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<\/p>\nSince its inception over a decade ago, the smart discourse and its promoters have been incredibly successful to the extent that now many cities identify themselves as smart cities.\u00a0 While there is no single definition of a smart city, in broad terms such developments are based on digital infrastructures comprising sensors and data hubs which present data in various ways via city dash boards and smart phone apps to assist decision making and augment city management.<\/p>\n
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Smart city developments have been widely critiqued for their capacity to surveil urban populations and perhaps edit their choices in pursuit of opaque notions of urban progress, inflected by corporate interests.\u00a0 However, it is difficult to deny that new knowledge gained through smart city initiatives can be useful in city management. \u00a0On one hand we may be reluctant to share our travel patterns with transport management databases, on the other when we are hurrying to appointments, we are grateful when we can follow routes through a city which minimise congestion.<\/p>\n
If we excavate smart city initiatives more deeply, we can see many people are ultimately concerned that smart decisions undertaken in pursuit of the modernist ideal of ever \u2018greater efficiencies\u2019 are not automatically wise<\/em>decisions.\u00a0 For example, smart city initiatives may identify efficient transport routes but tell us little about the lived experience of making journeys \u2013 smart cities may tell us that it is efficient to travel from Milton Keynes to London at 23:52 on a Sunday evening but they do not tell us much about the lived experiences of making that journey \u2013 how the affects such as atmospheres on the railway station platform may lead to concerns about safety and security.<\/p>\n There is growing concern that smart city initiatives and subsequent artificial intelligence based developments hold potential to shorn cities of their profoundly human attributes which cannot be expressed numerically and managed in that vein.\u00a0 For example, as suggested above there are times when we need to travel in efficient manner but there are also times when the act of travelling (e.g. embodied in the idea of touring) is more important.\u00a0 Here, people are not simply users which can be portrayed as part of transport systems in instrumental fashion but \u2018travellers\u2019 for whom both the efficient operation of transport systems is important as well as <\/em>the affects of journeying and corporeal experiences of urban life.<\/p>\n Such limitations of smart city developments are clearly a matter of concern.\u00a0 Why do these limitations arise?\u00a0 What can be done to help resolve them?<\/em><\/p>\n Founded on modernist inspired notions of efficient urban living, it is hardly surprising that smart city developments are based on what is often called \u2018data science\u2019.\u00a0 Drawing on the ancient Greek intellectual virtues, we can observe that smart cities thus embody scientific thinking – episteme,<\/em> which can be characterised as scientific knowledge, universal, context independent, invariable.\u00a0 Based on analytical rationality, episteme<\/em> provided the intellectual foundations of much 20th<\/sup> century urban planning.\u00a0 In practice, this resulted in \u2018Black Boxed\u2019 scientific ways of knowing cities (e.g. models) which were more or less the sole preserve of planning technocrats.\u00a0 And there are now serious concerns that smart city developments hark back to such arrangements and in time that the episteme<\/em> of the smart city begins to dominate city governance and foreclose other ways of knowing and acting in the inevitable struggles to represent, plan and manage cities.<\/p>\n Although such arguments about knowledge politics can seem a little abstract, these aspects of urban governance cities matter.\u00a0 Cities are complex and challenging to represent in meaningful ways.\u00a0 In planning processes, as Ash Amin observes, we \u2018summon up\u2019 cities and as there is not a singular criterion against which we may objectively determine the validity of such representations, their construction is profoundly political embodying power relations which shape who gets what.<\/p>\n In representations generated by smart city initiatives, which may be summoned up in urban planning processes, the measurement of phenomena (e.g. of flows such as energy and traffic) is prioritised.\u00a0 Such logics are embodied in the phrase \u2018what gets measured gets managed\u2019, which signal development priorities and potential patterns of investment.\u00a0 However, residents may be unable to narrate their felt needs by drawing on a data science discourse but nonetheless have valuable local knowledges and understandings that are of immense value in urban development.\u00a0 It may also be the case that even if residents could narrate their concerns using a data science discourse, such approaches would be inappropriate as their quantitative foundations mean they are incapable of representing residents\u2019 views in a meaningful way.<\/p>\n Thus, being smart may be useful to help manage aspects of the technical systems which underpin everyday life in cities.\u00a0 But ultimately being smart may be insufficiently socially inclusive for wise city planning and governance.\u00a0 if we are to achieve socially progressive more sustainable urban development, we must ensure that other ways of thinking about and representing cities are not marginalised in city planning and management.\u00a0 This means planners need to learn when smart city knowledge is valuable and how it can be usefully joined in planning processes, with other forms of knowledge generated by ways of knowing which do not necessarily conform with the epistemic principles of data science.\u00a0 Ultimately deliberate action is required to ensure modes of thinking other than \u2018smart\u2019 quantitative episteme thrive in cities and ensure many voices (human and non-human) are heard and make a difference in urban governance.<\/p>\n