Can Cities Be Smart? Urban Governance in the Digital Age

Abstract

Amid the federal government’s policy disarray of the 2010s, scholars from multiple fields called for U.S. cities to take the lead in advancing progressive policy aims. In the same decade, responding to the digital revolution, “smart city” initiatives proliferated throughout the country. These initiatives combined aspirations for unlocking the governance potential of cities with excitement about the power of digitization to enhance public goods provision. But the promise of smart urbanism quickly faded as many projects became mired in controversy. Critical academic scholarship, including in Science and Technology Studies (STS), has detailed many of the ethical and political concerns raised by smart cities, such as surveillance, digital inequality and privatization. Yet little comparative work has been done to understand how and why city residents accepted or problematized local smart city projects in different ways, to different ends. At the same time, smart city controversies have been largely neglected in the literature on city-scale governance. This dissertation addresses these gaps through a comparative study of smart city controversies in the United States in the 2010s. Specifically, it examines three pairs of smart city projects across three key areas of urban life: self-driving mobility in Phoenix and Columbus; digital connectivity in New York City and San Diego; and economic opportunity in Queens and Northern Virginia through the competition for Amazon’s second headquarters. Working with the STS method of comparative problematization, which calls attention to the site-specific character of problem framings, I find that controversies emerged from local processes of epistemic and normative co-production, whereby the abstract and promissory concept of the smart city was interpreted against more durable forms of local meaning-making and value creation. Smart city projects produced conflicts when they imposed visions of urban futures – often formulated by actors at other sites and scales – that were out of alignment with local imaginaries of social progress. These cases reveal new ways in which urban citizens are confronting the process of digitization by voicing different expectations about their capacity to exercise agency in setting the terms of progress, digital or otherwise. It is this collective capacity for upholding what I call the “urban social compact” that will determine whether, in the face of digital transformation, cities can be smart.