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In cities around the world, digital technologies are utilized to manage city services and infrastructures, to govern urban life, to solve urban issues and to drive local and regional economies. While “smart city” advocates are keen to promote the benefits of smart urbanism – increased efficiency, sustainability, resilience, competitiveness, safety and security – critics point to the negative effects, such as the production of technocratic governance, the corporatization of urban services, technological lock-ins, privacy harms, and vulnerability to cyberattack. This book, through a range of international case studies, suggests social, political and practical interventions that would enable more equitable and just smart cities, reaping the benefits of smart city initiatives while minimizing some of their perils. Included are case studies from Ireland, the United States of America, Colombia, the Netherlands, Singapore, India and the United Kingdom. These essays discuss a range of issues including political economy, citizenship, standards, testbedding, urban regeneration, ethics, surveillance, privacy and cybersecurity. This book will be of interest to urban policymakers, as well as researchers in Regional Studies and Urban Planning.

Initial empirical research concerning the development of smart urbanism focused largely on smart city rhetoric, the marketing materials of companies promoting smart city products and services, and the policy and visioning documents of lobbying bodies and city administrations. This chapter examines how the smart city idea has been enacted through a set of smart city initiatives and brought into common discourse in the Dublin city region through the Smart Dublin programme. It charts how Dublin has moved from an 'accidental smart city' to an articulated vision with its own projects. So successful has this re-articulation been that Dublin was one of six shortlisted finalists for smart city of the year at the Smart City Expo and World Congress 2017. A key factor in the revival of Dublin's fortunes was the adoption of entrepreneurial urbanism to stimulate property development and attract service-based foreign direct investment.

We argue that the ideas, ideals and the rapid proliferation of smart city rhetoric and initiatives globally have been facilitated and promoted by three interrelated communities: (i) ‘urban technocrats’; (ii) a smart cities ‘epistemic community’; (iii) a wider ‘advocacy coalition’. We examine their roles and the multiscale formation, and why despite their influence they encounter a ‘last mile problem’; that is, smart city initiatives are yet to become fully mainstreamed. We illustrate this last mile problem through a discussion of plans to introduce smart lighting in Dublin.

Today, withdrawing from digital space would mean giving up on countless pleasures and conveniences afforded by communication and navigation devices. Even if one wanted to withdraw, living offline has become rather difficult. Around the world urban life has become digitized and datafied to a degree that any attempt at living even for a few days without engagement with digital space would likely require a withdrawal from urban life altogether: from travel, work, and personal relations as we nowadays experience and live them. Many urbanites produce digital data through almost everything they do. We get up in the morning and use a mobile phone that is constantly emitting information to check our email, the news, and social media. We travel to work using an electronic travel card or in a car with various GPS and digital systems. We walk down streets where signals from our phones and other devices are captured and read by wifi beacons and MAC address sensors, and our images by CCTV. We use apps that emit details of our location, we tweet, we tag, we check in. We make phone calls through particular antennas set up by our mobile phone providers. We interact with the city digitally by paying our taxes, living in our houses, using city services, and offering feedback to the authorities. All day, digital signatures are embedded in the technologies we use, emitted as we communicate and move around, and signaled by most of our activities. The picture that builds up about us in the course of every day is both behavioral and spatial in ways that are often opaque to us. Actual and possible effects of digitalization and datafication of urban life are critically debated in scholarly and policy circles; and Liesbet Van Zoonen (2015) has observed that city governments today are faced with a super-wicked problem of data governance (Levin et al. 2012). In this context citizens are both contributors to the digitalization and datafication, as well as being affected by these processes.

While there is a relatively extensive literature concerning the nature of smart cities in general, the roles of corporate actors in their production and the development and deployment of specific smart city technologies, to date there have been relatively few studies that have examined the situated practices by which the smart city unfolds in specific places. In this paper, we draw on three sets of interviews ( n = 114) and ethnographic fieldwork to chart the smart city ecosystem in Dublin, Ireland. We examine how the four city authorities have actively collaborated to frame a disparate and uncoordinated set of information and communication technology-led initiatives, what Dourish terms the ‘accidental smart city’, into an articulated vision of Dublin as a smart city. In particular, we focus on the work of ‘Smart Dublin’, a shared unit established to coordinate, manage and promote Dublin’s smart city initiatives and to drive new economic development opportunities centred on corporate interventions into urban management and living. Our analysis highlights the value of undertaking a holistic mapping of a smart city in formation, and the role of political and administrative geographies and specialist smart city units in shaping that formation.

This chapter examines the technocracy of smart cities and the set of urban technocrats that promote and implement their use. It first sets out the new technocracy at work and the forms of technocratic governance and governmentality it enacts. The chapter then details how this technocracy is supported by a new smart city epistemic community of technocrats that is aligned with a wider set of smart city interest groups to form a powerful ‘advocacy coalition’ that works at different scales. In the final section, the chapter considers the translation of the ideas and practices of this advocacy coalition into the policies and work of city administrations. In particular, it considers the reasons why smart city initiatives and its associated technocracy are yet to become fully mainstreamed and the smart city mission successfully realised in cities across the globe.