For the Smarter Good of Cities: On Cities, Complexity and Slippages in the Smart City Discourse

Abstract

The notion of the Smart City describes the city as a system of information and flow, one that, although complex and wayward, can be controlled, manipulated and optimised to increase efficiency in sectors such as transportation infrastructures, health care, etc. This way of thinking takes for granted that there exists something like a common goal of optimisation which would benefit the larger whole of the city and which would make purposeness and meaning come together in the built environment. It thus propagates a rhetoric that echoes modernist visions from the early twentieth century of betterment of culture through technology. What remains to be understood in a cultural-theoretical perspective, however, is what consequences this way of thinking has on the urban cultural level.

This article takes a closer look at the smart city discourse as it is set forward in IBM’s online exhibition site Before Cities Got Smart. Using strategies of close reading and analysis of the visual material presented on this site, the aim is to illuminate how art, technology and advertisement are brought together to account for and promote the Smart City model. What becomes apparent is the problematic way in which the complexity of such environments is dealt with in this discourse. In order to illuminate the deeper urban-cultural significance of the complexities at work in the use of automated technologies in the contemporary city, we turn to French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and his notion of ‘societies of control’ as well as the artworks of the Canadian artist David Rokeby. The artworks approach the implications of smart city technologies in a different and critical way, one that allows for the complexity of these environments to be enhanced rather than glossed over. In this way, we hope to develop a more differentiated cultural-theoretical platform for discussing the Smart City concept and the ideological implications embedded in its use of technology within the context of contemporary urbanism.