[Air-L] CFP 4S New Orleans: Who knows? Smart cities as epistemology

[Ryan Burns]

Who Knows? Smart cities as epistemology

Organizers: Morgan Mouton, Ryan Burns (University of Calgary)

Deadline: February 1, 2019


This session interrogates the knowledge politics and discursive practices around ‘smart cities’. It begins from the assumption that the emergence of smart cities necessitated a reframing of how we are to know the city. This reframing hinged on growing public faith in Big Data collection and analytics, “data-driven decision making”, and the ability of digital technologies to solve persistent socio-political problems. While scholars and practitioners alike have contended with the smart city as planning regime, ideology, political economy, and governance strategy, considerably less attention has been directed toward the smart city as a discursive mechanism shaping claims about what the urban is and how it operates. That is, smart cities consist of policies, imaginaries, and discourses that delimit the constitution of “legitimate” knowledge claims, usually toward empiricist and quantitative metrics that translate phenomena into and across data models, analytics platforms, political-economic imperatives, and social norms and values. For instance, Söderström et al. (2014) traced and analyzed the emergence of a form of “corporate storytelling”, a describing of urban systems in ways that buttress multi-national corporations’ centrality to managing them. Similarly, Vanolo (2014) reflected, in Foucauldian terms, on how smart city policies subtly draw in citizens under new urban evaluative terms and standards. White (2016) argues that smart cities invigorate anxieties about purportedly impending crisis inherent to urban systems, which subtend the transformation of “good” urban planning.


These advances provoke us to ask about the kinds of epistemologies the smart city enables and suppresses. While we now understand that the smart city comprises a knowledge politics, how are we to make sense of those politics and their implications? What forms of knowing are obfuscated in smart cities discourses and planning regimes? How are new mechanisms of legitimacy secured? In this panel, we expand on existing scholarship to posit that epistemological claims regarding the urban are shifting within the milieu of “smartness”, and to provide specificity, nuance, and characterization to this shift. In other words, smart city discourses are establishing new frames of reference for the definition and the interpretation of the urban.


From here, several questions arise:

  *   How can we characterize smart city epistemologies? Is there a singular, or are there multiple epistemologies? More specifically, what do smart city visions promote — and even more importantly, what do they obscure?

  *   What is the performativity of the ’smart city’ discourse? In other words, what can emerging ’smart city’ initiatives tell us about the translation from discourse to practice, and back again?

  *   What are the possibilities for intervention / re-orientation of these new visions of urbanism?

  *   How do actants and assemblages secure legitimacy for their knowledge claims within this smart milieu? What struggles emerge when social and political relations, interpersonal knowledges and experiences, and values and norms come to be encoded in, and as, data?

  *   What are the linkages between smart epistemologies and the (re)production of urban, national, and mesoscale territories? In what ways do governments leverage emergent digital technologies like data science and visualization software, along with their attendant epistemological claims, in their efforts to govern populations?

  *   What are the new politics of visibility within smart cities? How do individuals, organizations, or social groups struggle for or against recognition, legibility, and being seen?

  *   How are we to contend with the material and discursive manifestation of epistemologies in and through the bodies and subjectivities that circulate in the smart city?

Please send an abstract of up to 250 words to Ryan Burns (ryan.burns1 at ucalgary.ca<mailto:ryan.burns1 at ucalgary.ca>) and Morgan Mouton (morgan.mouton at ucalgary.ca<mailto:morgan.mouton at ucalgary.ca>) by February 1.

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Ryan Burns, PhD
Department of Geography
Engaging Open Data Research
O'Brien Institute for Public Health
University of Calgary

http://burnsr77.github.io<http://burnsr77.github.io/>