Listen to the episode:
Welcome to today’s What is the future for cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today, I will introduce a research article by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original article, and in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole article.
So, the third research episode is working with a 2008 article about smart cities. This article is one of the most mentioned in the literature giving a critical opinion about smart cities. Since smart city is accepted as a special future for our cities, it is worth examining the pros and cons of it. This article highlights the smart city’s missing definition, the numerous terms for it, and the smart city’s connection to the entrepreneurial city. Therefore, I thought it would be good to examine the biggest issues with smart cities.
Our summary today works with the article titled as Will the real smart city please stand up? Intelligent, progressive or entrepreneurial? from 2008 by Robert G. Hollands. The article was published in the City journal to discuss what is to be understood as smart city and what can be the critique of this concept.
Hollands started by examining the many existing understandings of smart cities: the information communication technologies being major factors in ensuring the smart city transformation, smart communities being nominated as the main characters, even using smart cards or creating intelligent islands were said to be smart cities. However, the use of IT could create certain assumptions about the transformation and play down urban issues that needed to be solved. The smart term’s various uses were also confusing: either the uses of smart with different meaning or the different terms used interchangeably with smart city. This confusion led to a rather self-congratulatory tendency with cities claiming themselves to be smart.
One of the difficulties with smart cities was the separation of the different terms from each other, like smart, intelligent, innovative, wired, digital, creative, and cultural cities, even though these had had different meanings, according to Hollands. The second problem was the use of these terms for marketing purposes instead of actual change in infrastructure, for example.
Smart growth for him was also controversial because it had been including nothing and everything from IT to architectural planning, even smart communities and social learning approaches. He noted that these elements and their mix were also full of ideological contradictions; for instance, he questioned how and why IT would automatically transform life and work in a region just by appearing there.
He tried to fix what smart was about smart cities, and he found a wide range of things involved, IT, business, innovation, governance, communities and sustainability, but the term could also only assume relationships among these things. He was unwrapping the smart city label through various examples, such as how networked infrastructures utilised one of the key elements for improving efficiency or how it was simply business-led urban development towards the entrepreneurial city. However, his aim was not to define smart city or disprove how smart some solutions could be but to emphasise the existing problems regarding the term and its involved elements and their relationships.
The real-life examples and their critic also proved that there had been no one definition for smart cities. Therefore, cities could advertise themselves as smart by mere sensor application, hence the self-congratulatory claims. Additionally, he also stated that these developments, called either smart or creative cities, could enhance the social polarisation in cities disregarding social justice and not addressing class inequality of urban areas. He also questioned how the smart city could help the knowledge workers, for example, or how the less smart city related to the local population. Moreover, he also stated the controversy regarding the smart city’s compatibility for economic growth and environmental sustainability.
He advocated for a more progressive understanding of smart cities or entrepreneurial cities and highlighted the shortcomings and contradictions behind them. First, investments did not always produce accumulation, or the business which invested could make their rules to invest in an area. There was no spatial fix in smart cities, as there had been no spatial fix in the industrial city. Unfortunately, investment in human, social and infrastructural capital did not always pay back, or not to the citizens, because the money went to the businesses.
Second, the self-designated smart cities needed to deal with the issues of widening inequality and social polarisation brought by IT. The information technology could create a very significant gap between the ones who could use it and those who could not, instead of raising the living standards generally for city dwellers. Additionally, the smart city required a service working class to the knowledge and information workers, creating an entrenched labour market, signifying inequalities. Therefore, smart city could be the accelerator for dual cities, in his understanding.
So what aspects should the more progressive smart cities strive for? First and foremost, they needed to start with people, according to Hollands. The IT’s importance should not have been its automatic capacity to create smart communities but its adaptability to be socially utilised to empower, educate and involve people consciously into the urban environment they inhabited. Cities needed to start establishing such future visions based on the citizens’ existing knowledge and skills, not to start specifically with technology.
Second, the progressive smart city needed to create power-balance for the use of IT by businesses, government, communities and individuals of the city. Furthermore, urban areas needed to balance out economic growth with sustainability. The real smart city’s use of IT might be able to enhance democratic debates about what kind of reality the citizens want to have in their urban areas.
With such shifts, smart cities could address power, inequality, diversity, democracy, and urban pluralism. Through IT inequality, globalisation processes affecting cities had been changing the urban labour markets and increased gentrification. While smart entrepreneurial cities successfully assisted the rich, mobile, creative businessmen with portals and services, they also ignored the welfare needs of the poorer populace, even exploiting them in some cases. Human capital also went unnoticed under the rubric of social problem discourse, not seen through cultural creativity’s perspective, and many socially or environmentally positive movements went unnoticed or seen as nuisances.
Therefore, the progressive smart city needed input and contribution from these various groups. A city could not be simply labelled as smart for the mere application of sophisticated IT infrastructure. The vast number of people living in cities deserved more than just wires and cables, smart offices, trendy bars and luxury hotels. However, being used many times as a label, smart city could be the obstacle to consciously face the problems present in urban areas. Hollands finished with this sentence: “real smart cities have to take much greater risks with technology, devolve power, tackle inequalities and redefine what they mean by smart itself if they want to retain such a lofty title”.
As the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects: 1. He could not find a definition for the smart city term, but he found it to be interchangeable with other terms – both increasing the confusion regarding the concepts, 2. Such labels can disguise or gloss over real and pressing issues such as sustainability or inequality, which are not self-evident to be enhanced by the introduction of information technology, 3. Smart cities need to be progressive with the populace’s involvement to solve the issues and prosper in the urban area.
Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions: 1. Is there a smart city or each city has its own definition based on their own culture, populace, problems, environment, and the like? 2. Whose responsibility is to initiate the smart or the progressive smart or the entrepreneurial city? And 3. Which is more important: equality, the state or quality of being equal in quantity, degree, value, rank, or ability; or equity, the quality of being impartial and fair? Does everyone need to have the same of everything, or the same opportunities to create their own best forms of life?
What was the most interesting part for you? What questions did arise for you? Do you have any follow up questions? Let me know on Twitter @WTF4Cities or on the website where the transcripts and show notes are available! I hope this was an interesting research article for you as well, and thanks for tuning in!
What is the future for cities? podcast 
Leave a comment