No need to fix: Strategic inclusivity in developing and managing the smart city

Alessandro Aurigi

Introduction

The prevalent discourses around the concept of the smart city often describe it as a long-awaited revolution in urban planning and management that is needed to 'fix' increasingly large, wasteful, chaotic and unsustainable civic environments across the globe through the deployment of high technologies. The emergence of located informatics, the Internet of Things, the creation of 'urban operating systems' and the addition of sensing and intelligent functions to everyday objects and spaces will – it is argued – change rules and improve quality of life, urban attractiveness and the related economic development potential to fix an otherwise critical situation. These remedial aspects of the smart city are becoming entirely dominant in global debates, as well as in many proposed real-world initiatives involving large-scale interventions, including the shaping of brand new urban centres.

This chapter looks at how the current urge to evoke an urban crisis and the consequent need of major fixes – this time of the 'smart' type – is, essentially, nothing new. The history of urbanism, however, has shown how the push of top-down, idealized models and solutions has tended to make urban space and inhabitation 'stiffer' and less – rather than more – resilient. Reflecting on this can have important implications within the same battleground of the smart city's major selling point: successful urban management. The urban futures of large-scale smart city proposals so often discussed by large tech companies and their municipal clients tend to be based on hierarchy and centralization; a vision where 'big data' might be collected locally, but which serves centrally conceived and controlled systems. How really flexible and able to adapt is such a model of the smart city? A model where 'good' management is based on economy of scale efficiencies and expert algorithms can be called into question.

This contribution outlines an alternative outlook for future smart urban management and development. This stems from the ability of organizations to engage in low-risk, context-aware trial-and-error developments from which to continuously learn, enhancing adaptability. The city can then be looked at as a 'learning' organization that can thrive – and has historically thrived – on the dialogue between a series of smaller-scale interventions in the public's good interest and the holistic breadth of institutional involvement and planning. Urban designers have looked at ways to stimulate change and revitalization through localized design and construction, which has sometimes been effectively branded as 'urban acupuncture' Similarly, a 'smart' approach can be more effective, grounded and sustainable only by articulating the institutional and 'acupunctural' dimensions successfully and strategically, through facilitation, incubation and coordination.

The call for the smart city

The 'digital city' movement of the second half of the 1990s thrived – with all the hype associated to it – at a time of economic growth and during a high-tech financial 'bubble'. This was characterized, amongst other things, by strong discourse over the 'death of distance' (Cairncross 1998) and the replacement of the physical with the digital (cf. Benedikt 1991; Negroponte 1995). Overall, there was an over-optimistic outlook at the base of those developments, one which identified the rise of an 'information society' and its knowledge economy as a greatly beneficial – and somehow unstoppable – revolution and opportunity on economic, social and environmental grounds.

The current case for pushing major smart city projects, however, is being taken forward against the backdrop of a strong financial crisis and a steep reduction in public spending for most post-industrial economies. For most cities of the global north, the burden of further investing in new technological infrastructure has become harder to justify. A set of more critical reasons is therefore employed.

As can be read on numerous websites, blogs and documents, the large-scale urban ICT platforms and 'solutions' being envisaged and marketed by large companies are described as urgently needed to avoid a crisis. The case for the smart city is therefore made by employing emergency, dystopian discourses that represent the urban condition as quasi-terminal, highlighting the need for technological fixes. Cities are described as 'ill-equipped to deal with the shift in population and lack the necessary scale of infrastructure required to support it' (Living PlanIT 2011). Anil Menon (2013) argues on the CISCO blog that 'With limited resources, obstacles that range from traffic congestion and pollution to infrastructure constraints and overcrowding are increasingly amplified – all of which requires a paradigm shift in how we approach and manage these types of situations'. Similarly, Schneider Electric (n.d.) argues on its website that 'Cities face huge challenges: congestion, pollution, blackouts, crime, debt and rising costs –...