This issue, our third, looks at the “smart city” idea. This appellation is increasingly gaining traction in global discourses of urban planning and public administration, despite a widely held sense that it lacks adequate definitional clarity. Practice being the crucible of meaning, we look at a number of real world contexts—notably Rio de Janeiro and Dhaka—for possible perspectives. What is clear is the increasing faith city administrators are placing in networked information and communications technologies capable of interpreting vast, intangible and temporal sets of mathematical data to implement the top-down managerial ordering of large-scale urban phenomenon. The draw of doing business this way is simple. “Technology gives you a faster response,” explains Dario Bizzo Marques, a technology systems coordinator at Rio’s $14-million integrated city management centre (see p.58), home to Latin America’s largest surveillance screen. The inevitability of doing things this way is not without quandaries. “We increasingly share the space and time of cities with semi-autonomous agents of a nonhuman, indeed non-biological, nature, from drones to algorithms,” offers Adam Greenfield in a provocative 100-point manifesto (see p.24). “The grandeur in determining the conditions of urban existence increasingly resides with those who produce networked objects and services, and the interfaces to them.” Greenfield’s contribution serves as a useful primer, not least for drawing attention to the latent ideological assumptions underpinning the smart city idea. Ash Amin, in his interview with Matthew Gandy (see p.86), is similarly interested in what it means to reduce city management to the marshalling of abstract data. “The positivist legacy has been rekindled in the ‘big data’ approach to the city,” he offers. “Its conceit is to think that the availability of sophisticated mathematical models able to work large data in nuanced ways, allows the city to be visualised and understood in all its complexities and evolving changes.” It is not the only way to critique the smart city idea. In his editorial, crime researcher Hennie van Vuuren highlights the huge payday new African megacities will (and already do) offer to criminal syndicates (see p.18). Take Johannesburg, whose highways are the busiest in Africa. As part of its massive road infrastructure upgrade project, South African National Roads Agency (SANRAL), an independent statutory company solely owned by the government, implemented a host of “intelligent transport systems” to manage traffic flows. A solution was desperately needed: a 2010 report on 20 key global cities undertaken by IBM found Johannesburg’s roads only marginally worse than Beijing and Mexico City. SANRAL’s solution: an integrated system comprising significant in-situ hardware, including electronic vehicle identification readers, CCTV cameras and variable message signs, all linked to a network management centre by fibre optic cables. Criminal syndicates have ruthlessly targeted this physical infrastructure. “We don’t know what to do anymore,” said a senior project manager at SANRAL in 2009.

The smart city idea may not always represent the panacea its boosters promise, but its apparent inevitably as a management tool makes it a crucial topic for research.

Good reading…