Placebo Urban Interventions? Observing Smart City Initiatives in Santiago de Chile

• In Event: ¿Dónde está la inteligencia en el discurso de las Smart Cities?

Abstract

Smart Cities as a global urban discourse has presented various interpretations from the public, private,
and citizens’ perspectives on how to incorporate new information and communication technologies in urban planning and management. Santiago de Chile has embraced the smart cities trend with various initiatives involving transportation improvements, waste disposal, public space innovations, and enhanced data gathering and processing systems. A common thread of these initiatives in Santiago involves small scale, low cost, and impermanent interventions using innovative technological and collaborative means. Yet, despite the multiple actors and opportunities activated through smart cities ideas, these tend to either cover up the absence of more relevant interventions required in the city, or deflect attention from major infrastructure interventions taking place. Santiago’s way of provincializing Smart Cities involves promoting smartness from scarcity. Through a critical analysis of two smart city initiatives in Santiago — Intendencia Metropolitana Plazas de Bolsillo and Santiago Municipality Paseo Bandera —the paper provides an overview of the aims and implementation of each initiative. It argues that Smart City urban initiatives in Santiago render ideology (power) invisible and neglect other major urban interventions through actions that promote a placebo effect through four specific fictions: democratisation, citizen appropriation; social and technological innovation and situated and territorialised interventions. While these initiatives are often relevant, useful and creative, they frequently ignore local intelligence and discard learning opportunities and end up deviating or ignoring critical conflicts in particularly uneven cities like Santiago.

Author

• Carlos Lange