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Are you interested in how smart city can be more than just top-down or bottom-up?

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Our summary today works with the article titled Interstitiality in the smart city: more than top-down and bottom-up smartness from 2023 by Ryan Burns and Preston Welker, published in the Urban Studies journal. Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see how smart city can be more. This article investigates the interstitial actors that influence the ways in which the smart city manifests, through the case of Calgary, Alberta.

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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 paper by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original paper, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole paper. Stay tuned until because I will give you the 3 most important things and some questions which would be interesting to discuss.

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The smart city urban planning paradigm is now both entrenched on a global level and is deeply contested by academic scholars and community activists. The critical research focuses on smart city assumptions, implications and socio-political relations, especially in the field of urban governance. The latest wave of digital urban geographies manifesting in smart cities has raised pressing new questions stemming from new forms of data collection, data process and technological determinism. Questions emerge like who the smart city is for, who enacts smartness, and who has the right to the smart city.

Early critics assumed a top-down approach, prioritising the state’s role as an active agent with less attention to those subjects of state power. The top-down approaches were noted to just deepen capitalist processes led by private corporations with little meaningful consideration to civic participation or communities’ needs. To seek social justice, these top-down approaches were contested and reconceptualised as smart city from the bottom-up. This implies seeking citizen-driven strategies where citizens hold more direct control over the deployment of smart city initiatives. However, these two approaches, top-down and bottom-up, missing a lot of influential actors who are neither on top nor at the bottom. This paper develops the concept of interstitiality for actors with power in the middle imagining the smart city.

For the authors, the top-down smart city is the unrolling of digital-technology programmes from the state or private corporations to the public. So smartness is seen as a programme dominated and unrolled by powerful actors. Bottom-up smart city concepts generally emphasise individual city residents, citizens, hackers and other persons either resisting how their smart city unfolds, or constructing their own versions of it. Both approaches seem to be too reductive in recent literature, which brings to mind the long tradition of urban research with community organisations and other actors that here are called interstitial. In theorising bottom-up or top-down smart cities, we necessarily overlook the middle actors that urban geographers have long established as impacting urban geographies.

The authors draw conclusions from a five-year ongoing qualitative study examining smart city discourses in the context of Calgary, Alberta. Calgary is a fruitful site to explore these questions as a city deliberately positioning itself as smart. The authors used observations, semi-structured interviews, and reports to pursue three parallel objectives. First, to illuminate the range of actors, institutions, and coalitions that are neither government, nor corporations, nor loosely coordinated individuals – those which can be the interstices of the smart city. Second, to identify processes, relationships and apparatuses utilised by actors to produce influence. Third, to situate the interstitial actors and processes within the uneven geographies of the digital divide.

Interstitial actors are neither properly top-down nor bottom-up but instead exist in two forms of interstices. They can be civil organisations, like community associations, non-profit organisations, charities and so on, situated between the state and corporations and the individual citizens. More than mere conduits relaying the needs, knowledge and desires of their constituents, interstitial actors play a key role in framing how the smart city unfolds. Their influence exists both on its material dimensions of physical sensors and circulation of capital, and the symbolic-discursive dimensions of how the smart city is conceived and the way its value is communicated. They wield this power by intervening in formal city planning processes and by enacting on their own terms in data collection and representation practices. In Calgary, these groups are officially invited and involved in decision-making.

The second and horizontal form of intestitiality is the set of actors on the margins of smartness whose spectre compels digital urban programmes. They are traditionally conceived as on the lacking side of the digital divide, like immigrants, the poor, the elderly and the youth, and marginalised organisations, like women’s emergency shelters or homeless foundations. Despite of their lack of proper skills to use digital techniques and tools, their position receives a deeper agency with the interstitial approach. These actors enact their influence on smart cities from its interstices, from its figurative margins. In this way they function as a spectre: fear of these interstices compels smart city programmes to take some actions and development plans over others, in order to draw in these people from the margins.

Many urban actors take on, create new, or switch between interstitial roles, organisations, and spaces to engage other actors and generate support for particular smart city initiatives. For example, an actor may simultaneously serve as a non-profit organisation administrator and a community association board member which enables the person to strategically mobilise their multiple positions with profound consequence for their interstitial actor organisations. Another mobility form for interstitial actors can be the rearticulation of concepts and terms, making them flexible and allowing these actors to enter the smart city conversations, like reflecting on an initiative and articulating how it could be smarter for a broader set of recipients.

The authors focused on two broad sets of interstitial actors: those between top-down and bottom-up smartness, and those on the interstices of the smart city. These interstitial actors are neither passive recipients nor mere conduits for smart city policies, even though the traditional smart city concepts have regarded them as such. Rather, interstitial actors actively shape smart city programmes even if they are physically absent from the arenas of formal planning. This understanding opens new avenues for activists, policymakers and interstitial actors to intervene in smart city politics, towards more just cities.

By re-emphasising the role of interstitial actors not just as subjects enacted upon, nor merely an amassing of individuals, but instead as active collective agents of smart urban change, we contend that the smart city produces fertile ground for new political economic relationships. Through such a complex understanding, we will be better able to observe and understand the complex political geographies of smart cities.

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What was the most interesting part for you? What questions did arise for you? Do you have any follow up question? Let me know on Twitter at WTF4Cities or on the wtf4cities.com website where the transcripts and show notes are available! Additionally, I will highly appreciate if you consider subscribing to the podcast or on the website. I hope this was an interesting paper for you as well, and thanks for tuning in!

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Finally, as the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects:

1. Smart city concepts have traditionally focused on the top and the bottom of the landscape, however, they have been influenced by the middle, the interstitial actors.
2. These interstitial actors are neither passive recipients nor mere conduits for smart city policies, rather, they actively shape smart city programmes even if they are physically absent from the arenas of formal planning.
3. This understanding opens new avenues for activists, policymakers and interstitial actors to intervene in smart city politics, towards more just cities.

Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions:

1. Who are the interstitial actors in your city?
2. What does interest you enough to become an interstitial actor in your urban area?
3. How would you act on that interest to influence the city as an interstitial actor?

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