title: Not a dashboard, not a sandcastle
title: unpacking the smart city discourse
titleType: Subtitle
Creators: name: Wang, Ding
Publisher: name: Lancaster University
Year: 2018
Subjects: Smart City
Ethnography
Foucauldian Approaches

description: While the idea of the ‘Smart City’ has attracted increasing attention from
      academia, industry,
      
      and government, this interest has largely had a technical and
      technological focus. This thesis
      
      explores the notion of the smart city in several different but related
      fashions. I first review
      
      and unpack the current research and literature on the smart city, as part
      of a Foucauldian
      
      emphasis on the notion of ‘discourse’. My thesis then charts empirically
      some of the contours
      
      of this current discourse through ethnographic interviews and a form of
      grounded analysis to
      
      ascertain and identify some of the major themes and ideas. I then
      contribute to the current
      
      discussion and debate regarding the smart city by introducing a novel
      Foucauldian theoretical
      
      approach to features of this discourse, as well as considering Foucauldian
      notions of ‘gaze’
      
      as applied to the smart city; and examining the extent to which the smart
      city might be
      
      considered as a Foucauldian ‘heterotopia’. I conclude the thesis with
      design implications
      
      in terms of knowledge production, civic engagement and policy potentials.
      Ultimately this
      
      is an attempt to identify some of the important political and policy
      challenges facing the
      
      idea, the discourse, of a ‘smart city’ to optimise human computing
      interaction, computing
      
      supported collaborative work and design research input into the ‘smart
      city’ debate. In
      
      order to develop an empirical basis for my research, I conducted
      ethnographic interviews
      
      with both citizens from cities undergoing smart city transformation and
      experts who are
      
      either leading or previously involved in these smart city developments.
      The citizens were
      
      asked about their current experience with the cities they lived in, their
      understanding and
      
      expectations of a smart city and what they envisioned for their cities.
      The experts were asked
      
      questions regarding their prior experience with the “smart city”, their
      understandings of
      
      what it means for a city to be ‘smart’, what policy potentials they’ve
      recognised in the smart
      
      city, the implications smart cities have on democracy and finally the
      knowledge production,
      
      dissemination and sharing in the smart city. The thesis first follows a
      sociological, ‘grounded’
      
      thematic analysis of these interviews. It analyses and offers a synthesis
      of the responses
      
      collected throughout the research with the current policies concerning
      various smart city
      
      proximity, thereby providing a critical assessment of the values
      underlying the smart city. I
      
      then contrast this with a Foucauldian theoretical approach to analyse the
      discursive formation
      
      of the smart city, conceptualising the smart city as a heterotopia and
      then develop Foucault’s notion of ‘gaze’ to outline the different elements
      involved in what might be termed the
      
      ‘smart city gaze’. In so doing I bring another critical approach to smart
      city discussion to
      
      demonstrate that the smart city concept is not a new novel approach to
      urban problems, it is a
      
      continuation previous attempt to deploy information communication
      technology (ICT) in
      
      cities with new add-ons such as data gathering, and internet of things
      features. In so doing
      
      I hope to highlight both the inherited issues facing such a technology
      deployment, such as
      
      digital inclusion and piracy ,and relatively newer issues that comes with
      the new features
      
      of the technology in general but of the ‘smart city’ in particular–
      concerns, for example, of
      
      the surveillance features embedded in the data gathering and internet of
      things approach
      
      that may both threaten privacy whilst providing for possibilities such as
      ‘designing out’
      
      crime, or encouraging civic engagement. The thesis accordingly concludes
      by exploring the
      
      ‘implications for design’ and presents some of the policy possibilities
      for UK smart cities that
      
      are potentially useful for politicians, policy makers, planners,
      academics, and technology
      
      companies. I believe that these perspectives for policy development can be
      used to inform
      
      responsible development, spatially and socially inclusive technologies,
      and ultimately more
      
      resilient and liveable cities. The thesis is structured as follows: I
      begin by presenting the
      
      academic context and political status quo for this research, followed by
      an overview of the
      
      methods I used during the project, highlighting some of the challenges I
      encountered while
      
      applying these methods. This is followed by a discussion of the research
      results, as well as
      
      the implications of the results, and the limitations of the project. The
      thesis is concluded by
      
      outlining questions that were left unanswered for further research.