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

Jenni Cauvain · Richard Kingston

441 citations0/0 files storedEnvironment and Planning A Economy and Space

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Smart Cities and Technologies Urban Planning and Governance Urban Development and Societal Issues

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.

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References

2014The theory of communicative action 1985Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age 2002Splintering Urbanism 2007Wikinomics: how mass collaboration changes everything 2008Will the real smart city please stand up?1996Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture 1989The informational city: Information technology, economic restructuring, and the urban-regional process 2010The Political Power of Social Media

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