Smart cities are a marketing technique.

“Over the last decade, the smart city has gone from a corporate buzzword, to an all-encompassing techno-utopian vision for urbanism in the 21st century, to a rather cautious descriptor of what municipalities attempt to accomplish with digital technologies,” Baykurt and co-author Christoph Raetzsch of Aarhus University, Denmark, write. “Anticipatory visions undergirding the smart city may simply be a marketing strategy on the part of tech companies, or a totalizing promise by Silicon Valley that does not quite understand the politics of the city. Our analysis took a different turn and examined the variety of ways these visions are mobilized and altered by tech companies as well as municipalities.”

Drawing on fieldwork in aspiring smart cities, Baykurt and Raetzsch argue that the development of smart city initiatives has followed divergent paths in the United States and Europe.

“Over the last five years, I've been studying how urban inequalities change or persist in smart cities,” Baykurt says. “I’ve looked particularly at Kansas City as it became a testing ground for a range of companies, including Google and Cisco. In this paper, we are interested in how logics of smartness have changed across time and place. By comparing U.S. and European cities, we found that tech companies in the U.S. positioned smart cities as a project of efficiency and energy-saving in the early 2000s, aimed at climate change and sustainability.

“The financial crisis of 2008-09, however, radically altered what smartness stood for: tech companies began to offer cash-strapped cities smart tech under the promise of innovation and growth, ostensibly enabled by the use of sensors, dashboards and machine learning. Places like Las Vegas, San Diego, Columbus, or Kansas City were just a few examples of many, many cities that embraced digital infrastructures with the hopes of becoming an innovation hub for emerging technologies. A few years forward, their efforts led to little or no measurable outcomes.”