Exploring the horizontal tensions of complex smart city governance

In the spring 2021 we set out to interview urban planners and people working in similar positions in municipally owned corporations in the Swedish town of Norrköping, which has been working on scattered projects of smartification over the past decade. This was part of a larger interdisciplinary project on citizen engagement in smart technology development. Given the hype and techno-optimism often surrounding smart cities, we expected to hear stories about how the municipality is planning to implement smart technology, and how Norrköping in the near future will become a smart city. However, at first the interviews were disappointing. Despite the many ‘smart’ technologies being considered or implemented, nobody wanted to talk about ‘smart’ technologies or cities. It felt like a failure. Going back to the project team and reporting on this disappointment, however, made us start noticing interesting things in the material. Many of the interviewees had interesting ideas of what makes cities smart that did not fit with the general depiction of top-down actors buying into corporate narratives of monolithic ‘smart’ city technologies and their uniform implementation and adaptation. Rather, most of the interviewees talked about the horizontal tensions of achieving truly smart technologies to fit into existing infrastructures, time frames and governance logics of municipal work. Thus, we try to tease these tensions apart, to gain a deeper understanding of employees within the municipality and municipally owned corporations’ attitudes towards smartification and what they mean for smart city development in ordinary cities.

Staying with the trouble, or the tensions in this case, we took the points where these horizontal tensions converge as the focus of our analysis. We found that the tensions converged around issues such as the different time frames that the municipally owned waste management company operate at compared to the subcontracted waste collector and how this provided an obstacle to implement new technologies to make waste management more efficient, something which the municipally owned company needed to work around. Another tension cut across the responsibilities of the municipality in terms of daily service delivery versus long-term development and efficiency, where the visibility, and political potency, of the day-to-day could sometimes outcompete the ability to keep the eyes on the horizon/on the long-term goals. A third tension converged around infrastructure and the need to engage multiple stakeholders in order to find ways forward in transforming/adapting old infrastructures to new necessities, such as electrification of good transport, which need to involve stakeholders at various scales ranging from the EU regulation and funding, to national level investment, to regional and local planning agencies, but also private sector actors such as those developing and constructing electric goods and those that are expected to buy them. Getting all these stakeholders together to work towards the same goals is a monumental task. These three examples complicate the linear, technology-development, future-oriented discourse often associated with smart cities.

While smart city development is often portrayed as a struggle/tension between top-down or bottom-up, we thus found that there are many horizontal tensions that play out between actors that would often be characterised as top-down actors. We thus need to pay attention also to these tensions and struggles of interstitial actors to understand why and how smartification of cities is piece-meal, ad hoc, resisted and move forward unevenly across space and time. This attention needs to extend to how collaboration and regulation as well as the intermingling of public and private interests and sectoral composition and functioning of different infrastructures influences smartification, and thus the future sustainability in our cities.

Read the full article on Urban Studies OnlineFirst here.