No need to fix: Strategic inclusivity in developing and managing the smart city

Abstract

The prevalent discourses around the concept of the smart city often describe it as a long-awaited revolution in urban planning and management needed to ‘fix’ increasingly large, wasteful, chaotic and unsustainable civic environments across the globe through the deployment of high technologies. The emergence of located informatics, the ‘Internet of Things’, the creation of ‘urban operating systems’ and the addition of sensing and intelligent functions to everyday objects and spaces will – it is argued – change rules and improve quality of life, urban attractiveness and the related economic development potential, to fix an otherwise critical situation. These remedial aspects of the smart city are becoming entirely dominant in global debates as well as in many proposed real-world initiatives involving large-scale interventions, including the shaping of brand new urban centres.