Pre/Performing the Smart City: BIAs, Asset Management Apps and Precursory Technologies

• In Event: Who Knows? Smart Cities as Epistemology

Abstract

In response to economic challenges, cities have repeatedly turned toward the entrepreneurial urbanism and technological solutionism marketed by the private sector. From Business Improvement Areas (BIAs) to smart cities, these new public management solutions promise to revitalize and revolutionize cities and their governance. However, as cities pilot a range of spatial and locative technologies to further digitize city infrastructures and services, old forms of entrepreneurial urbanism threaten are being reinterpreted in the wake of “smart”. To enhance their own corporate storytelling, BIAs have moved away from clipboards and ledgers and have become early adopters of smarter urban technologies. Initially relying on social media metrics, pedestrian counters, i-beacons and CCTV to collect data and demonstrate return on investment, increasingly today, geospatial applications and platforms have been developed for and marketed to BIAs to further automate their organizational mandates and promote accountability and transparency among stakeholders. Building on epistemological discussions in digital geographies (Ash, Kitchin and Leszczynski 2018; Kitchin 2013) science and technology studies (Neyland 2006; Woolgar and Neyland 2013) and critical studies of accounting (Lapsley, Miller and Panozzo 2010; Neu 2006), this paper explores precursors to the production of smart knowledge, accounting and decision making. What concurrencies exist between these ways of knowing and governing the city? Will the gradual diffusion and adoption of these technologies pose challenges for existing political economic continuities? Or will they be reinforced? 

Author

• Debra Mackinnon, Queen's University (Kingston, Canada)