Neoliberal obsession to improve smart city efficiency via measuring ambiguous standards of success paves way to logic of discipline and endless growth

[Evgeny and Frencesca, “RETHINKING THE SMART CITY: DEMOCRATIZING URBAN TECHNOLOGY,” Rosa Luxemberg Foundation, January 2018, , Accessed 7/2/23, GDS – PL]

2. Smartness and Neoliberalism

The dynamics and concurrent imperatives of the three aforementioned rationales can be grasped without recourse to any advanced analytical or historical frameworks. Once we factor in the additional consideration that most cities embarking on smart city experiments also happen to be caught up in the regulatory apparatuses of neoliberalism, however, several additional considerations come to the fore. First of all, if neoliberalism—as many scholars have argued over the years—is characterized by the transition from a form of rule enacted by a centralized government to one underpinned by decentralized governance, then we must also account for the precise mechanisms (and technological enablers) of this newer, softer, less obvious form of rule. One such mechanism identified in the burgeoning literature on neoliberalism in general13 as well as in the some-what smaller literature on neoliberalism and cities14 is the growing importance of rankings, competitive tables, and comparative scores. City indebtedness rankings by credit agencies like Moody’s or Standard & Poor’s represent the root of this trend, with cities vying for a favourable rating which determines their costs of borrowing.

Today, this function is further exercised by various rankings—measuring innovation, creativity, or even smartness itself—compiled by the emerging urban-philanthrocapitalist complex of think-tanks, foundations, and allegedly neutral NGOs, determining the broader constraints and parameters within which cities now compete. How cities perform on those secondary indicators in turn feeds into how investors view their competitiveness, which ultimately flows into the ratings assigned by credit agencies, thus affecting their borrowing costs. Most cities have little choice but to borrow as a result of their budgets being cut by national governments; the worsening economic conditions in many of them—most visible in the looming public sector pension crises—produce additional financial strain. Consequently, a city need not harbor any strong, rational desire to be smart in order to embark on a smart city agenda of some kind—doing otherwise would mean risking one’s standing on the international bond markets.

Related to this is the pressure facing many cities to quantify the performance of their various constituent parts in order to render them more accountable, competitive, and manageable—another phenomenon commonly associated with the ascendance of neoliberalism and its “audit society” or “logic of discipline,”15 depending on one’s theoretical predilections. While this drive to quantification—led by cities like Boston, which has its own “city score”—is rarely linked to the smart city phenomenon (at least not in popular discourse), it is nevertheless rather obvious that the ranking-of-everything mentality upon which it rests is only possible in a city capable of collecting, analysing, and processing vast amounts of data.

Thus, willingly or not, the smart city agenda along with the infrastructure of sensors and connectivity it promotes also opens the door to the kind of audit-obsessed quantification celebrated by neoliberalism. An analytical lens well-trained on the methods, techniques, and aspirations of neoliberalism can help us to reveal several other dimensions of the smart city problematique which usually escape those analyzing it from a purely technical perspective. In the last three decades, as the logic of corporatism and embedded liberalism dominating the political landscape of Western Europe and North America gave way to the logic of highly globalized and liquid capital elevating the interests of finance over those of any other sector of society (including the productive economy), cities, like all other units of society, have found themselves subjected to immense pressure to both roll back some institutions of the welfare state, as well as roll out some policy innovations of their own.16