Finding the old in the new: Smart cities in the national and local trajectories of urban development

Abstract

The smart city concept has become a ubiquitous policy agenda across the world. From the Megacities of Asia to medium-sized cities across the Global North and South, politicians, planners and tech entrepreneurs have embraced and promoted the concept. As the concept has gained popularity, the early techno-optimism or -pessimism has been replaced by more nuanced and in-depth analyses of smart city projects. Furthermore, while early so-called smart cities took the form of new urban development such as Songdo in South Korea, most smart city projects today are implemented in a variety of existing urban contexts with long historical trajectories, a broad range of stakeholders, and variegated institutional contexts. Even if the term of smart city has been applied to a whole host of urban development and renewal projects, it has become clear that smart cities have not become the global homogenizing force envisioned by early proponents and feared by critics (Cardullo & Kitchin, 2019; Cugurullo, 2018; Halpern, Mitchell, & Geoghegan, 2017; Joss, Sengers, Schraven, Caprotti, & Dayot, 2019). As Shelton et al. have pointed out most smart city projects do not occur on a tabula rasa but are rather interventions ‘ ... awkwardly integrated into, existing social and spatial constellations of urban governance and the built environment’ (Shelton, Zook, & Wiig, 2015, p. 14). In their study of Songdo New City in South Korea Shin, Park and Sonn argue for an analytical framework that investigates the dialectic interaction between path dependence and new forms of networks where relations of power between different actors, old and new, are being renegotiated and agendas reformulated (Shin, Park, & Sonn, 2015). Perhaps the heaviest critique of smart city projects is that, despite more than a decade of projects, it is still unclear how they have helped to solve or mitigate some of the most pressing urban problems (Clark, 2021). The promise of smart city technologies as a technological fix has indeed yet to materialize. Perhaps what is the most tangible outcome of the smart city debate has been how it has shaken things up and reignited much needed discussions on what really matters when it comes to urban futures. Another main critique of the smart city agenda is its focus on scalability and replicability. In the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Smart Cities and Communities Lighthouse programme development of scalable and replicable technical solutions to urban problems was at the centre (Cardullo & Kitchin, 2019; European Commission, 2022). Forty eight lead cities and 72 follower cities across Europe with a combined budget of more than 1.2 billion EUR were to pathways to smarter and sustainable cities across 28 EU member states and associated countries. The lighthouse projects were also expected to be amenable to local needs, but the tension between the EU’s ambition of scalable and replicable solutions on one hand and national and local contexts on the other speaks to the limitations of devising universal solutions. Rather perhaps, it would be more useful to focus on learning potentials? What can be learned about the myriad of ways that smart city projects shape and are shaped as they encounter different national and local urban development trajectories?