Corporate Expertise and Civic Good: A Critical Examination of Seattle’s Innovation Advisory Council

• In Event: “Smart Infrastructure” as Relational Practice: Cities, Nations and Corporate Strategies in Framing Future Cities

Abstract

“Smart cities” initiatives are not limited to the deployment of networked sensors and real time analysis; rather, they are rationales that produce (and are a product of) entrenched urban challenges as “design problems” in need of technical solutions. This ethnographic case study reports from a smart cities initiative from within the City of Seattle to harness local technology firms to provide “in kind” public service; Mayor Jenny Durkan’s Innovation Advisory Council (IAC) convenes leadership from tech firms like Microsoft, Amazon, Twitter, and Zillow. Teams from the city pitch ideas to the IAC in an effort to elicit support for “technology solutions including new data analytics, dashboards, applications, and software for the City,” with a particular focus on how projects can address the city’s homelessness crisis and transportation challenges (Press Release, August 2, 2018). Our analysis situates this case study within the context of contemporary local discourse and policy controversies critical of the impact of locally based tech firms on city infrastructure. We argue that the IAC initiative illustrates a rationale underlying smart cities initiatives overall; namely, one that valorizes the private sector within a tradition of problem solving by means of technical expertise-- an impulse that has been variously described as masculinized, High Modernist, and techno-solutionist. In our discussion, we highlight how the Innovation Advisory Council may re-conceptualize and interpenetrate notions of “state,” “firm,” and “citizen,” and argue that important publics and stakeholders are overlooked when these boundaries are so reconfigured.

Authors

• Meg Young

• Michael Katell, University of Washington (Information School)

• Peaks Krafft