Dr. Igor Calzada, MBA, Lecturer and Senior Research Fellow, Urban Transformations, University of Oxford
It is noteworthy that although Smart Cities are already being built around us, they differ considerably from the simplistic, one-size-fits-all, smart-city-in-the-box mainstream approach that has been hegemonic so far.
Hence, we could ask then, for whom and what purpose are Smart Cities being developed? Are Smart Cities primarily about, or should they be about, a) creating new markets and profit; b) facilitating state control and regulation; or c) improving the quality of life while enhancing levels of democracy within citizens?
Thus, the contemporary Smart City cannot just be reduced to the economic value generated by partnerships involving powerful public and private actors. When attention to the application of new information flows and the development of so-called ‘Smart Cities’ is increasing, there is still limited understanding of the interconnections among ‘hard’ and ‘smart’ infrastructures, and economic, political and social systems on metropolitan and regional scales. Furthermore, this hegemonic paradigm has often failed to deliver practical tools that can help us to better understand and intervene in our daily realities, while also engaging with the various stakeholders that are important for our cities and regions. Hence, a multistakeholder approach is required to overcome ‘dataism,’ the simplistic assumption that cities are systems of data or algorithms rather than ecosystems of citizens.
In a nutshell, I argue that the development and use of the buzzword ‘Smart City’ in planning inner cities are intimately connected to required current urban transformations. There is currently a great deal of rhetoric about the importance of building Smart Cities without paying attention to elements that constitute the Smart City strategies and policies in diverse contexts. Technological solutions have often been proposed under the umbrella of the ‘Smart City’ buzzword without considering first the needs and usability by citizens or the socio-technical misalignment within the city itself. I suggest that first we should unplug, unpack and deconstruct the meaning of ‘smartness’ in our unique urban realities (Calzada et al., 2015) by asking ten underlying questions about the city that we want to make:
- Who: Will the Smart City evolve into an urban sphere in which dwellers have the right to decide whether or not to be connected?
- How: Is the city a social interface in which the citizens will be able to self-design their social, everyday life needs?
- System: Will these devices serve the citizens more than the citizens serve the devices?
- Governance: Is the bottom-up innovation perspective simply wishful thinking?
- Information: In the era of data, is it possible to transition from controlled to open data-driven models?
- Focus: Do we notice the difference between simple social interactions and trusting human ties?
- Space: Will we observe changes in which context-collapsed information will be contextualised to enhance social interactions? What are the implications for the privacy and security perspective of individuals?
- Design: How can design of places and user interactions be improved to anticipate an ambient commons for citizens?
- Socio-Political Processes: Is a shift occurring among the stakeholders’ power interactions?
- Political Economy: Will the political economy of the Smart City be altered by any changes in stakeholder power relations?
Indeed, it will be just after unplugging when we can plug stakeholders into a wide smart governance framework by including five type of actors, known as the Penta Helix model (Calzada, 2016). These actors are the public sector, the private sector, academia, civic society and social entrepreneurs. Indeed, it is necessary to plug stakeholders in by setting up a new, complex, multistakeholder, city-regional urbanity to transit towards real ‘smartness’ in cities and regions. A lack of dynamic power balance between stakeholders has so far been present in the hegemonic and technocratic version of the Smart City.
This view embraces a constructive take that favourable conditions exist for a potential critical politics of Smart City policy agenda based on urban transformations driven by social innovation and experimentation. Likewise, cities and regions represent powerful places in which to detect emerging processes and observe spontaneous urban transformations.
To sum up, after minimising the negative side-effects of hyper-connected societies, technology-oriented pathways of Smart Cities offer still-unexplored opportunities for experimenting. We should embrace transitional experiments in our cities and regions in the way some cities are already showing this alternative pathway: Dublin, Bristol, Barcelona, Amsterdam, and Glasgow, among others.
There are three related open research lines that we could test in today’s cities and regions:
- What prospects are there for alternative funding and business models for Smart Cities?
- What practical/political interventions are needed (among business, local governments, academic, communities and social entrepreneurs)?
- Is another type of Smart City possible, that is, a third-way between state and market (overcoming the PPP, public-private-partnership)?