Call for Papers

Critical Geographies of the Smart City

Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting, 21-25 April 2015, Chicago, USA.

Convened by:
•       David Murakami Wood, Queen’s University, Canada, [log in to unmask]
•       Rob Kitchin, Maynooth University, Eire. 
•       Torin Monahan, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA.

Outline:
‘Smart cities’ combine ubiquitous computing and urban management, and are characterized by pervasive wireless networks and distributed sensor platforms from video surveillance to meteorological stations, monitoring flows from traffic to sewerage, producing and analyzing big data in real-time or in anticipation of risks. These have extended from small projects for example, shopping / business complexes with integrated building control systems combining video surveillance, fire detection and crowd flow monitoring or other kinds of customer tracking, through larger but temporary initiatives like the command and control systems established for sports mega-events, to permanent whole-city initiatives, the most famous example being that or Rio de Janeiro’s Operations Center. Most are bound up with corporate sponsorship, with names like IBM, Cisco and Hitachi being particularly prominent, or are entirely privately operated.

Although portrayed largely as ‘value-free’, global, civic and environmental solutionism, smart cities are often justified in neoliberal corporate and managerial discourses, are strongly to connected to urban restructuring and gentrification projects, and many schemes also have involve or have strong influences from police and military sources, from crime mapping and predictive policing models, to new forms of urban warfare involving forms of distributed sensor platforms, and computer analytics, to enable state security forces to get a clear picture of the complexities of the urban cultural landscape and its inhabitants. 

But how much are smart cities something new and how much has ‘smart’ simply emerged as the latest in a long line of ‘silver-bullet’ management solutions to problem of urban governance, replacing and incorporating previous notions of the ‘sustainable city’, the ‘digital city’, the ‘creative city’ and so on? This session aims to discuss emerging critical geographies of the smart city. It welcomes papers on all aspects of this topic including but not limited to:

• Genealogies of the smart city
• Smart cities, risk and the politics of possibility
• Smart cities, security and surveillance
• Smart cities and sustainability
• Smart cities, big data and GIS
• Smart cities, development and gentrification
• Smart cities, class and exclusion
• Smart cities and technoutopianism / dystopianism
• Smart cities, infrastructure and flow
• Case-studies of particular smart city initiatives
• etc.