Reframing, reimagining and remaking smart cities

A principal aim of this book has been to critically examine the creation of smart cities and to try and formulate new visions of smart urbanism that seek to gain the promises of smart cities while minimizing their perils; to explore the various critiques of smart city rhetoric and deployments and to suggest social, political and practical interventions that would enable better designed and more equitable and just smart city initiatives. Of course, producing a form of smart urbanism that realizes promises while curtailing perils is no easy task – and is perhaps impossible at a deep ideological level given the many stakeholders and vested interests involved and their differing politics, approaches, aims and ambitions. Nonetheless, trying to negotiate across these interests and ambitions is necessary if critique is to transition, even if in partial and limited ways, into the reframing, reimagining and remaking of smart cities so that they are more emancipatory, empowering and inclusive. It is also required if the present adoption gap for smart city technologies, wherein solutions are not being taken up by city administrations as hoped and expected by the smart city advocacy coalition, is to be overcome (Kitchin et al. 2017). In this concluding chapter, I contend that the reframing, re-imagining and remaking of smart city thinking and implementation needs to occur in at least six broad ways. Three of the transitions concern normative and conceptual thinking with regards to goals, cities and epistemology; and three concern more practical and political thinking and praxes with regards to management/governance, ethics and security, and stakeholders and working relationships.