Who Knows? Smart Cities as Epistemology

Abstract

This session interrogates the knowledge politics and discursive practices around ‘smart cities’. It begins from the assumption that the emergence of smart cities necessitated a reframing of how we are to know the city. This reframing hinged on growing public faith in Big Data collection and analytics, “data-driven decision making”, and the ability of digital technologies to solve persistent socio-political problems. While scholars and practitioners alike have contended with the smart city as planning regime, ideology, political economy, and governance strategy, considerably less attention has been directed toward the smart city as a discursive mechanism shaping claims about what the urban is and how it operates. That is, smart cities consist of policies, imaginaries, and discourses that delimit the constitution of “legitimate” knowledge claims, usually toward empiricist and quantitative metrics that translate urban life into and across data models, analytics platforms, political-economic imperatives, and social norms and values.

These advances provoke us to ask about the kinds of epistemologies the smart city enables and suppresses. If smart cities comprise a knowledge politics, how are we to make sense of those politics and their implications? What forms of knowing are obfuscated in smart cities discourses and planning regimes? How are new mechanisms of legitimacy secured? What are the new politics of visibility within smart cities? How do individuals, organizations, or social groups struggle for or against recognition, legibility, and being seen? Finally, what are the possibilities for intervention/re-orientation of these new visions of urbanism?

Chair

• Ryan Burns, Department of Geography

Individual Presentations

• The Persistence of Neo-Colonial Relations in the Smart City - Ryan Burns, Department of Geography; Morgan Mouton, University of Calgary

• A Brief History of Smartness: Infrastructure, Resilience, and “Smartness” - Orit Halpern, Concordia University

• Smart City Data as an Epistemic Object - Inna Kouper, Indiana University; Angie Raymond, Indiana University

• Pre/Performing the Smart City: BIAs, Asset Management Apps and Precursory Technologies - Debra Mackinnon, Queen's University (Kingston, Canada)

• Buying into the Smart City Narrative: Discursive Engineering and Agenda Setting in South African and Indian Municipalities - Ola Söderström, Université de Neuchâtel; Evan Blake, University of Neuchâtel

Session Organizers

• Morgan Mouton, University of Calgary

• Ryan Burns, Department of Geography