Journal ArticleDOI
Smart cities as corporate storytelling
Reads0
Chats0
TLDR
The authors analyzes IBM's smart city campaign and finds it to be storytelling, aimed at making the company an "obligatory passage point" in the implementation of urban technologies, and argues that IBM's influential story about smart cities is far from novel but rather mobilizes and revisits two long-standing tropes: systems thinking and utopianism.Abstract:
On 4 November 2011, the trademark ‘smarter cities’ was officially registered as belonging to IBM. This was an important milestone in a struggle between IT companies over visibility and legitimacy in the smart city market. Drawing on actor-network theory and critical planning theory, the paper analyzes IBM's smarter city campaign and finds it to be storytelling, aimed at making the company an ‘obligatory passage point’ in the implementation of urban technologies. Our argument unfolds in three parts. We first trace the emergence of the term ‘smart city’ in the public sphere. Secondly, we show that IBM's influential story about smart cities is far from novel but rather mobilizes and revisits two long-standing tropes: systems thinking and utopianism. Finally, we conclude, first by addressing two critical questions raised by this discourse: technocratic reductionism and the introduction of new moral imperatives in urban management; and second, by calling for the crafting of alternative smart city stories.read more
Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
What are the differences between sustainable and smart cities
TL;DR: Analyzing 16 sets of city assessment frameworks for smart city and sustainable city frameworks suggests that there is a need for developing smart city frameworks further or re-defining the smart city concept, and recommends the use of a more accurate term “smart sustainable cities” instead of smart cities.
Journal ArticleDOI
Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization.
Daphne Spain,Richard Sennett +1 more
TL;DR: The body and city: the passive body the plan of the book a personal note as discussed by the authors, is a survey of the body and its relationship to the city and its culture. But it does not discuss the relationship between the passive and active body.
Journal ArticleDOI
Making sense of smart cities: addressing present shortcomings
TL;DR: The authors characterises and critiques research on smart cities and argues that much of the writing and rhetoric about smart cities seeks to appear non-ideological, commonsensical, and pragmatic, while making vital conceptual and political interventions.
Journal ArticleDOI
The First Two Decades of Smart-City Research: A Bibliometric Analysis
TL;DR: A bibliometric analysis of the literature published between 1992 and 2012 shows that smart-city research is fragmented and lacks cohesion, and its growth follows two main development paths.
Journal ArticleDOI
Can cities become smart without being sustainable? A systematic review of the literature
Tan Yigitcanlar,Md. Kamruzzaman,Marcus Foth,Jamile Sabatini-Marques,Eduardo Moreira da Costa,Giuseppe Ioppolo +5 more
TL;DR: In this article, a systematic review of the smart and sustainable cities literature is presented, which highlights the need for a post-anthropocentric approach in practice and policymaking for the development of truly smart cities.
References
More filters
Book
Science in action : how to follow scientists and engineers through society
TL;DR: In this article, the quandary of the fact-builder is explored in the context of science and technology in a laboratory setting, and the model of diffusion versus translation is discussed.
Journal ArticleDOI
Science in action : How to follow scientists and engineers through society
Wiebe E. Bijker,Bruno Latour +1 more
Book
The Limits to Growth
TL;DR: In this article, the authors investigate five major trends of global concern: accelerating industrialization, rapid population growth, widespread malnutrition, depletion of nonrenewable resources, and a deteriorating environment.
Journal ArticleDOI
Will the Real Smart City Please Stand Up?: Intelligent, progressive or entrepreneurial?
TL;DR: In this article, the authors provide a preliminary critical polemic against some of the more rhetorical aspects of smart cities, with a view to problematizing a range of elements that supposedly characterize this new urban form, as well as question some underlying assumptions/contradictions hidden within the concept.
Smart Cities in Europe
TL;DR: In this article, the authors provide a focused and operational definition of the concept of smart city and present consistent evidence on the geography of smart cities in the EU27, for the first time to our knowledge.