Smart Cities and Green Growth: Outsourcing Democratic and Environmental Resilience to the Global Technology Sector
By J. Viitanen, Richard Kingston. 2014
378 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Climate change and advances in urban technology propel forward the ‘smart city’. As decision makers strive to find a technological fix, smart city strategies are often based on technological orthodoxies which are conceptually and empirically shallow. The motivation behind this paper is to address the conceptual adolescence which relates to the wholesale digitisation of the city by pursuing a twin argument about the democratic and environmental consequences. The authors draw on interdisciplinary theory and insights from urban studies, infrastructure, informatics, and the sociology of the Internet to critique the way the ‘smart city’ is taken forward. It is concluded that private firms market smart city services and solutions based on an ideological legacy of ‘ubiquitous computing’, ‘universal infrastructure’, and ‘green technology’. Based on evidence from three UK cities—Manchester, Birmingham, and Glasgow—it is argued that the underlying principle of future city strategies is to expand the market for new technology products and services to support ‘green growth’ with disregard for their wider impacts. For citizens, becoming a consumer of the technologies is often presented as progressive ‘participation’ or ‘empowerment’ with unknown or hidden consequences both political and environmental. The city systems become a digital marketplace where citizen-consumers' participation is increasingly involuntary and the hegemony of global technology firms is inflated. What follows is that the city's ‘intelligent systems' are defined through a digital consumer experience that has inherent biases and leaves parts of the city and its population unaccounted for. This renders the city less resilient in the face of future social and climatic risks.
Subfields: Building and Construction, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Media Technology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6834c6307410329af82eef47961bd2142e4c22ec
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Building and Construction
In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering
In Media Technology
Citations in the corpus
- The Smart City as Global Discourse: Storylines and Critical Junctures across 27 Cities (2019, background): “Finally, the relationship between smart city innovation and sustainable development has come in for critical examination (e.g., Gargiulo Morelli et al., 2013; Viitanen and Kingston, 2014; Haarstad, 2017; Kudva and Ye, 2017; Trindade et al., 2017; Chang et al., 2018).”
- The sharing economy: : A pathway to sustainability or a nightmarish form of neoliberal capitalism? (2016, background): “However, given the malleability of digital technologies discussed above, I suggest that such expectations should be moderated (Viitanen and Kingston, 2014); giving further cause for concern that we are not taking the action needed to transition to sustainability (Geels, 2013).”
- European energy poverty metrics: Scales, prospects and limits (2020, neutral): “In current energy infrastructure transitions, energy data may be held by private owners, e.g., in the context of smart cities [21].”
- Urban Digital Twins for Smart Cities and Citizens: The Case Study of Herrenberg, Germany (2020, background): “…and ethical implications of the development of these digital technologies, as well as the growing influence of technology giants on city economics, the freedom and privacy of its inhabitants [19] are a separate issue and not taken into account adequately within many of these definitions and concepts.”
- Diversifying and de-growing the circular economy: Radical social transformation in a resource-scarce world (2016, background): “However, this reading of the rise of the online SE hides a number of less-than-positive political and environmental consequences (McNeill, 2015; Viitanen & Kingston, 2014).”