Actually-existing sociality in a smart city

The social as sociological, neoliberal and cybernetic

Bibliographic Data

ID12579968
AuthorsG Rose (0000-0002-2367-6965, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume24
Issue3-4
Pages512-529
Publication date2020-07-03
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCity (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1360-4813 • E-ISSN: 1470-3629
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13604813.2020.1781412
OpenAlexW3043562653
LanguageEN
Citations received31
References cited46

This paper explores the forms of sociality that are implicit in discussions about a range of smart projects in one actually-existing smart city. Current scholarship on smart cities focuses almost entirely on their digital infrastructure and on the figure of the ‘smart citizen’. This paper argues that smart city projects also emerge and develop through specific understandings of the social. The paper explores understandings of smart sociality by analysing nearly sixty interviews with a wide range of actors involved in smart city projects in the UK city of Milton Keynes. Implicit in those interviews are three overlapping but distinct forms of smart sociality, which the paper terms sociological, neoliberal and cybernetic. The paper argues that it is important to engage both empirically and theoretically with these three understandings of the social in relation to smart, because they suggest that the reconfiguration of human activity assumed in smart city discourses is more diverse than most current scholarship acknowledges. The paper concludes by arguing that if this diversity is to become a critical resource, urban scholarship must give more empirical and conceptual attention to cybernetic forms of sociality in particular

Control reconfiguration · Cybernetics · Diversity (politics · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Internet of Things · Internet privacy · Political science · Resource (disambiguation · Scholarship · Smart city · Social science · Sociality · Sociology · Anthropology · Computer Science · Human Mobility and Location-Based Analysis · Law · Opportunistic and Delay-Tolerant Networks · Smart Cities and Technologies · Ecology

Tools

Open DOI