Selling Smartness: Corporate Narratives and the Smart City as a Sociotechnical Imaginary

By Jathan Sadowski, R. Bendor. Science, Technology and Human Values, 2018

296 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article argues for engaging with the smart city as a sociotechnical imaginary. By conducting a close reading of primary source material produced by the companies IBM and Cisco over a decade of work on smart urbanism, we argue that the smart city imaginary is premised in a particular narrative about urban crises and technological salvation. This narrative serves three main purposes: (1) it fits different ideas and initiatives into a coherent view of smart urbanism, (2) it sells and disseminates this version of smartness, and (3) it crowds out alternative visions and corresponding arrangements of smart urbanism. Furthermore, we argue that IBM and Cisco construct smart urbanism as both a reactionary and visionary force, plotting a model of the near future, but one that largely reflects and reinforces existing sociopolitical systems. We conclude by suggesting that breaking IBM’s and Cisco’s discursive dominance over the smart city imaginary requires us to reimagine what smart urbanism means and create counter-narratives that open up space for alternative values, designs, and models.

Subfields: Management of Technology and Innovation, Media Technology, Transportation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/390c0a1d42cb34747175ac9ced933d8b37ef83c9

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1. Salomé Viljöen
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Citations in the corpus

• Algorithmic realism: expanding the boundaries of algorithmic thought (2020, background): “directly as algorithmic thinking shapes how scholars (both inside and outside the eld), practitioners, and public o cials conceive of social challenges and progress [16, 53, 125, 148].”