Description
The vision of the smart city has become a dominant paradigm of urban development. Typically, it emphasises the installation of large-scale sensor networks in urban spaces in combination with real-time analytics of big data. Especially large US corporations like Alphabet, Cisco, and IBM market integrated solution suites to city officials and municipalities all over the world.This technocratic vision of the smart city arose in the wake of the financial crisis (2008) when city governments were forced to find new ways of offering efficient citizen services with shrinking budgets. Corporate players suggested to simply integrate more data sources from a vertical perspective on city life and unleash the future-making powers of AI and Big Data, for the wellbeing of the citizens.
Of course the corporate vision of the smart city underestimates the local specificities and political dependencies in cities. The dominant critique of this smart city vision therefore focuses on dismantling corporate solutionism to urban problems. Contrary to this corporate vision of the smart city, a European path towards equitable, inclusive, and sustainable city governance has been shaped by reaching out to multiple stakeholder groups. This European approach is centrally concerned with the Living Lab, as both a methodology of innovation and a space of participatory governance along the horizontal access of different sectors and interests.
This talk will present both kinds of visions in a comparative framework to outline that the smart city vision is not an abstract vision of a remote future, but an ongoing social, political, and economic negotiation of what smartness does in the present.
| Period | 18 Dec 2019 |
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| Held at | Free University of Berlin, Germany |
| Degree of Recognition | International |