Smartmentality: The Smart Cityas Disciplinary Strategy

Alberto Vanolo

[Paper first received, November 2012; in final form, April 2013]

Abstract

The paper analyses the concept of the smart city in critical perspective, focusing onthe power/knowledge implications for the contemporary city. On the one hand,smart city policies support new ways of imagining, organising and managing the cityand its flows; on the other, they impress a new moral order on the city by introdu-cing specific technical parameters in order to distinguish between the ‘good’ and‘bad’ city. The smart city discourse may therefore be a powerful tool for the produc-tion of docile subjects and mechanisms of political legitimisation. The paper islargely based on theoretical reflections and uses smart city politics in Italy as a casestudy. The paper analyses how the smart city discourse proposed by the EuropeanUnion has been reclassified to produce new visions of the ‘good city’ and the role ofprivate actors and citizens in the management of urban development.

1. Introduction: The Smart Citybetween Insurgence and Discipline

The expression ‘smart city’ has recentlybecome a leitmotiv in discussions about thecity and urban development models, both inItaly and other European countries. At thesame time, as discussed in this paper, thesmart city is currently an ambiguous con-cept. Echoing the work of Osborne and Rose(1999), the objective of this study is to inves-tigate the mechanisms for the territorialisa-tion of government triggered by the advent,in the landscape of urban policies, of visions

of the ‘smart city’, intended chiefly as anefficient, technologically advanced, greenand socially inclusive city. The research issuebehind the article concerns the effects of thesmart city discourse: among these manyeffects, is there a redefinition of the role andmeaning of cities in order to justify hyper-technological rationalities and new geome-tries of power? In other words, the articleanalyses the possibility that the smart citydiscourse distances urban government from

Alberto Vanolo is in EU-POLIS, Politecnico e Universita di Torino, Viale Mattioli, 39, Torino,10125, Italy; and in the Dipartimento Culture, Politica e Societa, Universita di Torino, Lungo DoraSiena 100A, Torino, 10153, Italy. Email: alberto.vanolo@unito.it.

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politics and represents the urban question interms of the environment and technology,broadening the field of action of technicians,consultants and private companies. With thisin mind, the paper discusses the risk that thesmart city vision reduces political conflict,insurgence, radicalism and resistance in thecontemporary city in favour of ‘disciplined’cities, ready to be coupled with political-tech-nological assemblages designed to naturaliseand justify new assets for the circulation ofcapital and its rationalities within cities.

Although largely based on theoreticalreflection, this article will also be corrobo-rated by the analysis of the dissemination ofthe smart city concept in Italy, a countryfully committed to smart urban policies. Tothis end, the paper will present a brief dis-cussion regarding how the smart city con-cept has been transferred from the US to theEU, and from Brussels to Italy.

Concerning methodology, the paper isbased on the analysis of recent policy docu-ments and promotional materials related tothe smart city produced by the EuropeanUnion, the Italian government, several Italianmunicipalities and a number of public–private partnerships involved in the produc-tion of the smart city discourse.1 The paperwill also review social sciences literatureabout the smart city. In particular, ‘grey’ lit-erature (conference presentations, on-linepapers, research reports) is rather widespreadand constitutes interesting research material.Finally, discussions have benefited frominsight acquired by the author during recentparticipation in several meetings and round-tables on behalf of the Italian Ministry ofTerritorial Cohesion (January to June 2012).

The article does not intend to produce aradical critique of the smart city concept,denying a priori its utility. The author’sperspective—throughout the article—isthat the term smart city is basically an evo-cative slogan lacking a well defined concep-tual core and, in this sense, proponents of

the smart city are allowed to use the termin ways that support their own agendas.With this in mind, assessment of the effectsof smart city policies has to be contextua-lised and related to specific cases—in otherwords, each assessment will depend on howthe smart city concept is actually assem-bled, developed, filled with meaning andimplemented by policy-makers. The cri-tique developed in this paper will analyse inwhat way the smart city strategy impressesnew diagrams of government (Rose, 1999;Osborne and Rose, 1999) implying new dis-courses and new geometries of power. Inthis framework, the paper will briefly dis-cuss issues concerning the risks of depoliti-cisation and naturalisation of conceptswithin urban policies, the changing role ofcities in elaborating developmental andenvironmental issues, and the ‘smart’ refor-mulation of the concept of citizenship.

The article is divided into five sections.Section 2 will briefly present theoreticalconsiderations about urban governmental-ity. Section 3 will introduce the smart cityconcept, its origins and operational strate-gies. Section 4 will analyse the productionof the ‘smart city’ as a political entity andthe mechanisms of discipline present in theItalian urban discourse. Finally, concludingremarks will discuss the results of the anal-ysis and further conceptual problems.

2. Cities and Governmentalities

The analysis proposed here is based on the-oretical and methodological considerationstaken from critical urban studies and, inparticular, the concept of governmentality.It is a well-known fact that critical analysis,especially since the 1990s, has been inspiredby Michel Foucault’s attempt to investigatethe subsurface implicitly found in the mostdiverse forms of knowledge circulating in asociety, be they moral discourses, practices,

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policies, public opinions, conventional wis-doms or scientific knowledge, and wherethe boundaries between these different cate-gories are often unstable (see, for example,Burchell et al., 1991; Rose, 1999; Cramptonand Elden, 2007). The basic premise is that‘truth’ is a historical and contingent prod-uct; in other words, specific historically andgeographically variable cultural systemsmake it possible to distinguish between trueand false, appropriate and inappropriate.Specifically, Osborne and Rose (1999)mapped several ways in which the city hasbeen a core element of the government ofhuman existence, human conduct, humansubjectivity and, more generally, humanlife.

The concept of governmentality refers, inthis framework,2 to the practices of sub-sumption of knowledge in the mechanismsof government, in the practices of ‘the con-duct of conduct’, in the production ofpolice systems (broadly understood as disci-pline systems) and in the cultural mechan-isms that allocate specific identities to theruler and the ruled (Rose, 1999). Power isnot only the product of active agents apply-ing force and sovereignty to the bodies ofthe subjected (as it basically was up to the18th century), but rather the product of dis-cursive tactics of professionals who use sci-entific surveillance techniques to normalisesocial behaviour. Governmentality involvesthe way in which subjects perceive them-selves and form their identities throughprocesses of government which control,incite or suppress actions by drawing a linebetween what is ‘acceptable’ and what is‘unacceptable’.

The concept of governamentality hasbeen applied in a number of fields in thesocial sciences in order to unravel variousmechanisms of ‘the conduct of conduct’.For example, within the debate on ‘newpublic health’, several authors have dis-cussed how citizens are increasingly

considered as responsible for their ownhealth, which is supposed to be potentiallysafeguarded through adhesion to specific‘lifestyles’ (Peterson and Lupton, 1996).This is the case of the obesity discourse,where fat is stigmatised as a health problemand form of deviance—for example, interms of lack of self-control—to be tackledwith individual efforts and discipline (Richet al., 2011).

Based on a similar theoretical perspective,a well-known branch of urban studies hasshown that, in the political/cultural frame-work of advanced liberalism, cities havebeen gradually imagined and reclassified as‘engines of development’ and as actors‘responsible’ for their own development(Rose, 1999; Raco and Imrie, 2000), to beachieved through ‘regeneration’ and ‘entre-preneurial’ actions aimed at creating attrac-tive urban landscapes for the circuits ofcapital—for example, through tax incentivesor urban branding (see classic contributionsby Harvey, 1989a; Hall and Hubbard, 1998).With regard to governmentality, it is there-fore possible to practise an ‘archaeology’ ofthe tools (cultural systems, ideologies, ideas,strategies) used to frame urban develop-ment, tools that have evolved over time as aresult of reinventions and negotiations byeconomic, political and social actors. In thepast two decades, this kind of archaeologyincludes imaginaries of the post-Fordist city,the global city, the cultural city and the crea-tive city (see, for example, Short and Kim,1999; Cochrane, 2007; Mah, 2012).

The smart city discourse is ideally placedin the most recent phase of this ‘history ofurban imaginaries’, a phase that can besituated in the wake of the narratives of thesustainable city (or, more recently, resilientcities; see Newman et al., 2009) and of theinformational/intelligent city. Both theimaginaries of the green/sustainable cityand the technological/informational cityhave been, and still are, powerful devices to

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activate and rethink specific rationalities inorder to justify political choices and triggernew economic paradigms—in other words,accumulation regimes that generate newbusinesses and possible capital accumula-tion (see Harvey, 1989b), as analysed, forexample, in recent literature on eco-staterestructuring (While et al., 2010; Jonaset al., 2011; Weller, 2012). In particular,production of the ‘sustainable city’ subjectis culturally and politically linked to thetension between various forces such as:institutional reorganisation of territorialstructures, governmental powers, and regu-latory mechanisms with a view to reduceenvironmental impact; claims of environ-mental justice by social movements, citi-zens’ associations and other grassrootssocial forces, as well as the revived ‘environ-mental awareness’ of citizens-consumers;and, appropriation of the environmentaldiscourse by firms and economic actorswilling to employ the rhetoric of sustain-ability to reframe or justify their activities.Analysis of the mechanisms of productionof sustainable urban conduct thereforeinvolves the different geometries of powerand social positionalities of the variousactors and rationalities involved, assembledin different configurations in differentplaces, since the way in which the city isimagined as an agent of sustainability islikely to be different, for example, inCopenhagen or Buenos Aires (see Gibbsand Krueger, 2012). At the same time,recent literature on urban policy transferemphasises how policy solutions increas-ingly tend to circulate, migrate and mutateon an international scale and with growingspeed (see Cook and Ward, 2011; McCann,2011; Peck, 2011); this will be discussed inthe next section analysing the mobility ofthe concept of the smart city.

In the following pages, the intellectual‘smart city’ device will be placed in this ana-lytical framework. It is useful to clarify that

‘smart city’ has been conceptualised in theurban political discourse in at least two, par-tially overlapping, ways.

On the one hand, the ‘smart city’ may beintended as a goal for urban developmentprojects. With regard thereto, urban analystsestimate and measure how ‘smart’ citiesare—i.e. how ‘good’, ‘healthy’ and ‘techno-logically advanced’ they are in specific fields.The dissemination of urban benchmarkingtechniques is part of this framework.

On the other hand, the ‘smart city’ dis-course may be used by urban managers andpolitical and economic urban elites to sup-port specific development policies. Thereare many links between neoliberal urbandevelopment policies and smart city ima-ginary: the construction of a clean, greenand intelligent city image is in fact useful toattract investments, leading sector profes-sional workers and tourists (Brand, 2007;Jonas and While, 2007; Hollands, 2008).

The paper will remark on both aspects ofthe smart city discourse, but will focusmainly on the former. At present, transfer ofthe smart city concept to the field of urbandevelopment policies is just beginning, atleast in Italy, to make it difficult to producea comprehensive analysis. As a result, thepaper focuses on the production of thesmart city discourse and on the power/knowledge implications for cities. The paperassumes that catchy urban imaginaries of‘the smart city’ deeply influence urban poli-cies, but never analyses this relation indepth. Instead, it analyses the rationalityand governmentality of urban smartness.

3. Smart City: Origins and Mobilityof Urban Imaginary

As mentioned earlier, the smart city is cur-rently a generic and optimistic concept forthe city of the future and, in fact, no suitablywidespread definition has yet been

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elaborated, as emphasised by Hollands(2008) in his critique of the concept. In theliterature, the most reliable source of a defi-nition of smart city is usually considered theresearch paper by a group of researchersbased in Vienna, Ljubljana and Delft(Giffinger et al., 2007) entitled Smart cities:ranking of European medium-sized cities. Apartfrom benchmarking 70 European cities, theresearch paper has a specific section entitled‘‘Defining smart city’’. After confirming thatno agreed definition exists and affirming theneed for a holistic perspective, this explains theterm smart city by distinguishing six concep-tually distinct characteristics

— Smart economy: an aspect which theauthors link to a spirit of innovation,entrepreneurialism, flexibility of thelabour market, integration in the inter-national market and the ability totransform.

— Smart mobility: referred to local andsupra-local accessibility, availability ofICTs, modern, sustainable and safetransport systems.

— Smart governance: related to participa-tion in decision-making processes,transparency of governance systems,availability of public services and qual-ity of political strategies.

— Smart environment: understood interms of attractiveness of natural con-ditions, lack of pollution and sustain-able management of resources.

— Smart living: involving the quality oflife, imagined and measured in terms ofavailability of cultural and educationalservices, tourist attractions, social cohe-sion, healthy environment, personalsafety and housing.

— Smart people: linked to the level of qua-lification of human and social capital,flexibility, creativity, tolerance, cosmo-politanism and participation in publiclife.

This classification of the six characteris-tics of urban smartness is present in mostliterature about the smart city;3 for example,in Caragliu et al. (2011) and Lombardi et al(2012). The report Smart cities in Italy bythe AAB-The European House-Ambrosettigroup, for example, explicitly states that

The main definition of smart city that seems

to have driven a change in perspective is due

to the Vienna University of Technology in

collaboration with the University of Ljubljana

and the Delft University of Technology: six

axes along which it is possible to assess the

degree of smartness of 70 medium-sized

European cities (AAB-The European House-

Ambrosetti, 2012, p. 70; author’s translation).

The division into six characteristics probablycontains a certain amount of conventionalwisdom and runs the risk of naturalising anddepoliticising political choices: for example,flexibility of the labour market is notassumed as an option, but as a goal of asmart economy together with conventionalkeywords such as ‘social cohesion’ and ‘par-ticipation’. Instead, it is useful here to con-ceive the smart city discourse as theassemblage of several pre-existing urbanimaginaries.

On the one hand, smart city is indebtedto policies and planning ideas migratingfrom America, in particular the concept ofSmart Growth developed within the frame-work of New Urbanism which originated inthe United States in the 1980s and latermoved to Europe (Falconer Al Hindi andTill, 2001; Hollands, 2008). In a nutshell,New Urbanism in planning was aimed atimproving the urban environment and thequality of life in cities by promoting com-munitarian ideas and limiting urban sprawl,land consumption and the proliferation offorms of development inspired by the logicof the automobile and personal mobility.One of the major intellectual results of New

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Urbanism is precisely the idea of SmartGrowth, a planning strategy aimed atmaking cities more compact, less greedyand less soil-consuming. Furthermore,Smart Growth was a political idea of grass-roots movements, especially in urban socialmovements in the 1990s (Beatley andCollins, 2000).

On the other hand, the adjective ‘smart’is indebted to the concept of the ‘intelligentcity’ (Castells and Hall, 1994; Komninos,2002; Hollands, 2008), mainly involving therelationship between urban space and tech-nology and including issues such as theability to generate innovation, transitiontowards forms of e-governance, sociallearning, and the possibility to provide ICTinfrastructures. Singapore has probablybeen the city that identified most with theimaginary of the intelligent city; in fact, itfunded huge computing infrastructure proj-ects destined to both businesses and citizensas part of its branding as an ‘intelligent island’(Arun and Yap, 2000; Olds and Yeung, 2004).However, many more cities around the worldhave integrated the vision of the ICT city intotheir development strategies.

Without going into the details of the ima-ginaries of the ‘intelligent city’ and ‘smartgrowth’, it is reasonable to imagine that thesmart city concept stems from the overlap-ping and assembly of these two concepts(Hollands, 2008; McFarlane, 2011; Allwinkleand Cruickshank, 2011) and, not surpris-ingly, the expression ‘smart city’ has beenliterally used in some old publications in theframework of the two discourses (for exam-ple, Arun, 1999, about the ‘smart’ intelligentisland of Singapore; see also Brooker, 2012).The observation that ICT solutions canfacilitate urban growth and urban restruc-turing was also promptly seized on by anumber of large multinational companieswhich have significantly contributed to theproduction and circulation of the smart citydiscourse (see Graham and Marvin, 2001).

Cisco, for example, began to adopt thesmart city concept in the late 1990s, somuch so that it tried to sponsor a public–private partnership project to build an ICTinfrastructure in Milan. Moreover, IBM isnow a major player in the development ofsmart city projects, mainly involving datacollection systems and public administra-tion management: the company has alreadystarted partnerships with cities like NewYork, Chicago and Madrid in order to workin the fields of urban safety management,healthcare and energy distribution; in Italy,IBM has signed an agreement with the cityof Genoa to develop ‘a new smart citymodel’.4

It is mainly in Europe, and only recently,that the concept of smartness has becomeextremely popular, especially after theexpression ‘smart city’ became part of thecomplex mechanisms of EU research fund-ing. The Seventh Framework Progra-mme for Research and TechnologicalDevelopment—i.e. the main engine forresearch funding in EU countries, such asItaly, where national research funding isquite low (1.1 per cent of GDP in 2011)—introduces smart cities in Line 5, EnergyPolicy. More specifically, the FrameworkProgramme provides financial support tofacilitate the implementation of a StrategicEnergy Technology plan (SET-Plan) whichprovides several funding schemes related toan initiative called ‘Smart cities and com-munities’. The goals of the initiative includea 40 per cent reduction in greenhousegas emissions by 2020 through improve-ment in the energy efficiency of buildings,energy distribution networks and transportsystems. Furthermore, the Smart Citiesand Communities European InnovationPartnership5 was launched on 10 July 2012;the initiative intends to

catalyse progress in areas where energy pro-

duction, distribution and use; mobility and

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transport; and information and communica-

tion technologies (ICT) are intimately linked

and offer new interdisciplinary opportunities

to improve services while reducing energy and

resource consumption and greenhouse gas

(GHG) and other polluting emissions (p. 2)

Without going into the complex organisa-tion and ramification of European projectssupporting research and innovation, it isclear that abundant resources—i.e. severalbillion euros—have been allocated in thepursuit of energy and technology-efficientcities. Such a vast deployment of resources,at a time of widespread crisis in urbaneconomies, has a fallout effect on the stra-tegies of European countries. In 2012, theItalian government introduced an impor-tant programme to fund smart city andsocial innovation projects, first reservedonly for southern Italian cities, and thenthe entire country.6 In particular, the fund-ing programme defines 16 thematic areas,including a wide variety of issues, fromgeneral social concerns such as safety(theme 1), justice (theme 5) and education(theme 6), to specific topics such as last-mile logistics (theme 11), cloud computingtechnology (theme 16) and house automa-tion (theme 4). Conferences and meetingsdevoted to smart cities have begun to beorganised and attract the attention ofurban administrators, private companiesand the media, thereby further contributingto disseminating the smart city vision andrhetoric across the country.

4. The Production ofSmartmentalities

In recent months, smart city discourses inItaly—under pressure to obtain Europeanfunding and become involved in the mar-keting campaigns of private companies—sustain the construction of a new urban

identity, functioning as a discipline mechan-ism that can be defined as a ‘smartmental-ity’. Cities are made responsible for theachievement of smartness—i.e. adherenceto the specific model of a technologicallyadvanced, green and economically attractivecity, while ‘diverse’ cities, those followingdifferent development paths, are implicitlyreframed as smart-deviant.

This section of the paper will focus onthree mechanisms governing the function-ing of this smartmentality device: the role ofcomputing practices in the production ofurban charts and smart city benchmarkinganalysis; the discourse on public–privatepartnerships in the production and manage-ment of smart cities; and the responsibilisa-tion of cities in relation to environmentalprotection, technological development andquality of life.

4.1 Urban Charts and BenchmarkingAnalysis

The smart city discourse helps to naturalisethe concept of the city as a collective actor:cities are represented as single, homoge-neous and unitary actors who win orlose the challenge of the smart city. Thislogic specifically takes shape through theuse of classification techniques, also calledbenchmarking or rating analysis. The quan-titative comparison—in terms of urbansmartness—between different cities hasbeen developed, for example, in the afore-mentioned report Smart cities. Ranking ofEuropean medium-sized cities (Giffingeret al., 2007) and, in Italy, in two recentranking studies entitled iCity Rate (ForumPA, 2012) and Citta e infrastrutture per lacrescita (Cittalia and Siemens, 2012). In allthese cases, the use of a set of multiple sta-tistical indicators has reduced the smarturban development issue to a single numberwhich can be arranged in a linear manner—for example, by establishing the relative

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position of the city of Bari (69th, in theiCity Rate) compared with that of Pisa(10th). Although the analysis of indicatorsmeasuring the performances of cities mayundoubtedly be a useful exercise for bothsocial scientists and policy-makers, creatingcharts introduces two relevant elements ofgovernmentality. First, the creation of aranking; by assigning a different position toeach city, this transforms the specificities ofthe multiple urban dynamics in assessableand enumerable units which as a resultoperate as a computing technology assem-bling different kinds of data (mainly techni-cal) in order to produce new and specificways to organise problems and prefiguresolutions (see Bruno, 2009; Fougner, 2008;Ilcan and Phillips, 2010). For example, thefact that in the iCity Rate rankings of south-ern Italian cities are at the bottom of thechart reframes the traditional socioeco-nomic problems of those cities, such as Bariand Naples, in a new discourse and in a newregulatory space involving their ‘delay’ inpursuing the smart city model and impli-citly suggesting they become more ‘similar’to northern cities like Bologna or Milan. Asstated at the beginning of the iCity Rateranking report (Forum PA, 2012, p. 4;author’s translation), ‘‘this is not a finalchart, but a starting grid for a race yet to berun’’. In this regard, the ranking takes onthe role of a ‘performance technology’ bywhich urban spaces are standardised andgoverned. Furthermore, many southernItalian cities face much more traditionalurban problems, such as the lack of publicservices or massive degradation of the his-torical built environment in the city centreand the ensuing need for massive physicalimprovement; however, they are reposition-ing their problems according to the smartcity discourse, and consequently cities arereorganising their agendas. Of course, it isimpossible to assess immediately the effectsof such a reorganisation, but the key issue

here is the way in which problems and solu-tions are designed, and appropriate andinappropriate actions identified: the lan-guage of technical standards, targets andbest practices helps to hide the power rela-tions which inevitably lurk behind everyprocess of knowledge production. In addi-tion, choosing classification indicators maybe a very subtle disciplining technique: forexample, measuring the performance ofcities by attributing a higher score to urbansettings which attract higher private invest-ments imposes a certain approach towardsdistinguishing between what is desirableand what is not. In fact, urban scholars arewell aware that merely attracting capital isnot necessarily a good thing, because it willdepend on how the capital is used in urbanspace; in the benchmarking discourse, thisproblem is less important and one-dimen-sional—in other words, it involves simpledichotomous categories like ‘good’ and‘bad’. And it is no accident that charts are afavourite with politicians, since their simpleschematics and apparent objectivity can beused to justify different political rationales.An analogous point has been just empha-sised in the literature criticising the over-simplified creative policies triggered byRichard Florida’s urban charts (Florida,2002), as well as the fact that it is commonfor cities to evaluate the effectiveness oftheir creativity strategies according to theirshifting position in Florida’s league tables(see Peck, 2005). It is therefore meaningfulto find the following slogan concerningsmart cities on the IBM website: ‘‘movingbeyond policy-based decisions to reshapecities with insights gained from data’’.7

4.2 Merging Public and Private in thePursuit of the Smart City

The smart city discourse is opening up newhorizons in the problematic relationshipbetween the public and private sectors in the

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management of cities (see Deakin and AlWaer, 2011). In many Italian cities, such asTurin (Fondazione Torino Smart City),Genoa (Associazione Genova Smart City),Milan (Agenzia Smart Milano), Naples(Associazione Napoli Smart City) and Bari(Associazione Bari Smart City), new ‘smartcity’ associations and foundations have beencreated by emerging coalitions of public andprivate actors with common objectives;quite often these coalitions, which are notdemocratically elected, focus explicitly oninvestments. Consider, for example, thenewspaper headline ‘‘Genoa scoops upEuropean funds’’.8 The article waxes lyricalabout how the city of Genoa is ‘virtuous’and as a result was ‘selected’ as one of thethree EU smart cities amongst those whichparticipated in the tender. However, takinga closer look, it is obvious that funding wasnot ‘won’ only by the Municipality, but by apartnership with massive involvement byprivate supralocal actors, including ENEL,an Italian energy giant. Another example isthe recently developed Milan Smart Citystrategy which includes strong participationby the aforementioned Cisco; last but notleast, it is very common to find newspaperheadlines such as ‘‘Siemens: ready to co-operate in Turin Smart City’’.9 Indeed, themedia seem to praise public–private part-nerships as an asset in themselves; just lookat the headline: ‘‘Smart city, Italy is laggingbehind. In Europe the public–private mixworks right now’’.10 The purpose of theseconsiderations is not to support an a prioricritical vision of the role of the private sectorin the management of urban development,but to analyse the prejudices and power rela-tions behind the construction of a smart cityrationale. In this regard, it is clear that, ifprivate capital is necessary, this does notnecessarily mean it is a good thing, or thatrules are not needed to prevent the manyproblematic aspects of the public–privatepartnership, including the risk that private

requests dominate the arena and public sec-tors are merely co-opted in a marginal posi-tion, or the risk that the public sector simplysubsidises the private. Also, as discussed byGraham and Marvin (2001), the provisionof technological infrastructures by privateactors pursuing profit may enhance urbanfragmentation, as in many cases it has led tofunctional separation between sealed-offtechnological enclaves and leftover margina-lised spaces (see also Minton, 2009).

If, on the one hand, the construction ofsmart cities is presented mainly as a techno-logical question based on technical para-meters that most people do not understand,and, on the other, most of these technicalissues are controlled by private companies,obviously it is important that there bemechanisms for the democratic and politi-cal control of inhabitants in smart cities. Infact, the construction of the cities of tomor-row runs the risk of becoming a technologi-cal issue which will have serious effects onthe framing and search for solutions tourban problems.

First of all, if we adopt the perspectivedeveloped by Swyngedouw (2007), underthe heading smart city discourse, urbanissues run the risk of shifting more andmore towards the field of post-politics: thesmart city may increasingly become a gen-eric and easily agreed target, without propercritical discussions and without ‘politics’,intended as the clash and debate betweendifferent ideas and positions (Catney andDoyle, 2011). The danger behind this view isthat urban development policies be basedon a single model, applicable everywhereand linked only to the application of tech-nological solutions: it is no coincidence thatcities at the bottom of the aforementionedcharts are described as ‘lagging behind’,implicitly suggesting the inevitability of alinear path of development and the need forsome kinds of modernisation policies to beapplied everywhere with limited local

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adaptation (McCann, 2011).11 Further-more, the smart city vision is superimposedon a widespread reconfiguration of privatesubjects portraying technologies as ‘heroes’:the private companies investing in smartcity projects adhere to a new ‘spirit of capit-alism’ that increase their soft power, prestigeand the social justifiability of their busi-nesses (see Boltanski and Chiapello, 1999;Thrift, 2005) and it is no coincidence thatthe word ‘smart’ abounds in the advertisingmaterial of private companies. Italy, forexample, has the second-highest number ofpassengers in cars in the world (596 cars per1000 inhabitants in 2009; the first country isIceland)12 and is an important market in theeyes of car manufacturers. Moreover, it is ahighly saturated market and eco-restructur-ing presents highly profitable possibilitiesfor car manufacturers: in recent years, theItalian government financed generous eco-nomic incentives to encourage replacementof old cars in favour of new, more energy-efficient vehicles. It is therefore not surpris-ing that several car manufacturers haverecently used the smart city rhetoric to rede-fine their role as agents in the search fornon-polluting private mobility, in particularby producing electric cars; for example, thefollowing statement appears on the websiteof the Smart City Exhibition 2013 to be heldin Bologna

At the end of 2011, with the market launch

of Ampera, the first, extreme self-sufficient

electric car, Opel . emphasises its role as

innovator in the field of advanced mobility

solutions.13

Of course, technologies are social constructswith a range of positive or negative effectson human life. However, after years of dys-topian visions of the technological future(see Thrift, 1996; Kaika and Swyngedouw,2000), there seems to be an on-goingattempt to overcelebrate the social and

environmental opportunities offered bytechnology. On the one hand, the idea that‘technologies will save us’ guards technolo-gical-related activities against criticism; onthe other, it boosts the idea that technologi-cal networks and governmental practiceswill automatically guarantee better cities,regardless, for example, of the developmenttrajectories of local societies, the nature oftechnological developments, the difficultyof reducing the chaos and complexity ofecosystems to a handful of statistics andindicators which have to be fully monitoredand controlled,14 and the need for debates,rules and forms of control in order toachieve virtuous coupling between technol-ogy and society (Hjerpe and Linner, 2009).It is perhaps a coincidence, but most of thevisual representations of a smart city (easyto find on the web) present stereotypicalimages of cities with plenty of hi-tech sym-bols, but without any visible human pres-ence. Smart city aesthetics seem to supporta political unconsciousness that relegatessocial importance to the invisible peripheryof a technological discourse, despite the factthat most European funding schemes expli-citly talk about ‘communities’. Moreover, abrilliant example of the non-critical praiseof hi-tech is present in certain ideas about‘sustainable districts’ in which human com-munities live in futuristic micro environ-ments ideally living a ‘zero impact’ life;clearly, these interesting experiments areunsustainable for the 7 billion people whoinhabit the planet today (Davis, 2010). Aneven more problematic example could bethe new smart city experiments completelycreated, developed and managed by privateactors: for example, Songdo near Seoul, oneof the most expensive real estate projects inthe world, sponsored by Gale Internationaland Morgan Stanley Real Estate, or thesmart city of Kochi, in Kerala (India), spon-sored by DIC (Dubai Internet City), a proj-ect that has already sparked local resistance

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movements. In these cases, the ideal smartcity becomes a ‘privatopia’ (metaphorcoined by McKenzie, 1996), raising seriousquestions about the balance between publicand private powers.

4.3 The Responsibilisation of the City andthe Smart Citizen

The smart city discourse produces a newresponsibilisation of the city as concernsenvironmental protection, technologicalupgrading and quality of life. In particular,the environmental problem is reclassified asan urban problem: this is certainly logical tosome degree, but it is not that obvious whenyou consider that almost half the world’spopulation lives in non-urban settings.Moreover, cities are imagined as morallyresponsible entities vis-a-vis environmentalconcerns (see Raco and Imrie, 2000; Laurie,2006; Brand, 2007). Although dealing withthese problems within this urban frameworkcan certainly offer original insights (Howcan we design better cities? What kind ofsmart city do we want to live in?), it masksother perspectives (such as the possibility torethink the capitalist system in entirely dif-ferent ways, or invent solutions to the crisisof effective citizenship). In Italy, where thenational system is clearly going through aneconomic crisis, one of the perverse effectsof the smart city discourse is fierce, cut-throat competition, not in terms of creativesolutions to people’s problems, but in tryingto obtain national and European funding, inother words, how to create the best condi-tions so that private companies can partici-pate in smart city projects. Furthermore, thisis the way in which academic research fundshave been regulated, because funds areincreasingly related to smart city projects.

Secondly, producing ‘smart cities’ inevi-tably also co-produces what we could call a‘smart citizen’. In fact, the smart city dis-course means that people have to be willing

to adapt to, and to live in, smart cities. It ishardly necessary to point out that there islittle room for the technologically illiterate,the poor and, in general, those who aremarginalised from the smart city discourse;moreover, citizens are considered responsi-ble for their own ability to adapt to theseon-going changes. In Italy, at least, it isquite clear that the smart city discoursenever touches on ‘hot’ issues such as thecrisis of the welfare system. Also, the smartcity discourse has an effect on the way citi-zens are supposed to behave. On the onehand, citizens are very subtly asked to par-ticipate in the construction of smart cities,on the other, they are implicitly consideredresponsible for this objective. This meansthat the citizen is re-subjectified in theform of an active citizen required to achievehis goals (Marinetto, 2003; Brand, 2007;Summerville et al., 2008; Paterson andStripple, 2010). In the smart city discourseimplemented by local public–private part-nerships, it is easy to find the followingstatements15

The primary goal of the Bari Smart City is to

inform, involve and mobilise the commu-

nity, residents, associations and public and

private organisations, in order to develop an

effective action plan in co-operation with the

European Commission.

Follow our tips to get SMART. Reducing

energy consumption in the home and the

workplace benefits the environment and your

wallet.

To build a smart city, we need citizens capable

of inventing a new world.

In other words, citizens and local commu-nities are invested with a moral obligationto behave in a certain way and adhere to thecollective project of building smart cities; inthis regard, the production of ‘smart citi-zens’ can be seen as an instrument of

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‘government at a distance’. One examplecould be the pressure towards a sort ofsmart self-care that includes the opportu-nity for life-long technological learning.Another example may be the manipulationof lifestyles towards green consumption andecological tourism.16 Smartness is becominga field of social control that makes intrusionin a person’s private life quite natural; as aresult, we need to pay attention to the goalsestablished in the framework and the labelgiven to smart city projects.

5. Concluding Remarks

The smart city vision has been forcefullyintroduced into urban policies in Italy. Thispaper contributes to the urban studies liter-ature by critically analysing the politicalconcept of the smart city and providing acase study concerning urban governamen-talities. As discussed in the paper, the smartcity is an example of a ‘political assemblage’(McFarlane, 2011) involving the mobilityof policy ideas in global circuits of knowl-edge (Cook and Ward, 2011; McCann,2011; Peck, 2011). The smart city is anurban imaginary combining the concept of‘green cities’ with technological futurismand giving a name to techno-centric visionsof the city of tomorrow. At the same time,smart city is a framework for policies sup-porting technological and ecological urbantransitions, a political technology that iscurrently spreading across Europe and fer-tilising national and local political agendas.

The reasons why the smart city is so pop-ular in Europe are based mainly on a mix ofvarious forces, including: the availability ofsubstantial European financial resources tofund the eco-restructuring of cities; the ten-dency of large private companies to investin urban digitisation projects; the construc-tion of a powerful rhetoric including salva-tion visions of technology; and the image of

clean, liveable, technologically advancedcities far removed from the economic crisis.The reasoning developed in the paper isthat the smart city discourse inevitablyinvolves a new geometry of power relationsrequiring the production and circulation ofknowledge, rationalities, subjectivities andmoralities suited to the management of thesmart city project. The discourse on the cityas the protagonist of social, technologicaland environmental development (ratherthan the state or global society, as in mostprevious discourses), the construction of asystem to measure the performances of thecities, the promotion of new public–privatepartnerships and the empowerment of localcommunities and citizens, are all aspects of‘technologies of government at a distance’or ‘smartmentalisation’. It is helpful topoint out that there are two dangers inher-ent in this process.

The first is that, together with the ideal-type of the smart city, specific objectives,strategies, ideologies and political choicesmay be presented as ‘natural’ and ‘univocal’approaches. Like any other urban develop-ment issue, the smart city will triggerrestructuring which in turn will producesubjects that are either included or excluded,visible or invisible, people who will benefit,and people marginalised from the circuits ofpower (Hollands, 2008). At present in Italyit is clear that the rhetoric of smartness runsthe risk of building an a priori non-criticalconsensus, as discussed in the paper, due tothe lack of critical opponents and the manyenthusiastic and celebratory images of thesmart city strategy illustrated by the media.

The second danger is that urban visioningis increasingly reduced to a single technol-ogy-centric vision of the city of the future,and that this will somehow restrict the hori-zon of any possible imaginative planningapproaches, as well as limit the creationof alternative solutions to the problemsof today and tomorrow (regarding the

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possibilities of imagination and utopia, seeHarvey, 2000; Davis, 2010).

This is why stimulating researchand critical debates about the smart city isso important. There is obviously a need—in Italy and in the rest of the world—forstudies and considerations regarding: thepolitics engendered by smart city projects;the geometries of power triggered by strate-gies; the relationships between the city andtechnology; the role played by differentfields of knowledge in shaping the city ofthe future; and, finally, the need to bringthe smart city into the political arena inorder to spark a serious debate about thekind of smart city we want to live in.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from anyfunding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

1. Specifically, concerning the EuropeanUnion, documents in the Setis (http://seti-s.ec.europa.eu) and Energy directorate(http://ec.europa.eu/energy) websites havebeen reviewed. In the case of Italian govern-ment policies, the two normative referencesare PON Research and Competitiveness2007–2013 by the MIUR and DirectorialDecree 5 July 2012 no. 391/Ric. Concerningthe urban scale, documents from the officialwebsites of municipal councils and smartcity foundations/associations have been ana-lysed in the cases of Turin, Milan, Genoa,Trento, Venice, Bologna, Rome, Naples, Bariand Palermo. Materials from the 2012Bologna Smart City exposition, a fair involv-ing urban administrators and companies,have also been analysed. Finally, a sample of48 Italian newspaper articles has been col-lected and analysed.

2. It is, in fact, only one of the many meaningsof governmentality outlined by the

philosopher and by the scientific debate(see Burchell et al., 1991).

3. A simple search on Google Scholar(accessed November 2012) will come upwith 35 citations, a very large number giventhe limited literature on the subject. Mostof the references concern ‘grey’ literature(mostly papers presented at conferences).

4. See the IBM Italia website: www-03.ibm.com/press/it/it/pressrelease/33631.wss (accessedNovember 2012).

5. Communication from the Commission‘‘Smart Cities and Communities—European Innovation Partnership’’, COM(2012)4701; http://ec.europa.eu/energy/tech-nology/ initiatives/smart_cities_en.htm

6. Respectively PON Research and Compe-titiveness 2007–2013 MIUR and DirectorialDecree 5 July 2012 no. 391/Ric. The ItalianDigital Agenda initiative—DL 18 October2012, no. 179—should also be mentioned:it mainly supports the diffusion of ICT inpublic administrations, without specific ref-erence to the urban scale.

7. See: www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/smarter_cities/overview/index.html.

8. Il Sole 24 Ore, 3 April 2012. As for all theother quotations from Italian newspaperspresented in the article, translation by theauthor.

9. See: www.ecodallecitta.it/notizie.php?id=105603 (accessed November 2012).

10. La Repubblica, 12 October 2012.11. This perspective confuses the logical per-

spectives of geography, intended as thedescription of variety and co-presence ofdifferent evolutive trajectories, with thoseof history, a conceptual problem fully ana-lysed by Massey (2005).

12. See: www.data.worldbank.org/indicator/IS.VEH. PCAR.P3 (accessed November 2012).

13. See: www.smartcityexhibition.it/espositori/general-motors/#/questions (accessed November2012, author’s translation).

14. In the words of Graham and Marvin (2001,p. 392), ‘‘The life of major cities cannot besimply programmed like some computer’’.See also Richard Sennett’s newspaper article‘No one likes a city that’s too smart’, The

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Guardian, 4 December 2012; (accessedDecember 2012).

15. Sources: www.barismartcity.it; www.tori-nosmart city.csi.it; www.genovasmartcity.it(all accessed November 2012, translation bythe author).

16. For a critique of the government of life-styles, linked in particular to the publichealth debate, see Petersen and Lupton(1996) and Rich et al., (2011).

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