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Developmentalist smart cities? the cases of Singapore and Seoul
Abstract
Governments and companies across the globe are promoting smart cities, and their developments usually reflect both globally shared ideas and locally specific agendas and implementations. This paper examines the smart cities of Singapore and Seoul – two key global cities in Asia with legacies of state-led developmentalism. It discusses the two cities’ latest smart city endeavors, trajectories, and policy motivations. In particular, it explores the role of smart city policy in governments’ local and global agendas for development and argues that the two acclaimed cases can be interpreted as globally-oriented neo-developmentalist smart cities. In doing so, this paper also explains that the typically assumed developmentalist feature becomes much more complicated as it intermixes with the global cities’ international outlooks and aspirations as well as the changing demands from citizens in the post-developmental era.
• Highlights
• I examine the two ‘actually-existing’ global smart cities in Asia.
• I explore the role of smart city policy in local and global agendas for development.
• Singapore and Seoul reflect globally-oriented neo-developmentalist smart cities.
• Singapore and Seoul are not hardware-driven developmentalist smart cities.
... Singapur'un güçlü ve müdahaleci devleti, 1959'dan beri iktidarda kalan PAP (People's Action Party)'ın siyasi liderliği altında egemenliğini sürdürmektedir. Ayrıca, küçük bir kent devleti olarak Singapur'un ulusal kalkınma hedefleri, o zamandan beri küresel kent olma ve yerel kentsel gelişim arayışları ile yakından uyumludur (Joo, 2021). Uyguladığı başarılı politikalar ile Singapur, büyük bir küresel ticaret, finans ve ulaşım merkezine dönüşmüştür. ...
Estonia, which gained its independence in 1991, has carried out studies to create a digital citizen by using blockchain technology. Singapore, which is located in the southernmost part of the Asian continent and is poor in terms of natural resources, but is now an important trade center in the world, has shown a successful digital transformation performance. In this respect, these countries have been chosen as examples worth examining. Answers were sought to the questions of what kind of digital transformation Estonia and Singapore are going through and what practices that can inspire other cities in this transformation that took place in a short time. In Estonia, especially in Tallinn, projects have been carried out for the smart economy, smart mobility, smart environment, smart people, smart governance and smart life components of the smart city. Estonia's prominent smart and digital projects; contactless mobile payment, autonomous vehicle, 3D Urban Information Model, SmartEnCity Initiative, digital signature, mobile identity card, e-residence, DigiDoc, e-cabinet, e-law, e-tax, e-school, online voting, x- road data layer is the Telliskivi Loomelinnak Transformation Project. Smart projects realized by Singapore are; Lab on Wheels and SkillsFuture programs, HealthHub, OneService, SafeEntry, MyTransport.SG mobile apps, Auto Rider Autonomous Vehicle and 3D printing center. The main purpose of the study is to make a comparative evaluation on the projects developed by identifying smart or digital applications realized in Singapore and Estonia. In the study, the case study method, which is one of the qualitative research methods, was used.
Despite its growing ubiquitous presence, the smart city continues to struggle for definitional clarity and practical import. In response, this study interrogates the smart city as a global discourse network by examining a collection of key texts associated with cities worldwide. Using a list of 5,553 cities, a systematic webometric exercise was conducted to measure hit counts produced by searching for ‘smart city’. Consequently, 27 cities with the highest validated hit counts were selected. Next, 346 online texts were collected from among the top 20 hits across each of the selected cities, and comprehensively analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively using AntConc software. The findings confirm, on one hand, the presence of a strong globalising narrative which emphasises world cities as ‘best practice’ models. On the other, they reveal the smart city’s association – beyond the quest for incremental, technical improvements of current urban systems and processes – with a pronounced transformative governance agenda. The article identifies five critical junctures (interlocking discourses) at the heart of the evolving smart city discourse regime; these shed light on the ongoing boundary work in which the smart city is engaged and which contain significant unresolved tensions. The paper concludes with a discussion of resulting implications for research, policy and practice.
The era of the smart city has arrived. Only a decade ago, the promise of optimising urban services through the widespread application of information and communication technologies was largely a techno-utopian fantasy. Today, smart urbanisation is occurring via urban projects, policies and visions in hundreds of cities around the globe.
Inside Smart Cities provides real world evidence on how local authorities, small and medium enterprises, corporations, utility providers and civil society groups are creating smart cities at the neighbourhood, city and regional scales. Twenty-one empirically detailed case studies from the Global North and South, ranging from Cape Town, Stockholm, and Abu Dhabi to Philadelphia, Hong Kong, and Santiago, illustrate the multiple and diverse incarnations of smart urbanism. The contributors draw on ideas from urban studies, geography, urban planning, science and technology studies and innovation studies to go beyond the rhetoric of technological innovation and reveal the political, social and physical implications of digitising the built environment.
Collectively, the practices of smart urbanism raise fundamental questions about the sustainability, liveability and resilience of the cities in the future. The findings are relevant to academics, students, practitioners and urban stakeholders who are questioning how urban innovation relates to politics and place.
Over the past decade, much has been written about the potential of smart urbanism to bring about various and lasting forms of betterment. The embedding of digital technologies within urban infrastructures has been well documented, and the efficiencies of smart models of urban governance and management have been lauded. More recently, however, the discourse has been labelled ‘hegemonic’, and accused of developing a view of smart technology that is blinkered by its failure to critique its socio-political effects. By focusing on the case of Singapore’s ‘Smart Nation’ initiative, this paper embraces the paradoxes at the heart of smart urbanism and, in doing so, interrogates the tension between ideology and praxis, efficiency and control, access and choice, and smart governance and smart citizenship. It also demonstrates how such tensions are (re)produced through ‘fourthspace’ – the digitally enabled spaces of urbanism that are co-created, and that contribute to an expansion and diffusion of social and political responsibility. It ends by suggesting how such spaces have the potential to radically transform not just the urban environment, but also the role of government and citizens in designing urban futures.
Reacting to critiques that the smart city is overly technocratic and instrumental, companies and cities have reframed their initiatives as ‘citizen-centric’. However, what ‘citizen-centric’ means in practice is rarely articulated. We draw on and extend Sherry Arnstein’s seminal work on participation in planning and renewal programmes to create the ‘Scaffold of Smart Citizen Participation’—a conceptual tool to unpack the diverse ways in which the smart city frames citizens. We use this scaffold to measure smart citizen inclusion, participation, and empowerment in smart city initiatives in Dublin, Ireland. Our analysis illustrates how most ‘citizen-centric’ smart city initiatives are rooted in stewardship, civic paternalism, and a neoliberal conception of citizenship that prioritizes consumption choice and individual autonomy within a framework of state and corporate defined constraints that prioritize market-led solutions to urban issues, rather than being grounded in civil, social and political rights and the common good. We conclude that significant normative work is required to rethink ‘smart citizens’ and ‘smart citizenship’ and to remake smart cities if they are to truly become ‘citizen-centric’.
Growing practice interest in smart cities has led to calls for a less technology-oriented and more citizen-centric approach. In response, this article investigates the citizenship mode promulgated by the smart city standard of the British Standards Institution. The analysis uses the concept of citizenship regime and a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods to discern key discursive frames defining the smart city and the particular citizenship dimensions brought into play. The results confirm an explicit citizenship rationale guiding the smart city (standard), although this displays some substantive shortcomings and contradictions. The article concludes with recommendations for both further theory and practice development.
This communication explores the unique challenge of contemporary urban problems and the technologies that vendors have to solve them. An acknowledged gap exists between widely referenced technologies that city managers utilize to optimize scheduled operations and those that reflect the capability of spontaneity in search of nuance-laden solutions to problems related to the reflexivity of entire systems. With regulation, the first issue type succumbs to rehearsed preparation whereas the second hinges on extemporaneous practice. One is susceptible to ready-made technology applications while the other requires systemic deconstruction and solution-seeking redesign. Research suggests that smart city vendors are expertly configured to address the former, but less adept at and even ill-configured to react to and address the latter. Departures from status quo responses to systemic problems depend on formalizing metrics that enable city monitoring and data collection to assess "smart investments", regardless of the size of the intervention, and to anticipate the need for designs that preserve the individuality of urban settings as they undergo the transformation to become "smart"..
As visions of smart urbanism gain traction around the world, it is crucial that we question the benefits that an increasingly technologised urbanity promise. It is not about the technology, but bettering peoples’ lives, insist smart city advocates. In this paper, I question the progressive potential of the smart city drawing on the case of Singapore’s Smart Nation initiative. Using the case studies of the smart home and ‘learning to code’ movement, I highlight the limits of such ‘smart’ interventions as they are stunted by the neoliberal-developmental logics of the state, thereby facilitating authoritarian consolidation in Singapore. As such, this paper distinguishes itself from previous works on the neoliberal smart city by situated smart urbanism within the socio-political dynamics of neoliberalism-as-developmental strategy. For smart urbanism to better peoples’ everyday lives, technological ‘solutionism’ needs to be replaced with more human-centric framings and understandings of urban challenges.
This article discusses the idea of city as a platform. The analysis focuses on the forms and implications of citizen involvement in publicly-supported participatory innovation platforms that facilitate urban economic development in the welfare society context. The discussion opens with a review of the smart city discourse, which in the context of economic development policy translates into cities' need to support innovativeness by creating smart environments. Participatory innovation platform is a prime example of such an environment. The empirical section discusses three cases, those of the Finnish cities of Helsinki, Tampere, and Oulu. The analysis shows that platformization in the first half of the 2010s became a strategic focal area supported by national and EU programs. Platforms are used to support both urban revitalization and economic development, of which the former is based on representative and the latter on instrumental modes of participation. Platforms are well integrated with city governments, even though they vary greatly in terms of organizational forms and scopes. Democratic culture, welfarism, and redistributive policy provide contextual support for platformization by strengthening social inclusion, taming the growth machine, and easing the tensions between pro-growth and anti-growth coalitions.
The Korean government, like many in Asia, is actively building green cities from scratch—the most famous being Sejong, Songdo, and Cheongna. All these are considered models of green cities and are characterized by similar networked smart technological systems. This research builds on recent scholarly discourse by Anthony Townsend on smart technologies and urban planning, and Sofia T. Shwayri and Simon Joss on the “ubiquitous-eco-city” phenomena in Korea. In particular, it aims to extend Shwayri's hypothesis that the model is developed for export by uncovering the goals of the green city model actors. By tracing the national government's economic growth ICT strategy—“IT839”—and its key industry stakeholders, KT Telecommunications, this paper illuminates how Korea's green city model is being driven by an agenda of horizontal technology transfer in which the government has aimed to extend its traditional markets, and create a new paradigm for economic growth.
This study approaches the politics of urban development from within the framework of the emergence of a new multi-scalar growth regime and the path-dependence of the Korean developmental state. Through a case study of the Songdo New City development in South Korea, this study looks at how the scalar division of labor among various actors has interacted with the emergence of a multi-scalar growth regime. We focus on the logic by which different scales of governmental and non-governmental actors cooperate and, at the same time, compete with one another for authority over economic development. Our findings demonstrate, first, that the new regime resulted from the emergence of downward state-rescaling to the local scale and of private business as a key actor. Second, the regime actors have been involved in scalar tensions and have constantly negotiated the scalar divisions of labor among them. This research provides a contextualized example of a spatio-temporal logic in which statehood has been transformed into a network. KEY WORDS: growth regime, the politics of urban development, rescaling, Songdo New City, scalar tension Introduction This paper analyses the politics of urban development of the Songdo New City in South Korea under the lens of regime theory, 1 teasing out the complex and evolving
Smart urbanism is emerging at the intersection of visions for the future of urban places, new technologies and infrastructures. Smart urbanism discourses are deeply rooted in seductive and normative visions of the future where digital technology stands as the primary driver for change. Yet our understanding of the opportunities, challenges, and implications of smart urbanism is limited. Research in this field is in its infancy, fragmented along disciplinary lines and often based on single city case studies. As a result, we lack both the theoretical insight and empirical evidence required to assess the implications of this potentially transformative phenomenon. Given the significant implications of smart urbanism there is an urgent need to critically engage with why, how, for whom and with what consequences smart urbanism is emerging in different urban contexts. The aim of this review is to unpack the different logics and rationales behind smart urbanism discourses and proposals, and in this way understand the ways by which imaginaries of urban futures are currently being constructed, along with their socio-technical and political implications for future research priorities.
Despite the ongoing discussion of the recent years, there is no agreed definition of a ‘smart city’, while strategic planning in this field is still largely unexplored. Inspired by this, the purpose of this paper was to identify the forces shaping the smart city conception and, by doing so, to begin replacing the currently abstract image of what it means to be one. The paper commences by dividing the recent history of smart cities into two large sections – urban futures and the knowledge and innovation economy. The urban futures strand shows that technology has always played an important role in forward-looking visions about the city of the future. The knowledge and innovation economy strand shows that recent technological advancements have introduced a whole new level of knowledge management and innovation capabilities in the urban context. The paper proceeds to explicate the current technology push and demand pull for smart city solutions. On one hand, technology advances rapidly and creates a booming market of smart city products and solutions around it. On the other hand, there is demand on the side of cities that seek to address the problems of efficiency and sustainability, making the ground fertile for a smart city product economy. The research route of this paper eventually allows the identification of the underlying – and often forgotten – principles of what it means to be ‘smart’ in an urban context and yields conclusions about strategic planning for the development of smart cities today.
Driven by the profit motive of global high-technology companies, in collusion with the trend towards city governance being
wedded to a competitive form of ‘urban entrepreneurialism’, has left little room for ordinary people to participate in the
smart city. The article seeks to make a two-fold critical intervention into the dominance of this corporate smart city model.
It does this by first looking at how we currently understand the smart city and critiques the growing trend towards corporate
and entrepreneurial governance versions. A second form of intervention concerns considering smartness from different perspectives
emanating from small-scale and fledgling examples of participatory and citizen-based types of smart initiatives.
This commentary characterises and critiques research on smart cities. I argue that much of the writing and rhetoric about
smart cities seeks to appear non-ideological, commonsensical and pragmatic. More critically orientated scholarship, while
making vital conceptual and political interventions, presently has four shortcomings that inhibit making sense of and refashioning
the smart city agenda: the lack of detailed genealogies of the concept and initiatives, the use of canonical examples and
one-size fits all narratives, an absence of in-depth empirical case studies of specific smart city initiatives and comparative
research that contrasts smart city developments in different locales and weak collaborative engagement with various stakeholders.
These shortcomings are elaborated, accompanied with suggestions for addressing them.
This paper grounds the critique of the ‘smart city’ in its historical and geographical context. Adapting Brenner and Theodore’s
notion of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’, we suggest a greater attention be paid to the ‘actually existing smart city’,
rather than the exceptional or paradigmatic smart cities of Songdo, Masdar and Living PlanIT Valley. Through a closer analysis
of cases in Louisville and Philadelphia, we demonstrate the utility of understanding the material effects of these policies
in actual cities around the world, with a particular focus on how and from where these policies have arisen, and how they
have unevenly impacted the places that have adopted them.
This chapter examines the experience of making Songdo City, a much discussed global model of eco- and smart urbanism in recent years. By examining the development history and the role of main stakeholders, the chapter ascertains that Songdo City represents the territorial manifestation of the legacy of the Korean developmental state that has been internalizing the neoliberal logics of capital accumulation. In Songdo City, green and smart urbanisms have conjoined to produce entrepreneurial and speculative urbanisation that centers on real estate speculation and state-led investment in the built environment, which are the key characteristics of developmentalist urbanisation in Korea. Songdo City presents a segregated and exclusive space, catering for the needs of the rich and the powerful and becoming their own version of an urban utopia. However, the heavy reliance of Songdo City on real estate investment would turn out to be its own weakness.
On 4 November 2011, the trademark ‘smarter cities’ was officially registered as belonging to IBM. This was an important milestone in a struggle between IT companies over visibility and legitimacy in the smart city market. Drawing on actor-network theory and critical planning theory, the paper analyzes IBM's smarter city campaign and finds it to be storytelling, aimed at making the company an ‘obligatory passage point’ in the implementation of urban technologies. Our argument unfolds in three parts. We first trace the emergence of the term ‘smart city’ in the public sphere. Secondly, we show that IBM's influential story about smart cities is far from novel but rather mobilizes and revisits two long-standing tropes: systems thinking and utopianism. Finally, we conclude, first by addressing two critical questions raised by this discourse: technocratic reductionism and the introduction of new moral imperatives in urban management; and second, by calling for the crafting of alternative smart city stories.
‘Smart cities’ is a term that has gained traction in academia, business and government to describe cities that, on the one hand, are increasingly composed of and monitored by pervasive and ubiquitous computing and, on the other, whose economy and governance is being driven by innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship, enacted by smart people. This paper focuses on the former and, drawing on a number of examples, details how cities are being instrumented with digital devices and infrastructure that produce ‘big data’. Such data, smart city advocates argue enables real-time analysis of city life, new modes of urban governance, and provides the raw material for envisioning and enacting more efficient, sustainable, competitive, productive, open and transparent cities. The final section of the paper provides a critical reflection on the implications of big data and smart urbanism, examining five emerging concerns: the politics of big urban data, technocratic governance and city development, corporatisation of city governance and technological lock-ins, buggy, brittle and hackable cities, and the panoptic city.
In Pacific Asia, the globalisation of trade, production and finance underlies an accelerated urban transition focusing on a limited number of mega-urban regions. Intercity competition for world city status among these regions has intensified following the 1997 economic crisis. With governments compelled to devote greater amounts of public resources to creating a built environment to host global investment, a number of key policy issues are emerging. These include demands for inclusive governance and more livable cities; the appearance of new forms of urban poverty; low economic resilience in the face of growing global economic turbulence and the spatial unevenness of global economic growth. With the rise of civil society as a political force, addressing these issues calls for a sharper focus on cities not simply as economic agglomerations or collectivities of consumers in the world market, but also as arenas for the formation of political communities.
Debates about the future of urban development in many Western countries have been increasingly influenced by discussions of smart cities. Yet despite numerous examples of this 'urban labelling' phenomenon, we know surprisingly little about so-called smart cities, particularly in terms of what the label ideologically reveals as well as hides. Due to its lack of definitional precision, not to mention an underlying self-congratulatory tendency, the main thrust of this article is to provide a preliminary critical polemic against some of the more rhetorical aspects of smart cities. The primary focus is on the labelling process adopted by some designated smart cities, with a view to problematizing a range of elements that supposedly characterize this new urban form, as well as question some of the underlying assumptions/contradictions hidden within the concept. To aid this critique, the article explores to what extent labelled smart cities can be understood as a high-tech variation of the 'entrepreneurial city', as well as speculates on some general principles which would make them more progressive and inclusive.
Creativity management is a management practice that jump-starts the innovation process by encouraging officials to act and respond with increased creativity and initiative. This article describes recent practices of a major metropolitan city, Seoul Metropolitan Government (the world's eighth-largest city), to increase initiative through modification of existing reward, management, and training systems. Detailed descriptions are provided. Results of a multimethod study show that during a two-year period, employees and managers proposed 62,666 ideas, of which 13 percent were selected for implementation. Survey results among 1,194 managers and employees also show that the percentage of officials who now view their divisions as innovative doubled in a two-year period, from 16 percent to 33 percent, thus providing further evidence of jump-starting innovation. Creativity management is presented as an effective approach for encouraging new ideas and solutions and broadening innovation practices in public organizations.
The diversity of smart city case studies presented in this special issue demonstrates the need for provincialised understandings of smart cities that account for cities’ worlding strategies. Case studies drawn from North America, South America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia show that ‘the smart city’ takes very diverse forms, serves very diverse objectives, and is embedded in complex power geometries that vary from city to city. Case studies are a critical strategy for understanding phenomena in context, yet they present their own epistemological and ontological limitations. We argue for a more-than-Global-North smart city research agenda focused on the comparative analysis of smart cities, an agenda that foregrounds the conjunctural geographies of relationships and processes shaping these cities.
We introduce key concepts that have guided the diverse case studies of this special issue on smart cities. Calling into question Global North conceptions of the smart city, nine different articles analyse smart city projects around the world, with particular attention paid to the need to provincialise our understanding of these projects as well as to consider their relationship to worlding strategies. These case studies demonstrate the diversity of what smart cities can be and the need to consider, through comparative analysis, the broader power geometries in which they are imbedded.
In recent years, urban governance has become increasingly preoccupied with the exploration of new ways in which to foster and encourage local development and employment growth. Such an entrepreneurial stance contrasts with the managerial practices of earlier decades which primarily focussed on the local provision of services, facilities and benefits to urban populations. This paper explores the context of this shift from managerialism to entrepreneurialism in urban governance and seeks to show how mechanisms of inter-urban competition shape outcomes and generate macroeconomic consequences. The relations between urban change and economic development are thereby brought into focus in a period characterised by considerable economic and political instability.
This article contributes to the politicisation of smart urbanism and data-driven governance by making visible some of the potential inequalities emerging from these transitions through a provisional risk-class analysis. To pursue this analysis, it focuses on the case of smart urbanism and its associated process of data-driven governance in China. It looks specifically at the manner in which Chinese smart urbanism, in terms of its security measures, including widespread use of facial recognition and the roll-out of social credit scoring, is affecting inequalities. This article proposes risk-class analysis as a toolbox that can pose new questions in the search for what types of potential risks and inequalities emerge from the smart urbanism and data-driven governance being rolled out in the Chinese context.
Since the term smart city was coined, theories and practices of smart cities have flourished. Regarding the theoretical aspect, user-driven innovation has been discussed in studies on the innovation ecosystems of smart cities. Smart cities have been built in various countries around the world in recent years, including in Japan, which has experienced the same global trends in smart cities since 2010. Four smart community projects run by the Agency for Natural Resources and Energy between 2010 and 2014 followed such trends. The present study addressed user-driven innovation using the quadruple helix model as an analytical framework for the four smart community projects, and the outcomes of the projects were evaluated. In conclusion, the smart community projects were evaluated as successful. However, it was revealed that these projects were not completely conducive to user-driven innovation.
Smart city can be seen as a glocal phenomenon, as it is characterised by both global and local aspects. Smart cities are a global phenomenon because they spread all over the world and emerge with similar features and interdependencies at the global level. In the meantime, smart cities are a local phenomenon, because each city is unique, has different problems and should address them with specific solutions. The aim of this work is to better understand smart cities as a glocal phenomenon, considering their universal features together with the local aspects influencing their implementation. Through a research based on a Qualitative Data Analysis, the present work suggests a novel way to examine the smart city, to support a better understanding of this glocal trend promising enormous benefits for citizens and growing revenues in all five continents, but not equally distributed. In particular, the paper analyses and compares Italy and China to verify that smart city is a glocal urban strategy, depending both from global, standard drivers and local contingencies. The methodology and results can be generalised to other cities and countries.
The convergence of technology and the city is commonly referred to as the 'smart city'. It is seen as a possible remedy for the challenges that urbanisation creates in the age of global climate change, and as an enabler of a sustainable and liveable urban future. A review of the abundant but fragmented literature on smart city theories and practices, nevertheless, reveals that there is a limited effort to capture a comprehensive understanding on how the complex and multidimensional nature of the drivers of smart cities are linked to desired outcomes. The paper aims to develop a clearer understanding on this new city model by identifying and linking the key drivers to desired outcomes, and then intertwining them in a multidimensional framework. The methodological approach of this research includes a systematic review of the literature on smart cities, focusing on those aimed at conceptual development and provide empirical evidence base. The review identifies that the literature reveals three types of drivers of smart cities-community, technology, policy-which are linked to five desired outcomes productivity , sustainability, accessibility, wellbeing, liveability, governance. These drivers and outcomes altogether assemble a smart city framework, where each of them represents a distinctive dimension of the smart cities notion. This paper helps in expanding our understanding beyond a monocentric technology focus of the current common smart city practice.
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to identify the key characteristics and propose a working definition of a smart nation.
Design/methodology/approach
A case study of Singapore through an analysis of the key speeches made by senior Singapore leaders, publicly available government documents and news reports since the launch of the smart nation initiative in December 2014 was carried out.
Findings
Just like smart cities, the idea of a smart nation is an evolving concept. However, there are some emerging characteristics that define a smart nation.
Research limitations/implications
The paper provides an initial understanding of the key characteristics and definition of a smart nation at the nascent stage and a foundation for further research on the topic.
Originality/value
This paper contributes to the existing smart cities and smart nation literature by providing insights to the key characteristics of smart nation and proposing a working definition of the term.
The smart city encompasses a broad range of technological innovations which might be applied to any city for a wide variety of reasons. In this article, I make a distinction between local efforts to reshape the urban landscape, and a global smart city imaginary which those efforts draw upon and help sustain. While attention has been given to the malleability of the smart city concept at this global scale, there remains little effort to interrogate the way that the future is used to sanction specific solutions. Through a critical engagement with smart city marketing materials, industry documents, and consultancy reports, I explore how the future is recruited, rearranged, and represented as a rationalization for technological intervention in the present. This is performed amidst three recurring crises: massive demographic shifts and subsequent resource pressures, global climate change, and the conflicting demands of fiscal austerity that motivate the desire of so many cities to attract foreign direct investment and highly skilled workers. In revealing how crises are pre-empted, precautioned, and prepared for, I argue that the smart city imaginary normalizes a style and scale of response deemed appropriate under liberal capitalism.
In recent years, "smart cities" have rapidly increased in discourses as well as in their real number, and raise various issues. While citizen engagement is a key element of most definitions of smart cities, information and communication technologies (ICTs) would also have great potential for facilitating public participation. However, scholars have highlighted that little research has focused on actual practices of citizen involvement in smart cities so far. In this respect, the authors analyse public participation in Japanese "Smart Communities", paying attention to both official discourses and actual practices. Smart Communities were selected in 2010 by the Japanese government which defines them as "smart city" projects and imposed criteria such as focus on energy issues, participation and lifestyle innovation. Drawing on analysis of official documents as well as on interviews with each of the four Smart Communities' stakeholders, the paper explains that very little input is expected from Japanese citizens. Instead, ICTs are used by municipalities and electric utilities to steer project participants and to change their behaviour. The objective of Smart Communities would not be to involve citizens in city governance, but rather to make them participate in the co-production of public services, mainly energy production and distribution.
Smart city initiatives have been adopted by cities worldwide, proposing forward-looking, technological solutions to urban problems big and small. These policies are indicative of a digitized urban condition, where social and economic exchange rely on globalized telecommunications networks, and governance strategies follow suit. Propelled through events such as IBM’s Smarter Cities Challenge, the smart city acts as a data-driven logic urban change where widespread benefit to a city and its residents is proposed, masking the utility of these policies to further entrepreneurial economic development strategies. In this article, I present a case study of the Digital On-Ramps initiative that emerged from IBM’s policy-consultation in Philadelphia. The initiative proposed a social media-style workforce education application (app) to train up to 500,000 low-literacy residents for jobs in the information and knowledge economy, but even as the city’s mayor declared the project a success, it did not meet expectations. This essay argues that the rhetoric of intelligent, transformative digital change works much more to “sell” a city in the global economy than to actually address urban inequalities.
This study aims to shed light on the process of building an effective smart city by integrating various practical perspectives with a consideration of smart city characteristics taken from the literature. We developed a framework for conducting case studies examining how smart cities were being implemented in San Francisco and Seoul Metropolitan City. The study's empirical results suggest that effective, sustainable smart cities emerge as a result of dynamic processes in which public and private sector actors coordinate their activities and resources on an open innovation platform. The different yet complementary linkages formed by these actors must further be aligned with respect to their developmental stage and embedded cultural and social capabilities. Our findings point to eight ‘stylized facts’, based on both quantitative and qualitative empirical results that underlie the facilitation of an effective smart city. In elaborating these facts, the paper offers useful insights to managers seeking to improve the delivery of smart city developmental projects.
This paper explores IBM's Smarter Cities Challenge as an example of global smart city policymaking. The evolution of IBM's smart city thinking is discussed, then a case study of Philadelphia's online workforce education initiative, Digital On-Ramps, is presented as an example of IBM's consulting services. Philadelphia's rationale for working with IBM and the translation of IBM's ideas into locally adapted initiatives is considered. The paper argues that critical scholarship on the smart city over-emphasizes IBM's agency in driving the discourse. Unpacking how and why cities enrolled in smart city policymaking with IBM places city governments as key actors advancing the smart city paradigm. Two points are made about the policy mobility of the smart city as a mask for entrepreneurial governance. (1) Smart city efforts are best understood as examples of outward-looking policy promotion for the globalized economy. (2) These policies proposed citywide benefit through a variety of digital governance augmentations, unlike established urban, economic development projects such as a downtown redevelopment. Yet, the policy rhetoric of positive change was always oriented to fostering globalized business enterprise. As such, implementing the particulars of often-untested smart city policies mattered less than their capacity to attract multinational corporations.
Ambitious eco-city initiatives of the 21st century are commonly branded as carbon-neutral, low-carbon, smart-eco, sustainable, ubiquitous-eco and zero-carbon emphasising their sustainability niches. This study focuses on one of these brands—ubiquitous-eco-city (u-eco-city). The principal premise of a u-eco-city is to provide a high quality of life and place to residents, workers and visitors with low-to-no negative impacts on the natural environment with support from the state-of-the-art technologies in their planning, development and management. The paper aims to put this premise into a test and address whether u-eco-city is a dazzling smart and sustainable urban form that constitutes an ideal 21st century city model or just a branding hoax. It, first, explores the recent developments and trends in ubiquitous technologies, infrastructures, services and management systems, and their utilisation and implications for the development of u-eco-cities. It, then, places Korean u-eco-city initiatives under the microscope, and critically discusses their prospects in forming a smart and sustainable urban form and becoming an ideal city model.
The paper analyses the concept of the smart city in critical perspective, focusing on the power/knowledge implications for the contemporary city. On the one hand, smart city policies support new ways of imagining, organising and managing the city and its flows; on the other, they impress a new moral order on the city by introducing specific technical parameters in order to distinguish between the 'good' and 'bad' city. The smart city discourse may therefore be a powerful tool for the production of docile subjects and mechanisms of political legitimisation. The paper is largely based on theoretical reflections and uses smart city politics in Italy as a case study. The paper analyses how the smart city discourse proposed by the European Union has been reclassified to produce new visions of the 'good city' and the role of private actors and citizens in the management of urban development.
Building cities from scratch has continued unabated since the latter half of the twentieth century despite some of these planned cities achieving global infamy for their failures. These endeavors are, in part, due to a persistent belief by governments that newly constructed cities can set their nations on a fast path to the future. Today, challenges posed both by global climate change and increased urbanization have widened this platform from projects almost exclusively of developing nations to include those in the developed world. Today we talk of the eco-city, a local solution to a global crisis. If completion is successfully fast-tracked, the resultant eco-city will position its respective nation at the forefront of innovation in what is effectively a global race: the resultant city can be exported as a model both locally and globally. In this regard, the envisioning and building of Songdo in South Korea may not be unique. Songdo is a city underway on flat land created from wetland reclamation. As part of the Incheon Free Economic Zone (IFEZ), Songdo's development has benefited from opportunistic circumstances that has led to its pursuit of becoming a “Ubiquitous Eco-City.” The green infrastructure of the new city is to be enhanced by the provision of extra services that combine information and communication technologies as well as digital networks to ideally create harmony among the environment, society, and technology. Songdo, as planned, will position South Korea among a group of leading nations, and possibly at the forefront of new city development, potentially producing a model for export.
The paper traces the development of Singapore as an 'intelligent' island through an identification of the various social policy arrangements which have harnessed new information technology modes in their delivery. At home, at work, on the road, in public service and in the court room, the emergence of new IT arrangements is a matter of fact in Singaporean lives. Attention is drawn to the 'unencumbered' character of IT policy-making in Singapore, a characteristic which is the outcome of little or no strong political opposition in parliament.
The 'world city paradigm' assumes a convergence in economic base, spatial organisation and social structure among the world's major cities. However, Tokyo, capital of the world's second-largest national economy and the world's largest urban agglomeration, departs from the world city model on most salient dimensions. Seoul, centre of east Asia's second OECD member and the region's second-largest metropolis, exhibits the same anomaly. Tokyo and Seoul's departure from the world city hypothesis stem from late industrialisation and especially the relationship between industrial policy and finance institutionalised in a developmental state. Understanding Tokyo and Seoul necessitates a different conception of the world system from the globalist version of the world city argument. World cities differ from one another in many salient respects because they are lodged within a non-hegemonic and interdependent world political economy divided among differently organised national systems and regional alliances.
In recent years, urban governance has become increasingly preoccupied with the exploration of new ways in which to foster and encourage local development and employment growth. Such an entrepreneurial stance contrasts with the managerial practices of earlier decades which primarily focussed on the local provision of services, facilities and benefits to urban populations. This paper explores the context of this shift from managerialism to entrepreneurialism in urban governance and seeks to show how mechanisms of inter-urban competition shape outcomes and generate macroeconomic consequences. The relations between urban change and economic development are thereby brought into focus in a period characterised by considerable economic and political instability.