Actually Existing Smart Dublin

Abstract

Initial empirical research concerning the development of smart urbanism focused largely on smart city rhetoric, the marketing materials of companies promoting smart city products and services, and the policy and visioning documents of lobbying bodies and city administrations (e.g., Söderström et al., 2014, McNeill 2015). This was accompanied by academic critique concerning the underlying political economy of the smart city that countered its supposedly pragmatic, nonideological, commonsensical vision for future city-making (e.g., Greenfield 2013, Kitchin 2014, Vanolo 2014, Datta 2015). However, as Kitchin (2015) and Shelton et al. (2015) detail, until recently few in-depth studies had been directed towards how the smart city was unfolding on the ground in actually existing initiatives, both in terms of locally grounded rhetoric and materially manifested technological deployments (cf. Cugurullo 2017, Wiig 2018, Trencher and Karvonen forthcoming). As this book attests, this situation has been rectified to some degree in the last couple of years, with researchers starting to unpack and analyse specific initiatives and the socio-economic contingencies and consequences of smart urbanism in particular locales. Our contribution to understanding the ‘actually existing smart city’ (Shelton et al. 2015) has been to focus attention on the unfolding of the idea of the smart city and its supporting administration and initiatives in Dublin, Ireland and Boston, United States, conducted as part of the Programmable City project.1 This large project has involved several hundred interviews and ethnographic fieldwork over a five-year period; producing smart city technologies (e.g., the Dublin Dashboard); and active involvement in smart city initiatives (for example, conducting the smart lighting scoping study, running ‘challenge’ workshops and being a member of the Smart Dublin steering group). 6