Session at the forthcoming IAS-STS Conference on the Smart-City narrative and its deconstruction. Abstracts should include no more than 250 words, comprising detailed contact information, affiliation and specification of the *session* you are referring to. In this case, *SESSION 17: DE-CONSTRUCTING THE SMART CITY, REASSEMBLING URBAN LIFE.* Abstracts should be sent to Michaela Jahrbacher ([email protected] ) until *January 15**, 2015* as a *DOC/DOCX-file*. *---* *SESSION 17: DE-CONSTRUCTING THE SMART CITY, REASSEMBLING URBAN LIFE* *Michela Cozza, Giusi Orabona, Giacomo Poderi, Maurizio Teli*, Department of Information Engineering and Computer Sciences (DISI), University of Trento, Italy Since nearly a decade, the idea of a “Smart City” strongly emerged and rapidly spread in urban planning, political discourse and academia in general. As any successful term, its widespread adoption has attributed it many meanings, almost overlapping with the idea of having digital technologies distributed in the urban environment. On the one hand, such distribution seems to favour the city management related to the transit, traffic and provision of localized services. On the other hand, it could be interpreted as a program of control of the population by the big corporations of the ICT domain (Greenfield 2013). Nevertheless, we are already witnessing tentative appropriations and applications of the “Smart City” ideal into several specific domains which concern urban life: from transportation to welfare services, from active ageing to energy management. As already noted in one of the first and pivotal works on Smart Cities (Hollands, 2008), this concept is usually vaguely defined, biased towards the ICT dimension of urban developments, and often portrayed with enthusiastic, uncritical and entrepreneurial rhetoric. In summary, the concept of “Smart City” hides urban life behind the (often physical) screens of technological efficiency and monitoring social practices. As described, the picture of the “Smart City” is signed by technological determinism, an ideological commitment privileging the private sector, social polarization as an inevitable by-product, missing concerns with class inequality, inclusion and social justice, and the almost clear neo-liberal attempt to incorporate local communities into the entrepreneurial discourse. Such discourse needs to be de-constructed and re-assembled in order to leave space for a more socially aware, distributed effort, that is actually empowering people more than the powerful actor at the political and economic level. Therefore, we welcome contributions that critically examines the concept of a “Smart City” at one or both of the two following levels. At the theoretical level, where the different dimensions and elements of “Smart City” such as ICT, urban planning, societal challenges, are defined, analysed and discussed in relationship to state-of-the-art developments and their respective domains of application (e.g. energy, mobility). At the empirical and practical level, where the actual efforts of designing, implementing and deploying plans for smart cities are critically described, reviewed or assessed. In particular, we welcome contributions able to point at how the “Smart City” can be de-constructed and re-assembled in a more democratic way, supporting urban life instead of neo-liberal narratives. Ultimately, we welcome contributions that look at the “Smart City” from the viewpoints both of the citizens and professionals: reflections that discuss how citizens’ identity and professional practices take part in the construction of the idea of “smartness” are appreciated.
Posted on: Mon, 24 Nov 2014 11:35:03 +0000
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