Book review – Lessons from existing smart cities: living labs, smart-green initiatives, and citizen participation

Andrew Karvonen, Federico Cugurullo, and Federico Caprotti (eds.), Inside Smart Cities: Place, Politics and Urban Innovation, New York, NY: Routledge, 2019; 322 pp.: ISBN: 9780815348689, £37.99/US $41.59 (pbk); ISBN: 9780815348672, £135.00 (hbk); ISBN: 9781351166188, £37.99 (eBook).

Karvonen et al.’s edited collection, Inside Smart Cities, provides an in-depth snapshot of smart city intensification since the beginning of the 21st century. Global in scope, the collection maps and reframes key debates on smart cities, with 19 chapters exploring the ‘actually existing smart city’ (Shelton et al., 2015) from within empirical experiences of planning, building, researching and developing new technologies in conjunction with urban planning. It poses the question whether we are living in an imagined future of ubiquitous smart technology, or whether that is yet to come.

The book is structured in four parts – Grounding and contextualising, Integrating and aligning, Contradicting and challenging, and Experiencing and encountering – laying broad strokes under which to analyse the implementation and social engagements of smart city technologies in a range of urban spaces.

Certain frameworks emerge as dominant. Several scholars address smart-green frameworks, as some municipalities envisioned smart cities as a follow-on to sustainable cities, ensuring their green agendas were integrated into subsequent smart city initiatives. For example, Burton, Karvonen and Caprotti explore how city councils in Bristol and Manchester have created living labs, experimenting with urban futures that integrate environmental concerns into smart urbanisation. Relatedly, Cugurullo and Ponzini consider how Masdar City in Abu Dhabi has branded itself a beacon of smart eco-urbanisation, shifting the label, however, from ‘eco-city’ to ‘zero-carbon city’ to ‘low-carbon city’ to ‘smart city’ and finally returning to ‘eco-city’ (pp. 149–150), labels based less on the city’s design and more on changing political and ideological exigencies. They foreground the contradiction inherent in hypercapitalist big tech companies developing smart technologies to be used in conjunction with green initiatives attempting to curb growth and mitigate climate impacts.

Theorists consider these contradictions within the context of the typology of smart cities developed by Cohen (2012), that is, smart economy, environment, government, living (quality of life), mobility and people (creativity and empowerment). This framework is used by Kitchin, Coletta and Heaphy to map smart city developments in Dublin, Ireland, focusing on how initiatives have been testbedded to support innovation in smart city districts serving as ‘living labs in conjunction with local actors’ (p. 95), from residents and city councils to researchers and big tech suppliers. They define a living lab as ‘a spatially delimited real-world experiment outside the confines of the traditional laboratory, where technologies can be tested against real-world conditions’ (p. 95).

This volume points to two trends in smart city research. The first is a shift away from the established framework of the ‘triple helix’ model of smart city innovation (Deakin and Leydesdorff, 2013) – where three key sectors participated in smart urbanisation: academia, industry and government – towards understanding civil society as a key fourth sector. I would argue that these four sectors are increasingly complex. For example, whereas city development was typically the purview of urban planners, with smart technologies, new actors must be integrated into urban planning, including IT departments, national data privacy regulators and so on, as Waterfront Toronto quickly discovered in its failed smart city partnership with Sidewalk Labs (Artyushina, 2020).

Moreover, big tech companies might have engaged civil society through public consultations, but these were typically invitation-only to key boards of directors. Increasingly, however, as this volume so vividly illustrates, civil society has begun to play a leadership role in the development of smart city initiatives, including grassroots citizen groups, data justice advocates, local tech developers, NGOs and non-profits, unions and even unaffiliated citizens and marginalised groups across race, social class, disability, age and so on. Trencher and Karvonen, for example, research with ageing citizens in Japan to understand how smart technologies can be effectively mobilised to better integrate seniors into everyday community life. Odendaal examines smart innovation in Cape Town and Kibera to gain insights into how marginalised groups use ubiquitous telephony to keep connected and provide embodied security in a sometimes hostile urban environment. Thus, understanding structural urban inefficiencies has a different meaning for the marginalised, who mobilise smart technologies not for lifestyle gains but survival.

The second trend is a shift towards developing smart cities as living labs. This trend has quickly become a dominant mode of smart city development, with the smart district sometimes being a university campus, a mini-city within a city, providing comprehensive spaces for working, living, socializing, consumption and recreation. This testbedding, however, has been contested by citizens who do not want to be part of an experiment, but are not always given opt-out options. Testbeds, moreover, only generate insights into local smart city initiatives embedded in specific historical, geographical, political, economic, and cultural contexts, and thus cannot be scaled up in ways big tech corporations might imagine. As explored by Tironi and Valderrama in Santiago de Chile, citizens may take different approaches to smart technologies. Using the concept of ‘the idiot’ in the smart city, the authors ask whether testbedding that attempts only to validate specific technologies – they study the reduction of pollution in a smart transportation initiative that reduces car lanes to promote walking and cycling – can overlook resistant citizen actions. The actions of the so-called ‘idiot’ who does not adopt technologies or does not use them as instructed, rather than being explained away, or corrected for through better education to develop the preferred green citizen, can deepen our understanding of how citizens respond to, adopt, negotiate or reject smart technologies.

The strengths of this book are many. It lays out theoretical frameworks pivotal within the field, that continue to be expanded; as such it is an excellent text for a graduate or upper-year undergraduate course on smart cities. A second strength is that it brings together many key scholars in the field while ensuring the integration of not just case studies but also epistemological frameworks from a range of global locations, combining well-known cases such as Masdar City with understudied locations, while accounting for not just the impacts on marginalized citizens but also their active contributions to smart city thinking and practices.

The book suggests that ‘it is unclear if smart can be applied to make tangible improvements to the lives of the disadvantaged’ (p. 294). This is partially due to ‘the inevitable messy reality of digitalising cities through recursive, two-way processes of sociotechnical change’ (p. 294).

One statement I take issue with is the suggestion that ‘it is important to remember that smart technologies are agnostic or ambivalent’ (p. 294). This is a somewhat techno-instrumentalist claim long contested in communication studies, and one which the rest of the tome does not substantiate. Rather, what the volume clearly reveals is that smart technologies are not neutral, but rather developed under sociotechnical regimes that have ideological underpinnings and objectives. Smart technologies themselves are designed, at base, to benefit some social groups and disadvantage others in very particular ways (Cardullo and Kitchin, 2019; Sadowski and Bendor, 2019), with counter-initiatives within the emerging field of design justice (Costanza-Chock, 2020).

The editors conclude that ‘by looking inside the smart city, we can begin to question how we want to live as urban residents and cities, and devise ways to direct urban development towards more progressive ends’ (p. 296). These must include future explorations of design and data justice, concepts that the book points to and that researchers must further explore.

References

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