and Mullin, 2012;Seyfang and Smith, 2007), or of governance arenas (Bulkeley et al, 2014;Evans, 2011) and smart urbanism visions more broadly (Calzada and Cobo, 2015;Luque et al, 2014). For Van Assche et al (2013:239), informal communities operating in contexts that elude the immediate reach of incumbent regimes, rely on fluid governance arrangements to which "flexibility in role distribution is an enabling factor" for social learning and innovation.…”