Smart Cities in Global Comparative Perspective: Worlding and Provincializing Relationships

Of International (non-EU) scope.

Can information and communications technologies (ICTs) help solve urban problems and improve wellbeing? Increasingly, city administrators, planners, and portions of the public believe so. Claims that "smart cities" are doing just this are increasingly common, yet little attention is paid to the diverse ways such initiatives play out in different contexts. Smart cities are emerging across the globe concurrent with two other trends: efforts to destabilize urban theory's predominantly Global North focus, and more calls for comparative analysis. The former has stimulated renewed interest in tacking between the "worlding" and "provincializing" of cities. These dichotomous approaches entail both positioning cities within global flows of capital and cultural processes (worlding), and challenging claims that take Global North cities as the norm against which other cities are compared (provincializing). This trend coincides with more calls for comparative research that draws connections, as well as recognizes differences, in urban processes across space. Moreover, most smart city research focuses on ideal-types that often do not exist, neglecting "actually existing" smart cities across a variety of contexts, in particular their highly variable social, political, and environmental characteristics. Global comparative research provides an avenue for addressing these lacunae in contemporary smart city scholarship. We propose a global comparative investigation of smart urbanism as a ge...

Researchers

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Ramon

Ribera Fumaz

Leader

Paolo

Cardullo

Hug

March Corbella

Former participants (1)

• Paco Gonzalez-Gil 20212022