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The smart city and Its publics insights from across six UK cities

Cowley R Joss S and Dayot Y

This is a copy of the final version of an article published in Urban Research amp Practice

doi 1010801753506920171293150 Available online from the publisher at

httpsdxdoiorg1010801753506920171293150

copy 2017 Informa UK Limited trading as Taylor amp Francis GroupThis is an Open Access

article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License

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The smart city and its publics insights from across six UK cities

Robert Cowleyab Simon Jossc and Youri Dayotd

aDepartment of Geography University of Exeter Exeter UK bDepartment of Geography KingrsquosCollege London London UK cDepartment of Politics amp International Relations University ofWestminster London UK dSciences Po Grenoble Universiteacute de Grenoble Saint-Martin-drsquoHegraveresFrance

In response to policy-makersrsquo increasing claims to prioritise lsquopeoplersquo in smart citydevelopment we explore the publicness of emerging practices across six UK citiesBristol Glasgow London Manchester Milton Keynes and Peterborough Localsmart city programmes are analysed as techno-public assemblages invoking varie-gated modalities of publicness Our findings challenge the dystopian speculativecritiques of the smart city while nevertheless indicating the dominance of lsquoentrepre-neurialrsquo and lsquoservice userrsquo modes of the public We highlight the risk of bifurcationwithin smart city assemblages such that the lsquocivicrsquo and lsquopoliticalrsquo roles of the publicbecome siloed into less obdurate strands of programmatic activity

Keywords smart cities future cities UK assemblage theory public publicness

1 Introduction

The growing body of academic commentary which the smart city has attracted inrecent years (De Jong et al 2015) has often suggested that its envisionment takesinsufficient account of social and political questions (see eg Greenfield 2013Soumlderstroumlm Paasche and Klauser 2014 Calzada and Cobo 2015 Hollands 2015)In parallel the concept has met with less than universal approval in the broaderpublic realm in a review of popular cultural products Vanolo (2016) has sketchedout a series of lsquosmart city imaginariesrsquo in which citizens are variously absentexcluded or subjugated But as smart concepts are gradually being translated intolocally embedded policies and practices in many countries the question arises ofwhether the earlier speculative critiques of the smart city and its rather dystopianpopular imaginaries remain relevant The present research begins instead from theobservation that contemporary policies appear consciously to have adopted an lan-guage of aspirational claims which chime with calls for smart cities to be morelsquocitizen focusedrsquo or lsquopeople-centredrsquo (Saunders and Baeck 2015) Whether theseclaims respond to its sceptical earlier reception or are the outcome of its accommo-dation within local policy processes they suggest that the smart city has entered anew phase as it takes shape in particular places and about which we currently haverelatively little empirical understanding (Kitchin 2015 132)

The shift in smart city rhetoric is apparent in various recent national policies andinitiatives On its home page the Indian Smart Cities Challenge website prominentlyclaims that lsquoGood governance is putting people at the centre of the development processrsquo

Corresponding author Email jossswestminsteracuk

Urban Research amp Practice 2017httpdxdoiorg1010801753506920171293150

copy 2017 Informa UK Limited trading as Taylor amp Francis GroupThis is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (httpcreativecommonsorglicensesby40) which permits unrestricted use distribution and reproduction in any medium provided the originalwork is properly cited

(Smart Cities Challenge 2016) For Smart Nation Singapore the hope is that lsquopeople areempowered by technology to lead meaningful and fulfilled lives A Smart Nation isbuilt not by government but by all of usrsquo (Smart Nation 2016) And the UKrsquos new smartcity standards assert that lsquothe key challenge around smart cities is not technological butabout peoplersquo (BSI 2015 10) and that lsquoFor the citizen the benefits of this integration ofcity systems include an increased sense of democratic participationrsquo (7) Indeed thepresent research focuses on the United Kingdom because lsquosmart cityrsquo discourse appearsto be having a widespread influence on its local policy-making A recent survey (Caprottiet al 2016) found just under a third of UK local authority areas with populations of over100000 to have a clear smart city ambition andor substantial-related initiatives takingplace and local programmes of activity are imbued with rhetoric implicitly counteringthe charge of the smart city being a technocratic imposition Glasgow for example islsquoputting people at the heart of its futurersquo and lsquoinvolving and empowering communitiesrsquo(Future City Glasgow 2016a) Manchesterrsquos Smarter City Programme aims lsquoto achievebetter outcomes for the city and its citizensrsquo (Manchester City Council 2016) the SmartLondon Plan places lsquoLondoners at the corersquo (GLA 2016) Bristolrsquos vision of an lsquoOpenProgrammable Cityrsquo involves lsquogiving citizens more ability to interact work and playwith their cityrsquo (Bristol is Open 2016a)

The current phase in the (UK) smart cityrsquos development then marks a confluence ofearlier normative visions with the agency of local actors and agendas In response to thecommon claims to be putting lsquothe peoplersquo or lsquocitizensrsquo at the heart of the resultingactivities the present research explores the variegated ways that smart city programmesare attempting to mobilise lsquopublicnessrsquo conceptually rhetorically or practically Basedon the present study we propose four modalities of publicness ndash which we label thelsquoservice-userrsquo lsquoentrepreneurialrsquo lsquopoliticalrsquo and lsquocivicrsquo ndash and understand these as emer-ging from particular lsquotechno-public assemblagesrsquo of issues people practices and spaceThrough this framework we explore two broad questions What types of publicness areenvisaged and enacted through recent UK smart city policy initiatives and What is theparticular role of digital urban technology deployed through the smart city in shapingand recasting the public in novel ways In extension of the latter we also open thefollowing question to debate What spatial (re-)configurations of publicness are envi-sioned by and enacted through smart city policy

The article begins by introducing the concept of the techno-public assemblage asa framework for analysing the smart city as it transitions from policy into practiceAfter then explaining the rationale for the choice of the six UK cities and theapproach taken to analysis the article explores the characteristics of their smartcity activities from the perspective of each modality of publicness in turn Thisanalysis draws out broad patterns in the relative prevalence of each modality acrossthe six cities and the forms of the assemblage through which each emerges Based onthis evidence the article then draws a series of conclusions about current successesand failures in developing a more lsquopublicrsquo smart city and possible reasons for these

2 The smart city as techno-public assemblage

Like other grand urban visions smart city concepts have to lsquonegotiate with thespatiality and the geography of placersquo (Harvey 2000 179ndash180) as they are translatedinto individual political economic and social contexts As a globally lsquomobilersquothough ill-defined body of urban policy (Crivello 2015) the smart city is likely to

2 R Cowley et al

be selectively adopted and reworked as it becomes embedded in local governancenetworks and pre-existing strategic concerns (Peck and Theodore 2001 2010 Prince2010) These processes increasingly provide the opportunity to analyse smart cities assituated bodies of practices into which human actors are differently enrolled Ratherthan understanding the smart city as a given set of technologies whose promoters(problematically) assume certain deterministic effects on society this article construesthe smart city as contingently shaped both by local factors and by broader (policy)discourses To develop a grounded understanding of the varying implications for thelsquopublic cityrsquo when different technologies are labelled as smart implemented bycombinations of local actors in response to varied agendas and enacted in particularways in particular spaces we propose that smart city initiatives may be usefullytheorised as techno-public assemblages

In understanding these contingent (and shifting) local manifestations as givingrise to various modalities of publicness we take direct inspiration from Newman andClarkersquos (2009) notion of lsquoassemblages of publicnessrsquo These authors draw attentionto ways that lsquopeople policies discourses texts technologies and techniques sitesor locationsrsquo and lsquoforms of power or authorityrsquo (24) become articulated in particularcases They highlight lsquothe creative and dynamic ways in which actors seek outinterpret and enrol ideas in new settings in which ideas are received translatedmediated and adapted into the new practicesrsquo (20) Accordingly we analyse smartcity assemblages as shaped by multiple inter-related agencies rather than as onlyimposed by state or corporate actors from lsquoaboversquo We note further Kitchinrsquos (2014)recent elaboration of the idea of lsquosocio-technical assemblagesrsquo of big data referringto smart city infrastructure among other things which draws on attempts to capturethe open-ended multiple relational and dynamic qualities of urban phenomenathrough the lens of assemblage theory (eg Fariacuteas and Bender 2010 Fariacuteas 2011McFarlane 2011a 2011b) In relating particular activities to each other and to city-level strategies we follow Buchanan (2015) nevertheless in understanding assem-blages as lsquopurposeful not simply a happenstance collocation of people materialsand actions but the deliberate realisation of a distinctive planrsquo (385) The smarttechno-public assemblages presented in this paper then are neither fixed nor fullyfluid but rather lsquoworking arrangementsrsquo (383) which both derive from multipledeliberate processes of formation and are subject to ongoing stabilising and destabi-lising influences

Our notion of lsquopublicnessrsquo is aligned with the long-term shift away from theoris-ing the public as a singular whole or as expressing the common good towardsthinking in terms of a lsquoheterogeneous publicrsquo (Young 1989) or the co-existence ofmultiple lsquopublicsrsquo (see most notably Fraser 1990) whether interpellated by differentmedia (see eg Warner 2002) or emerging around issues (see eg Marres 2005) Italso reflects Mahonyrsquos (2013) observation that the policy goal of lsquopublic engagementrsquois informed variously by quite different perspectives on the public Alongside itsmodernist sense as a representable lsquoreal and pre-existing entityrsquo (352) the lsquopublicrsquomay be conceptualised as a normative democratic ideal or as an emergent phenom-enon From a different angle Barnett (2014) relatedly observes that lsquopublic valuesrsquooften describe lsquodistributed whole fields of practices and relationshipsrsquo (8) We con-ceive of the publicness of the smart city then as variously invoked and performedthrough the place-specific articulation of different goals technologies materialspaces and institutional settings

Urban Research amp Practice 3

The idea that publicness is assembled through new digital urban technologies also allowsus to explore the implications of the differentiated obduracy (Hommels 2005 2010) of whatresults Although the field of the smart city may be in flux its related infrastructuralinnovations in particular are likely to become relatively fixed (Hommels 2010) ndash even iftheir significance changes over time as they lsquocome to be related to new entities and react tothemrsquo (Ureta 2014 245) We are therefore alert to the possibility that certain forms ofassemblages may come to form lsquostabilised networksrsquo constituting lsquopotential actant[s] in asubsequent phase of urban developmentrsquo (Bender 2010 310) Equally the resulting norms ofpublicness may become lsquosedimentedrsquo (Newman and Clarke 2009) into more permanentinstitutional processes Conversely those elements of the assemblages which are moreephemeral and fragile ndash as Newman and Clarke (2009) characterise many assemblages ofpublicness ndashmay seem less well placed to have ongoing influence on the production of urbanspace

Assessing the likely obduracy of these varied assemblages also potentially allowsanalysis to encompass more lsquoemergentrsquo forms of public counter-discourse It is preciselythe obduracy of both infrastructures and regulatory institutions (as lsquosedimentedrsquo sites ofnorms) which in the Dewey (1989) tradition lead to frictions and frustrations in times ofrapid technological change This raises the important question of whether the smart cityadequately accounts for the possibility of public non-compliance or resistance Whether thatis it envisions ndash or even serves to suppress ndash the political multiplicity of civil society in thelsquorealrsquo city Conceptualisations of civil society only as a lsquodomain that needs to be constructedand tutored (by governments and international organisations)rsquo (Newman and Clarke 200958) may problematically ignore its more unruly but potentially constructive role as lsquotheorganic condition of society that provides the springboard for economic and social develop-mentrsquo (58)

Here the scope of Newman and Clarkersquos discussion of publicness is extended in twoways First we focus more directly on the impact of digital technology on its assemblagerelatedly Barns (2016) has recently called for further understanding of what lsquodigital urbanpublicsrsquo might comprise Second we wish to initiate a discussion about the distinctivespatialities of smart city initiatives While citizenship theory tends not to focus on questionsof space this goal seems germane within an investigation of the variegated publicnesspotentially generated by smart city initiatives as interventions in real (and virtual) urbanspace

To make sense of the variegated publicness thus invoked we conceive of it displayingfour distinct modalities the service user entrepreneurial civic and political ndash each of whichare discussed in the main findings section of this article This novel four-way conceptualisa-tion was derived on one hand from political theory perspectives on the public and inparticular Newman amp Clarkersquos (2009) aforementioned theorisation of new heterogenousforms of publicness which not only distinguishes between political and civic publics butalso draws attention to the emergence of new uneven market- and consumer-based sites andpractices of publicness On the other it was derived from a grounded analysis of contempo-ary smart city initiatives identified in an earlier broader survey of 34 UK cities (Caprotti et al2016) This empirical material highlighted the varied ways in which the public was explicitlyor implicitly positioned in relation to smart city strategies and activities Altogether thesetheoretical and empirical observations resulted in the four distinct heuristic categoriespresented here The categorisation was further corroborated by the growing literaturewhich highlights the entrepreneurial aspects of smart city governance (eg Caragliu DelBo and Nijkamp 2011 Wiig 2015 Evans Karvonen and Raven 2016 Krivyacute 2016) or

4 R Cowley et al

suggests that smart city visions of technology-driven innovation in service provision havenot convincingly accounted for the social and political dimensions of urban life (seeIntroduction)

3 Methodology

This research focuses on evidence drawn from six UK cities Bristol Glasgow LondonManchester Milton Keynes and Peterborough The units of our comparative analysis are notthese cities in a broader sense (Robinson 2011) ndash defined for example by municipalboundaries ndash but rather their smart city (policy) activity at the point of local implementationOur choice does not imply that we advocate these cities as exemplars of lsquobest practicersquo butrather reflects in each case the emergence of a relatively wide range of activities throughpolicy-making explicitly drawing on smart city discourse We treat these cases as importantlsquonodal pointsrsquo within wider flows of concepts and policy discourses (15) and have includedsix ndash rather than focusing on say one city in particular ndash in order to capture a sufficientdiversity of institutional and municipal contexts through which local policies are beingapplied precisely since we are interested in the variety evident among programmes ofactivities taking shape within different local contexts

The six cities were selected following an earlier analysis (Caprotti et al 2016) of relevantnational policy documentation and internet searches on lsquosmart cityrsquo or lsquofuture cityrsquo1 initia-tives across the United Kingdom The latter reflects the naming of the national Future CitiesCatapult centre established by the government to support the development and implementa-tion of smart city technology Additionally all six submitted bids for funding in the 2012Future Cities Demonstrator competition held by the Technology Strategy Board thenational innovation agency supported by the Department for Business Innovation andSkills (see Taylor Buck and While 2015 Caprotti et al 2016) Glasgow as overall winnerwas awarded pound24m to implement its plans and Bristol London and Peterborough were eachawarded pound3m as runners-up Since this competition significantly catalysed all six citiesrsquosmart activities we treat their submitted lsquoFeasibility Studiesrsquo as key policy documents As acommonality this competition also provides a basis for comparative research (Robinson2011) exploring the variety of the lsquoactually existingrsquo smart city (Shelton Zook and Wiig2015) in the United Kingdom

For each urban setting the key policy strategies and all associated current and plannedactivities were identified and relevant publicly available documents were collected Specificactivities were included if they were clearly linked to or promoted within the policydocumentation and sought either to use digital technology to achieve particular goals or tofacilitate the use of digital technology Beyond this no further criteria (eg the centrality oflsquobig datarsquo) were imposed given our desire to understand how the smart city has beenassembled contingently in practice Table 1 lists the 68 activities thus identified and thekey associated policy documents along with any overarching programmes of which parti-cular activities formed a part or local bodies (typically partnerships involving the councilamong other actors) responsible for their delivery2 The time frame for gathering thisdocumentation was AprilndashJune 2016 and those materials publicly available during thisperiod were included in the research

Based on this set of documents each of the 68 activities was then analysed individuallyFirst through a protocol with four inter-related assemblage dimensions based on Newmanand Clarkersquos (2009) discussion (1) the issues which the activity or policy sought to address(2) the key actors involved in implementation (3) the particular socio-technical practices

Urban Research amp Practice 5

Table

1Sum

maryof

smartcity

policy

documentsandinitiativesanalysed

insixUK

cities

Bristol

Glasgow

London(G

LA)

Key

PolicyDocuments

SmartCityBristol

(2011)

Connect

Bristol

Feasibility

Study

(2012)

Key

PolicyDocuments

Glasgow

CityManagem

entSystem

(2012)

OpenManifesto

ndashPrinciples(2013)

CityTechnologyPlatform

(2013)

Key

PolicyDocuments

LinkedLondon(2012)

SmartLondonPlan(2013)

The

Futureof

Smart(2013)

DataforLondon

ACityStrategyforLondon(2016)

Program

me

organisation

Activities(yearlaunched

ortook

place)

Program

me

organisation

Activities(yearlaunched

ortook

place)

Program

me

organisation

Activities(yearlaunched

ortook

place)

CityCouncil

GigabitBristol

(2012)

FutureCityGlasgow

OpenGlasgow

(2013)

Glasgow

Operation

Centre(2013)

MyGlasgow

(2013)

IntelligentStreetLighting(2013)

Dashboards(2013)

ActiveTravel(2013)

Hacking

theFuture(2013)

Com

munityMapping

(2014)

FutureMakers(2014)

OpenDataCatalogue

(2013)

LinkedMapping

(2013)

Energy(2013)

SocialTransport(2013)

EngagingtheCity(2013)

Citizen

Engagem

ent(2014)

LinkedLondon

SmartParkQueen

Elizabeth

Park

(2014)

Bristol

IsOpen

DataDom

e(2015)

IoTMesh(2016)

WirelessMile(2016)

SoftwareDefined

Network

Control

(2016)

SmartLondon

Board

LondonDatastore

(2010)

SmartLondonDistrictsNetwork

(2014)

SmartLondonInfrastructure

Network

(2015)

TalkLondon(2015)

Civic

Crowdfunding

(2015)

Infrastructure

Mapping

Application

(2015)

TechLondonersPeopleSolving

City

Challenges(2016)

Speed

Volunteering(2016)

ConnectingBristol

OpenDataBristol

(2010)

Media

Sandbox

2010

B-O

pen

Strand(2010)

PlayableCitiesAward(2013)

Dem

ocratree

(2014)

MyKnowle

WestMyBristol

(2014)

YouDecide(2015)

Healthy

Office(2016)

REPLICATE(2016)

Knowle

West

Media

Centre

Bristol

Approachto

Citizen

Sensing

(planned)

6 R Cowley et al

Manchester

MiltonKeynes

Peterborough

Key

PolicyDocuments

Digital

Strategy(2008)

Digital

Manchester(2012)

ManchesterFutureCity(2012)

SmarterCityProgram

me(2016)

Key

PolicyDocuments

Future-Ready

MK

(2012)

MK

SmartAWater

strategy

forMiltonKeynes

(2016)

Key

PolicyDocuments

PeterboroughDNA

(2012)

Deliveringatrulysm

artcity

(2014)

Program

meorganisation

Activities(yearlaunched

ortook

place)

Program

me

organisation

Activities(yearlaunched

ortook

place)

Program

me

organisation

Activities(yearlaunched

ortook

place)

ManchesterDigital

Develop

mentAgency

ManchesterLivingLab

(2006)

MKSmart

MK

DataHub

(2016)

Our

MK

(2015)

GardenMonitor

(planned)

Water

Monitor

(2016)

Water

measurementschool

kits

(2014)

SmartMeters(2015)

ApexSuite

business

engagement

programme(2015)

MK

Hackathon

(2016)

MotionMap

(2015)

SmartParking

(2015)

OpenEnergyMap

(2016)

Electricity

Dem

andShifting

(2013)

SmartGridDynam

icDem

and

Response(2014)

SmartLighting(2014)

Peterborough

DNA

BrainwavePortal(2014)

OpenC

ityScreen(planned)

Hackathon

(2014)

Innovation

Week(2014)

LivingDataPortal(2015)

CorridorManchester

Triangulum

(2015)

CityV

erve

(2016)

SmarterCityProgram

me

ManchesterDigital

Laboratory(M

adLab)

(2009)

DIM

MER(2013)

MiGuide

(2013)

Central

Library

Digital

Dem

onstrator(2014)

IntelligentLighting(2015)

Greater

ManchesterData

Synchronisation

Program

me

DataG

M(2011)

Transport

Systems

Catapult

Imagined

FestivalIntelligent

MobilityHackathon

(2016)

Feasibility

Study

for2012

FutureCitiesDem

onstratorCom

petition

Urban Research amp Practice 7

involved and (4) the variegated spatiality produced And second to identify the dominantmodality of publicness thus invoked service user entrepreneurial political or civic (asdiscussed in the previous section)

By taking into account the linkages between individual activities and the wider policylandscape a profile of each smart city assemblage as a whole was built up For the purposesof triangulation the results were aggregated following separate initial analyses and jointlyreviewed by the three authors Finally a transversal analysis was conducted across the sixcities in order to identify common patterns as well as divergent practices

Basing the analysis on detailed evidence has allowed for some of the variety acrossparticular locations to be captured in partial response to Kitchinrsquos (2015) call to movebeyond critiques of the lsquoplace-lessrsquo corporate and governmental promotional literature Ourresponse is a partial one since given the emergent nature of much smart city activity even inthese six locations the research neither investigates practices of implementation in depth norprovides a long-term perspective on the smart cityrsquos impact on the lived experience of thecity The aim rather has been to investigate the outcomes of the processes whereby thelsquoplace-lessrsquo smart city has been translated into locally specific projects through the lens ofthe documentation surrounding these

The high-level findings reported below relate to our conclusions about the relativeprominence of different modalities of publicness Although the discussion is illustratedwith particular examples of activity space does not permit a thorough presentation of thedetailed elements of the six assemblages3 Any of these elements can itself be seen as atechno-public assemblage and the analytical framework is offered as a tool for otherswishing to explore the public dimensions of current and future smart city activities at agranular level

4 Findings

41 The smart city in six municipal contexts initial findings and observations

It is worth noting first that the policy documents analysed generally operate at the peripheryof traditional urban planning frameworks local authorities are not formally obliged toinclude smart city principles within statutory planning processes Instead these policiesare often championed by overarching strategy boards economic development agencies andsimilar municipal bodies As such they typically seek to promote cohesive socio-economicinnovation policy to a range of actors both internally and externally for the purpose ofleveraging inward investment Thus they will have been shaped by their imagined receptionby varied audiences (Freeman and Maybin 2011 163ndash164) rather than by the specificintention that they should serve as traditional planning tools The varying status of thisdocumentation is significantly reflective of the often opportunistic nature of smart cityactivity but also points to the often complicated governance arrangements in placeImportantly then the relationship between the policy documents and activities shown inTable 1 is not consistent across the six cities For Glasgow which presents itself as havingrelatively straightforward governance arrangements there is clear linearity between the plansoutlined in its 2012 Feasibility Study and the resulting initiatives At the other end of thespectrum Manchesterrsquos recent Smarter City Programme for example essentially collates aseries of activities already planned or taking place

The activities themselves range from small-scale pilot scheme to major infrastructuralprojects from interventions into specific spatially bounded areas to initiatives operating invirtual space city-wide from lsquotop-downrsquo technological innovations to grass-roots

8 R Cowley et al

community activities and from one-off events to ongoing activities and services alreadywell-embedded into the urban fabric Despite the identification in the academic literaturethen of broad commonalities in variously conceived smart city lsquoimaginariesrsquo its manifesta-tions on the ground in the United Kingdom defy simple categorisation at first sight

The policy documents also display noticeable city-specific inflections in their narrativeframings reflecting the local contextual factors through which the translation of smart citydiscourse into practical activity has been mediated To provide some background for themain analysis an overview of the key framing principles in each cityrsquos policy documents isprovided below along with the varied governance structures that have emerged in dynamicrelationship with both the policy documents and the activities themselves Such differences ndashas will be discussed ndash help to explain some of the forms that local assemblages take withimplications in turn for the nature of the publicness invoked

411 Bristol

Bristolrsquos stated overall smart city goals are to expand the cityrsquos knowledge economy in a waywhich furthers its image as a pioneer in environmental sustainability and a centre of grass-roots innovation Its 2012 Feasibility Study (Bristol City Council 2012) broadened the remitof the earlier Smart City Bristol report (Bristol City Council 2011) which focused largely oncarbon emissions and transport issues to develop a narrative of enabling environmentallyand socially sustainable growth at a time of economic expansion in recognition of the cityrsquossignificant health and wealth inequalities

The council is one actor among many in Bristolrsquos current smart city activities which arenot orchestrated by an overarching policy document Nevertheless the dual focus of its 2012Feasibility Study which proposed a mixture of lsquohardrsquo infrastructure and a parallel pro-gramme of citizen engagement resembles the two-stranded nature of what has emerged inpractice The first strand delivering digital infrastructure is coordinated by the lsquoBristol isOpenrsquo partnership between the council and the University of Bristol with support from otherprivate public and charitable organisations The second collates various activities mostlyrelated to citizen and SME engagement within the lsquoConnecting Bristolrsquo initiative Here thecouncilrsquos role is more lsquohands-offrsquo specific activities are typically directly led by socialenterprises such as the Knowle West Media Centre

412 Glasgow

As the overall winner of the Future Cities Demonstrator competition in 2012 Glasgow wasawarded pound24m to implement its Feasibility Study proposals Approximately half the award(Davies 2014) was spent on a smart Operations Centre fully operational since 2014 whichmonitors real-time transport and public safety data Meanwhile a spread of smaller initia-tives took place many of which were participatory and interactive and were concluded (asproject deliverables) by the end of the TSB grant period

Glasgow City Council clearly positions itself as the key driving force behind theseactivities the initiative is characterised by the absence of publicised collaborative partner-ship This may reflect the terms of the TSB award positioning the City Council as the singlecontractor and requiring rapid project implementation within the two-year schedule Equallyit upholds the principle asserted in the Feasibility Study that lsquosmart cities are led from the topby a strong and visionary championrsquo (Glasgow City Council 2012 5) Either way the

Urban Research amp Practice 9

councilrsquos centrality appears to have left Glasgowrsquos official smart city activities in a state ofsuspension following the end of funding

413 London

Londonrsquos foray into smart city innovation is explicitly linked to the opportunities andchallenges facing the UKrsquos capital as a global city the smart city discourse deployedforms an integral part of the overarching narrative of London striving for continuous growthand consolidating its position as a leading international city (Mayor of London 2013 see alsoNESTA 2015) The lsquoSmart Londonrsquo initiative is primarily directed at forging a newcollaborative and entrepreneurial mode of governance in the service of sustaining economicgrowth to meet expected population growth The Greater London Authority (GLA) andparticularly the office of the Mayor of London is positioned at the centre of a wide range ofactivities It has co-opted a number of public and private actors including leading research-ers tech companies and larger utilities mainly through the Smart London Board andindividual project partnerships In promoting a co-creative governance mode for smart cityinnovation the GLArsquos role is more to lsquosteerrsquo than to direct outcomes

414 Manchester

Manchester is building on a legacy of digital innovations having published digitalstrategies in 2008 and 2012 and previously established a Digital DevelopmentAgency (MDDA) in 2003 (which was disbanded in 2015) Its 2012 FeasibilityStudy framed its smart aspirations as potentially consolidating recent successesincluding strong hi-tech industries infrastructural investments and repopulation ofthe urban core The lsquoDefining visionrsquo of Manchester was presented as lsquothe birthplaceof the industrial revolution re-inventing itself as a model of twenty-first centuryldquogreen growthrdquorsquo (Manchester City Council 2012 8) The Feasibility Study wastaken as a starting point for an ongoing programme of smart activities in theOxford Road Corridor (Manchester City Council 2013) running 2 km south fromthe city centre Corridor Manchester established as an incorporated body in 2007(CAICT and PDSF 2014 131) hopes that the district will continue to attract lsquoknowl-edge workersrsquo to become lsquoone of the top five innovation districts in Europersquo(Corridor Manchester 2015 4) achieving lsquolocal and global recognition as a placethat is original creative and smart where knowledge is put to workrsquo (4)

Its smart city activities exhibit a particularly networked style of governance withthe council just one of a series of actors allied in varying combinations ndash mostnoticeably the cityrsquos universities and large hospitals local engineering and hi-techfirms Transport for Greater Manchester and grass-roots digital organisation FutureEverything However the council appears to have reclaimed a more central rolethrough its 2016 lsquoSmarter Cityrsquo programme which promotes activities from acrossthe city

415 Milton Keynes

Milton Keynes consciously draws on its history of innovative urban planning andtechnology deployment in stating the aim of becoming the UKrsquos lsquoleading digital cityrsquo(Milton Keynes Council 2012 10) with an lsquounambiguous objective backed with

10 R Cowley et al

integrated city planning to reduce its carbon footprint with an energy-efficient high-techknowledgersquo (3) Although its 2012 Feasibility Study did not win funding it has sincelaunched a lsquoFuture Cityrsquo programme clearly framed by the goals of citizen co-creationand environmental improvements

Although universities typically play prominent partnership roles in other UK smartcity initiatives Milton Keynes is unusual in that the Open University is the dominantactor This may be one reason why the MK Smart programme strongly emphasisescitizen engagement as an end in itself rather than ndash as is more the case in London andPeterborough ndash a source of entrepreneurial ideas

416 Peterborough

The smart activities taking place under the lsquoPeterborough DNArsquo programme finally areclearly shaped by a green growth strategy Peterborough aims to become the lsquoSustainabilityCapital of the UKrsquo and as such lsquothat ldquocapitalrdquo will be exploited to the maximum to ensurethat it delivers true economic prosperity and well-being through job creation and theintegration of employment skills and innovationrsquo (Peterborough City Council 2012 4)The lsquofundamental goalrsquo of its smart activities is one of lsquogrowth innovation and sustain-abilityrsquo (Peterborough City Council 2014 4)

As a runner-up in the TSB competition Peterborough was awarded pound3m While its moreexpensive proposals including significant investment in the transport system were notfunded the four strands of its lsquoDNArsquo programme are similar to those proposed in its 2012Feasibility Study lsquosmart businessrsquo lsquoliving datarsquo lsquoskillsrsquo and lsquoinnovationrsquo In accordancewith the strong economic focus of the programme Peterborough DNA is led collaborativelyby the council and the Local Economic Partnership lsquoOpportunity Peterboroughrsquo

42 The four modalities of publicness and their associated forms of assemblage

Despite the variety suggested above some pertinent observations can be made about bothcommon tendencies and significant differences in the types of publicness invoked by thevarious smart city initatives across the six cities As noted we distinguish four modalities ofpublicness each of which correlates broadly with particular forms of assemblage

421 Service-user publicness

What we term the lsquoservice userrsquomodality of publicness relates the consumption of everydayurban services when for example a person travels by public transport consumes water orelectricity or uses broadband infrastructure Smart technology offers the promise of poten-tially enhancing such public interactions with service providers by providing more accurateor lsquoreal-timersquo data for decision-making new possibilities for users to contribute to servicesthrough automated or voluntary feedback and new channels of accountability

By our assessment this modality was dominant in 25 of the 68 activities analysedmaking it the most common form of publicness across the six cities as a whole Examples ofrelevant activities include Milton Keynesrsquo smart parking initiatives the lsquoIntelligent StreetLightingrsquo and lsquoEnergy Efficiency Demonstratorrsquo pilots in Glasgow and ManchesterrsquoslsquoTriangulumrsquo project which aims to reduce energy use and improve local transport Mosttypically such initiatives are characterised by relatively direct local council involvementThe issues addressed vary depending on the type of infrastructure in question but transport

Urban Research amp Practice 11

congestion resource consumption carbon emissions and digital inclusion are repeatedlymentioned in the documentation A commonality then is a normative framing in which thegoal of improved efficiency is highlighted

Service user-oriented smart city projects are most typically associated with two types ofspatiality The first relates to the traditional materiality of systems operating across the citydigital technology serves to improve the functional efficiency of these existing systemsWhile then the new technology may have clear spatial effects (eg in reworking trafficflows or recalibrating energy distribution) the spatialised phenomena to be rendered moreefficient are already present

Crucially this is the most passive of the four modalities identified The public ispositioned as part of the cityrsquos routine functionality rather than assigned lsquoco-creationalrsquoagency This then does not radically depart from the traditional relationship of the public toinfrastructural services Of course the provision of improved services does not contradict aclaim to being lsquocitizen-centricrsquo or lsquoputting people firstrsquo its conceptualisation neither deniesnor acknowledges that publicness may be assembled otherwise

422 Entrepreneurial publicness

If lsquoservice userrsquo publicness implies a relatively compliant reactive collectivity a more activelsquoentrepreneurialrsquo sense of the public is conjured up in other activities which enrol citizensinto co-creating and innovating in the smart arena This resonates with findings elsewhereidentifying a strong entrepreneurial governance mode at work in smart cities (eg Hollands2015 Wiig 2015) The entrepreneurial modality relates less to the everyday functioning ofthe city and more to the expectation that residents will be involved in creating services andeconomic value Rather than addressing particular thematic issues it is framed by an unmetneed to harness the economic and service-related possibilities afforded by new digitaltechnologies and big data We identified this modality as dominant for 19 of the 68 activitiesconsidered

Examples of related initiatives include the lsquohackathonrsquo events in several cities the lsquoTechLondonersrsquo initiative (aiming to bring lsquoLondonersrsquo and entrepreneurs together to co-createdigital solutions to predefined problems) Peterboroughrsquos lsquoInnovationWeekrsquoworkshops andlsquoBrainwave Innovation Portalrsquo and Manchesterrsquos Digital Laboratory (lsquoMadLabrsquo) whichencouraged local residents to find solutions to social problems through lsquoco-creative human-centric and user-driven research development and innovationrsquo (Ruijsink and Smith 2016 4)Bristolrsquos lsquoIoTMeshrsquo scheme will lsquoopen-up the test-bed to a wide range of Internet-of-Things(IoT) developers In doing so Bristol Is Open will enable companies to perfect their newtechnology solutions for everything from smart rubbish bins to connected streetlamps and awide range of IoTsensorsrsquo (Bristol is Open 2016b) The various lsquoopen datarsquo initiatives acrossthe cities serve directly to allow members of the public to make connections between thedatasets provided (and with their own data if they wish) Public involvement in suchactivities is often explicitly incentivised by commercial possibilities and no clear conceptualdistinction is evident between the public sphere and the market Glasgowrsquos lsquoOpen DataCataloguersquo for example promises to lsquoempower everybody (the public voluntary academicprivate sectors and communities) to harness [data] use it and combine it in new ways Wecan all contribute to making Glasgow a better place to live work and playrsquo (Future CityGlasgow 2016b)

In some cases such as hackathon events the practices associated with this entrepre-neurialism take place in traditional fora or make fairly conventional uses of internet sites (as

12 R Cowley et al

in the case of Tech Londoners) But a more distinctively lsquosmartrsquo spatiality may sometimes beobserved in the various attempts to add a lsquodigital layerrsquo to the city creating what might betermed a ubiquitous network of connectivity The digital infrastructure projects within theBristol is Open programme exemplify this spatiality particularly well in a literal sense theywill add a layer of digital connectivity to the city centre The lsquoWireless Milersquo for exampleaims at the creation of a lsquoheterogeneous technology environmentrsquo (Bristol is Open 2016c 1)which integrates differently formatted wifi signals such that lsquocomplex multi-layered net-works of overlapping big and small cells supply smartphones tablets cars drones and evenbuildings with a huge amount of cheap connectivityrsquo (Bristol is Open 2016d2) The variousopen data initiatives also fall into this category insofar as they enable datasets about existingservices and amenities to be linked together

Again this invocation of entrepreneurial public agency sits comfortably with claims thatpeople are being put at the centre of smart city development it explicitly invites publiccontributions to the ongoing forms that this will take However like the service-usermodality it says little about the more democratic dimensions of publicness A more roundedsense of lsquocitizenshiprsquo as traditionally conceived encompasses not only lsquosocial rightsrsquo (ieaccess to services) but also lsquopolitical rightsrsquo (contributing to decision-making processes) andlsquocivilrsquo ones (relating to freedom of speech) (Isin and Ruppert 2015) Accordingly we furtherpropose and distinguish between a lsquopoliticalrsquo and a lsquocivicrsquo modality of publicness

423 Political publicness

We use the label lsquopoliticalrsquo here in the narrow sense of public involvement in decision-making and deliberation through institutional channels or through novel extensions of theseExamples include the lsquoTalk Londonrsquo online platform which hosts a mixture of surveysblogs and discussion boards promoting itself as a lsquoplace to discuss Londonrsquos big issuesrsquo(Talk London 2016) and Bristolrsquos lsquoDemocratreersquo app which encouraged residents to nomi-nate and vote on suitable locations for planting new trees (While the latter was not initiateddirectly by the council it nevertheless provided a direct means for residents to influenceofficial decisions on resource allocation) If there is a commonality in the issues addressedthrough such activities it relates to a perceived lack of participation ndash often with certainsocial groups in mind ndash in local decision-making

Overall this is by far the least commonmodality of publicness invoked it is dominant inonly three of the 68 activities considered This is perhaps surprising given that the potentialfor digital technologies to reinvigorate democratic deliberation and decision-making hasbeen enthusiastically envisioned and debated since the 1990s (Isin and Ruppert 2015) Thelack of experimentation in this respect may partly be explained by the marginality of smartcity activities to traditional policy-making processes

The uses of online fora (as in the case of the Talk London initiative) or voting apps(Democratree) clearly depart from traditional modes of political deliberation ndash for exampleface-to-face settings ndash and yet nevertheless describe rather conventional uses of the internetHowever there are too few examples in the set of activities analysed for us to drawconclusions about the types of spatialities or spatial effects associated with this modalityof publicness

We highlight the paucity of political publicness specifically because strategy documentsmake repeated claims that citizen engagement is vital to the successful implementation of thesmart city and that related initiatives will enable wider citizen engagement with decision-making processes Its absence points more to a situation in which the smart city not only

Urban Research amp Practice 13

operates at the margins of normal institutional processes but might even be criticallyinterpreted as seeking to bypass them ndash a possibility raised by Shearmur (2016) in recountinghow delegates at a technology conference imagined the public sector as merely an obstacle tosmart city implementation

424 Civic publicness

Decision-making mediated through official processes only captures part of a cityrsquos politicallife and may tend to frame issues in certain ways for the purposes of voting or other forms ofdeliberation We therefore distinguish the lsquopoliticalrsquo from a rather less structured lsquocivicrsquomodality of publicness which loosely maps onto a traditional sense of the broader lsquopublicspherersquo In other words it inheres in those activities taking place in spaces beyond stateinstitutions but which are not directly oriented towards market activity A local councilrsquosinvolvement in such activities is necessarily more at armrsquos length it may enable or merelyapprove of such activities in its own promotional documents The types of issues shaping itsassemblage should then emerge lsquofrom belowrsquo Equally however this modality of public-ness may be more immediately associated with leisure activities or lsquoplayfulnessrsquo ndash suchactivities in public space may constitute a performative type of claim making within thebroader democratic process (see eg Hou 2010 Parkinson 2012) The invocation of civicpublicness is far from uncommon across the six cities considered here on a par with theentrepreneurial it is dominant for 21 of the 68 activities (and the most common modality inLondon)

Examples include the lsquoCommunity Wellnessrsquo strand of Manchesterrsquos lsquoCityVerversquo pro-ject aiming to encourage schoolchildren and commuters to take exercise in parks BristolrsquoslsquoMyKWrsquo community social media platform the lsquoBristol Approach to Citizen Sensingrsquo andlsquoPlayable Cityrsquo initiatives Glasgowrsquos lsquoActive Travelrsquo demonstrator initiative insofar as itencouraged cyclists to share data and experiences of cycling in the city and Londonrsquos lsquoSpeedVolunteeringrsquo app which seeks to put those wishing to volunteer in touch with peopleseeking help

We discern two distinctive spatialities as characteristic of assemblages of civic public-ness First relevant initiatives are often constituted by the goal of manifesting the virtualdigital in traditional (physical) public space Peterborough for example has planned a largelsquoOpenCityrsquo digital screen in the city centre Bristolrsquos lsquoPlayable Citiesrsquo competition has beenrunning annually since 2013 to fund temporary artistic installations in the city centre Theproject also taking place elsewhere internationally aims to put lsquopeople and play at the heartof the future city Through interaction and creative installations it unlocks a socialdialogue bringing the citizens into a city development conversationrsquo (Watershed 2016)Examples have included the 2013 winner Hello Lamp Post which allowed members of thepublic to have text message conversations with various items of street furniture andUrbanimals in 2015 in which digitally projected animals would appear unexpectedly acrossthe city and interact with the public (Watershed 2016) Manchesterrsquos lsquoCityVerversquo Internet ofThings demonstrator project mentioned above plans to install lsquotalkative bus stopsrsquo and alsquoCommunity Wellnessrsquo sensor network in parks along school and commuter routes toencourage exercise (UK Government 2015)

The second characteristic spatiality of civic publicness relates to varied attempts toreclaim the digital sphere from the private sector The idea of lsquoreclamationrsquo may not beexplicit in the documentation but such initiatives are typically driven by civil society actorsand aim variously to empower citizens to use and have a presence through new digital urban

14 R Cowley et al

technologies Manchesterrsquos lsquoLiving Labrsquo programme (whose current status is unclearfollowing the disbandment of the Manchester Digital Development Authority) includedthe development of an interactive local news and information web portal featuring contentcreated by residents The lsquoManchester Digital Laboratoryrsquo describes itself as a lsquograssrootsinnovation organisationrsquo (MadLab 2016a) which organises various events and digital train-ing courses with a core mission to allow the general public to lsquohelp people to make thingsbetter togetherrsquo through lsquoexperimentationrsquo lsquoplayrsquo and lsquofunrsquo and the promotion of craftman-ship (MadLab 2016b) In Bristol a local social networking site (first trialled as lsquoMyKWrsquo inthe Knowle West district) has been extended to the city as a whole (as lsquoMyBristolrsquo) Theplanned lsquoBristol Approach to Citizen Sensingrsquo initiative meanwhile mentioned above mostexplicitly displays the aim of reconfiguring virtual space in this way in its vision of a lsquoco-created city commonsrsquo which lsquosupports the deployment of new or adapted technologies intoeveryday environmentsrsquo (KWMC 2016 1)

425 Summary of relative prominence of different modalities of publicness

Table 2 summarises the relative prominence of the four modalities of publicness in eachcity and across all six cities

Analysing these data too closely would potentially yield spurious findings for severalreasons our six cities were not chosen to yield a somehow statistically representative sampleof activities for the purposes of quantitative research the coding of their modalities involvedsome subjective judgement and all activities are equally weighted regardless of scale timeperiod budget and policy significance These reservations aside the findings provide anindicative overview of the variations in the publicness assembled in these six leading citiesand in this spirit two broad observations are ventured

First the relative prominence of the four modalities differs considerably by city In thissense again lsquosmart publicnessrsquo is evidently not determined by globally circulating dis-courses but at least partly reflects its immediate governance and policy context The relativeabsence of entrepreneurial publicness in Glasgow for example communicates the councilrsquossole responsibility for delivering activities In Bristol the dominant entrepreneurial and civicmodalities chime with an overall strategic goal of expanding the knowledge economy bytapping into a strong tradition of grass-roots innovation The lack of service-user publicnessin Peterborough reflects the limited funding available for hard infrastructural projects theemphasis on entrepreneurial and civic publicness evinces the shared responsibility of thecityrsquos economic development agency and the council in managing the Peterborough DNAprogramme Londonrsquos relatively weak service use focus differently confirms the GLArsquos roleas steering and advisory actor rather than as funder of large-scale material interventions Thecity-level assemblages in Manchester and Milton Keynes display similarity in their strongoverall service-use sense of publicness and relatively weak civic modality While civicpublicness may come to the fore in Manchester in future given Corridor Manchesterrsquos statedlsquoplace-makingrsquo goals (Corridor Manchester 2015 24ndash25) its current relative absenceimplies a lack of active engagement on the part of the general public Milton Keynes isperhaps more surprising in this respect given its clear strategic claim to be civically engagedIts relatively weak civic publicness underlines the opportunistic nature of smart urbanactivities those coming to be implemented or funded may reflect strategic goals unevenlysmart policy documents themselves carry relatively little weight in the urban developmentprocess

Urban Research amp Practice 15

Table

2Relativeprom

inence

ofdominantmodalitiesof

publicness

insm

artcity

activities

across

sixUK

cities

Dom

inantmodality

Bristol

Glasgow

London

Manchester

MiltonKeynes

Peterborough

Allactivities

Meanfor6cities

Service

User

1457

1156

530

3732

Entrepreneurial

367

3333

2460

2832

Political

140

110

00

44

Civic

3636

4411

2440

3132

(Total

no

ofactivities)

(14)

(14)

(9)

(9)

(17)

(5)

(68)

16 R Cowley et al

Second the proportion of initiatives oriented towards civic publicness is not insig-nificant these account for approximately a third of all the activities examined On thisbasis it would be oversimplistic to dismiss the claims that the lsquoactually existingrsquocontemporary UK smart city pays only lip service to the importance of public claim-making Nevertheless this embrace of the democratic process does not extend to theprovision of significant opportunities for citizens to engage directly with the formalpolitical system in innovative ways In itself the absence of envisaged political public-ness does not undermine the possibility of more traditional public engagement withgovernmental institutions elsewhere yet the smart city does not provide channels for thedirect expression of public contestation or more radical forms of dissent

In this sense the smart city may appear to be aligned with broader depoliticising or lsquopost-politicalrsquo tendencies in governance generally and urban planning specifically (Swyngedouw2007 2011 Allmendinger and Haughton 2012 Joss 2015) In a post-political reading itsassemblage across UK cities would reflect the nature of its conceptual underpinnings thesmart city can only lsquocommand agreement as a result of [its] broadly progressive if non-specific framingrsquo (Allmendinger and Haughton 2012 94) and is therefore lsquounable to arouseconflicts among political ideasrsquo (Crivello 2015 919) Alternatively following Newman andClarke (2009) it illustrates the apparent paradox of the decline of the traditional lsquopublicrsquobeing accompanied by its simultaneous proliferation as a fragmented mulitiplicity politicalpublicness may be assembling elsewhere but is not associated with the intended role of thesmart city in the United Kingdom

426 Obduracy

Political publicness aside our findings have at least provided convincing evidence that UKsmart city initiatives are guided by a genuine desire to encourage civic engagement ofvarious kinds Even here however a more nuanced picture emerges when the relativeobduracy of individual activities is factored in Based on the available information weflagged each of the 68 activities as either lsquopermanentrsquo (to indicate ongoing operation orpresence in the city) or lsquotemporaryrsquo (to indicate a one-off or time-limited activity) As Table 3shows civic (and political) activities tend to be less permanent in nature than those invokingentrepreneurial and service-user publicness

In an important sense the relatively temporary nature of activities oriented towardspolitical and civic publicness is unsurprising particularly when contrasted with the service-user modality which is more often associated ndash as discussed above ndash with lsquohardrsquo infra-structural interventions The consequences of such activities may be long-lasting even whenthe activity itself is short-lived Nevertheless these findings fall short of convincinglyheralding a situation in which citizenship is prioritised as the central ongoing concern ofthe UK smart city

Table 3 Obduracy of smart city activities invoking each modality of publicness

Dominant modalityPermanent

Temporary

Base (number of activities)

Service-user 76 24 (25)Entrepreneurial 58 42 (19)Political 33 67 (3)Civic 48 52 (21)

Urban Research amp Practice 17

Significantly furthermore a degree of bifurcation is evident in the overall techno-publicassemblages such that civic and political publicness are sidelined within less obduratestrands of programmatic activity In Glasgow the enduring legacy of the lsquoFuture Cityrsquoprogramme is most visible in the service-user-oriented Operation Centre However manyof its other activities characterised by a more interactive and participatory mode of publicengagement were one-off events As lsquodemonstrator projectsrsquo they served in principle to helpdefine rather than enact the smart city ndash but there is little evidence that this more temporarystrand of the lsquoFuture Cityrsquo programme has subsequently been embedded in mainstreammunicipal activities In Bristol too a clear bifurcation is evident On one side the lsquoBristol isOpenrsquo improvements to the cityrsquos digital infrastructure and the lsquoOpen Data Bristolrsquo initiative(all of which might be expected to be relatively durable) invoke primarily entrepreneurialpublicness On the other the Connecting Bristol partnership promotes diverse lsquosofterrsquo civicand political activities led by grass-roots organisations which exhibit rather less obduracy assmall-scale pilot schemes or activities with limited public participation Evidently then lesscommitment and resources are available for experiments in the field of citizenship under-stood in more traditional liberal democratic ways than in those which conjure up a passive orentrepreneurial public

5 Discussion

Our reading of the smart city consciously departs from critical presentations of the smart cityas a lsquotop-downrsquo imposition and towards a foregrounding and more nuanced appreciation ofits practical variety But the observation that this variety is skewed towards the assemblage ofservice-user and entrepreneurial senses of the public does not constitute a straightforwardlyuseful critique of its current local manifestations The focus on service-user publicness atleast is unsurprising to the extent that local authorities are arguably seen by default asprimarily service providers To observe that civic and political publicness by way ofcontrast are less well considered and often only tokenistically accommodated is not tomake the normative case that these should necessarily or could realistically be privileged inlocal techno-public smart assemblages Rather the prevalence of this more passive modalityof publicness becomes significant when set against rhetorical claims that the smart city iseffecting transformational lsquocitizen-centricrsquo change

The dominance of service-user publicness does little to counter a broader trend identifiedby Powell (2014 15) towards lsquoa shift in the notion of citizenship away from civicresponsibilities and engagements to classifying [citizens] as consumers who purchaseservices from providersrsquo Although Powellrsquos discussion relates to the role of digitised datamore generally it is clearly relevant to the smart cityrsquos focus on providing greater efficien-cies Insofar as the lsquorelationship between government individuals and corporate entitiesrsquo (15)is viewed through the lens of the lsquocitizen as consumerrsquo its quality is only improved by theefficiencies which datafication enables Citizenship in this narrow sense is not related toaltruism or responsibilities but rather based on a principle of exchange and enacted throughlsquocollecting and sharing personal datarsquo (15) Drawing on Dean (2005) Powell highlights therisk that lsquothe norms of publicity ndash information communication and participation ndash havecome to stand for the political ends that they were presumed to serversquo (Powell 2014 16) Thisperspective raises various questions about many of the goals of UK smart city initiatives inrelation to the broader dimensions of citizenship For example the aim of lsquodigital inclusionrsquocommonly asserted among these six cases may appear laudable and yet it pushes the deeperpurpose of digital inclusion into the background smart connectivity itself becomes the goal

18 R Cowley et al

Similarly ideals of lsquotransparent governancersquo or lsquoopen datarsquo may end up being fetishisedwithin a discourse of efficiency even though this discourse tells us little about the normativebasis of the relationship between the public and the state beyond its passive lsquoservice-userrsquomodality

Although again our analysis opposes the existence of a deterministic link betweenglobal smart discourse and local practices the focus on efficiency of different types(including resource use provision of services and access to information) clearly resonateswith Whitersquos (2016) identification of an international discursive storyline in which the smartcity responds to lsquoresource pressures brought on by rapid urbanization and an ageing popula-tion the effects of anthropogenic global climate change and the twinned pressure of fiscalausterity and inter-urban competitionrsquo (577) We would at least suggest that the narrative ofthe lsquoage of crisisrsquo which accompanies much of the contemporary envisionment of futurecities (Caprotti 2015) has had a shaping influence on the prominence given to efficientservice provision in smart activities implemented to date

Equally given the broader UK policy context it would seem eccentric for local autho-rities to discourage entrepreneurialism On the immediate pragmatic level of funding andresources it must be significant that the governmentrsquos Department for Business Skills andInnovation has played a significant catalytic role smart city initiatives have not emergedunder the auspices of say the Department for Communities and Local Government But theprominence of entrepreneurial publicness raises a separate set of concerns echoing Dattarsquos(2015) diagnosis ndash albeit with reference to the rather different context of the Indian city ofDholera ndash of the smart city promoting lsquourbanization as a business model rather than a modelof social justicersquo Across our UK cases issues of social sustainability are far from absent inpolicy documents but their range tends to be limited for example focusing on health ande-inclusion or educating residents to participate in the digital economy In Glasgow suchquestions are subsumed within overall questions of efficiency and relate to very specificfactors such as public safety and reporting problems with services Milton Keynes claimsconsiderable interest in citizen co-creation but its initiatives are not primarily aimed attargeting social problems Although Peterboroughrsquos 2012 Feasibility Study prominentlyflagged up inequalities social cohesion and health improvements among other issues(Peterborough City Council 2012 3) its current strategy is addressed towards developingskills which lsquomeet local business demandrsquo and lsquoput Peterboroughrsquo in lsquothe best possibleposition to take advantage of emerging marketsrsquo (Peterborough City Council 2014 5)

One final way in which the lsquocitizen-centricrsquo nature of the UK smart city is questionablerelates to an apparent straightforward lack of public interest On one level this simplyreminds us of the peripherality of the smart city many of the associated activities only claimto be small-scale experimental trials and are not deeply embedded into the mainstream policyprocess While the actual numbers of local residents involved with many civic and politicalschemes are often negligible we found no convincing evidence either of broader enthusiasmor emergent public counter-discourse in any city4 While emergent political or civic con-testation is clearly not something which local authorities might lsquoplanrsquo for ndash it would beabsurd to expect local authorities to devise problems for frustrated publics to assemblearound ndash its absence does not provide evidence of acquiescence or approval or guarantee thesmooth passage of smart technology into urban life more broadly in future It more obviouslyreflects the survey evidence suggesting that general public awareness of any lsquosmartrsquo plans oractivities undertaken by local councils is neglible (Arqiva 2015) and that only one in five UKadults even recognises the term smart city (IET 2016)

Urban Research amp Practice 19

6 Conclusions towards a new lsquosmart urban publicnessrsquo

In studying and comparing a series of relatively well-developed smart city programmes aslsquotechno-public assemblagesrsquo we have responded to a series of policy claims made about therelationships between smart urban technologies and the public Our analysis reveals that thepublicness envisaged and enacted in the UK smart city is far from one-dimensional Citizensare not merely absent as the earlier critiques of the smart city would have it nor do smart cityactivities necessarily invoke a particular stunted notion of publicness in all cases Rather thegreat variety of types of publicness in evidence leads us to conclude that the rhetorical claimsabout the smart city being citizen-centric are not straightforwardly empty ones Rather thanagreeing with the speculative critiques of the smart city as a devious attempt to exclude thepublic we would urge commentators to begin from the assumption that its institutionalprotagonists do have a vested interest in questions of democracy

That said it also seems fair to conclude that the smart does not yet evince a convincinglyrounded sense of the lsquopublic cityrsquo The opportunistic nature of smart city development inother words gives rise to unique local forms but simultaneously holds these hostage tobroader societal and economic agendas the forms of their assemblage have remained shapedby immediate policy contexts and broader smart city policy discourse Thinking in terms ofits experimental shifting and peripheral assemblage in practice nevertheless opens upagentive space for actors involved to influence smart development in ways which moreconvincingly invoke a more rounded sense of publicness and in turn enable a moreconvincing sense of public ownership and enthusiasm

For more fully public smart city assemblages to emerge in future the civic and politicalmay need to be more obviously accommodated within the service-user and entrepreneurialThis need not relate to heavy-handed attempts to co-opt the civic which risk neutralising itsinnovative potential but the civic should at least not be siloed into more ephemeral strands ofactivity A lack of civic engagement with large infrastructural projects for example seemsunlikely to be successfully mitigated by a series of parallel participatory events which passunnoticed by most residents Similarly entrepreneurial activities are to be welcomed whichare more obviously oriented towards finding solutions to problems defined by citizensalongside those oriented at the creation of wealth through hi-tech innovations The possibi-lities for smart city technology to enable or engender more formal political participationfurthermore appear to have remained largely unexplored in practical terms

If only because the lsquoactually existingrsquo smart city is still at an experimental stage ofdevelopment we note that it has effected only marginal reconfigurations of the materialspaces of the city to date Nevertheless looking forward we urge researchers and practi-tioners to pay attention to the distinctive spatialities of the lsquosmart publicrsquo particularly in theinterfaces between public and private space and between virtual space and the traditionalmaterial public realm There is considerable scope in this regard to reverse the tendencyidentified by Kinsley (2013) to assign the digital to a parallel disembodied lsquohyperspacersquorather our understandings might more fruitfully be grounded in the relationships betweenhumans and technology in local contexts For policy-makers and practitioners activelyseeking a more widespread and involved sense of public debate around and engagementwith the implications of smart technology it may be rewarding to focus on the visibility ofnew innovations This may involve moving towards a more active consideration of themultiple roles of public space and more imaginatively using smart technologies to moveaway from more traditional fora as spaces of public engagement

Overall we resist from concluding that contemporary UK smart initiatives alreadyconstitute a qualitatively novel recasting of the public In relying on dominant political

20 R Cowley et al

structures and economic actors they have come to promote incremental change at best bothin terms of publicness and the material space of the city But assessing the long-termimpacts of smart innovations on urban space will be an ongoing project indeed the conceptlsquosmartrsquo itself may in future lose currency as a label or be reworked as a signifier In themeantime insofar as the smart city is indicative of broader contemporary attempts to shapeurban change in a time of austerity its lsquoexperimentalrsquo nature may appear rather moreproblematically reflective of a bypassing of the traditional democratic process And if wetoo may be allowed to propose a dystopian scenario it is one where in spite of the bestintentions of policy-makers the dominant norms of emerging smart city practices becomesedimented into novel twenty-first century institutional processes whose pragmatic world-view does not extend beyond that of a society of entrepreneurs and service users

AcknowledgementsThis study was undertaken at the University of Westminster with financial support from ESRC grantESL0159781 Youri Dayot was Visiting Fellow from the University of Grenoble

Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors

FundingThis study was undertaken at the University of Westminster as part of the ESRC-funded projectlsquoSmart Eco-cities for a Green Economy a Comparative Study of Europe and Chinarsquo (grant ESL0159781)

Notes1 The two terms (lsquosmart cityrsquo lsquofuture cityrsquo) are complementary and often used interchangeably

especially in the UK national policy context (see eg BSI 2014 3 also Joss Cook andDayot forthcoming) It is beyond the scope of this paper to delve into the conceptualinterrelationship of these recent policy terms in more detail

2 A fuller list of the key documents and links to relevant web pages consulted has been madepublicly available on the lead authorrsquos ResearchGate web pages httpswwwresearchgatenetprofileRobert_Cowley

3 More detailed descriptions of many of the individual activities and bodies analysed in thepresent research may be found in the lsquogrey literaturersquo (see eg Caprotti et al 2016 Woodset al 2016)

4 With the exception of some concerns in Glasgow about the use of facial recognition softwarein the cityrsquos CCTV system linked to the Operation Centre (Sunday Herald 2014 Aitchinson2015)

ReferencesAitchinson J 2015 ldquoShould We Be Worried about Glasgowrsquos New Hi-Tech Surveillance Systemrdquo

STV News February 23 httpglasgowstvtvarticles310713-glasgows-new-surveillance-installed-by-israeli-firm-nice-systems

Allmendinger P and G Haughton 2012 ldquoPost-Political Spatial Planning in England A Crisis ofConsensusrdquo Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37 (1) 89ndash103 doi101111j1475-5661201100468x

Arqiva 2015 ldquoAre Cities Really Getting Smarterrdquo httpswwwarqivacomnewspress-releasesare-our-cities-really-getting-smarter

Urban Research amp Practice 21

be selectively adopted and reworked as it becomes embedded in local governancenetworks and pre-existing strategic concerns (Peck and Theodore 2001 2010 Prince2010) These processes increasingly provide the opportunity to analyse smart cities assituated bodies of practices into which human actors are differently enrolled Ratherthan understanding the smart city as a given set of technologies whose promoters(problematically) assume certain deterministic effects on society this article construesthe smart city as contingently shaped both by local factors and by broader (policy)discourses To develop a grounded understanding of the varying implications for thelsquopublic cityrsquo when different technologies are labelled as smart implemented bycombinations of local actors in response to varied agendas and enacted in particularways in particular spaces we propose that smart city initiatives may be usefullytheorised as techno-public assemblages

In understanding these contingent (and shifting) local manifestations as givingrise to various modalities of publicness we take direct inspiration from Newman andClarkersquos (2009) notion of lsquoassemblages of publicnessrsquo These authors draw attentionto ways that lsquopeople policies discourses texts technologies and techniques sitesor locationsrsquo and lsquoforms of power or authorityrsquo (24) become articulated in particularcases They highlight lsquothe creative and dynamic ways in which actors seek outinterpret and enrol ideas in new settings in which ideas are received translatedmediated and adapted into the new practicesrsquo (20) Accordingly we analyse smartcity assemblages as shaped by multiple inter-related agencies rather than as onlyimposed by state or corporate actors from lsquoaboversquo We note further Kitchinrsquos (2014)recent elaboration of the idea of lsquosocio-technical assemblagesrsquo of big data referringto smart city infrastructure among other things which draws on attempts to capturethe open-ended multiple relational and dynamic qualities of urban phenomenathrough the lens of assemblage theory (eg Fariacuteas and Bender 2010 Fariacuteas 2011McFarlane 2011a 2011b) In relating particular activities to each other and to city-level strategies we follow Buchanan (2015) nevertheless in understanding assem-blages as lsquopurposeful not simply a happenstance collocation of people materialsand actions but the deliberate realisation of a distinctive planrsquo (385) The smarttechno-public assemblages presented in this paper then are neither fixed nor fullyfluid but rather lsquoworking arrangementsrsquo (383) which both derive from multipledeliberate processes of formation and are subject to ongoing stabilising and destabi-lising influences

Our notion of lsquopublicnessrsquo is aligned with the long-term shift away from theoris-ing the public as a singular whole or as expressing the common good towardsthinking in terms of a lsquoheterogeneous publicrsquo (Young 1989) or the co-existence ofmultiple lsquopublicsrsquo (see most notably Fraser 1990) whether interpellated by differentmedia (see eg Warner 2002) or emerging around issues (see eg Marres 2005) Italso reflects Mahonyrsquos (2013) observation that the policy goal of lsquopublic engagementrsquois informed variously by quite different perspectives on the public Alongside itsmodernist sense as a representable lsquoreal and pre-existing entityrsquo (352) the lsquopublicrsquomay be conceptualised as a normative democratic ideal or as an emergent phenom-enon From a different angle Barnett (2014) relatedly observes that lsquopublic valuesrsquooften describe lsquodistributed whole fields of practices and relationshipsrsquo (8) We con-ceive of the publicness of the smart city then as variously invoked and performedthrough the place-specific articulation of different goals technologies materialspaces and institutional settings

Urban Research amp Practice 3

The idea that publicness is assembled through new digital urban technologies also allowsus to explore the implications of the differentiated obduracy (Hommels 2005 2010) of whatresults Although the field of the smart city may be in flux its related infrastructuralinnovations in particular are likely to become relatively fixed (Hommels 2010) ndash even iftheir significance changes over time as they lsquocome to be related to new entities and react tothemrsquo (Ureta 2014 245) We are therefore alert to the possibility that certain forms ofassemblages may come to form lsquostabilised networksrsquo constituting lsquopotential actant[s] in asubsequent phase of urban developmentrsquo (Bender 2010 310) Equally the resulting norms ofpublicness may become lsquosedimentedrsquo (Newman and Clarke 2009) into more permanentinstitutional processes Conversely those elements of the assemblages which are moreephemeral and fragile ndash as Newman and Clarke (2009) characterise many assemblages ofpublicness ndashmay seem less well placed to have ongoing influence on the production of urbanspace

Assessing the likely obduracy of these varied assemblages also potentially allowsanalysis to encompass more lsquoemergentrsquo forms of public counter-discourse It is preciselythe obduracy of both infrastructures and regulatory institutions (as lsquosedimentedrsquo sites ofnorms) which in the Dewey (1989) tradition lead to frictions and frustrations in times ofrapid technological change This raises the important question of whether the smart cityadequately accounts for the possibility of public non-compliance or resistance Whether thatis it envisions ndash or even serves to suppress ndash the political multiplicity of civil society in thelsquorealrsquo city Conceptualisations of civil society only as a lsquodomain that needs to be constructedand tutored (by governments and international organisations)rsquo (Newman and Clarke 200958) may problematically ignore its more unruly but potentially constructive role as lsquotheorganic condition of society that provides the springboard for economic and social develop-mentrsquo (58)

Here the scope of Newman and Clarkersquos discussion of publicness is extended in twoways First we focus more directly on the impact of digital technology on its assemblagerelatedly Barns (2016) has recently called for further understanding of what lsquodigital urbanpublicsrsquo might comprise Second we wish to initiate a discussion about the distinctivespatialities of smart city initiatives While citizenship theory tends not to focus on questionsof space this goal seems germane within an investigation of the variegated publicnesspotentially generated by smart city initiatives as interventions in real (and virtual) urbanspace

To make sense of the variegated publicness thus invoked we conceive of it displayingfour distinct modalities the service user entrepreneurial civic and political ndash each of whichare discussed in the main findings section of this article This novel four-way conceptualisa-tion was derived on one hand from political theory perspectives on the public and inparticular Newman amp Clarkersquos (2009) aforementioned theorisation of new heterogenousforms of publicness which not only distinguishes between political and civic publics butalso draws attention to the emergence of new uneven market- and consumer-based sites andpractices of publicness On the other it was derived from a grounded analysis of contempo-ary smart city initiatives identified in an earlier broader survey of 34 UK cities (Caprotti et al2016) This empirical material highlighted the varied ways in which the public was explicitlyor implicitly positioned in relation to smart city strategies and activities Altogether thesetheoretical and empirical observations resulted in the four distinct heuristic categoriespresented here The categorisation was further corroborated by the growing literaturewhich highlights the entrepreneurial aspects of smart city governance (eg Caragliu DelBo and Nijkamp 2011 Wiig 2015 Evans Karvonen and Raven 2016 Krivyacute 2016) or

4 R Cowley et al

suggests that smart city visions of technology-driven innovation in service provision havenot convincingly accounted for the social and political dimensions of urban life (seeIntroduction)

3 Methodology

This research focuses on evidence drawn from six UK cities Bristol Glasgow LondonManchester Milton Keynes and Peterborough The units of our comparative analysis are notthese cities in a broader sense (Robinson 2011) ndash defined for example by municipalboundaries ndash but rather their smart city (policy) activity at the point of local implementationOur choice does not imply that we advocate these cities as exemplars of lsquobest practicersquo butrather reflects in each case the emergence of a relatively wide range of activities throughpolicy-making explicitly drawing on smart city discourse We treat these cases as importantlsquonodal pointsrsquo within wider flows of concepts and policy discourses (15) and have includedsix ndash rather than focusing on say one city in particular ndash in order to capture a sufficientdiversity of institutional and municipal contexts through which local policies are beingapplied precisely since we are interested in the variety evident among programmes ofactivities taking shape within different local contexts

The six cities were selected following an earlier analysis (Caprotti et al 2016) of relevantnational policy documentation and internet searches on lsquosmart cityrsquo or lsquofuture cityrsquo1 initia-tives across the United Kingdom The latter reflects the naming of the national Future CitiesCatapult centre established by the government to support the development and implementa-tion of smart city technology Additionally all six submitted bids for funding in the 2012Future Cities Demonstrator competition held by the Technology Strategy Board thenational innovation agency supported by the Department for Business Innovation andSkills (see Taylor Buck and While 2015 Caprotti et al 2016) Glasgow as overall winnerwas awarded pound24m to implement its plans and Bristol London and Peterborough were eachawarded pound3m as runners-up Since this competition significantly catalysed all six citiesrsquosmart activities we treat their submitted lsquoFeasibility Studiesrsquo as key policy documents As acommonality this competition also provides a basis for comparative research (Robinson2011) exploring the variety of the lsquoactually existingrsquo smart city (Shelton Zook and Wiig2015) in the United Kingdom

For each urban setting the key policy strategies and all associated current and plannedactivities were identified and relevant publicly available documents were collected Specificactivities were included if they were clearly linked to or promoted within the policydocumentation and sought either to use digital technology to achieve particular goals or tofacilitate the use of digital technology Beyond this no further criteria (eg the centrality oflsquobig datarsquo) were imposed given our desire to understand how the smart city has beenassembled contingently in practice Table 1 lists the 68 activities thus identified and thekey associated policy documents along with any overarching programmes of which parti-cular activities formed a part or local bodies (typically partnerships involving the councilamong other actors) responsible for their delivery2 The time frame for gathering thisdocumentation was AprilndashJune 2016 and those materials publicly available during thisperiod were included in the research

Based on this set of documents each of the 68 activities was then analysed individuallyFirst through a protocol with four inter-related assemblage dimensions based on Newmanand Clarkersquos (2009) discussion (1) the issues which the activity or policy sought to address(2) the key actors involved in implementation (3) the particular socio-technical practices

Urban Research amp Practice 5

Table

1Sum

maryof

smartcity

policy

documentsandinitiativesanalysed

insixUK

cities

Bristol

Glasgow

London(G

LA)

Key

PolicyDocuments

SmartCityBristol

(2011)

Connect

Bristol

Feasibility

Study

(2012)

Key

PolicyDocuments

Glasgow

CityManagem

entSystem

(2012)

OpenManifesto

ndashPrinciples(2013)

CityTechnologyPlatform

(2013)

Key

PolicyDocuments

LinkedLondon(2012)

SmartLondonPlan(2013)

The

Futureof

Smart(2013)

DataforLondon

ACityStrategyforLondon(2016)

Program

me

organisation

Activities(yearlaunched

ortook

place)

Program

me

organisation

Activities(yearlaunched

ortook

place)

Program

me

organisation

Activities(yearlaunched

ortook

place)

CityCouncil

GigabitBristol

(2012)

FutureCityGlasgow

OpenGlasgow

(2013)

Glasgow

Operation

Centre(2013)

MyGlasgow

(2013)

IntelligentStreetLighting(2013)

Dashboards(2013)

ActiveTravel(2013)

Hacking

theFuture(2013)

Com

munityMapping

(2014)

FutureMakers(2014)

OpenDataCatalogue

(2013)

LinkedMapping

(2013)

Energy(2013)

SocialTransport(2013)

EngagingtheCity(2013)

Citizen

Engagem

ent(2014)

LinkedLondon

SmartParkQueen

Elizabeth

Park

(2014)

Bristol

IsOpen

DataDom

e(2015)

IoTMesh(2016)

WirelessMile(2016)

SoftwareDefined

Network

Control

(2016)

SmartLondon

Board

LondonDatastore

(2010)

SmartLondonDistrictsNetwork

(2014)

SmartLondonInfrastructure

Network

(2015)

TalkLondon(2015)

Civic

Crowdfunding

(2015)

Infrastructure

Mapping

Application

(2015)

TechLondonersPeopleSolving

City

Challenges(2016)

Speed

Volunteering(2016)

ConnectingBristol

OpenDataBristol

(2010)

Media

Sandbox

2010

B-O

pen

Strand(2010)

PlayableCitiesAward(2013)

Dem

ocratree

(2014)

MyKnowle

WestMyBristol

(2014)

YouDecide(2015)

Healthy

Office(2016)

REPLICATE(2016)

Knowle

West

Media

Centre

Bristol

Approachto

Citizen

Sensing

(planned)

6 R Cowley et al

Manchester

MiltonKeynes

Peterborough

Key

PolicyDocuments

Digital

Strategy(2008)

Digital

Manchester(2012)

ManchesterFutureCity(2012)

SmarterCityProgram

me(2016)

Key

PolicyDocuments

Future-Ready

MK

(2012)

MK

SmartAWater

strategy

forMiltonKeynes

(2016)

Key

PolicyDocuments

PeterboroughDNA

(2012)

Deliveringatrulysm

artcity

(2014)

Program

meorganisation

Activities(yearlaunched

ortook

place)

Program

me

organisation

Activities(yearlaunched

ortook

place)

Program

me

organisation

Activities(yearlaunched

ortook

place)

ManchesterDigital

Develop

mentAgency

ManchesterLivingLab

(2006)

MKSmart

MK

DataHub

(2016)

Our

MK

(2015)

GardenMonitor

(planned)

Water

Monitor

(2016)

Water

measurementschool

kits

(2014)

SmartMeters(2015)

ApexSuite

business

engagement

programme(2015)

MK

Hackathon

(2016)

MotionMap

(2015)

SmartParking

(2015)

OpenEnergyMap

(2016)

Electricity

Dem

andShifting

(2013)

SmartGridDynam

icDem

and

Response(2014)

SmartLighting(2014)

Peterborough

DNA

BrainwavePortal(2014)

OpenC

ityScreen(planned)

Hackathon

(2014)

Innovation

Week(2014)

LivingDataPortal(2015)

CorridorManchester

Triangulum

(2015)

CityV

erve

(2016)

SmarterCityProgram

me

ManchesterDigital

Laboratory(M

adLab)

(2009)

DIM

MER(2013)

MiGuide

(2013)

Central

Library

Digital

Dem

onstrator(2014)

IntelligentLighting(2015)

Greater

ManchesterData

Synchronisation

Program

me

DataG

M(2011)

Transport

Systems

Catapult

Imagined

FestivalIntelligent

MobilityHackathon

(2016)

Feasibility

Study

for2012

FutureCitiesDem

onstratorCom

petition

Urban Research amp Practice 7

involved and (4) the variegated spatiality produced And second to identify the dominantmodality of publicness thus invoked service user entrepreneurial political or civic (asdiscussed in the previous section)

By taking into account the linkages between individual activities and the wider policylandscape a profile of each smart city assemblage as a whole was built up For the purposesof triangulation the results were aggregated following separate initial analyses and jointlyreviewed by the three authors Finally a transversal analysis was conducted across the sixcities in order to identify common patterns as well as divergent practices

Basing the analysis on detailed evidence has allowed for some of the variety acrossparticular locations to be captured in partial response to Kitchinrsquos (2015) call to movebeyond critiques of the lsquoplace-lessrsquo corporate and governmental promotional literature Ourresponse is a partial one since given the emergent nature of much smart city activity even inthese six locations the research neither investigates practices of implementation in depth norprovides a long-term perspective on the smart cityrsquos impact on the lived experience of thecity The aim rather has been to investigate the outcomes of the processes whereby thelsquoplace-lessrsquo smart city has been translated into locally specific projects through the lens ofthe documentation surrounding these

The high-level findings reported below relate to our conclusions about the relativeprominence of different modalities of publicness Although the discussion is illustratedwith particular examples of activity space does not permit a thorough presentation of thedetailed elements of the six assemblages3 Any of these elements can itself be seen as atechno-public assemblage and the analytical framework is offered as a tool for otherswishing to explore the public dimensions of current and future smart city activities at agranular level

4 Findings

41 The smart city in six municipal contexts initial findings and observations

It is worth noting first that the policy documents analysed generally operate at the peripheryof traditional urban planning frameworks local authorities are not formally obliged toinclude smart city principles within statutory planning processes Instead these policiesare often championed by overarching strategy boards economic development agencies andsimilar municipal bodies As such they typically seek to promote cohesive socio-economicinnovation policy to a range of actors both internally and externally for the purpose ofleveraging inward investment Thus they will have been shaped by their imagined receptionby varied audiences (Freeman and Maybin 2011 163ndash164) rather than by the specificintention that they should serve as traditional planning tools The varying status of thisdocumentation is significantly reflective of the often opportunistic nature of smart cityactivity but also points to the often complicated governance arrangements in placeImportantly then the relationship between the policy documents and activities shown inTable 1 is not consistent across the six cities For Glasgow which presents itself as havingrelatively straightforward governance arrangements there is clear linearity between the plansoutlined in its 2012 Feasibility Study and the resulting initiatives At the other end of thespectrum Manchesterrsquos recent Smarter City Programme for example essentially collates aseries of activities already planned or taking place

The activities themselves range from small-scale pilot scheme to major infrastructuralprojects from interventions into specific spatially bounded areas to initiatives operating invirtual space city-wide from lsquotop-downrsquo technological innovations to grass-roots

8 R Cowley et al

community activities and from one-off events to ongoing activities and services alreadywell-embedded into the urban fabric Despite the identification in the academic literaturethen of broad commonalities in variously conceived smart city lsquoimaginariesrsquo its manifesta-tions on the ground in the United Kingdom defy simple categorisation at first sight

The policy documents also display noticeable city-specific inflections in their narrativeframings reflecting the local contextual factors through which the translation of smart citydiscourse into practical activity has been mediated To provide some background for themain analysis an overview of the key framing principles in each cityrsquos policy documents isprovided below along with the varied governance structures that have emerged in dynamicrelationship with both the policy documents and the activities themselves Such differences ndashas will be discussed ndash help to explain some of the forms that local assemblages take withimplications in turn for the nature of the publicness invoked

411 Bristol

Bristolrsquos stated overall smart city goals are to expand the cityrsquos knowledge economy in a waywhich furthers its image as a pioneer in environmental sustainability and a centre of grass-roots innovation Its 2012 Feasibility Study (Bristol City Council 2012) broadened the remitof the earlier Smart City Bristol report (Bristol City Council 2011) which focused largely oncarbon emissions and transport issues to develop a narrative of enabling environmentallyand socially sustainable growth at a time of economic expansion in recognition of the cityrsquossignificant health and wealth inequalities

The council is one actor among many in Bristolrsquos current smart city activities which arenot orchestrated by an overarching policy document Nevertheless the dual focus of its 2012Feasibility Study which proposed a mixture of lsquohardrsquo infrastructure and a parallel pro-gramme of citizen engagement resembles the two-stranded nature of what has emerged inpractice The first strand delivering digital infrastructure is coordinated by the lsquoBristol isOpenrsquo partnership between the council and the University of Bristol with support from otherprivate public and charitable organisations The second collates various activities mostlyrelated to citizen and SME engagement within the lsquoConnecting Bristolrsquo initiative Here thecouncilrsquos role is more lsquohands-offrsquo specific activities are typically directly led by socialenterprises such as the Knowle West Media Centre

412 Glasgow

As the overall winner of the Future Cities Demonstrator competition in 2012 Glasgow wasawarded pound24m to implement its Feasibility Study proposals Approximately half the award(Davies 2014) was spent on a smart Operations Centre fully operational since 2014 whichmonitors real-time transport and public safety data Meanwhile a spread of smaller initia-tives took place many of which were participatory and interactive and were concluded (asproject deliverables) by the end of the TSB grant period

Glasgow City Council clearly positions itself as the key driving force behind theseactivities the initiative is characterised by the absence of publicised collaborative partner-ship This may reflect the terms of the TSB award positioning the City Council as the singlecontractor and requiring rapid project implementation within the two-year schedule Equallyit upholds the principle asserted in the Feasibility Study that lsquosmart cities are led from the topby a strong and visionary championrsquo (Glasgow City Council 2012 5) Either way the

Urban Research amp Practice 9

councilrsquos centrality appears to have left Glasgowrsquos official smart city activities in a state ofsuspension following the end of funding

413 London

Londonrsquos foray into smart city innovation is explicitly linked to the opportunities andchallenges facing the UKrsquos capital as a global city the smart city discourse deployedforms an integral part of the overarching narrative of London striving for continuous growthand consolidating its position as a leading international city (Mayor of London 2013 see alsoNESTA 2015) The lsquoSmart Londonrsquo initiative is primarily directed at forging a newcollaborative and entrepreneurial mode of governance in the service of sustaining economicgrowth to meet expected population growth The Greater London Authority (GLA) andparticularly the office of the Mayor of London is positioned at the centre of a wide range ofactivities It has co-opted a number of public and private actors including leading research-ers tech companies and larger utilities mainly through the Smart London Board andindividual project partnerships In promoting a co-creative governance mode for smart cityinnovation the GLArsquos role is more to lsquosteerrsquo than to direct outcomes

414 Manchester

Manchester is building on a legacy of digital innovations having published digitalstrategies in 2008 and 2012 and previously established a Digital DevelopmentAgency (MDDA) in 2003 (which was disbanded in 2015) Its 2012 FeasibilityStudy framed its smart aspirations as potentially consolidating recent successesincluding strong hi-tech industries infrastructural investments and repopulation ofthe urban core The lsquoDefining visionrsquo of Manchester was presented as lsquothe birthplaceof the industrial revolution re-inventing itself as a model of twenty-first centuryldquogreen growthrdquorsquo (Manchester City Council 2012 8) The Feasibility Study wastaken as a starting point for an ongoing programme of smart activities in theOxford Road Corridor (Manchester City Council 2013) running 2 km south fromthe city centre Corridor Manchester established as an incorporated body in 2007(CAICT and PDSF 2014 131) hopes that the district will continue to attract lsquoknowl-edge workersrsquo to become lsquoone of the top five innovation districts in Europersquo(Corridor Manchester 2015 4) achieving lsquolocal and global recognition as a placethat is original creative and smart where knowledge is put to workrsquo (4)

Its smart city activities exhibit a particularly networked style of governance withthe council just one of a series of actors allied in varying combinations ndash mostnoticeably the cityrsquos universities and large hospitals local engineering and hi-techfirms Transport for Greater Manchester and grass-roots digital organisation FutureEverything However the council appears to have reclaimed a more central rolethrough its 2016 lsquoSmarter Cityrsquo programme which promotes activities from acrossthe city

415 Milton Keynes

Milton Keynes consciously draws on its history of innovative urban planning andtechnology deployment in stating the aim of becoming the UKrsquos lsquoleading digital cityrsquo(Milton Keynes Council 2012 10) with an lsquounambiguous objective backed with

10 R Cowley et al

integrated city planning to reduce its carbon footprint with an energy-efficient high-techknowledgersquo (3) Although its 2012 Feasibility Study did not win funding it has sincelaunched a lsquoFuture Cityrsquo programme clearly framed by the goals of citizen co-creationand environmental improvements

Although universities typically play prominent partnership roles in other UK smartcity initiatives Milton Keynes is unusual in that the Open University is the dominantactor This may be one reason why the MK Smart programme strongly emphasisescitizen engagement as an end in itself rather than ndash as is more the case in London andPeterborough ndash a source of entrepreneurial ideas

416 Peterborough

The smart activities taking place under the lsquoPeterborough DNArsquo programme finally areclearly shaped by a green growth strategy Peterborough aims to become the lsquoSustainabilityCapital of the UKrsquo and as such lsquothat ldquocapitalrdquo will be exploited to the maximum to ensurethat it delivers true economic prosperity and well-being through job creation and theintegration of employment skills and innovationrsquo (Peterborough City Council 2012 4)The lsquofundamental goalrsquo of its smart activities is one of lsquogrowth innovation and sustain-abilityrsquo (Peterborough City Council 2014 4)

As a runner-up in the TSB competition Peterborough was awarded pound3m While its moreexpensive proposals including significant investment in the transport system were notfunded the four strands of its lsquoDNArsquo programme are similar to those proposed in its 2012Feasibility Study lsquosmart businessrsquo lsquoliving datarsquo lsquoskillsrsquo and lsquoinnovationrsquo In accordancewith the strong economic focus of the programme Peterborough DNA is led collaborativelyby the council and the Local Economic Partnership lsquoOpportunity Peterboroughrsquo

42 The four modalities of publicness and their associated forms of assemblage

Despite the variety suggested above some pertinent observations can be made about bothcommon tendencies and significant differences in the types of publicness invoked by thevarious smart city initatives across the six cities As noted we distinguish four modalities ofpublicness each of which correlates broadly with particular forms of assemblage

421 Service-user publicness

What we term the lsquoservice userrsquomodality of publicness relates the consumption of everydayurban services when for example a person travels by public transport consumes water orelectricity or uses broadband infrastructure Smart technology offers the promise of poten-tially enhancing such public interactions with service providers by providing more accurateor lsquoreal-timersquo data for decision-making new possibilities for users to contribute to servicesthrough automated or voluntary feedback and new channels of accountability

By our assessment this modality was dominant in 25 of the 68 activities analysedmaking it the most common form of publicness across the six cities as a whole Examples ofrelevant activities include Milton Keynesrsquo smart parking initiatives the lsquoIntelligent StreetLightingrsquo and lsquoEnergy Efficiency Demonstratorrsquo pilots in Glasgow and ManchesterrsquoslsquoTriangulumrsquo project which aims to reduce energy use and improve local transport Mosttypically such initiatives are characterised by relatively direct local council involvementThe issues addressed vary depending on the type of infrastructure in question but transport

Urban Research amp Practice 11

congestion resource consumption carbon emissions and digital inclusion are repeatedlymentioned in the documentation A commonality then is a normative framing in which thegoal of improved efficiency is highlighted

Service user-oriented smart city projects are most typically associated with two types ofspatiality The first relates to the traditional materiality of systems operating across the citydigital technology serves to improve the functional efficiency of these existing systemsWhile then the new technology may have clear spatial effects (eg in reworking trafficflows or recalibrating energy distribution) the spatialised phenomena to be rendered moreefficient are already present

Crucially this is the most passive of the four modalities identified The public ispositioned as part of the cityrsquos routine functionality rather than assigned lsquoco-creationalrsquoagency This then does not radically depart from the traditional relationship of the public toinfrastructural services Of course the provision of improved services does not contradict aclaim to being lsquocitizen-centricrsquo or lsquoputting people firstrsquo its conceptualisation neither deniesnor acknowledges that publicness may be assembled otherwise

422 Entrepreneurial publicness

If lsquoservice userrsquo publicness implies a relatively compliant reactive collectivity a more activelsquoentrepreneurialrsquo sense of the public is conjured up in other activities which enrol citizensinto co-creating and innovating in the smart arena This resonates with findings elsewhereidentifying a strong entrepreneurial governance mode at work in smart cities (eg Hollands2015 Wiig 2015) The entrepreneurial modality relates less to the everyday functioning ofthe city and more to the expectation that residents will be involved in creating services andeconomic value Rather than addressing particular thematic issues it is framed by an unmetneed to harness the economic and service-related possibilities afforded by new digitaltechnologies and big data We identified this modality as dominant for 19 of the 68 activitiesconsidered

Examples of related initiatives include the lsquohackathonrsquo events in several cities the lsquoTechLondonersrsquo initiative (aiming to bring lsquoLondonersrsquo and entrepreneurs together to co-createdigital solutions to predefined problems) Peterboroughrsquos lsquoInnovationWeekrsquoworkshops andlsquoBrainwave Innovation Portalrsquo and Manchesterrsquos Digital Laboratory (lsquoMadLabrsquo) whichencouraged local residents to find solutions to social problems through lsquoco-creative human-centric and user-driven research development and innovationrsquo (Ruijsink and Smith 2016 4)Bristolrsquos lsquoIoTMeshrsquo scheme will lsquoopen-up the test-bed to a wide range of Internet-of-Things(IoT) developers In doing so Bristol Is Open will enable companies to perfect their newtechnology solutions for everything from smart rubbish bins to connected streetlamps and awide range of IoTsensorsrsquo (Bristol is Open 2016b) The various lsquoopen datarsquo initiatives acrossthe cities serve directly to allow members of the public to make connections between thedatasets provided (and with their own data if they wish) Public involvement in suchactivities is often explicitly incentivised by commercial possibilities and no clear conceptualdistinction is evident between the public sphere and the market Glasgowrsquos lsquoOpen DataCataloguersquo for example promises to lsquoempower everybody (the public voluntary academicprivate sectors and communities) to harness [data] use it and combine it in new ways Wecan all contribute to making Glasgow a better place to live work and playrsquo (Future CityGlasgow 2016b)

In some cases such as hackathon events the practices associated with this entrepre-neurialism take place in traditional fora or make fairly conventional uses of internet sites (as

12 R Cowley et al

in the case of Tech Londoners) But a more distinctively lsquosmartrsquo spatiality may sometimes beobserved in the various attempts to add a lsquodigital layerrsquo to the city creating what might betermed a ubiquitous network of connectivity The digital infrastructure projects within theBristol is Open programme exemplify this spatiality particularly well in a literal sense theywill add a layer of digital connectivity to the city centre The lsquoWireless Milersquo for exampleaims at the creation of a lsquoheterogeneous technology environmentrsquo (Bristol is Open 2016c 1)which integrates differently formatted wifi signals such that lsquocomplex multi-layered net-works of overlapping big and small cells supply smartphones tablets cars drones and evenbuildings with a huge amount of cheap connectivityrsquo (Bristol is Open 2016d2) The variousopen data initiatives also fall into this category insofar as they enable datasets about existingservices and amenities to be linked together

Again this invocation of entrepreneurial public agency sits comfortably with claims thatpeople are being put at the centre of smart city development it explicitly invites publiccontributions to the ongoing forms that this will take However like the service-usermodality it says little about the more democratic dimensions of publicness A more roundedsense of lsquocitizenshiprsquo as traditionally conceived encompasses not only lsquosocial rightsrsquo (ieaccess to services) but also lsquopolitical rightsrsquo (contributing to decision-making processes) andlsquocivilrsquo ones (relating to freedom of speech) (Isin and Ruppert 2015) Accordingly we furtherpropose and distinguish between a lsquopoliticalrsquo and a lsquocivicrsquo modality of publicness

423 Political publicness

We use the label lsquopoliticalrsquo here in the narrow sense of public involvement in decision-making and deliberation through institutional channels or through novel extensions of theseExamples include the lsquoTalk Londonrsquo online platform which hosts a mixture of surveysblogs and discussion boards promoting itself as a lsquoplace to discuss Londonrsquos big issuesrsquo(Talk London 2016) and Bristolrsquos lsquoDemocratreersquo app which encouraged residents to nomi-nate and vote on suitable locations for planting new trees (While the latter was not initiateddirectly by the council it nevertheless provided a direct means for residents to influenceofficial decisions on resource allocation) If there is a commonality in the issues addressedthrough such activities it relates to a perceived lack of participation ndash often with certainsocial groups in mind ndash in local decision-making

Overall this is by far the least commonmodality of publicness invoked it is dominant inonly three of the 68 activities considered This is perhaps surprising given that the potentialfor digital technologies to reinvigorate democratic deliberation and decision-making hasbeen enthusiastically envisioned and debated since the 1990s (Isin and Ruppert 2015) Thelack of experimentation in this respect may partly be explained by the marginality of smartcity activities to traditional policy-making processes

The uses of online fora (as in the case of the Talk London initiative) or voting apps(Democratree) clearly depart from traditional modes of political deliberation ndash for exampleface-to-face settings ndash and yet nevertheless describe rather conventional uses of the internetHowever there are too few examples in the set of activities analysed for us to drawconclusions about the types of spatialities or spatial effects associated with this modalityof publicness

We highlight the paucity of political publicness specifically because strategy documentsmake repeated claims that citizen engagement is vital to the successful implementation of thesmart city and that related initiatives will enable wider citizen engagement with decision-making processes Its absence points more to a situation in which the smart city not only

Urban Research amp Practice 13

operates at the margins of normal institutional processes but might even be criticallyinterpreted as seeking to bypass them ndash a possibility raised by Shearmur (2016) in recountinghow delegates at a technology conference imagined the public sector as merely an obstacle tosmart city implementation

424 Civic publicness

Decision-making mediated through official processes only captures part of a cityrsquos politicallife and may tend to frame issues in certain ways for the purposes of voting or other forms ofdeliberation We therefore distinguish the lsquopoliticalrsquo from a rather less structured lsquocivicrsquomodality of publicness which loosely maps onto a traditional sense of the broader lsquopublicspherersquo In other words it inheres in those activities taking place in spaces beyond stateinstitutions but which are not directly oriented towards market activity A local councilrsquosinvolvement in such activities is necessarily more at armrsquos length it may enable or merelyapprove of such activities in its own promotional documents The types of issues shaping itsassemblage should then emerge lsquofrom belowrsquo Equally however this modality of public-ness may be more immediately associated with leisure activities or lsquoplayfulnessrsquo ndash suchactivities in public space may constitute a performative type of claim making within thebroader democratic process (see eg Hou 2010 Parkinson 2012) The invocation of civicpublicness is far from uncommon across the six cities considered here on a par with theentrepreneurial it is dominant for 21 of the 68 activities (and the most common modality inLondon)

Examples include the lsquoCommunity Wellnessrsquo strand of Manchesterrsquos lsquoCityVerversquo pro-ject aiming to encourage schoolchildren and commuters to take exercise in parks BristolrsquoslsquoMyKWrsquo community social media platform the lsquoBristol Approach to Citizen Sensingrsquo andlsquoPlayable Cityrsquo initiatives Glasgowrsquos lsquoActive Travelrsquo demonstrator initiative insofar as itencouraged cyclists to share data and experiences of cycling in the city and Londonrsquos lsquoSpeedVolunteeringrsquo app which seeks to put those wishing to volunteer in touch with peopleseeking help

We discern two distinctive spatialities as characteristic of assemblages of civic public-ness First relevant initiatives are often constituted by the goal of manifesting the virtualdigital in traditional (physical) public space Peterborough for example has planned a largelsquoOpenCityrsquo digital screen in the city centre Bristolrsquos lsquoPlayable Citiesrsquo competition has beenrunning annually since 2013 to fund temporary artistic installations in the city centre Theproject also taking place elsewhere internationally aims to put lsquopeople and play at the heartof the future city Through interaction and creative installations it unlocks a socialdialogue bringing the citizens into a city development conversationrsquo (Watershed 2016)Examples have included the 2013 winner Hello Lamp Post which allowed members of thepublic to have text message conversations with various items of street furniture andUrbanimals in 2015 in which digitally projected animals would appear unexpectedly acrossthe city and interact with the public (Watershed 2016) Manchesterrsquos lsquoCityVerversquo Internet ofThings demonstrator project mentioned above plans to install lsquotalkative bus stopsrsquo and alsquoCommunity Wellnessrsquo sensor network in parks along school and commuter routes toencourage exercise (UK Government 2015)

The second characteristic spatiality of civic publicness relates to varied attempts toreclaim the digital sphere from the private sector The idea of lsquoreclamationrsquo may not beexplicit in the documentation but such initiatives are typically driven by civil society actorsand aim variously to empower citizens to use and have a presence through new digital urban

14 R Cowley et al

technologies Manchesterrsquos lsquoLiving Labrsquo programme (whose current status is unclearfollowing the disbandment of the Manchester Digital Development Authority) includedthe development of an interactive local news and information web portal featuring contentcreated by residents The lsquoManchester Digital Laboratoryrsquo describes itself as a lsquograssrootsinnovation organisationrsquo (MadLab 2016a) which organises various events and digital train-ing courses with a core mission to allow the general public to lsquohelp people to make thingsbetter togetherrsquo through lsquoexperimentationrsquo lsquoplayrsquo and lsquofunrsquo and the promotion of craftman-ship (MadLab 2016b) In Bristol a local social networking site (first trialled as lsquoMyKWrsquo inthe Knowle West district) has been extended to the city as a whole (as lsquoMyBristolrsquo) Theplanned lsquoBristol Approach to Citizen Sensingrsquo initiative meanwhile mentioned above mostexplicitly displays the aim of reconfiguring virtual space in this way in its vision of a lsquoco-created city commonsrsquo which lsquosupports the deployment of new or adapted technologies intoeveryday environmentsrsquo (KWMC 2016 1)

425 Summary of relative prominence of different modalities of publicness

Table 2 summarises the relative prominence of the four modalities of publicness in eachcity and across all six cities

Analysing these data too closely would potentially yield spurious findings for severalreasons our six cities were not chosen to yield a somehow statistically representative sampleof activities for the purposes of quantitative research the coding of their modalities involvedsome subjective judgement and all activities are equally weighted regardless of scale timeperiod budget and policy significance These reservations aside the findings provide anindicative overview of the variations in the publicness assembled in these six leading citiesand in this spirit two broad observations are ventured

First the relative prominence of the four modalities differs considerably by city In thissense again lsquosmart publicnessrsquo is evidently not determined by globally circulating dis-courses but at least partly reflects its immediate governance and policy context The relativeabsence of entrepreneurial publicness in Glasgow for example communicates the councilrsquossole responsibility for delivering activities In Bristol the dominant entrepreneurial and civicmodalities chime with an overall strategic goal of expanding the knowledge economy bytapping into a strong tradition of grass-roots innovation The lack of service-user publicnessin Peterborough reflects the limited funding available for hard infrastructural projects theemphasis on entrepreneurial and civic publicness evinces the shared responsibility of thecityrsquos economic development agency and the council in managing the Peterborough DNAprogramme Londonrsquos relatively weak service use focus differently confirms the GLArsquos roleas steering and advisory actor rather than as funder of large-scale material interventions Thecity-level assemblages in Manchester and Milton Keynes display similarity in their strongoverall service-use sense of publicness and relatively weak civic modality While civicpublicness may come to the fore in Manchester in future given Corridor Manchesterrsquos statedlsquoplace-makingrsquo goals (Corridor Manchester 2015 24ndash25) its current relative absenceimplies a lack of active engagement on the part of the general public Milton Keynes isperhaps more surprising in this respect given its clear strategic claim to be civically engagedIts relatively weak civic publicness underlines the opportunistic nature of smart urbanactivities those coming to be implemented or funded may reflect strategic goals unevenlysmart policy documents themselves carry relatively little weight in the urban developmentprocess

Urban Research amp Practice 15

Table

2Relativeprom

inence

ofdominantmodalitiesof

publicness

insm

artcity

activities

across

sixUK

cities

Dom

inantmodality

Bristol

Glasgow

London

Manchester

MiltonKeynes

Peterborough

Allactivities

Meanfor6cities

Service

User

1457

1156

530

3732

Entrepreneurial

367

3333

2460

2832

Political

140

110

00

44

Civic

3636

4411

2440

3132

(Total

no

ofactivities)

(14)

(14)

(9)

(9)

(17)

(5)

(68)

16 R Cowley et al

Second the proportion of initiatives oriented towards civic publicness is not insig-nificant these account for approximately a third of all the activities examined On thisbasis it would be oversimplistic to dismiss the claims that the lsquoactually existingrsquocontemporary UK smart city pays only lip service to the importance of public claim-making Nevertheless this embrace of the democratic process does not extend to theprovision of significant opportunities for citizens to engage directly with the formalpolitical system in innovative ways In itself the absence of envisaged political public-ness does not undermine the possibility of more traditional public engagement withgovernmental institutions elsewhere yet the smart city does not provide channels for thedirect expression of public contestation or more radical forms of dissent

In this sense the smart city may appear to be aligned with broader depoliticising or lsquopost-politicalrsquo tendencies in governance generally and urban planning specifically (Swyngedouw2007 2011 Allmendinger and Haughton 2012 Joss 2015) In a post-political reading itsassemblage across UK cities would reflect the nature of its conceptual underpinnings thesmart city can only lsquocommand agreement as a result of [its] broadly progressive if non-specific framingrsquo (Allmendinger and Haughton 2012 94) and is therefore lsquounable to arouseconflicts among political ideasrsquo (Crivello 2015 919) Alternatively following Newman andClarke (2009) it illustrates the apparent paradox of the decline of the traditional lsquopublicrsquobeing accompanied by its simultaneous proliferation as a fragmented mulitiplicity politicalpublicness may be assembling elsewhere but is not associated with the intended role of thesmart city in the United Kingdom

426 Obduracy

Political publicness aside our findings have at least provided convincing evidence that UKsmart city initiatives are guided by a genuine desire to encourage civic engagement ofvarious kinds Even here however a more nuanced picture emerges when the relativeobduracy of individual activities is factored in Based on the available information weflagged each of the 68 activities as either lsquopermanentrsquo (to indicate ongoing operation orpresence in the city) or lsquotemporaryrsquo (to indicate a one-off or time-limited activity) As Table 3shows civic (and political) activities tend to be less permanent in nature than those invokingentrepreneurial and service-user publicness

In an important sense the relatively temporary nature of activities oriented towardspolitical and civic publicness is unsurprising particularly when contrasted with the service-user modality which is more often associated ndash as discussed above ndash with lsquohardrsquo infra-structural interventions The consequences of such activities may be long-lasting even whenthe activity itself is short-lived Nevertheless these findings fall short of convincinglyheralding a situation in which citizenship is prioritised as the central ongoing concern ofthe UK smart city

Table 3 Obduracy of smart city activities invoking each modality of publicness

Dominant modalityPermanent

Temporary

Base (number of activities)

Service-user 76 24 (25)Entrepreneurial 58 42 (19)Political 33 67 (3)Civic 48 52 (21)

Urban Research amp Practice 17

Significantly furthermore a degree of bifurcation is evident in the overall techno-publicassemblages such that civic and political publicness are sidelined within less obduratestrands of programmatic activity In Glasgow the enduring legacy of the lsquoFuture Cityrsquoprogramme is most visible in the service-user-oriented Operation Centre However manyof its other activities characterised by a more interactive and participatory mode of publicengagement were one-off events As lsquodemonstrator projectsrsquo they served in principle to helpdefine rather than enact the smart city ndash but there is little evidence that this more temporarystrand of the lsquoFuture Cityrsquo programme has subsequently been embedded in mainstreammunicipal activities In Bristol too a clear bifurcation is evident On one side the lsquoBristol isOpenrsquo improvements to the cityrsquos digital infrastructure and the lsquoOpen Data Bristolrsquo initiative(all of which might be expected to be relatively durable) invoke primarily entrepreneurialpublicness On the other the Connecting Bristol partnership promotes diverse lsquosofterrsquo civicand political activities led by grass-roots organisations which exhibit rather less obduracy assmall-scale pilot schemes or activities with limited public participation Evidently then lesscommitment and resources are available for experiments in the field of citizenship under-stood in more traditional liberal democratic ways than in those which conjure up a passive orentrepreneurial public

5 Discussion

Our reading of the smart city consciously departs from critical presentations of the smart cityas a lsquotop-downrsquo imposition and towards a foregrounding and more nuanced appreciation ofits practical variety But the observation that this variety is skewed towards the assemblage ofservice-user and entrepreneurial senses of the public does not constitute a straightforwardlyuseful critique of its current local manifestations The focus on service-user publicness atleast is unsurprising to the extent that local authorities are arguably seen by default asprimarily service providers To observe that civic and political publicness by way ofcontrast are less well considered and often only tokenistically accommodated is not tomake the normative case that these should necessarily or could realistically be privileged inlocal techno-public smart assemblages Rather the prevalence of this more passive modalityof publicness becomes significant when set against rhetorical claims that the smart city iseffecting transformational lsquocitizen-centricrsquo change

The dominance of service-user publicness does little to counter a broader trend identifiedby Powell (2014 15) towards lsquoa shift in the notion of citizenship away from civicresponsibilities and engagements to classifying [citizens] as consumers who purchaseservices from providersrsquo Although Powellrsquos discussion relates to the role of digitised datamore generally it is clearly relevant to the smart cityrsquos focus on providing greater efficien-cies Insofar as the lsquorelationship between government individuals and corporate entitiesrsquo (15)is viewed through the lens of the lsquocitizen as consumerrsquo its quality is only improved by theefficiencies which datafication enables Citizenship in this narrow sense is not related toaltruism or responsibilities but rather based on a principle of exchange and enacted throughlsquocollecting and sharing personal datarsquo (15) Drawing on Dean (2005) Powell highlights therisk that lsquothe norms of publicity ndash information communication and participation ndash havecome to stand for the political ends that they were presumed to serversquo (Powell 2014 16) Thisperspective raises various questions about many of the goals of UK smart city initiatives inrelation to the broader dimensions of citizenship For example the aim of lsquodigital inclusionrsquocommonly asserted among these six cases may appear laudable and yet it pushes the deeperpurpose of digital inclusion into the background smart connectivity itself becomes the goal

18 R Cowley et al

Similarly ideals of lsquotransparent governancersquo or lsquoopen datarsquo may end up being fetishisedwithin a discourse of efficiency even though this discourse tells us little about the normativebasis of the relationship between the public and the state beyond its passive lsquoservice-userrsquomodality

Although again our analysis opposes the existence of a deterministic link betweenglobal smart discourse and local practices the focus on efficiency of different types(including resource use provision of services and access to information) clearly resonateswith Whitersquos (2016) identification of an international discursive storyline in which the smartcity responds to lsquoresource pressures brought on by rapid urbanization and an ageing popula-tion the effects of anthropogenic global climate change and the twinned pressure of fiscalausterity and inter-urban competitionrsquo (577) We would at least suggest that the narrative ofthe lsquoage of crisisrsquo which accompanies much of the contemporary envisionment of futurecities (Caprotti 2015) has had a shaping influence on the prominence given to efficientservice provision in smart activities implemented to date

Equally given the broader UK policy context it would seem eccentric for local autho-rities to discourage entrepreneurialism On the immediate pragmatic level of funding andresources it must be significant that the governmentrsquos Department for Business Skills andInnovation has played a significant catalytic role smart city initiatives have not emergedunder the auspices of say the Department for Communities and Local Government But theprominence of entrepreneurial publicness raises a separate set of concerns echoing Dattarsquos(2015) diagnosis ndash albeit with reference to the rather different context of the Indian city ofDholera ndash of the smart city promoting lsquourbanization as a business model rather than a modelof social justicersquo Across our UK cases issues of social sustainability are far from absent inpolicy documents but their range tends to be limited for example focusing on health ande-inclusion or educating residents to participate in the digital economy In Glasgow suchquestions are subsumed within overall questions of efficiency and relate to very specificfactors such as public safety and reporting problems with services Milton Keynes claimsconsiderable interest in citizen co-creation but its initiatives are not primarily aimed attargeting social problems Although Peterboroughrsquos 2012 Feasibility Study prominentlyflagged up inequalities social cohesion and health improvements among other issues(Peterborough City Council 2012 3) its current strategy is addressed towards developingskills which lsquomeet local business demandrsquo and lsquoput Peterboroughrsquo in lsquothe best possibleposition to take advantage of emerging marketsrsquo (Peterborough City Council 2014 5)

One final way in which the lsquocitizen-centricrsquo nature of the UK smart city is questionablerelates to an apparent straightforward lack of public interest On one level this simplyreminds us of the peripherality of the smart city many of the associated activities only claimto be small-scale experimental trials and are not deeply embedded into the mainstream policyprocess While the actual numbers of local residents involved with many civic and politicalschemes are often negligible we found no convincing evidence either of broader enthusiasmor emergent public counter-discourse in any city4 While emergent political or civic con-testation is clearly not something which local authorities might lsquoplanrsquo for ndash it would beabsurd to expect local authorities to devise problems for frustrated publics to assemblearound ndash its absence does not provide evidence of acquiescence or approval or guarantee thesmooth passage of smart technology into urban life more broadly in future It more obviouslyreflects the survey evidence suggesting that general public awareness of any lsquosmartrsquo plans oractivities undertaken by local councils is neglible (Arqiva 2015) and that only one in five UKadults even recognises the term smart city (IET 2016)

Urban Research amp Practice 19

6 Conclusions towards a new lsquosmart urban publicnessrsquo

In studying and comparing a series of relatively well-developed smart city programmes aslsquotechno-public assemblagesrsquo we have responded to a series of policy claims made about therelationships between smart urban technologies and the public Our analysis reveals that thepublicness envisaged and enacted in the UK smart city is far from one-dimensional Citizensare not merely absent as the earlier critiques of the smart city would have it nor do smart cityactivities necessarily invoke a particular stunted notion of publicness in all cases Rather thegreat variety of types of publicness in evidence leads us to conclude that the rhetorical claimsabout the smart city being citizen-centric are not straightforwardly empty ones Rather thanagreeing with the speculative critiques of the smart city as a devious attempt to exclude thepublic we would urge commentators to begin from the assumption that its institutionalprotagonists do have a vested interest in questions of democracy

That said it also seems fair to conclude that the smart does not yet evince a convincinglyrounded sense of the lsquopublic cityrsquo The opportunistic nature of smart city development inother words gives rise to unique local forms but simultaneously holds these hostage tobroader societal and economic agendas the forms of their assemblage have remained shapedby immediate policy contexts and broader smart city policy discourse Thinking in terms ofits experimental shifting and peripheral assemblage in practice nevertheless opens upagentive space for actors involved to influence smart development in ways which moreconvincingly invoke a more rounded sense of publicness and in turn enable a moreconvincing sense of public ownership and enthusiasm

For more fully public smart city assemblages to emerge in future the civic and politicalmay need to be more obviously accommodated within the service-user and entrepreneurialThis need not relate to heavy-handed attempts to co-opt the civic which risk neutralising itsinnovative potential but the civic should at least not be siloed into more ephemeral strands ofactivity A lack of civic engagement with large infrastructural projects for example seemsunlikely to be successfully mitigated by a series of parallel participatory events which passunnoticed by most residents Similarly entrepreneurial activities are to be welcomed whichare more obviously oriented towards finding solutions to problems defined by citizensalongside those oriented at the creation of wealth through hi-tech innovations The possibi-lities for smart city technology to enable or engender more formal political participationfurthermore appear to have remained largely unexplored in practical terms

If only because the lsquoactually existingrsquo smart city is still at an experimental stage ofdevelopment we note that it has effected only marginal reconfigurations of the materialspaces of the city to date Nevertheless looking forward we urge researchers and practi-tioners to pay attention to the distinctive spatialities of the lsquosmart publicrsquo particularly in theinterfaces between public and private space and between virtual space and the traditionalmaterial public realm There is considerable scope in this regard to reverse the tendencyidentified by Kinsley (2013) to assign the digital to a parallel disembodied lsquohyperspacersquorather our understandings might more fruitfully be grounded in the relationships betweenhumans and technology in local contexts For policy-makers and practitioners activelyseeking a more widespread and involved sense of public debate around and engagementwith the implications of smart technology it may be rewarding to focus on the visibility ofnew innovations This may involve moving towards a more active consideration of themultiple roles of public space and more imaginatively using smart technologies to moveaway from more traditional fora as spaces of public engagement

Overall we resist from concluding that contemporary UK smart initiatives alreadyconstitute a qualitatively novel recasting of the public In relying on dominant political

20 R Cowley et al

structures and economic actors they have come to promote incremental change at best bothin terms of publicness and the material space of the city But assessing the long-termimpacts of smart innovations on urban space will be an ongoing project indeed the conceptlsquosmartrsquo itself may in future lose currency as a label or be reworked as a signifier In themeantime insofar as the smart city is indicative of broader contemporary attempts to shapeurban change in a time of austerity its lsquoexperimentalrsquo nature may appear rather moreproblematically reflective of a bypassing of the traditional democratic process And if wetoo may be allowed to propose a dystopian scenario it is one where in spite of the bestintentions of policy-makers the dominant norms of emerging smart city practices becomesedimented into novel twenty-first century institutional processes whose pragmatic world-view does not extend beyond that of a society of entrepreneurs and service users

AcknowledgementsThis study was undertaken at the University of Westminster with financial support from ESRC grantESL0159781 Youri Dayot was Visiting Fellow from the University of Grenoble

Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors

FundingThis study was undertaken at the University of Westminster as part of the ESRC-funded projectlsquoSmart Eco-cities for a Green Economy a Comparative Study of Europe and Chinarsquo (grant ESL0159781)

Notes1 The two terms (lsquosmart cityrsquo lsquofuture cityrsquo) are complementary and often used interchangeably

especially in the UK national policy context (see eg BSI 2014 3 also Joss Cook andDayot forthcoming) It is beyond the scope of this paper to delve into the conceptualinterrelationship of these recent policy terms in more detail

2 A fuller list of the key documents and links to relevant web pages consulted has been madepublicly available on the lead authorrsquos ResearchGate web pages httpswwwresearchgatenetprofileRobert_Cowley

3 More detailed descriptions of many of the individual activities and bodies analysed in thepresent research may be found in the lsquogrey literaturersquo (see eg Caprotti et al 2016 Woodset al 2016)

4 With the exception of some concerns in Glasgow about the use of facial recognition softwarein the cityrsquos CCTV system linked to the Operation Centre (Sunday Herald 2014 Aitchinson2015)

ReferencesAitchinson J 2015 ldquoShould We Be Worried about Glasgowrsquos New Hi-Tech Surveillance Systemrdquo

STV News February 23 httpglasgowstvtvarticles310713-glasgows-new-surveillance-installed-by-israeli-firm-nice-systems

Allmendinger P and G Haughton 2012 ldquoPost-Political Spatial Planning in England A Crisis ofConsensusrdquo Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37 (1) 89ndash103 doi101111j1475-5661201100468x

Arqiva 2015 ldquoAre Cities Really Getting Smarterrdquo httpswwwarqivacomnewspress-releasesare-our-cities-really-getting-smarter

Urban Research amp Practice 21

The idea that publicness is assembled through new digital urban technologies also allowsus to explore the implications of the differentiated obduracy (Hommels 2005 2010) of whatresults Although the field of the smart city may be in flux its related infrastructuralinnovations in particular are likely to become relatively fixed (Hommels 2010) ndash even iftheir significance changes over time as they lsquocome to be related to new entities and react tothemrsquo (Ureta 2014 245) We are therefore alert to the possibility that certain forms ofassemblages may come to form lsquostabilised networksrsquo constituting lsquopotential actant[s] in asubsequent phase of urban developmentrsquo (Bender 2010 310) Equally the resulting norms ofpublicness may become lsquosedimentedrsquo (Newman and Clarke 2009) into more permanentinstitutional processes Conversely those elements of the assemblages which are moreephemeral and fragile ndash as Newman and Clarke (2009) characterise many assemblages ofpublicness ndashmay seem less well placed to have ongoing influence on the production of urbanspace

Assessing the likely obduracy of these varied assemblages also potentially allowsanalysis to encompass more lsquoemergentrsquo forms of public counter-discourse It is preciselythe obduracy of both infrastructures and regulatory institutions (as lsquosedimentedrsquo sites ofnorms) which in the Dewey (1989) tradition lead to frictions and frustrations in times ofrapid technological change This raises the important question of whether the smart cityadequately accounts for the possibility of public non-compliance or resistance Whether thatis it envisions ndash or even serves to suppress ndash the political multiplicity of civil society in thelsquorealrsquo city Conceptualisations of civil society only as a lsquodomain that needs to be constructedand tutored (by governments and international organisations)rsquo (Newman and Clarke 200958) may problematically ignore its more unruly but potentially constructive role as lsquotheorganic condition of society that provides the springboard for economic and social develop-mentrsquo (58)

Here the scope of Newman and Clarkersquos discussion of publicness is extended in twoways First we focus more directly on the impact of digital technology on its assemblagerelatedly Barns (2016) has recently called for further understanding of what lsquodigital urbanpublicsrsquo might comprise Second we wish to initiate a discussion about the distinctivespatialities of smart city initiatives While citizenship theory tends not to focus on questionsof space this goal seems germane within an investigation of the variegated publicnesspotentially generated by smart city initiatives as interventions in real (and virtual) urbanspace

To make sense of the variegated publicness thus invoked we conceive of it displayingfour distinct modalities the service user entrepreneurial civic and political ndash each of whichare discussed in the main findings section of this article This novel four-way conceptualisa-tion was derived on one hand from political theory perspectives on the public and inparticular Newman amp Clarkersquos (2009) aforementioned theorisation of new heterogenousforms of publicness which not only distinguishes between political and civic publics butalso draws attention to the emergence of new uneven market- and consumer-based sites andpractices of publicness On the other it was derived from a grounded analysis of contempo-ary smart city initiatives identified in an earlier broader survey of 34 UK cities (Caprotti et al2016) This empirical material highlighted the varied ways in which the public was explicitlyor implicitly positioned in relation to smart city strategies and activities Altogether thesetheoretical and empirical observations resulted in the four distinct heuristic categoriespresented here The categorisation was further corroborated by the growing literaturewhich highlights the entrepreneurial aspects of smart city governance (eg Caragliu DelBo and Nijkamp 2011 Wiig 2015 Evans Karvonen and Raven 2016 Krivyacute 2016) or

4 R Cowley et al

suggests that smart city visions of technology-driven innovation in service provision havenot convincingly accounted for the social and political dimensions of urban life (seeIntroduction)

3 Methodology

This research focuses on evidence drawn from six UK cities Bristol Glasgow LondonManchester Milton Keynes and Peterborough The units of our comparative analysis are notthese cities in a broader sense (Robinson 2011) ndash defined for example by municipalboundaries ndash but rather their smart city (policy) activity at the point of local implementationOur choice does not imply that we advocate these cities as exemplars of lsquobest practicersquo butrather reflects in each case the emergence of a relatively wide range of activities throughpolicy-making explicitly drawing on smart city discourse We treat these cases as importantlsquonodal pointsrsquo within wider flows of concepts and policy discourses (15) and have includedsix ndash rather than focusing on say one city in particular ndash in order to capture a sufficientdiversity of institutional and municipal contexts through which local policies are beingapplied precisely since we are interested in the variety evident among programmes ofactivities taking shape within different local contexts

The six cities were selected following an earlier analysis (Caprotti et al 2016) of relevantnational policy documentation and internet searches on lsquosmart cityrsquo or lsquofuture cityrsquo1 initia-tives across the United Kingdom The latter reflects the naming of the national Future CitiesCatapult centre established by the government to support the development and implementa-tion of smart city technology Additionally all six submitted bids for funding in the 2012Future Cities Demonstrator competition held by the Technology Strategy Board thenational innovation agency supported by the Department for Business Innovation andSkills (see Taylor Buck and While 2015 Caprotti et al 2016) Glasgow as overall winnerwas awarded pound24m to implement its plans and Bristol London and Peterborough were eachawarded pound3m as runners-up Since this competition significantly catalysed all six citiesrsquosmart activities we treat their submitted lsquoFeasibility Studiesrsquo as key policy documents As acommonality this competition also provides a basis for comparative research (Robinson2011) exploring the variety of the lsquoactually existingrsquo smart city (Shelton Zook and Wiig2015) in the United Kingdom

For each urban setting the key policy strategies and all associated current and plannedactivities were identified and relevant publicly available documents were collected Specificactivities were included if they were clearly linked to or promoted within the policydocumentation and sought either to use digital technology to achieve particular goals or tofacilitate the use of digital technology Beyond this no further criteria (eg the centrality oflsquobig datarsquo) were imposed given our desire to understand how the smart city has beenassembled contingently in practice Table 1 lists the 68 activities thus identified and thekey associated policy documents along with any overarching programmes of which parti-cular activities formed a part or local bodies (typically partnerships involving the councilamong other actors) responsible for their delivery2 The time frame for gathering thisdocumentation was AprilndashJune 2016 and those materials publicly available during thisperiod were included in the research

Based on this set of documents each of the 68 activities was then analysed individuallyFirst through a protocol with four inter-related assemblage dimensions based on Newmanand Clarkersquos (2009) discussion (1) the issues which the activity or policy sought to address(2) the key actors involved in implementation (3) the particular socio-technical practices

Urban Research amp Practice 5

Table

1Sum

maryof

smartcity

policy

documentsandinitiativesanalysed

insixUK

cities

Bristol

Glasgow

London(G

LA)

Key

PolicyDocuments

SmartCityBristol

(2011)

Connect

Bristol

Feasibility

Study

(2012)

Key

PolicyDocuments

Glasgow

CityManagem

entSystem

(2012)

OpenManifesto

ndashPrinciples(2013)

CityTechnologyPlatform

(2013)

Key

PolicyDocuments

LinkedLondon(2012)

SmartLondonPlan(2013)

The

Futureof

Smart(2013)

DataforLondon

ACityStrategyforLondon(2016)

Program

me

organisation

Activities(yearlaunched

ortook

place)

Program

me

organisation

Activities(yearlaunched

ortook

place)

Program

me

organisation

Activities(yearlaunched

ortook

place)

CityCouncil

GigabitBristol

(2012)

FutureCityGlasgow

OpenGlasgow

(2013)

Glasgow

Operation

Centre(2013)

MyGlasgow

(2013)

IntelligentStreetLighting(2013)

Dashboards(2013)

ActiveTravel(2013)

Hacking

theFuture(2013)

Com

munityMapping

(2014)

FutureMakers(2014)

OpenDataCatalogue

(2013)

LinkedMapping

(2013)

Energy(2013)

SocialTransport(2013)

EngagingtheCity(2013)

Citizen

Engagem

ent(2014)

LinkedLondon

SmartParkQueen

Elizabeth

Park

(2014)

Bristol

IsOpen

DataDom

e(2015)

IoTMesh(2016)

WirelessMile(2016)

SoftwareDefined

Network

Control

(2016)

SmartLondon

Board

LondonDatastore

(2010)

SmartLondonDistrictsNetwork

(2014)

SmartLondonInfrastructure

Network

(2015)

TalkLondon(2015)

Civic

Crowdfunding

(2015)

Infrastructure

Mapping

Application

(2015)

TechLondonersPeopleSolving

City

Challenges(2016)

Speed

Volunteering(2016)

ConnectingBristol

OpenDataBristol

(2010)

Media

Sandbox

2010

B-O

pen

Strand(2010)

PlayableCitiesAward(2013)

Dem

ocratree

(2014)

MyKnowle

WestMyBristol

(2014)

YouDecide(2015)

Healthy

Office(2016)

REPLICATE(2016)

Knowle

West

Media

Centre

Bristol

Approachto

Citizen

Sensing

(planned)

6 R Cowley et al

Manchester

MiltonKeynes

Peterborough

Key

PolicyDocuments

Digital

Strategy(2008)

Digital

Manchester(2012)

ManchesterFutureCity(2012)

SmarterCityProgram

me(2016)

Key

PolicyDocuments

Future-Ready

MK

(2012)

MK

SmartAWater

strategy

forMiltonKeynes

(2016)

Key

PolicyDocuments

PeterboroughDNA

(2012)

Deliveringatrulysm

artcity

(2014)

Program

meorganisation

Activities(yearlaunched

ortook

place)

Program

me

organisation

Activities(yearlaunched

ortook

place)

Program

me

organisation

Activities(yearlaunched

ortook

place)

ManchesterDigital

Develop

mentAgency

ManchesterLivingLab

(2006)

MKSmart

MK

DataHub

(2016)

Our

MK

(2015)

GardenMonitor

(planned)

Water

Monitor

(2016)

Water

measurementschool

kits

(2014)

SmartMeters(2015)

ApexSuite

business

engagement

programme(2015)

MK

Hackathon

(2016)

MotionMap

(2015)

SmartParking

(2015)

OpenEnergyMap

(2016)

Electricity

Dem

andShifting

(2013)

SmartGridDynam

icDem

and

Response(2014)

SmartLighting(2014)

Peterborough

DNA

BrainwavePortal(2014)

OpenC

ityScreen(planned)

Hackathon

(2014)

Innovation

Week(2014)

LivingDataPortal(2015)

CorridorManchester

Triangulum

(2015)

CityV

erve

(2016)

SmarterCityProgram

me

ManchesterDigital

Laboratory(M

adLab)

(2009)

DIM

MER(2013)

MiGuide

(2013)

Central

Library

Digital

Dem

onstrator(2014)

IntelligentLighting(2015)

Greater

ManchesterData

Synchronisation

Program

me

DataG

M(2011)

Transport

Systems

Catapult

Imagined

FestivalIntelligent

MobilityHackathon

(2016)

Feasibility

Study

for2012

FutureCitiesDem

onstratorCom

petition

Urban Research amp Practice 7

involved and (4) the variegated spatiality produced And second to identify the dominantmodality of publicness thus invoked service user entrepreneurial political or civic (asdiscussed in the previous section)

By taking into account the linkages between individual activities and the wider policylandscape a profile of each smart city assemblage as a whole was built up For the purposesof triangulation the results were aggregated following separate initial analyses and jointlyreviewed by the three authors Finally a transversal analysis was conducted across the sixcities in order to identify common patterns as well as divergent practices

Basing the analysis on detailed evidence has allowed for some of the variety acrossparticular locations to be captured in partial response to Kitchinrsquos (2015) call to movebeyond critiques of the lsquoplace-lessrsquo corporate and governmental promotional literature Ourresponse is a partial one since given the emergent nature of much smart city activity even inthese six locations the research neither investigates practices of implementation in depth norprovides a long-term perspective on the smart cityrsquos impact on the lived experience of thecity The aim rather has been to investigate the outcomes of the processes whereby thelsquoplace-lessrsquo smart city has been translated into locally specific projects through the lens ofthe documentation surrounding these

The high-level findings reported below relate to our conclusions about the relativeprominence of different modalities of publicness Although the discussion is illustratedwith particular examples of activity space does not permit a thorough presentation of thedetailed elements of the six assemblages3 Any of these elements can itself be seen as atechno-public assemblage and the analytical framework is offered as a tool for otherswishing to explore the public dimensions of current and future smart city activities at agranular level

4 Findings

41 The smart city in six municipal contexts initial findings and observations

It is worth noting first that the policy documents analysed generally operate at the peripheryof traditional urban planning frameworks local authorities are not formally obliged toinclude smart city principles within statutory planning processes Instead these policiesare often championed by overarching strategy boards economic development agencies andsimilar municipal bodies As such they typically seek to promote cohesive socio-economicinnovation policy to a range of actors both internally and externally for the purpose ofleveraging inward investment Thus they will have been shaped by their imagined receptionby varied audiences (Freeman and Maybin 2011 163ndash164) rather than by the specificintention that they should serve as traditional planning tools The varying status of thisdocumentation is significantly reflective of the often opportunistic nature of smart cityactivity but also points to the often complicated governance arrangements in placeImportantly then the relationship between the policy documents and activities shown inTable 1 is not consistent across the six cities For Glasgow which presents itself as havingrelatively straightforward governance arrangements there is clear linearity between the plansoutlined in its 2012 Feasibility Study and the resulting initiatives At the other end of thespectrum Manchesterrsquos recent Smarter City Programme for example essentially collates aseries of activities already planned or taking place

The activities themselves range from small-scale pilot scheme to major infrastructuralprojects from interventions into specific spatially bounded areas to initiatives operating invirtual space city-wide from lsquotop-downrsquo technological innovations to grass-roots

8 R Cowley et al

community activities and from one-off events to ongoing activities and services alreadywell-embedded into the urban fabric Despite the identification in the academic literaturethen of broad commonalities in variously conceived smart city lsquoimaginariesrsquo its manifesta-tions on the ground in the United Kingdom defy simple categorisation at first sight

The policy documents also display noticeable city-specific inflections in their narrativeframings reflecting the local contextual factors through which the translation of smart citydiscourse into practical activity has been mediated To provide some background for themain analysis an overview of the key framing principles in each cityrsquos policy documents isprovided below along with the varied governance structures that have emerged in dynamicrelationship with both the policy documents and the activities themselves Such differences ndashas will be discussed ndash help to explain some of the forms that local assemblages take withimplications in turn for the nature of the publicness invoked

411 Bristol

Bristolrsquos stated overall smart city goals are to expand the cityrsquos knowledge economy in a waywhich furthers its image as a pioneer in environmental sustainability and a centre of grass-roots innovation Its 2012 Feasibility Study (Bristol City Council 2012) broadened the remitof the earlier Smart City Bristol report (Bristol City Council 2011) which focused largely oncarbon emissions and transport issues to develop a narrative of enabling environmentallyand socially sustainable growth at a time of economic expansion in recognition of the cityrsquossignificant health and wealth inequalities

The council is one actor among many in Bristolrsquos current smart city activities which arenot orchestrated by an overarching policy document Nevertheless the dual focus of its 2012Feasibility Study which proposed a mixture of lsquohardrsquo infrastructure and a parallel pro-gramme of citizen engagement resembles the two-stranded nature of what has emerged inpractice The first strand delivering digital infrastructure is coordinated by the lsquoBristol isOpenrsquo partnership between the council and the University of Bristol with support from otherprivate public and charitable organisations The second collates various activities mostlyrelated to citizen and SME engagement within the lsquoConnecting Bristolrsquo initiative Here thecouncilrsquos role is more lsquohands-offrsquo specific activities are typically directly led by socialenterprises such as the Knowle West Media Centre

412 Glasgow

As the overall winner of the Future Cities Demonstrator competition in 2012 Glasgow wasawarded pound24m to implement its Feasibility Study proposals Approximately half the award(Davies 2014) was spent on a smart Operations Centre fully operational since 2014 whichmonitors real-time transport and public safety data Meanwhile a spread of smaller initia-tives took place many of which were participatory and interactive and were concluded (asproject deliverables) by the end of the TSB grant period

Glasgow City Council clearly positions itself as the key driving force behind theseactivities the initiative is characterised by the absence of publicised collaborative partner-ship This may reflect the terms of the TSB award positioning the City Council as the singlecontractor and requiring rapid project implementation within the two-year schedule Equallyit upholds the principle asserted in the Feasibility Study that lsquosmart cities are led from the topby a strong and visionary championrsquo (Glasgow City Council 2012 5) Either way the

Urban Research amp Practice 9

councilrsquos centrality appears to have left Glasgowrsquos official smart city activities in a state ofsuspension following the end of funding

413 London

Londonrsquos foray into smart city innovation is explicitly linked to the opportunities andchallenges facing the UKrsquos capital as a global city the smart city discourse deployedforms an integral part of the overarching narrative of London striving for continuous growthand consolidating its position as a leading international city (Mayor of London 2013 see alsoNESTA 2015) The lsquoSmart Londonrsquo initiative is primarily directed at forging a newcollaborative and entrepreneurial mode of governance in the service of sustaining economicgrowth to meet expected population growth The Greater London Authority (GLA) andparticularly the office of the Mayor of London is positioned at the centre of a wide range ofactivities It has co-opted a number of public and private actors including leading research-ers tech companies and larger utilities mainly through the Smart London Board andindividual project partnerships In promoting a co-creative governance mode for smart cityinnovation the GLArsquos role is more to lsquosteerrsquo than to direct outcomes

414 Manchester

Manchester is building on a legacy of digital innovations having published digitalstrategies in 2008 and 2012 and previously established a Digital DevelopmentAgency (MDDA) in 2003 (which was disbanded in 2015) Its 2012 FeasibilityStudy framed its smart aspirations as potentially consolidating recent successesincluding strong hi-tech industries infrastructural investments and repopulation ofthe urban core The lsquoDefining visionrsquo of Manchester was presented as lsquothe birthplaceof the industrial revolution re-inventing itself as a model of twenty-first centuryldquogreen growthrdquorsquo (Manchester City Council 2012 8) The Feasibility Study wastaken as a starting point for an ongoing programme of smart activities in theOxford Road Corridor (Manchester City Council 2013) running 2 km south fromthe city centre Corridor Manchester established as an incorporated body in 2007(CAICT and PDSF 2014 131) hopes that the district will continue to attract lsquoknowl-edge workersrsquo to become lsquoone of the top five innovation districts in Europersquo(Corridor Manchester 2015 4) achieving lsquolocal and global recognition as a placethat is original creative and smart where knowledge is put to workrsquo (4)

Its smart city activities exhibit a particularly networked style of governance withthe council just one of a series of actors allied in varying combinations ndash mostnoticeably the cityrsquos universities and large hospitals local engineering and hi-techfirms Transport for Greater Manchester and grass-roots digital organisation FutureEverything However the council appears to have reclaimed a more central rolethrough its 2016 lsquoSmarter Cityrsquo programme which promotes activities from acrossthe city

415 Milton Keynes

Milton Keynes consciously draws on its history of innovative urban planning andtechnology deployment in stating the aim of becoming the UKrsquos lsquoleading digital cityrsquo(Milton Keynes Council 2012 10) with an lsquounambiguous objective backed with

10 R Cowley et al

integrated city planning to reduce its carbon footprint with an energy-efficient high-techknowledgersquo (3) Although its 2012 Feasibility Study did not win funding it has sincelaunched a lsquoFuture Cityrsquo programme clearly framed by the goals of citizen co-creationand environmental improvements

Although universities typically play prominent partnership roles in other UK smartcity initiatives Milton Keynes is unusual in that the Open University is the dominantactor This may be one reason why the MK Smart programme strongly emphasisescitizen engagement as an end in itself rather than ndash as is more the case in London andPeterborough ndash a source of entrepreneurial ideas

416 Peterborough

The smart activities taking place under the lsquoPeterborough DNArsquo programme finally areclearly shaped by a green growth strategy Peterborough aims to become the lsquoSustainabilityCapital of the UKrsquo and as such lsquothat ldquocapitalrdquo will be exploited to the maximum to ensurethat it delivers true economic prosperity and well-being through job creation and theintegration of employment skills and innovationrsquo (Peterborough City Council 2012 4)The lsquofundamental goalrsquo of its smart activities is one of lsquogrowth innovation and sustain-abilityrsquo (Peterborough City Council 2014 4)

As a runner-up in the TSB competition Peterborough was awarded pound3m While its moreexpensive proposals including significant investment in the transport system were notfunded the four strands of its lsquoDNArsquo programme are similar to those proposed in its 2012Feasibility Study lsquosmart businessrsquo lsquoliving datarsquo lsquoskillsrsquo and lsquoinnovationrsquo In accordancewith the strong economic focus of the programme Peterborough DNA is led collaborativelyby the council and the Local Economic Partnership lsquoOpportunity Peterboroughrsquo

42 The four modalities of publicness and their associated forms of assemblage

Despite the variety suggested above some pertinent observations can be made about bothcommon tendencies and significant differences in the types of publicness invoked by thevarious smart city initatives across the six cities As noted we distinguish four modalities ofpublicness each of which correlates broadly with particular forms of assemblage

421 Service-user publicness

What we term the lsquoservice userrsquomodality of publicness relates the consumption of everydayurban services when for example a person travels by public transport consumes water orelectricity or uses broadband infrastructure Smart technology offers the promise of poten-tially enhancing such public interactions with service providers by providing more accurateor lsquoreal-timersquo data for decision-making new possibilities for users to contribute to servicesthrough automated or voluntary feedback and new channels of accountability

By our assessment this modality was dominant in 25 of the 68 activities analysedmaking it the most common form of publicness across the six cities as a whole Examples ofrelevant activities include Milton Keynesrsquo smart parking initiatives the lsquoIntelligent StreetLightingrsquo and lsquoEnergy Efficiency Demonstratorrsquo pilots in Glasgow and ManchesterrsquoslsquoTriangulumrsquo project which aims to reduce energy use and improve local transport Mosttypically such initiatives are characterised by relatively direct local council involvementThe issues addressed vary depending on the type of infrastructure in question but transport

Urban Research amp Practice 11

congestion resource consumption carbon emissions and digital inclusion are repeatedlymentioned in the documentation A commonality then is a normative framing in which thegoal of improved efficiency is highlighted

Service user-oriented smart city projects are most typically associated with two types ofspatiality The first relates to the traditional materiality of systems operating across the citydigital technology serves to improve the functional efficiency of these existing systemsWhile then the new technology may have clear spatial effects (eg in reworking trafficflows or recalibrating energy distribution) the spatialised phenomena to be rendered moreefficient are already present

Crucially this is the most passive of the four modalities identified The public ispositioned as part of the cityrsquos routine functionality rather than assigned lsquoco-creationalrsquoagency This then does not radically depart from the traditional relationship of the public toinfrastructural services Of course the provision of improved services does not contradict aclaim to being lsquocitizen-centricrsquo or lsquoputting people firstrsquo its conceptualisation neither deniesnor acknowledges that publicness may be assembled otherwise

422 Entrepreneurial publicness

If lsquoservice userrsquo publicness implies a relatively compliant reactive collectivity a more activelsquoentrepreneurialrsquo sense of the public is conjured up in other activities which enrol citizensinto co-creating and innovating in the smart arena This resonates with findings elsewhereidentifying a strong entrepreneurial governance mode at work in smart cities (eg Hollands2015 Wiig 2015) The entrepreneurial modality relates less to the everyday functioning ofthe city and more to the expectation that residents will be involved in creating services andeconomic value Rather than addressing particular thematic issues it is framed by an unmetneed to harness the economic and service-related possibilities afforded by new digitaltechnologies and big data We identified this modality as dominant for 19 of the 68 activitiesconsidered

Examples of related initiatives include the lsquohackathonrsquo events in several cities the lsquoTechLondonersrsquo initiative (aiming to bring lsquoLondonersrsquo and entrepreneurs together to co-createdigital solutions to predefined problems) Peterboroughrsquos lsquoInnovationWeekrsquoworkshops andlsquoBrainwave Innovation Portalrsquo and Manchesterrsquos Digital Laboratory (lsquoMadLabrsquo) whichencouraged local residents to find solutions to social problems through lsquoco-creative human-centric and user-driven research development and innovationrsquo (Ruijsink and Smith 2016 4)Bristolrsquos lsquoIoTMeshrsquo scheme will lsquoopen-up the test-bed to a wide range of Internet-of-Things(IoT) developers In doing so Bristol Is Open will enable companies to perfect their newtechnology solutions for everything from smart rubbish bins to connected streetlamps and awide range of IoTsensorsrsquo (Bristol is Open 2016b) The various lsquoopen datarsquo initiatives acrossthe cities serve directly to allow members of the public to make connections between thedatasets provided (and with their own data if they wish) Public involvement in suchactivities is often explicitly incentivised by commercial possibilities and no clear conceptualdistinction is evident between the public sphere and the market Glasgowrsquos lsquoOpen DataCataloguersquo for example promises to lsquoempower everybody (the public voluntary academicprivate sectors and communities) to harness [data] use it and combine it in new ways Wecan all contribute to making Glasgow a better place to live work and playrsquo (Future CityGlasgow 2016b)

In some cases such as hackathon events the practices associated with this entrepre-neurialism take place in traditional fora or make fairly conventional uses of internet sites (as

12 R Cowley et al

in the case of Tech Londoners) But a more distinctively lsquosmartrsquo spatiality may sometimes beobserved in the various attempts to add a lsquodigital layerrsquo to the city creating what might betermed a ubiquitous network of connectivity The digital infrastructure projects within theBristol is Open programme exemplify this spatiality particularly well in a literal sense theywill add a layer of digital connectivity to the city centre The lsquoWireless Milersquo for exampleaims at the creation of a lsquoheterogeneous technology environmentrsquo (Bristol is Open 2016c 1)which integrates differently formatted wifi signals such that lsquocomplex multi-layered net-works of overlapping big and small cells supply smartphones tablets cars drones and evenbuildings with a huge amount of cheap connectivityrsquo (Bristol is Open 2016d2) The variousopen data initiatives also fall into this category insofar as they enable datasets about existingservices and amenities to be linked together

Again this invocation of entrepreneurial public agency sits comfortably with claims thatpeople are being put at the centre of smart city development it explicitly invites publiccontributions to the ongoing forms that this will take However like the service-usermodality it says little about the more democratic dimensions of publicness A more roundedsense of lsquocitizenshiprsquo as traditionally conceived encompasses not only lsquosocial rightsrsquo (ieaccess to services) but also lsquopolitical rightsrsquo (contributing to decision-making processes) andlsquocivilrsquo ones (relating to freedom of speech) (Isin and Ruppert 2015) Accordingly we furtherpropose and distinguish between a lsquopoliticalrsquo and a lsquocivicrsquo modality of publicness

423 Political publicness

We use the label lsquopoliticalrsquo here in the narrow sense of public involvement in decision-making and deliberation through institutional channels or through novel extensions of theseExamples include the lsquoTalk Londonrsquo online platform which hosts a mixture of surveysblogs and discussion boards promoting itself as a lsquoplace to discuss Londonrsquos big issuesrsquo(Talk London 2016) and Bristolrsquos lsquoDemocratreersquo app which encouraged residents to nomi-nate and vote on suitable locations for planting new trees (While the latter was not initiateddirectly by the council it nevertheless provided a direct means for residents to influenceofficial decisions on resource allocation) If there is a commonality in the issues addressedthrough such activities it relates to a perceived lack of participation ndash often with certainsocial groups in mind ndash in local decision-making

Overall this is by far the least commonmodality of publicness invoked it is dominant inonly three of the 68 activities considered This is perhaps surprising given that the potentialfor digital technologies to reinvigorate democratic deliberation and decision-making hasbeen enthusiastically envisioned and debated since the 1990s (Isin and Ruppert 2015) Thelack of experimentation in this respect may partly be explained by the marginality of smartcity activities to traditional policy-making processes

The uses of online fora (as in the case of the Talk London initiative) or voting apps(Democratree) clearly depart from traditional modes of political deliberation ndash for exampleface-to-face settings ndash and yet nevertheless describe rather conventional uses of the internetHowever there are too few examples in the set of activities analysed for us to drawconclusions about the types of spatialities or spatial effects associated with this modalityof publicness

We highlight the paucity of political publicness specifically because strategy documentsmake repeated claims that citizen engagement is vital to the successful implementation of thesmart city and that related initiatives will enable wider citizen engagement with decision-making processes Its absence points more to a situation in which the smart city not only

Urban Research amp Practice 13

operates at the margins of normal institutional processes but might even be criticallyinterpreted as seeking to bypass them ndash a possibility raised by Shearmur (2016) in recountinghow delegates at a technology conference imagined the public sector as merely an obstacle tosmart city implementation

424 Civic publicness

Decision-making mediated through official processes only captures part of a cityrsquos politicallife and may tend to frame issues in certain ways for the purposes of voting or other forms ofdeliberation We therefore distinguish the lsquopoliticalrsquo from a rather less structured lsquocivicrsquomodality of publicness which loosely maps onto a traditional sense of the broader lsquopublicspherersquo In other words it inheres in those activities taking place in spaces beyond stateinstitutions but which are not directly oriented towards market activity A local councilrsquosinvolvement in such activities is necessarily more at armrsquos length it may enable or merelyapprove of such activities in its own promotional documents The types of issues shaping itsassemblage should then emerge lsquofrom belowrsquo Equally however this modality of public-ness may be more immediately associated with leisure activities or lsquoplayfulnessrsquo ndash suchactivities in public space may constitute a performative type of claim making within thebroader democratic process (see eg Hou 2010 Parkinson 2012) The invocation of civicpublicness is far from uncommon across the six cities considered here on a par with theentrepreneurial it is dominant for 21 of the 68 activities (and the most common modality inLondon)

Examples include the lsquoCommunity Wellnessrsquo strand of Manchesterrsquos lsquoCityVerversquo pro-ject aiming to encourage schoolchildren and commuters to take exercise in parks BristolrsquoslsquoMyKWrsquo community social media platform the lsquoBristol Approach to Citizen Sensingrsquo andlsquoPlayable Cityrsquo initiatives Glasgowrsquos lsquoActive Travelrsquo demonstrator initiative insofar as itencouraged cyclists to share data and experiences of cycling in the city and Londonrsquos lsquoSpeedVolunteeringrsquo app which seeks to put those wishing to volunteer in touch with peopleseeking help

We discern two distinctive spatialities as characteristic of assemblages of civic public-ness First relevant initiatives are often constituted by the goal of manifesting the virtualdigital in traditional (physical) public space Peterborough for example has planned a largelsquoOpenCityrsquo digital screen in the city centre Bristolrsquos lsquoPlayable Citiesrsquo competition has beenrunning annually since 2013 to fund temporary artistic installations in the city centre Theproject also taking place elsewhere internationally aims to put lsquopeople and play at the heartof the future city Through interaction and creative installations it unlocks a socialdialogue bringing the citizens into a city development conversationrsquo (Watershed 2016)Examples have included the 2013 winner Hello Lamp Post which allowed members of thepublic to have text message conversations with various items of street furniture andUrbanimals in 2015 in which digitally projected animals would appear unexpectedly acrossthe city and interact with the public (Watershed 2016) Manchesterrsquos lsquoCityVerversquo Internet ofThings demonstrator project mentioned above plans to install lsquotalkative bus stopsrsquo and alsquoCommunity Wellnessrsquo sensor network in parks along school and commuter routes toencourage exercise (UK Government 2015)

The second characteristic spatiality of civic publicness relates to varied attempts toreclaim the digital sphere from the private sector The idea of lsquoreclamationrsquo may not beexplicit in the documentation but such initiatives are typically driven by civil society actorsand aim variously to empower citizens to use and have a presence through new digital urban

14 R Cowley et al

technologies Manchesterrsquos lsquoLiving Labrsquo programme (whose current status is unclearfollowing the disbandment of the Manchester Digital Development Authority) includedthe development of an interactive local news and information web portal featuring contentcreated by residents The lsquoManchester Digital Laboratoryrsquo describes itself as a lsquograssrootsinnovation organisationrsquo (MadLab 2016a) which organises various events and digital train-ing courses with a core mission to allow the general public to lsquohelp people to make thingsbetter togetherrsquo through lsquoexperimentationrsquo lsquoplayrsquo and lsquofunrsquo and the promotion of craftman-ship (MadLab 2016b) In Bristol a local social networking site (first trialled as lsquoMyKWrsquo inthe Knowle West district) has been extended to the city as a whole (as lsquoMyBristolrsquo) Theplanned lsquoBristol Approach to Citizen Sensingrsquo initiative meanwhile mentioned above mostexplicitly displays the aim of reconfiguring virtual space in this way in its vision of a lsquoco-created city commonsrsquo which lsquosupports the deployment of new or adapted technologies intoeveryday environmentsrsquo (KWMC 2016 1)

425 Summary of relative prominence of different modalities of publicness

Table 2 summarises the relative prominence of the four modalities of publicness in eachcity and across all six cities

Analysing these data too closely would potentially yield spurious findings for severalreasons our six cities were not chosen to yield a somehow statistically representative sampleof activities for the purposes of quantitative research the coding of their modalities involvedsome subjective judgement and all activities are equally weighted regardless of scale timeperiod budget and policy significance These reservations aside the findings provide anindicative overview of the variations in the publicness assembled in these six leading citiesand in this spirit two broad observations are ventured

First the relative prominence of the four modalities differs considerably by city In thissense again lsquosmart publicnessrsquo is evidently not determined by globally circulating dis-courses but at least partly reflects its immediate governance and policy context The relativeabsence of entrepreneurial publicness in Glasgow for example communicates the councilrsquossole responsibility for delivering activities In Bristol the dominant entrepreneurial and civicmodalities chime with an overall strategic goal of expanding the knowledge economy bytapping into a strong tradition of grass-roots innovation The lack of service-user publicnessin Peterborough reflects the limited funding available for hard infrastructural projects theemphasis on entrepreneurial and civic publicness evinces the shared responsibility of thecityrsquos economic development agency and the council in managing the Peterborough DNAprogramme Londonrsquos relatively weak service use focus differently confirms the GLArsquos roleas steering and advisory actor rather than as funder of large-scale material interventions Thecity-level assemblages in Manchester and Milton Keynes display similarity in their strongoverall service-use sense of publicness and relatively weak civic modality While civicpublicness may come to the fore in Manchester in future given Corridor Manchesterrsquos statedlsquoplace-makingrsquo goals (Corridor Manchester 2015 24ndash25) its current relative absenceimplies a lack of active engagement on the part of the general public Milton Keynes isperhaps more surprising in this respect given its clear strategic claim to be civically engagedIts relatively weak civic publicness underlines the opportunistic nature of smart urbanactivities those coming to be implemented or funded may reflect strategic goals unevenlysmart policy documents themselves carry relatively little weight in the urban developmentprocess

Urban Research amp Practice 15

Table

2Relativeprom

inence

ofdominantmodalitiesof

publicness

insm

artcity

activities

across

sixUK

cities

Dom

inantmodality

Bristol

Glasgow

London

Manchester

MiltonKeynes

Peterborough

Allactivities

Meanfor6cities

Service

User

1457

1156

530

3732

Entrepreneurial

367

3333

2460

2832

Political

140

110

00

44

Civic

3636

4411

2440

3132

(Total

no

ofactivities)

(14)

(14)

(9)

(9)

(17)

(5)

(68)

16 R Cowley et al

Second the proportion of initiatives oriented towards civic publicness is not insig-nificant these account for approximately a third of all the activities examined On thisbasis it would be oversimplistic to dismiss the claims that the lsquoactually existingrsquocontemporary UK smart city pays only lip service to the importance of public claim-making Nevertheless this embrace of the democratic process does not extend to theprovision of significant opportunities for citizens to engage directly with the formalpolitical system in innovative ways In itself the absence of envisaged political public-ness does not undermine the possibility of more traditional public engagement withgovernmental institutions elsewhere yet the smart city does not provide channels for thedirect expression of public contestation or more radical forms of dissent

In this sense the smart city may appear to be aligned with broader depoliticising or lsquopost-politicalrsquo tendencies in governance generally and urban planning specifically (Swyngedouw2007 2011 Allmendinger and Haughton 2012 Joss 2015) In a post-political reading itsassemblage across UK cities would reflect the nature of its conceptual underpinnings thesmart city can only lsquocommand agreement as a result of [its] broadly progressive if non-specific framingrsquo (Allmendinger and Haughton 2012 94) and is therefore lsquounable to arouseconflicts among political ideasrsquo (Crivello 2015 919) Alternatively following Newman andClarke (2009) it illustrates the apparent paradox of the decline of the traditional lsquopublicrsquobeing accompanied by its simultaneous proliferation as a fragmented mulitiplicity politicalpublicness may be assembling elsewhere but is not associated with the intended role of thesmart city in the United Kingdom

426 Obduracy

Political publicness aside our findings have at least provided convincing evidence that UKsmart city initiatives are guided by a genuine desire to encourage civic engagement ofvarious kinds Even here however a more nuanced picture emerges when the relativeobduracy of individual activities is factored in Based on the available information weflagged each of the 68 activities as either lsquopermanentrsquo (to indicate ongoing operation orpresence in the city) or lsquotemporaryrsquo (to indicate a one-off or time-limited activity) As Table 3shows civic (and political) activities tend to be less permanent in nature than those invokingentrepreneurial and service-user publicness

In an important sense the relatively temporary nature of activities oriented towardspolitical and civic publicness is unsurprising particularly when contrasted with the service-user modality which is more often associated ndash as discussed above ndash with lsquohardrsquo infra-structural interventions The consequences of such activities may be long-lasting even whenthe activity itself is short-lived Nevertheless these findings fall short of convincinglyheralding a situation in which citizenship is prioritised as the central ongoing concern ofthe UK smart city

Table 3 Obduracy of smart city activities invoking each modality of publicness

Dominant modalityPermanent

Temporary

Base (number of activities)

Service-user 76 24 (25)Entrepreneurial 58 42 (19)Political 33 67 (3)Civic 48 52 (21)

Urban Research amp Practice 17

Significantly furthermore a degree of bifurcation is evident in the overall techno-publicassemblages such that civic and political publicness are sidelined within less obduratestrands of programmatic activity In Glasgow the enduring legacy of the lsquoFuture Cityrsquoprogramme is most visible in the service-user-oriented Operation Centre However manyof its other activities characterised by a more interactive and participatory mode of publicengagement were one-off events As lsquodemonstrator projectsrsquo they served in principle to helpdefine rather than enact the smart city ndash but there is little evidence that this more temporarystrand of the lsquoFuture Cityrsquo programme has subsequently been embedded in mainstreammunicipal activities In Bristol too a clear bifurcation is evident On one side the lsquoBristol isOpenrsquo improvements to the cityrsquos digital infrastructure and the lsquoOpen Data Bristolrsquo initiative(all of which might be expected to be relatively durable) invoke primarily entrepreneurialpublicness On the other the Connecting Bristol partnership promotes diverse lsquosofterrsquo civicand political activities led by grass-roots organisations which exhibit rather less obduracy assmall-scale pilot schemes or activities with limited public participation Evidently then lesscommitment and resources are available for experiments in the field of citizenship under-stood in more traditional liberal democratic ways than in those which conjure up a passive orentrepreneurial public

5 Discussion

Our reading of the smart city consciously departs from critical presentations of the smart cityas a lsquotop-downrsquo imposition and towards a foregrounding and more nuanced appreciation ofits practical variety But the observation that this variety is skewed towards the assemblage ofservice-user and entrepreneurial senses of the public does not constitute a straightforwardlyuseful critique of its current local manifestations The focus on service-user publicness atleast is unsurprising to the extent that local authorities are arguably seen by default asprimarily service providers To observe that civic and political publicness by way ofcontrast are less well considered and often only tokenistically accommodated is not tomake the normative case that these should necessarily or could realistically be privileged inlocal techno-public smart assemblages Rather the prevalence of this more passive modalityof publicness becomes significant when set against rhetorical claims that the smart city iseffecting transformational lsquocitizen-centricrsquo change

The dominance of service-user publicness does little to counter a broader trend identifiedby Powell (2014 15) towards lsquoa shift in the notion of citizenship away from civicresponsibilities and engagements to classifying [citizens] as consumers who purchaseservices from providersrsquo Although Powellrsquos discussion relates to the role of digitised datamore generally it is clearly relevant to the smart cityrsquos focus on providing greater efficien-cies Insofar as the lsquorelationship between government individuals and corporate entitiesrsquo (15)is viewed through the lens of the lsquocitizen as consumerrsquo its quality is only improved by theefficiencies which datafication enables Citizenship in this narrow sense is not related toaltruism or responsibilities but rather based on a principle of exchange and enacted throughlsquocollecting and sharing personal datarsquo (15) Drawing on Dean (2005) Powell highlights therisk that lsquothe norms of publicity ndash information communication and participation ndash havecome to stand for the political ends that they were presumed to serversquo (Powell 2014 16) Thisperspective raises various questions about many of the goals of UK smart city initiatives inrelation to the broader dimensions of citizenship For example the aim of lsquodigital inclusionrsquocommonly asserted among these six cases may appear laudable and yet it pushes the deeperpurpose of digital inclusion into the background smart connectivity itself becomes the goal

18 R Cowley et al

Similarly ideals of lsquotransparent governancersquo or lsquoopen datarsquo may end up being fetishisedwithin a discourse of efficiency even though this discourse tells us little about the normativebasis of the relationship between the public and the state beyond its passive lsquoservice-userrsquomodality

Although again our analysis opposes the existence of a deterministic link betweenglobal smart discourse and local practices the focus on efficiency of different types(including resource use provision of services and access to information) clearly resonateswith Whitersquos (2016) identification of an international discursive storyline in which the smartcity responds to lsquoresource pressures brought on by rapid urbanization and an ageing popula-tion the effects of anthropogenic global climate change and the twinned pressure of fiscalausterity and inter-urban competitionrsquo (577) We would at least suggest that the narrative ofthe lsquoage of crisisrsquo which accompanies much of the contemporary envisionment of futurecities (Caprotti 2015) has had a shaping influence on the prominence given to efficientservice provision in smart activities implemented to date

Equally given the broader UK policy context it would seem eccentric for local autho-rities to discourage entrepreneurialism On the immediate pragmatic level of funding andresources it must be significant that the governmentrsquos Department for Business Skills andInnovation has played a significant catalytic role smart city initiatives have not emergedunder the auspices of say the Department for Communities and Local Government But theprominence of entrepreneurial publicness raises a separate set of concerns echoing Dattarsquos(2015) diagnosis ndash albeit with reference to the rather different context of the Indian city ofDholera ndash of the smart city promoting lsquourbanization as a business model rather than a modelof social justicersquo Across our UK cases issues of social sustainability are far from absent inpolicy documents but their range tends to be limited for example focusing on health ande-inclusion or educating residents to participate in the digital economy In Glasgow suchquestions are subsumed within overall questions of efficiency and relate to very specificfactors such as public safety and reporting problems with services Milton Keynes claimsconsiderable interest in citizen co-creation but its initiatives are not primarily aimed attargeting social problems Although Peterboroughrsquos 2012 Feasibility Study prominentlyflagged up inequalities social cohesion and health improvements among other issues(Peterborough City Council 2012 3) its current strategy is addressed towards developingskills which lsquomeet local business demandrsquo and lsquoput Peterboroughrsquo in lsquothe best possibleposition to take advantage of emerging marketsrsquo (Peterborough City Council 2014 5)

One final way in which the lsquocitizen-centricrsquo nature of the UK smart city is questionablerelates to an apparent straightforward lack of public interest On one level this simplyreminds us of the peripherality of the smart city many of the associated activities only claimto be small-scale experimental trials and are not deeply embedded into the mainstream policyprocess While the actual numbers of local residents involved with many civic and politicalschemes are often negligible we found no convincing evidence either of broader enthusiasmor emergent public counter-discourse in any city4 While emergent political or civic con-testation is clearly not something which local authorities might lsquoplanrsquo for ndash it would beabsurd to expect local authorities to devise problems for frustrated publics to assemblearound ndash its absence does not provide evidence of acquiescence or approval or guarantee thesmooth passage of smart technology into urban life more broadly in future It more obviouslyreflects the survey evidence suggesting that general public awareness of any lsquosmartrsquo plans oractivities undertaken by local councils is neglible (Arqiva 2015) and that only one in five UKadults even recognises the term smart city (IET 2016)

Urban Research amp Practice 19

6 Conclusions towards a new lsquosmart urban publicnessrsquo

In studying and comparing a series of relatively well-developed smart city programmes aslsquotechno-public assemblagesrsquo we have responded to a series of policy claims made about therelationships between smart urban technologies and the public Our analysis reveals that thepublicness envisaged and enacted in the UK smart city is far from one-dimensional Citizensare not merely absent as the earlier critiques of the smart city would have it nor do smart cityactivities necessarily invoke a particular stunted notion of publicness in all cases Rather thegreat variety of types of publicness in evidence leads us to conclude that the rhetorical claimsabout the smart city being citizen-centric are not straightforwardly empty ones Rather thanagreeing with the speculative critiques of the smart city as a devious attempt to exclude thepublic we would urge commentators to begin from the assumption that its institutionalprotagonists do have a vested interest in questions of democracy

That said it also seems fair to conclude that the smart does not yet evince a convincinglyrounded sense of the lsquopublic cityrsquo The opportunistic nature of smart city development inother words gives rise to unique local forms but simultaneously holds these hostage tobroader societal and economic agendas the forms of their assemblage have remained shapedby immediate policy contexts and broader smart city policy discourse Thinking in terms ofits experimental shifting and peripheral assemblage in practice nevertheless opens upagentive space for actors involved to influence smart development in ways which moreconvincingly invoke a more rounded sense of publicness and in turn enable a moreconvincing sense of public ownership and enthusiasm

For more fully public smart city assemblages to emerge in future the civic and politicalmay need to be more obviously accommodated within the service-user and entrepreneurialThis need not relate to heavy-handed attempts to co-opt the civic which risk neutralising itsinnovative potential but the civic should at least not be siloed into more ephemeral strands ofactivity A lack of civic engagement with large infrastructural projects for example seemsunlikely to be successfully mitigated by a series of parallel participatory events which passunnoticed by most residents Similarly entrepreneurial activities are to be welcomed whichare more obviously oriented towards finding solutions to problems defined by citizensalongside those oriented at the creation of wealth through hi-tech innovations The possibi-lities for smart city technology to enable or engender more formal political participationfurthermore appear to have remained largely unexplored in practical terms

If only because the lsquoactually existingrsquo smart city is still at an experimental stage ofdevelopment we note that it has effected only marginal reconfigurations of the materialspaces of the city to date Nevertheless looking forward we urge researchers and practi-tioners to pay attention to the distinctive spatialities of the lsquosmart publicrsquo particularly in theinterfaces between public and private space and between virtual space and the traditionalmaterial public realm There is considerable scope in this regard to reverse the tendencyidentified by Kinsley (2013) to assign the digital to a parallel disembodied lsquohyperspacersquorather our understandings might more fruitfully be grounded in the relationships betweenhumans and technology in local contexts For policy-makers and practitioners activelyseeking a more widespread and involved sense of public debate around and engagementwith the implications of smart technology it may be rewarding to focus on the visibility ofnew innovations This may involve moving towards a more active consideration of themultiple roles of public space and more imaginatively using smart technologies to moveaway from more traditional fora as spaces of public engagement

Overall we resist from concluding that contemporary UK smart initiatives alreadyconstitute a qualitatively novel recasting of the public In relying on dominant political

20 R Cowley et al

structures and economic actors they have come to promote incremental change at best bothin terms of publicness and the material space of the city But assessing the long-termimpacts of smart innovations on urban space will be an ongoing project indeed the conceptlsquosmartrsquo itself may in future lose currency as a label or be reworked as a signifier In themeantime insofar as the smart city is indicative of broader contemporary attempts to shapeurban change in a time of austerity its lsquoexperimentalrsquo nature may appear rather moreproblematically reflective of a bypassing of the traditional democratic process And if wetoo may be allowed to propose a dystopian scenario it is one where in spite of the bestintentions of policy-makers the dominant norms of emerging smart city practices becomesedimented into novel twenty-first century institutional processes whose pragmatic world-view does not extend beyond that of a society of entrepreneurs and service users

AcknowledgementsThis study was undertaken at the University of Westminster with financial support from ESRC grantESL0159781 Youri Dayot was Visiting Fellow from the University of Grenoble

Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors

FundingThis study was undertaken at the University of Westminster as part of the ESRC-funded projectlsquoSmart Eco-cities for a Green Economy a Comparative Study of Europe and Chinarsquo (grant ESL0159781)

Notes1 The two terms (lsquosmart cityrsquo lsquofuture cityrsquo) are complementary and often used interchangeably

especially in the UK national policy context (see eg BSI 2014 3 also Joss Cook andDayot forthcoming) It is beyond the scope of this paper to delve into the conceptualinterrelationship of these recent policy terms in more detail

2 A fuller list of the key documents and links to relevant web pages consulted has been madepublicly available on the lead authorrsquos ResearchGate web pages httpswwwresearchgatenetprofileRobert_Cowley

3 More detailed descriptions of many of the individual activities and bodies analysed in thepresent research may be found in the lsquogrey literaturersquo (see eg Caprotti et al 2016 Woodset al 2016)

4 With the exception of some concerns in Glasgow about the use of facial recognition softwarein the cityrsquos CCTV system linked to the Operation Centre (Sunday Herald 2014 Aitchinson2015)

ReferencesAitchinson J 2015 ldquoShould We Be Worried about Glasgowrsquos New Hi-Tech Surveillance Systemrdquo

STV News February 23 httpglasgowstvtvarticles310713-glasgows-new-surveillance-installed-by-israeli-firm-nice-systems

Allmendinger P and G Haughton 2012 ldquoPost-Political Spatial Planning in England A Crisis ofConsensusrdquo Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37 (1) 89ndash103 doi101111j1475-5661201100468x

Arqiva 2015 ldquoAre Cities Really Getting Smarterrdquo httpswwwarqivacomnewspress-releasesare-our-cities-really-getting-smarter

Urban Research amp Practice 21

suggests that smart city visions of technology-driven innovation in service provision havenot convincingly accounted for the social and political dimensions of urban life (seeIntroduction)

3 Methodology

This research focuses on evidence drawn from six UK cities Bristol Glasgow LondonManchester Milton Keynes and Peterborough The units of our comparative analysis are notthese cities in a broader sense (Robinson 2011) ndash defined for example by municipalboundaries ndash but rather their smart city (policy) activity at the point of local implementationOur choice does not imply that we advocate these cities as exemplars of lsquobest practicersquo butrather reflects in each case the emergence of a relatively wide range of activities throughpolicy-making explicitly drawing on smart city discourse We treat these cases as importantlsquonodal pointsrsquo within wider flows of concepts and policy discourses (15) and have includedsix ndash rather than focusing on say one city in particular ndash in order to capture a sufficientdiversity of institutional and municipal contexts through which local policies are beingapplied precisely since we are interested in the variety evident among programmes ofactivities taking shape within different local contexts

The six cities were selected following an earlier analysis (Caprotti et al 2016) of relevantnational policy documentation and internet searches on lsquosmart cityrsquo or lsquofuture cityrsquo1 initia-tives across the United Kingdom The latter reflects the naming of the national Future CitiesCatapult centre established by the government to support the development and implementa-tion of smart city technology Additionally all six submitted bids for funding in the 2012Future Cities Demonstrator competition held by the Technology Strategy Board thenational innovation agency supported by the Department for Business Innovation andSkills (see Taylor Buck and While 2015 Caprotti et al 2016) Glasgow as overall winnerwas awarded pound24m to implement its plans and Bristol London and Peterborough were eachawarded pound3m as runners-up Since this competition significantly catalysed all six citiesrsquosmart activities we treat their submitted lsquoFeasibility Studiesrsquo as key policy documents As acommonality this competition also provides a basis for comparative research (Robinson2011) exploring the variety of the lsquoactually existingrsquo smart city (Shelton Zook and Wiig2015) in the United Kingdom

For each urban setting the key policy strategies and all associated current and plannedactivities were identified and relevant publicly available documents were collected Specificactivities were included if they were clearly linked to or promoted within the policydocumentation and sought either to use digital technology to achieve particular goals or tofacilitate the use of digital technology Beyond this no further criteria (eg the centrality oflsquobig datarsquo) were imposed given our desire to understand how the smart city has beenassembled contingently in practice Table 1 lists the 68 activities thus identified and thekey associated policy documents along with any overarching programmes of which parti-cular activities formed a part or local bodies (typically partnerships involving the councilamong other actors) responsible for their delivery2 The time frame for gathering thisdocumentation was AprilndashJune 2016 and those materials publicly available during thisperiod were included in the research

Based on this set of documents each of the 68 activities was then analysed individuallyFirst through a protocol with four inter-related assemblage dimensions based on Newmanand Clarkersquos (2009) discussion (1) the issues which the activity or policy sought to address(2) the key actors involved in implementation (3) the particular socio-technical practices

Urban Research amp Practice 5

Table

1Sum

maryof

smartcity

policy

documentsandinitiativesanalysed

insixUK

cities

Bristol

Glasgow

London(G

LA)

Key

PolicyDocuments

SmartCityBristol

(2011)

Connect

Bristol

Feasibility

Study

(2012)

Key

PolicyDocuments

Glasgow

CityManagem

entSystem

(2012)

OpenManifesto

ndashPrinciples(2013)

CityTechnologyPlatform

(2013)

Key

PolicyDocuments

LinkedLondon(2012)

SmartLondonPlan(2013)

The

Futureof

Smart(2013)

DataforLondon

ACityStrategyforLondon(2016)

Program

me

organisation

Activities(yearlaunched

ortook

place)

Program

me

organisation

Activities(yearlaunched

ortook

place)

Program

me

organisation

Activities(yearlaunched

ortook

place)

CityCouncil

GigabitBristol

(2012)

FutureCityGlasgow

OpenGlasgow

(2013)

Glasgow

Operation

Centre(2013)

MyGlasgow

(2013)

IntelligentStreetLighting(2013)

Dashboards(2013)

ActiveTravel(2013)

Hacking

theFuture(2013)

Com

munityMapping

(2014)

FutureMakers(2014)

OpenDataCatalogue

(2013)

LinkedMapping

(2013)

Energy(2013)

SocialTransport(2013)

EngagingtheCity(2013)

Citizen

Engagem

ent(2014)

LinkedLondon

SmartParkQueen

Elizabeth

Park

(2014)

Bristol

IsOpen

DataDom

e(2015)

IoTMesh(2016)

WirelessMile(2016)

SoftwareDefined

Network

Control

(2016)

SmartLondon

Board

LondonDatastore

(2010)

SmartLondonDistrictsNetwork

(2014)

SmartLondonInfrastructure

Network

(2015)

TalkLondon(2015)

Civic

Crowdfunding

(2015)

Infrastructure

Mapping

Application

(2015)

TechLondonersPeopleSolving

City

Challenges(2016)

Speed

Volunteering(2016)

ConnectingBristol

OpenDataBristol

(2010)

Media

Sandbox

2010

B-O

pen

Strand(2010)

PlayableCitiesAward(2013)

Dem

ocratree

(2014)

MyKnowle

WestMyBristol

(2014)

YouDecide(2015)

Healthy

Office(2016)

REPLICATE(2016)

Knowle

West

Media

Centre

Bristol

Approachto

Citizen

Sensing

(planned)

6 R Cowley et al

Manchester

MiltonKeynes

Peterborough

Key

PolicyDocuments

Digital

Strategy(2008)

Digital

Manchester(2012)

ManchesterFutureCity(2012)

SmarterCityProgram

me(2016)

Key

PolicyDocuments

Future-Ready

MK

(2012)

MK

SmartAWater

strategy

forMiltonKeynes

(2016)

Key

PolicyDocuments

PeterboroughDNA

(2012)

Deliveringatrulysm

artcity

(2014)

Program

meorganisation

Activities(yearlaunched

ortook

place)

Program

me

organisation

Activities(yearlaunched

ortook

place)

Program

me

organisation

Activities(yearlaunched

ortook

place)

ManchesterDigital

Develop

mentAgency

ManchesterLivingLab

(2006)

MKSmart

MK

DataHub

(2016)

Our

MK

(2015)

GardenMonitor

(planned)

Water

Monitor

(2016)

Water

measurementschool

kits

(2014)

SmartMeters(2015)

ApexSuite

business

engagement

programme(2015)

MK

Hackathon

(2016)

MotionMap

(2015)

SmartParking

(2015)

OpenEnergyMap

(2016)

Electricity

Dem

andShifting

(2013)

SmartGridDynam

icDem

and

Response(2014)

SmartLighting(2014)

Peterborough

DNA

BrainwavePortal(2014)

OpenC

ityScreen(planned)

Hackathon

(2014)

Innovation

Week(2014)

LivingDataPortal(2015)

CorridorManchester

Triangulum

(2015)

CityV

erve

(2016)

SmarterCityProgram

me

ManchesterDigital

Laboratory(M

adLab)

(2009)

DIM

MER(2013)

MiGuide

(2013)

Central

Library

Digital

Dem

onstrator(2014)

IntelligentLighting(2015)

Greater

ManchesterData

Synchronisation

Program

me

DataG

M(2011)

Transport

Systems

Catapult

Imagined

FestivalIntelligent

MobilityHackathon

(2016)

Feasibility

Study

for2012

FutureCitiesDem

onstratorCom

petition

Urban Research amp Practice 7

involved and (4) the variegated spatiality produced And second to identify the dominantmodality of publicness thus invoked service user entrepreneurial political or civic (asdiscussed in the previous section)

By taking into account the linkages between individual activities and the wider policylandscape a profile of each smart city assemblage as a whole was built up For the purposesof triangulation the results were aggregated following separate initial analyses and jointlyreviewed by the three authors Finally a transversal analysis was conducted across the sixcities in order to identify common patterns as well as divergent practices

Basing the analysis on detailed evidence has allowed for some of the variety acrossparticular locations to be captured in partial response to Kitchinrsquos (2015) call to movebeyond critiques of the lsquoplace-lessrsquo corporate and governmental promotional literature Ourresponse is a partial one since given the emergent nature of much smart city activity even inthese six locations the research neither investigates practices of implementation in depth norprovides a long-term perspective on the smart cityrsquos impact on the lived experience of thecity The aim rather has been to investigate the outcomes of the processes whereby thelsquoplace-lessrsquo smart city has been translated into locally specific projects through the lens ofthe documentation surrounding these

The high-level findings reported below relate to our conclusions about the relativeprominence of different modalities of publicness Although the discussion is illustratedwith particular examples of activity space does not permit a thorough presentation of thedetailed elements of the six assemblages3 Any of these elements can itself be seen as atechno-public assemblage and the analytical framework is offered as a tool for otherswishing to explore the public dimensions of current and future smart city activities at agranular level

4 Findings

41 The smart city in six municipal contexts initial findings and observations

It is worth noting first that the policy documents analysed generally operate at the peripheryof traditional urban planning frameworks local authorities are not formally obliged toinclude smart city principles within statutory planning processes Instead these policiesare often championed by overarching strategy boards economic development agencies andsimilar municipal bodies As such they typically seek to promote cohesive socio-economicinnovation policy to a range of actors both internally and externally for the purpose ofleveraging inward investment Thus they will have been shaped by their imagined receptionby varied audiences (Freeman and Maybin 2011 163ndash164) rather than by the specificintention that they should serve as traditional planning tools The varying status of thisdocumentation is significantly reflective of the often opportunistic nature of smart cityactivity but also points to the often complicated governance arrangements in placeImportantly then the relationship between the policy documents and activities shown inTable 1 is not consistent across the six cities For Glasgow which presents itself as havingrelatively straightforward governance arrangements there is clear linearity between the plansoutlined in its 2012 Feasibility Study and the resulting initiatives At the other end of thespectrum Manchesterrsquos recent Smarter City Programme for example essentially collates aseries of activities already planned or taking place

The activities themselves range from small-scale pilot scheme to major infrastructuralprojects from interventions into specific spatially bounded areas to initiatives operating invirtual space city-wide from lsquotop-downrsquo technological innovations to grass-roots

8 R Cowley et al

community activities and from one-off events to ongoing activities and services alreadywell-embedded into the urban fabric Despite the identification in the academic literaturethen of broad commonalities in variously conceived smart city lsquoimaginariesrsquo its manifesta-tions on the ground in the United Kingdom defy simple categorisation at first sight

The policy documents also display noticeable city-specific inflections in their narrativeframings reflecting the local contextual factors through which the translation of smart citydiscourse into practical activity has been mediated To provide some background for themain analysis an overview of the key framing principles in each cityrsquos policy documents isprovided below along with the varied governance structures that have emerged in dynamicrelationship with both the policy documents and the activities themselves Such differences ndashas will be discussed ndash help to explain some of the forms that local assemblages take withimplications in turn for the nature of the publicness invoked

411 Bristol

Bristolrsquos stated overall smart city goals are to expand the cityrsquos knowledge economy in a waywhich furthers its image as a pioneer in environmental sustainability and a centre of grass-roots innovation Its 2012 Feasibility Study (Bristol City Council 2012) broadened the remitof the earlier Smart City Bristol report (Bristol City Council 2011) which focused largely oncarbon emissions and transport issues to develop a narrative of enabling environmentallyand socially sustainable growth at a time of economic expansion in recognition of the cityrsquossignificant health and wealth inequalities

The council is one actor among many in Bristolrsquos current smart city activities which arenot orchestrated by an overarching policy document Nevertheless the dual focus of its 2012Feasibility Study which proposed a mixture of lsquohardrsquo infrastructure and a parallel pro-gramme of citizen engagement resembles the two-stranded nature of what has emerged inpractice The first strand delivering digital infrastructure is coordinated by the lsquoBristol isOpenrsquo partnership between the council and the University of Bristol with support from otherprivate public and charitable organisations The second collates various activities mostlyrelated to citizen and SME engagement within the lsquoConnecting Bristolrsquo initiative Here thecouncilrsquos role is more lsquohands-offrsquo specific activities are typically directly led by socialenterprises such as the Knowle West Media Centre

412 Glasgow

As the overall winner of the Future Cities Demonstrator competition in 2012 Glasgow wasawarded pound24m to implement its Feasibility Study proposals Approximately half the award(Davies 2014) was spent on a smart Operations Centre fully operational since 2014 whichmonitors real-time transport and public safety data Meanwhile a spread of smaller initia-tives took place many of which were participatory and interactive and were concluded (asproject deliverables) by the end of the TSB grant period

Glasgow City Council clearly positions itself as the key driving force behind theseactivities the initiative is characterised by the absence of publicised collaborative partner-ship This may reflect the terms of the TSB award positioning the City Council as the singlecontractor and requiring rapid project implementation within the two-year schedule Equallyit upholds the principle asserted in the Feasibility Study that lsquosmart cities are led from the topby a strong and visionary championrsquo (Glasgow City Council 2012 5) Either way the

Urban Research amp Practice 9

councilrsquos centrality appears to have left Glasgowrsquos official smart city activities in a state ofsuspension following the end of funding

413 London

Londonrsquos foray into smart city innovation is explicitly linked to the opportunities andchallenges facing the UKrsquos capital as a global city the smart city discourse deployedforms an integral part of the overarching narrative of London striving for continuous growthand consolidating its position as a leading international city (Mayor of London 2013 see alsoNESTA 2015) The lsquoSmart Londonrsquo initiative is primarily directed at forging a newcollaborative and entrepreneurial mode of governance in the service of sustaining economicgrowth to meet expected population growth The Greater London Authority (GLA) andparticularly the office of the Mayor of London is positioned at the centre of a wide range ofactivities It has co-opted a number of public and private actors including leading research-ers tech companies and larger utilities mainly through the Smart London Board andindividual project partnerships In promoting a co-creative governance mode for smart cityinnovation the GLArsquos role is more to lsquosteerrsquo than to direct outcomes

414 Manchester

Manchester is building on a legacy of digital innovations having published digitalstrategies in 2008 and 2012 and previously established a Digital DevelopmentAgency (MDDA) in 2003 (which was disbanded in 2015) Its 2012 FeasibilityStudy framed its smart aspirations as potentially consolidating recent successesincluding strong hi-tech industries infrastructural investments and repopulation ofthe urban core The lsquoDefining visionrsquo of Manchester was presented as lsquothe birthplaceof the industrial revolution re-inventing itself as a model of twenty-first centuryldquogreen growthrdquorsquo (Manchester City Council 2012 8) The Feasibility Study wastaken as a starting point for an ongoing programme of smart activities in theOxford Road Corridor (Manchester City Council 2013) running 2 km south fromthe city centre Corridor Manchester established as an incorporated body in 2007(CAICT and PDSF 2014 131) hopes that the district will continue to attract lsquoknowl-edge workersrsquo to become lsquoone of the top five innovation districts in Europersquo(Corridor Manchester 2015 4) achieving lsquolocal and global recognition as a placethat is original creative and smart where knowledge is put to workrsquo (4)

Its smart city activities exhibit a particularly networked style of governance withthe council just one of a series of actors allied in varying combinations ndash mostnoticeably the cityrsquos universities and large hospitals local engineering and hi-techfirms Transport for Greater Manchester and grass-roots digital organisation FutureEverything However the council appears to have reclaimed a more central rolethrough its 2016 lsquoSmarter Cityrsquo programme which promotes activities from acrossthe city

415 Milton Keynes

Milton Keynes consciously draws on its history of innovative urban planning andtechnology deployment in stating the aim of becoming the UKrsquos lsquoleading digital cityrsquo(Milton Keynes Council 2012 10) with an lsquounambiguous objective backed with

10 R Cowley et al

integrated city planning to reduce its carbon footprint with an energy-efficient high-techknowledgersquo (3) Although its 2012 Feasibility Study did not win funding it has sincelaunched a lsquoFuture Cityrsquo programme clearly framed by the goals of citizen co-creationand environmental improvements

Although universities typically play prominent partnership roles in other UK smartcity initiatives Milton Keynes is unusual in that the Open University is the dominantactor This may be one reason why the MK Smart programme strongly emphasisescitizen engagement as an end in itself rather than ndash as is more the case in London andPeterborough ndash a source of entrepreneurial ideas

416 Peterborough

The smart activities taking place under the lsquoPeterborough DNArsquo programme finally areclearly shaped by a green growth strategy Peterborough aims to become the lsquoSustainabilityCapital of the UKrsquo and as such lsquothat ldquocapitalrdquo will be exploited to the maximum to ensurethat it delivers true economic prosperity and well-being through job creation and theintegration of employment skills and innovationrsquo (Peterborough City Council 2012 4)The lsquofundamental goalrsquo of its smart activities is one of lsquogrowth innovation and sustain-abilityrsquo (Peterborough City Council 2014 4)

As a runner-up in the TSB competition Peterborough was awarded pound3m While its moreexpensive proposals including significant investment in the transport system were notfunded the four strands of its lsquoDNArsquo programme are similar to those proposed in its 2012Feasibility Study lsquosmart businessrsquo lsquoliving datarsquo lsquoskillsrsquo and lsquoinnovationrsquo In accordancewith the strong economic focus of the programme Peterborough DNA is led collaborativelyby the council and the Local Economic Partnership lsquoOpportunity Peterboroughrsquo

42 The four modalities of publicness and their associated forms of assemblage

Despite the variety suggested above some pertinent observations can be made about bothcommon tendencies and significant differences in the types of publicness invoked by thevarious smart city initatives across the six cities As noted we distinguish four modalities ofpublicness each of which correlates broadly with particular forms of assemblage

421 Service-user publicness

What we term the lsquoservice userrsquomodality of publicness relates the consumption of everydayurban services when for example a person travels by public transport consumes water orelectricity or uses broadband infrastructure Smart technology offers the promise of poten-tially enhancing such public interactions with service providers by providing more accurateor lsquoreal-timersquo data for decision-making new possibilities for users to contribute to servicesthrough automated or voluntary feedback and new channels of accountability

By our assessment this modality was dominant in 25 of the 68 activities analysedmaking it the most common form of publicness across the six cities as a whole Examples ofrelevant activities include Milton Keynesrsquo smart parking initiatives the lsquoIntelligent StreetLightingrsquo and lsquoEnergy Efficiency Demonstratorrsquo pilots in Glasgow and ManchesterrsquoslsquoTriangulumrsquo project which aims to reduce energy use and improve local transport Mosttypically such initiatives are characterised by relatively direct local council involvementThe issues addressed vary depending on the type of infrastructure in question but transport

Urban Research amp Practice 11

congestion resource consumption carbon emissions and digital inclusion are repeatedlymentioned in the documentation A commonality then is a normative framing in which thegoal of improved efficiency is highlighted

Service user-oriented smart city projects are most typically associated with two types ofspatiality The first relates to the traditional materiality of systems operating across the citydigital technology serves to improve the functional efficiency of these existing systemsWhile then the new technology may have clear spatial effects (eg in reworking trafficflows or recalibrating energy distribution) the spatialised phenomena to be rendered moreefficient are already present

Crucially this is the most passive of the four modalities identified The public ispositioned as part of the cityrsquos routine functionality rather than assigned lsquoco-creationalrsquoagency This then does not radically depart from the traditional relationship of the public toinfrastructural services Of course the provision of improved services does not contradict aclaim to being lsquocitizen-centricrsquo or lsquoputting people firstrsquo its conceptualisation neither deniesnor acknowledges that publicness may be assembled otherwise

422 Entrepreneurial publicness

If lsquoservice userrsquo publicness implies a relatively compliant reactive collectivity a more activelsquoentrepreneurialrsquo sense of the public is conjured up in other activities which enrol citizensinto co-creating and innovating in the smart arena This resonates with findings elsewhereidentifying a strong entrepreneurial governance mode at work in smart cities (eg Hollands2015 Wiig 2015) The entrepreneurial modality relates less to the everyday functioning ofthe city and more to the expectation that residents will be involved in creating services andeconomic value Rather than addressing particular thematic issues it is framed by an unmetneed to harness the economic and service-related possibilities afforded by new digitaltechnologies and big data We identified this modality as dominant for 19 of the 68 activitiesconsidered

Examples of related initiatives include the lsquohackathonrsquo events in several cities the lsquoTechLondonersrsquo initiative (aiming to bring lsquoLondonersrsquo and entrepreneurs together to co-createdigital solutions to predefined problems) Peterboroughrsquos lsquoInnovationWeekrsquoworkshops andlsquoBrainwave Innovation Portalrsquo and Manchesterrsquos Digital Laboratory (lsquoMadLabrsquo) whichencouraged local residents to find solutions to social problems through lsquoco-creative human-centric and user-driven research development and innovationrsquo (Ruijsink and Smith 2016 4)Bristolrsquos lsquoIoTMeshrsquo scheme will lsquoopen-up the test-bed to a wide range of Internet-of-Things(IoT) developers In doing so Bristol Is Open will enable companies to perfect their newtechnology solutions for everything from smart rubbish bins to connected streetlamps and awide range of IoTsensorsrsquo (Bristol is Open 2016b) The various lsquoopen datarsquo initiatives acrossthe cities serve directly to allow members of the public to make connections between thedatasets provided (and with their own data if they wish) Public involvement in suchactivities is often explicitly incentivised by commercial possibilities and no clear conceptualdistinction is evident between the public sphere and the market Glasgowrsquos lsquoOpen DataCataloguersquo for example promises to lsquoempower everybody (the public voluntary academicprivate sectors and communities) to harness [data] use it and combine it in new ways Wecan all contribute to making Glasgow a better place to live work and playrsquo (Future CityGlasgow 2016b)

In some cases such as hackathon events the practices associated with this entrepre-neurialism take place in traditional fora or make fairly conventional uses of internet sites (as

12 R Cowley et al

in the case of Tech Londoners) But a more distinctively lsquosmartrsquo spatiality may sometimes beobserved in the various attempts to add a lsquodigital layerrsquo to the city creating what might betermed a ubiquitous network of connectivity The digital infrastructure projects within theBristol is Open programme exemplify this spatiality particularly well in a literal sense theywill add a layer of digital connectivity to the city centre The lsquoWireless Milersquo for exampleaims at the creation of a lsquoheterogeneous technology environmentrsquo (Bristol is Open 2016c 1)which integrates differently formatted wifi signals such that lsquocomplex multi-layered net-works of overlapping big and small cells supply smartphones tablets cars drones and evenbuildings with a huge amount of cheap connectivityrsquo (Bristol is Open 2016d2) The variousopen data initiatives also fall into this category insofar as they enable datasets about existingservices and amenities to be linked together

Again this invocation of entrepreneurial public agency sits comfortably with claims thatpeople are being put at the centre of smart city development it explicitly invites publiccontributions to the ongoing forms that this will take However like the service-usermodality it says little about the more democratic dimensions of publicness A more roundedsense of lsquocitizenshiprsquo as traditionally conceived encompasses not only lsquosocial rightsrsquo (ieaccess to services) but also lsquopolitical rightsrsquo (contributing to decision-making processes) andlsquocivilrsquo ones (relating to freedom of speech) (Isin and Ruppert 2015) Accordingly we furtherpropose and distinguish between a lsquopoliticalrsquo and a lsquocivicrsquo modality of publicness

423 Political publicness

We use the label lsquopoliticalrsquo here in the narrow sense of public involvement in decision-making and deliberation through institutional channels or through novel extensions of theseExamples include the lsquoTalk Londonrsquo online platform which hosts a mixture of surveysblogs and discussion boards promoting itself as a lsquoplace to discuss Londonrsquos big issuesrsquo(Talk London 2016) and Bristolrsquos lsquoDemocratreersquo app which encouraged residents to nomi-nate and vote on suitable locations for planting new trees (While the latter was not initiateddirectly by the council it nevertheless provided a direct means for residents to influenceofficial decisions on resource allocation) If there is a commonality in the issues addressedthrough such activities it relates to a perceived lack of participation ndash often with certainsocial groups in mind ndash in local decision-making

Overall this is by far the least commonmodality of publicness invoked it is dominant inonly three of the 68 activities considered This is perhaps surprising given that the potentialfor digital technologies to reinvigorate democratic deliberation and decision-making hasbeen enthusiastically envisioned and debated since the 1990s (Isin and Ruppert 2015) Thelack of experimentation in this respect may partly be explained by the marginality of smartcity activities to traditional policy-making processes

The uses of online fora (as in the case of the Talk London initiative) or voting apps(Democratree) clearly depart from traditional modes of political deliberation ndash for exampleface-to-face settings ndash and yet nevertheless describe rather conventional uses of the internetHowever there are too few examples in the set of activities analysed for us to drawconclusions about the types of spatialities or spatial effects associated with this modalityof publicness

We highlight the paucity of political publicness specifically because strategy documentsmake repeated claims that citizen engagement is vital to the successful implementation of thesmart city and that related initiatives will enable wider citizen engagement with decision-making processes Its absence points more to a situation in which the smart city not only

Urban Research amp Practice 13

operates at the margins of normal institutional processes but might even be criticallyinterpreted as seeking to bypass them ndash a possibility raised by Shearmur (2016) in recountinghow delegates at a technology conference imagined the public sector as merely an obstacle tosmart city implementation

424 Civic publicness

Decision-making mediated through official processes only captures part of a cityrsquos politicallife and may tend to frame issues in certain ways for the purposes of voting or other forms ofdeliberation We therefore distinguish the lsquopoliticalrsquo from a rather less structured lsquocivicrsquomodality of publicness which loosely maps onto a traditional sense of the broader lsquopublicspherersquo In other words it inheres in those activities taking place in spaces beyond stateinstitutions but which are not directly oriented towards market activity A local councilrsquosinvolvement in such activities is necessarily more at armrsquos length it may enable or merelyapprove of such activities in its own promotional documents The types of issues shaping itsassemblage should then emerge lsquofrom belowrsquo Equally however this modality of public-ness may be more immediately associated with leisure activities or lsquoplayfulnessrsquo ndash suchactivities in public space may constitute a performative type of claim making within thebroader democratic process (see eg Hou 2010 Parkinson 2012) The invocation of civicpublicness is far from uncommon across the six cities considered here on a par with theentrepreneurial it is dominant for 21 of the 68 activities (and the most common modality inLondon)

Examples include the lsquoCommunity Wellnessrsquo strand of Manchesterrsquos lsquoCityVerversquo pro-ject aiming to encourage schoolchildren and commuters to take exercise in parks BristolrsquoslsquoMyKWrsquo community social media platform the lsquoBristol Approach to Citizen Sensingrsquo andlsquoPlayable Cityrsquo initiatives Glasgowrsquos lsquoActive Travelrsquo demonstrator initiative insofar as itencouraged cyclists to share data and experiences of cycling in the city and Londonrsquos lsquoSpeedVolunteeringrsquo app which seeks to put those wishing to volunteer in touch with peopleseeking help

We discern two distinctive spatialities as characteristic of assemblages of civic public-ness First relevant initiatives are often constituted by the goal of manifesting the virtualdigital in traditional (physical) public space Peterborough for example has planned a largelsquoOpenCityrsquo digital screen in the city centre Bristolrsquos lsquoPlayable Citiesrsquo competition has beenrunning annually since 2013 to fund temporary artistic installations in the city centre Theproject also taking place elsewhere internationally aims to put lsquopeople and play at the heartof the future city Through interaction and creative installations it unlocks a socialdialogue bringing the citizens into a city development conversationrsquo (Watershed 2016)Examples have included the 2013 winner Hello Lamp Post which allowed members of thepublic to have text message conversations with various items of street furniture andUrbanimals in 2015 in which digitally projected animals would appear unexpectedly acrossthe city and interact with the public (Watershed 2016) Manchesterrsquos lsquoCityVerversquo Internet ofThings demonstrator project mentioned above plans to install lsquotalkative bus stopsrsquo and alsquoCommunity Wellnessrsquo sensor network in parks along school and commuter routes toencourage exercise (UK Government 2015)

The second characteristic spatiality of civic publicness relates to varied attempts toreclaim the digital sphere from the private sector The idea of lsquoreclamationrsquo may not beexplicit in the documentation but such initiatives are typically driven by civil society actorsand aim variously to empower citizens to use and have a presence through new digital urban

14 R Cowley et al

technologies Manchesterrsquos lsquoLiving Labrsquo programme (whose current status is unclearfollowing the disbandment of the Manchester Digital Development Authority) includedthe development of an interactive local news and information web portal featuring contentcreated by residents The lsquoManchester Digital Laboratoryrsquo describes itself as a lsquograssrootsinnovation organisationrsquo (MadLab 2016a) which organises various events and digital train-ing courses with a core mission to allow the general public to lsquohelp people to make thingsbetter togetherrsquo through lsquoexperimentationrsquo lsquoplayrsquo and lsquofunrsquo and the promotion of craftman-ship (MadLab 2016b) In Bristol a local social networking site (first trialled as lsquoMyKWrsquo inthe Knowle West district) has been extended to the city as a whole (as lsquoMyBristolrsquo) Theplanned lsquoBristol Approach to Citizen Sensingrsquo initiative meanwhile mentioned above mostexplicitly displays the aim of reconfiguring virtual space in this way in its vision of a lsquoco-created city commonsrsquo which lsquosupports the deployment of new or adapted technologies intoeveryday environmentsrsquo (KWMC 2016 1)

425 Summary of relative prominence of different modalities of publicness

Table 2 summarises the relative prominence of the four modalities of publicness in eachcity and across all six cities

Analysing these data too closely would potentially yield spurious findings for severalreasons our six cities were not chosen to yield a somehow statistically representative sampleof activities for the purposes of quantitative research the coding of their modalities involvedsome subjective judgement and all activities are equally weighted regardless of scale timeperiod budget and policy significance These reservations aside the findings provide anindicative overview of the variations in the publicness assembled in these six leading citiesand in this spirit two broad observations are ventured

First the relative prominence of the four modalities differs considerably by city In thissense again lsquosmart publicnessrsquo is evidently not determined by globally circulating dis-courses but at least partly reflects its immediate governance and policy context The relativeabsence of entrepreneurial publicness in Glasgow for example communicates the councilrsquossole responsibility for delivering activities In Bristol the dominant entrepreneurial and civicmodalities chime with an overall strategic goal of expanding the knowledge economy bytapping into a strong tradition of grass-roots innovation The lack of service-user publicnessin Peterborough reflects the limited funding available for hard infrastructural projects theemphasis on entrepreneurial and civic publicness evinces the shared responsibility of thecityrsquos economic development agency and the council in managing the Peterborough DNAprogramme Londonrsquos relatively weak service use focus differently confirms the GLArsquos roleas steering and advisory actor rather than as funder of large-scale material interventions Thecity-level assemblages in Manchester and Milton Keynes display similarity in their strongoverall service-use sense of publicness and relatively weak civic modality While civicpublicness may come to the fore in Manchester in future given Corridor Manchesterrsquos statedlsquoplace-makingrsquo goals (Corridor Manchester 2015 24ndash25) its current relative absenceimplies a lack of active engagement on the part of the general public Milton Keynes isperhaps more surprising in this respect given its clear strategic claim to be civically engagedIts relatively weak civic publicness underlines the opportunistic nature of smart urbanactivities those coming to be implemented or funded may reflect strategic goals unevenlysmart policy documents themselves carry relatively little weight in the urban developmentprocess

Urban Research amp Practice 15

Table

2Relativeprom

inence

ofdominantmodalitiesof

publicness

insm

artcity

activities

across

sixUK

cities

Dom

inantmodality

Bristol

Glasgow

London

Manchester

MiltonKeynes

Peterborough

Allactivities

Meanfor6cities

Service

User

1457

1156

530

3732

Entrepreneurial

367

3333

2460

2832

Political

140

110

00

44

Civic

3636

4411

2440

3132

(Total

no

ofactivities)

(14)

(14)

(9)

(9)

(17)

(5)

(68)

16 R Cowley et al

Second the proportion of initiatives oriented towards civic publicness is not insig-nificant these account for approximately a third of all the activities examined On thisbasis it would be oversimplistic to dismiss the claims that the lsquoactually existingrsquocontemporary UK smart city pays only lip service to the importance of public claim-making Nevertheless this embrace of the democratic process does not extend to theprovision of significant opportunities for citizens to engage directly with the formalpolitical system in innovative ways In itself the absence of envisaged political public-ness does not undermine the possibility of more traditional public engagement withgovernmental institutions elsewhere yet the smart city does not provide channels for thedirect expression of public contestation or more radical forms of dissent

In this sense the smart city may appear to be aligned with broader depoliticising or lsquopost-politicalrsquo tendencies in governance generally and urban planning specifically (Swyngedouw2007 2011 Allmendinger and Haughton 2012 Joss 2015) In a post-political reading itsassemblage across UK cities would reflect the nature of its conceptual underpinnings thesmart city can only lsquocommand agreement as a result of [its] broadly progressive if non-specific framingrsquo (Allmendinger and Haughton 2012 94) and is therefore lsquounable to arouseconflicts among political ideasrsquo (Crivello 2015 919) Alternatively following Newman andClarke (2009) it illustrates the apparent paradox of the decline of the traditional lsquopublicrsquobeing accompanied by its simultaneous proliferation as a fragmented mulitiplicity politicalpublicness may be assembling elsewhere but is not associated with the intended role of thesmart city in the United Kingdom

426 Obduracy

Political publicness aside our findings have at least provided convincing evidence that UKsmart city initiatives are guided by a genuine desire to encourage civic engagement ofvarious kinds Even here however a more nuanced picture emerges when the relativeobduracy of individual activities is factored in Based on the available information weflagged each of the 68 activities as either lsquopermanentrsquo (to indicate ongoing operation orpresence in the city) or lsquotemporaryrsquo (to indicate a one-off or time-limited activity) As Table 3shows civic (and political) activities tend to be less permanent in nature than those invokingentrepreneurial and service-user publicness

In an important sense the relatively temporary nature of activities oriented towardspolitical and civic publicness is unsurprising particularly when contrasted with the service-user modality which is more often associated ndash as discussed above ndash with lsquohardrsquo infra-structural interventions The consequences of such activities may be long-lasting even whenthe activity itself is short-lived Nevertheless these findings fall short of convincinglyheralding a situation in which citizenship is prioritised as the central ongoing concern ofthe UK smart city

Table 3 Obduracy of smart city activities invoking each modality of publicness

Dominant modalityPermanent

Temporary

Base (number of activities)

Service-user 76 24 (25)Entrepreneurial 58 42 (19)Political 33 67 (3)Civic 48 52 (21)

Urban Research amp Practice 17

Significantly furthermore a degree of bifurcation is evident in the overall techno-publicassemblages such that civic and political publicness are sidelined within less obduratestrands of programmatic activity In Glasgow the enduring legacy of the lsquoFuture Cityrsquoprogramme is most visible in the service-user-oriented Operation Centre However manyof its other activities characterised by a more interactive and participatory mode of publicengagement were one-off events As lsquodemonstrator projectsrsquo they served in principle to helpdefine rather than enact the smart city ndash but there is little evidence that this more temporarystrand of the lsquoFuture Cityrsquo programme has subsequently been embedded in mainstreammunicipal activities In Bristol too a clear bifurcation is evident On one side the lsquoBristol isOpenrsquo improvements to the cityrsquos digital infrastructure and the lsquoOpen Data Bristolrsquo initiative(all of which might be expected to be relatively durable) invoke primarily entrepreneurialpublicness On the other the Connecting Bristol partnership promotes diverse lsquosofterrsquo civicand political activities led by grass-roots organisations which exhibit rather less obduracy assmall-scale pilot schemes or activities with limited public participation Evidently then lesscommitment and resources are available for experiments in the field of citizenship under-stood in more traditional liberal democratic ways than in those which conjure up a passive orentrepreneurial public

5 Discussion

Our reading of the smart city consciously departs from critical presentations of the smart cityas a lsquotop-downrsquo imposition and towards a foregrounding and more nuanced appreciation ofits practical variety But the observation that this variety is skewed towards the assemblage ofservice-user and entrepreneurial senses of the public does not constitute a straightforwardlyuseful critique of its current local manifestations The focus on service-user publicness atleast is unsurprising to the extent that local authorities are arguably seen by default asprimarily service providers To observe that civic and political publicness by way ofcontrast are less well considered and often only tokenistically accommodated is not tomake the normative case that these should necessarily or could realistically be privileged inlocal techno-public smart assemblages Rather the prevalence of this more passive modalityof publicness becomes significant when set against rhetorical claims that the smart city iseffecting transformational lsquocitizen-centricrsquo change

The dominance of service-user publicness does little to counter a broader trend identifiedby Powell (2014 15) towards lsquoa shift in the notion of citizenship away from civicresponsibilities and engagements to classifying [citizens] as consumers who purchaseservices from providersrsquo Although Powellrsquos discussion relates to the role of digitised datamore generally it is clearly relevant to the smart cityrsquos focus on providing greater efficien-cies Insofar as the lsquorelationship between government individuals and corporate entitiesrsquo (15)is viewed through the lens of the lsquocitizen as consumerrsquo its quality is only improved by theefficiencies which datafication enables Citizenship in this narrow sense is not related toaltruism or responsibilities but rather based on a principle of exchange and enacted throughlsquocollecting and sharing personal datarsquo (15) Drawing on Dean (2005) Powell highlights therisk that lsquothe norms of publicity ndash information communication and participation ndash havecome to stand for the political ends that they were presumed to serversquo (Powell 2014 16) Thisperspective raises various questions about many of the goals of UK smart city initiatives inrelation to the broader dimensions of citizenship For example the aim of lsquodigital inclusionrsquocommonly asserted among these six cases may appear laudable and yet it pushes the deeperpurpose of digital inclusion into the background smart connectivity itself becomes the goal

18 R Cowley et al

Similarly ideals of lsquotransparent governancersquo or lsquoopen datarsquo may end up being fetishisedwithin a discourse of efficiency even though this discourse tells us little about the normativebasis of the relationship between the public and the state beyond its passive lsquoservice-userrsquomodality

Although again our analysis opposes the existence of a deterministic link betweenglobal smart discourse and local practices the focus on efficiency of different types(including resource use provision of services and access to information) clearly resonateswith Whitersquos (2016) identification of an international discursive storyline in which the smartcity responds to lsquoresource pressures brought on by rapid urbanization and an ageing popula-tion the effects of anthropogenic global climate change and the twinned pressure of fiscalausterity and inter-urban competitionrsquo (577) We would at least suggest that the narrative ofthe lsquoage of crisisrsquo which accompanies much of the contemporary envisionment of futurecities (Caprotti 2015) has had a shaping influence on the prominence given to efficientservice provision in smart activities implemented to date

Equally given the broader UK policy context it would seem eccentric for local autho-rities to discourage entrepreneurialism On the immediate pragmatic level of funding andresources it must be significant that the governmentrsquos Department for Business Skills andInnovation has played a significant catalytic role smart city initiatives have not emergedunder the auspices of say the Department for Communities and Local Government But theprominence of entrepreneurial publicness raises a separate set of concerns echoing Dattarsquos(2015) diagnosis ndash albeit with reference to the rather different context of the Indian city ofDholera ndash of the smart city promoting lsquourbanization as a business model rather than a modelof social justicersquo Across our UK cases issues of social sustainability are far from absent inpolicy documents but their range tends to be limited for example focusing on health ande-inclusion or educating residents to participate in the digital economy In Glasgow suchquestions are subsumed within overall questions of efficiency and relate to very specificfactors such as public safety and reporting problems with services Milton Keynes claimsconsiderable interest in citizen co-creation but its initiatives are not primarily aimed attargeting social problems Although Peterboroughrsquos 2012 Feasibility Study prominentlyflagged up inequalities social cohesion and health improvements among other issues(Peterborough City Council 2012 3) its current strategy is addressed towards developingskills which lsquomeet local business demandrsquo and lsquoput Peterboroughrsquo in lsquothe best possibleposition to take advantage of emerging marketsrsquo (Peterborough City Council 2014 5)

One final way in which the lsquocitizen-centricrsquo nature of the UK smart city is questionablerelates to an apparent straightforward lack of public interest On one level this simplyreminds us of the peripherality of the smart city many of the associated activities only claimto be small-scale experimental trials and are not deeply embedded into the mainstream policyprocess While the actual numbers of local residents involved with many civic and politicalschemes are often negligible we found no convincing evidence either of broader enthusiasmor emergent public counter-discourse in any city4 While emergent political or civic con-testation is clearly not something which local authorities might lsquoplanrsquo for ndash it would beabsurd to expect local authorities to devise problems for frustrated publics to assemblearound ndash its absence does not provide evidence of acquiescence or approval or guarantee thesmooth passage of smart technology into urban life more broadly in future It more obviouslyreflects the survey evidence suggesting that general public awareness of any lsquosmartrsquo plans oractivities undertaken by local councils is neglible (Arqiva 2015) and that only one in five UKadults even recognises the term smart city (IET 2016)

Urban Research amp Practice 19

6 Conclusions towards a new lsquosmart urban publicnessrsquo

In studying and comparing a series of relatively well-developed smart city programmes aslsquotechno-public assemblagesrsquo we have responded to a series of policy claims made about therelationships between smart urban technologies and the public Our analysis reveals that thepublicness envisaged and enacted in the UK smart city is far from one-dimensional Citizensare not merely absent as the earlier critiques of the smart city would have it nor do smart cityactivities necessarily invoke a particular stunted notion of publicness in all cases Rather thegreat variety of types of publicness in evidence leads us to conclude that the rhetorical claimsabout the smart city being citizen-centric are not straightforwardly empty ones Rather thanagreeing with the speculative critiques of the smart city as a devious attempt to exclude thepublic we would urge commentators to begin from the assumption that its institutionalprotagonists do have a vested interest in questions of democracy

That said it also seems fair to conclude that the smart does not yet evince a convincinglyrounded sense of the lsquopublic cityrsquo The opportunistic nature of smart city development inother words gives rise to unique local forms but simultaneously holds these hostage tobroader societal and economic agendas the forms of their assemblage have remained shapedby immediate policy contexts and broader smart city policy discourse Thinking in terms ofits experimental shifting and peripheral assemblage in practice nevertheless opens upagentive space for actors involved to influence smart development in ways which moreconvincingly invoke a more rounded sense of publicness and in turn enable a moreconvincing sense of public ownership and enthusiasm

For more fully public smart city assemblages to emerge in future the civic and politicalmay need to be more obviously accommodated within the service-user and entrepreneurialThis need not relate to heavy-handed attempts to co-opt the civic which risk neutralising itsinnovative potential but the civic should at least not be siloed into more ephemeral strands ofactivity A lack of civic engagement with large infrastructural projects for example seemsunlikely to be successfully mitigated by a series of parallel participatory events which passunnoticed by most residents Similarly entrepreneurial activities are to be welcomed whichare more obviously oriented towards finding solutions to problems defined by citizensalongside those oriented at the creation of wealth through hi-tech innovations The possibi-lities for smart city technology to enable or engender more formal political participationfurthermore appear to have remained largely unexplored in practical terms

If only because the lsquoactually existingrsquo smart city is still at an experimental stage ofdevelopment we note that it has effected only marginal reconfigurations of the materialspaces of the city to date Nevertheless looking forward we urge researchers and practi-tioners to pay attention to the distinctive spatialities of the lsquosmart publicrsquo particularly in theinterfaces between public and private space and between virtual space and the traditionalmaterial public realm There is considerable scope in this regard to reverse the tendencyidentified by Kinsley (2013) to assign the digital to a parallel disembodied lsquohyperspacersquorather our understandings might more fruitfully be grounded in the relationships betweenhumans and technology in local contexts For policy-makers and practitioners activelyseeking a more widespread and involved sense of public debate around and engagementwith the implications of smart technology it may be rewarding to focus on the visibility ofnew innovations This may involve moving towards a more active consideration of themultiple roles of public space and more imaginatively using smart technologies to moveaway from more traditional fora as spaces of public engagement

Overall we resist from concluding that contemporary UK smart initiatives alreadyconstitute a qualitatively novel recasting of the public In relying on dominant political

20 R Cowley et al

structures and economic actors they have come to promote incremental change at best bothin terms of publicness and the material space of the city But assessing the long-termimpacts of smart innovations on urban space will be an ongoing project indeed the conceptlsquosmartrsquo itself may in future lose currency as a label or be reworked as a signifier In themeantime insofar as the smart city is indicative of broader contemporary attempts to shapeurban change in a time of austerity its lsquoexperimentalrsquo nature may appear rather moreproblematically reflective of a bypassing of the traditional democratic process And if wetoo may be allowed to propose a dystopian scenario it is one where in spite of the bestintentions of policy-makers the dominant norms of emerging smart city practices becomesedimented into novel twenty-first century institutional processes whose pragmatic world-view does not extend beyond that of a society of entrepreneurs and service users

AcknowledgementsThis study was undertaken at the University of Westminster with financial support from ESRC grantESL0159781 Youri Dayot was Visiting Fellow from the University of Grenoble

Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors

FundingThis study was undertaken at the University of Westminster as part of the ESRC-funded projectlsquoSmart Eco-cities for a Green Economy a Comparative Study of Europe and Chinarsquo (grant ESL0159781)

Notes1 The two terms (lsquosmart cityrsquo lsquofuture cityrsquo) are complementary and often used interchangeably

especially in the UK national policy context (see eg BSI 2014 3 also Joss Cook andDayot forthcoming) It is beyond the scope of this paper to delve into the conceptualinterrelationship of these recent policy terms in more detail

2 A fuller list of the key documents and links to relevant web pages consulted has been madepublicly available on the lead authorrsquos ResearchGate web pages httpswwwresearchgatenetprofileRobert_Cowley

3 More detailed descriptions of many of the individual activities and bodies analysed in thepresent research may be found in the lsquogrey literaturersquo (see eg Caprotti et al 2016 Woodset al 2016)

4 With the exception of some concerns in Glasgow about the use of facial recognition softwarein the cityrsquos CCTV system linked to the Operation Centre (Sunday Herald 2014 Aitchinson2015)

ReferencesAitchinson J 2015 ldquoShould We Be Worried about Glasgowrsquos New Hi-Tech Surveillance Systemrdquo

STV News February 23 httpglasgowstvtvarticles310713-glasgows-new-surveillance-installed-by-israeli-firm-nice-systems

Allmendinger P and G Haughton 2012 ldquoPost-Political Spatial Planning in England A Crisis ofConsensusrdquo Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37 (1) 89ndash103 doi101111j1475-5661201100468x

Arqiva 2015 ldquoAre Cities Really Getting Smarterrdquo httpswwwarqivacomnewspress-releasesare-our-cities-really-getting-smarter

Urban Research amp Practice 21

Table

1Sum

maryof

smartcity

policy

documentsandinitiativesanalysed

insixUK

cities

Bristol

Glasgow

London(G

LA)

Key

PolicyDocuments

SmartCityBristol

(2011)

Connect

Bristol

Feasibility

Study

(2012)

Key

PolicyDocuments

Glasgow

CityManagem

entSystem

(2012)

OpenManifesto

ndashPrinciples(2013)

CityTechnologyPlatform

(2013)

Key

PolicyDocuments

LinkedLondon(2012)

SmartLondonPlan(2013)

The

Futureof

Smart(2013)

DataforLondon

ACityStrategyforLondon(2016)

Program

me

organisation

Activities(yearlaunched

ortook

place)

Program

me

organisation

Activities(yearlaunched

ortook

place)

Program

me

organisation

Activities(yearlaunched

ortook

place)

CityCouncil

GigabitBristol

(2012)

FutureCityGlasgow

OpenGlasgow

(2013)

Glasgow

Operation

Centre(2013)

MyGlasgow

(2013)

IntelligentStreetLighting(2013)

Dashboards(2013)

ActiveTravel(2013)

Hacking

theFuture(2013)

Com

munityMapping

(2014)

FutureMakers(2014)

OpenDataCatalogue

(2013)

LinkedMapping

(2013)

Energy(2013)

SocialTransport(2013)

EngagingtheCity(2013)

Citizen

Engagem

ent(2014)

LinkedLondon

SmartParkQueen

Elizabeth

Park

(2014)

Bristol

IsOpen

DataDom

e(2015)

IoTMesh(2016)

WirelessMile(2016)

SoftwareDefined

Network

Control

(2016)

SmartLondon

Board

LondonDatastore

(2010)

SmartLondonDistrictsNetwork

(2014)

SmartLondonInfrastructure

Network

(2015)

TalkLondon(2015)

Civic

Crowdfunding

(2015)

Infrastructure

Mapping

Application

(2015)

TechLondonersPeopleSolving

City

Challenges(2016)

Speed

Volunteering(2016)

ConnectingBristol

OpenDataBristol

(2010)

Media

Sandbox

2010

B-O

pen

Strand(2010)

PlayableCitiesAward(2013)

Dem

ocratree

(2014)

MyKnowle

WestMyBristol

(2014)

YouDecide(2015)

Healthy

Office(2016)

REPLICATE(2016)

Knowle

West

Media

Centre

Bristol

Approachto

Citizen

Sensing

(planned)

6 R Cowley et al

Manchester

MiltonKeynes

Peterborough

Key

PolicyDocuments

Digital

Strategy(2008)

Digital

Manchester(2012)

ManchesterFutureCity(2012)

SmarterCityProgram

me(2016)

Key

PolicyDocuments

Future-Ready

MK

(2012)

MK

SmartAWater

strategy

forMiltonKeynes

(2016)

Key

PolicyDocuments

PeterboroughDNA

(2012)

Deliveringatrulysm

artcity

(2014)

Program

meorganisation

Activities(yearlaunched

ortook

place)

Program

me

organisation

Activities(yearlaunched

ortook

place)

Program

me

organisation

Activities(yearlaunched

ortook

place)

ManchesterDigital

Develop

mentAgency

ManchesterLivingLab

(2006)

MKSmart

MK

DataHub

(2016)

Our

MK

(2015)

GardenMonitor

(planned)

Water

Monitor

(2016)

Water

measurementschool

kits

(2014)

SmartMeters(2015)

ApexSuite

business

engagement

programme(2015)

MK

Hackathon

(2016)

MotionMap

(2015)

SmartParking

(2015)

OpenEnergyMap

(2016)

Electricity

Dem

andShifting

(2013)

SmartGridDynam

icDem

and

Response(2014)

SmartLighting(2014)

Peterborough

DNA

BrainwavePortal(2014)

OpenC

ityScreen(planned)

Hackathon

(2014)

Innovation

Week(2014)

LivingDataPortal(2015)

CorridorManchester

Triangulum

(2015)

CityV

erve

(2016)

SmarterCityProgram

me

ManchesterDigital

Laboratory(M

adLab)

(2009)

DIM

MER(2013)

MiGuide

(2013)

Central

Library

Digital

Dem

onstrator(2014)

IntelligentLighting(2015)

Greater

ManchesterData

Synchronisation

Program

me

DataG

M(2011)

Transport

Systems

Catapult

Imagined

FestivalIntelligent

MobilityHackathon

(2016)

Feasibility

Study

for2012

FutureCitiesDem

onstratorCom

petition

Urban Research amp Practice 7

involved and (4) the variegated spatiality produced And second to identify the dominantmodality of publicness thus invoked service user entrepreneurial political or civic (asdiscussed in the previous section)

By taking into account the linkages between individual activities and the wider policylandscape a profile of each smart city assemblage as a whole was built up For the purposesof triangulation the results were aggregated following separate initial analyses and jointlyreviewed by the three authors Finally a transversal analysis was conducted across the sixcities in order to identify common patterns as well as divergent practices

Basing the analysis on detailed evidence has allowed for some of the variety acrossparticular locations to be captured in partial response to Kitchinrsquos (2015) call to movebeyond critiques of the lsquoplace-lessrsquo corporate and governmental promotional literature Ourresponse is a partial one since given the emergent nature of much smart city activity even inthese six locations the research neither investigates practices of implementation in depth norprovides a long-term perspective on the smart cityrsquos impact on the lived experience of thecity The aim rather has been to investigate the outcomes of the processes whereby thelsquoplace-lessrsquo smart city has been translated into locally specific projects through the lens ofthe documentation surrounding these

The high-level findings reported below relate to our conclusions about the relativeprominence of different modalities of publicness Although the discussion is illustratedwith particular examples of activity space does not permit a thorough presentation of thedetailed elements of the six assemblages3 Any of these elements can itself be seen as atechno-public assemblage and the analytical framework is offered as a tool for otherswishing to explore the public dimensions of current and future smart city activities at agranular level

4 Findings

41 The smart city in six municipal contexts initial findings and observations

It is worth noting first that the policy documents analysed generally operate at the peripheryof traditional urban planning frameworks local authorities are not formally obliged toinclude smart city principles within statutory planning processes Instead these policiesare often championed by overarching strategy boards economic development agencies andsimilar municipal bodies As such they typically seek to promote cohesive socio-economicinnovation policy to a range of actors both internally and externally for the purpose ofleveraging inward investment Thus they will have been shaped by their imagined receptionby varied audiences (Freeman and Maybin 2011 163ndash164) rather than by the specificintention that they should serve as traditional planning tools The varying status of thisdocumentation is significantly reflective of the often opportunistic nature of smart cityactivity but also points to the often complicated governance arrangements in placeImportantly then the relationship between the policy documents and activities shown inTable 1 is not consistent across the six cities For Glasgow which presents itself as havingrelatively straightforward governance arrangements there is clear linearity between the plansoutlined in its 2012 Feasibility Study and the resulting initiatives At the other end of thespectrum Manchesterrsquos recent Smarter City Programme for example essentially collates aseries of activities already planned or taking place

The activities themselves range from small-scale pilot scheme to major infrastructuralprojects from interventions into specific spatially bounded areas to initiatives operating invirtual space city-wide from lsquotop-downrsquo technological innovations to grass-roots

8 R Cowley et al

community activities and from one-off events to ongoing activities and services alreadywell-embedded into the urban fabric Despite the identification in the academic literaturethen of broad commonalities in variously conceived smart city lsquoimaginariesrsquo its manifesta-tions on the ground in the United Kingdom defy simple categorisation at first sight

The policy documents also display noticeable city-specific inflections in their narrativeframings reflecting the local contextual factors through which the translation of smart citydiscourse into practical activity has been mediated To provide some background for themain analysis an overview of the key framing principles in each cityrsquos policy documents isprovided below along with the varied governance structures that have emerged in dynamicrelationship with both the policy documents and the activities themselves Such differences ndashas will be discussed ndash help to explain some of the forms that local assemblages take withimplications in turn for the nature of the publicness invoked

411 Bristol

Bristolrsquos stated overall smart city goals are to expand the cityrsquos knowledge economy in a waywhich furthers its image as a pioneer in environmental sustainability and a centre of grass-roots innovation Its 2012 Feasibility Study (Bristol City Council 2012) broadened the remitof the earlier Smart City Bristol report (Bristol City Council 2011) which focused largely oncarbon emissions and transport issues to develop a narrative of enabling environmentallyand socially sustainable growth at a time of economic expansion in recognition of the cityrsquossignificant health and wealth inequalities

The council is one actor among many in Bristolrsquos current smart city activities which arenot orchestrated by an overarching policy document Nevertheless the dual focus of its 2012Feasibility Study which proposed a mixture of lsquohardrsquo infrastructure and a parallel pro-gramme of citizen engagement resembles the two-stranded nature of what has emerged inpractice The first strand delivering digital infrastructure is coordinated by the lsquoBristol isOpenrsquo partnership between the council and the University of Bristol with support from otherprivate public and charitable organisations The second collates various activities mostlyrelated to citizen and SME engagement within the lsquoConnecting Bristolrsquo initiative Here thecouncilrsquos role is more lsquohands-offrsquo specific activities are typically directly led by socialenterprises such as the Knowle West Media Centre

412 Glasgow

As the overall winner of the Future Cities Demonstrator competition in 2012 Glasgow wasawarded pound24m to implement its Feasibility Study proposals Approximately half the award(Davies 2014) was spent on a smart Operations Centre fully operational since 2014 whichmonitors real-time transport and public safety data Meanwhile a spread of smaller initia-tives took place many of which were participatory and interactive and were concluded (asproject deliverables) by the end of the TSB grant period

Glasgow City Council clearly positions itself as the key driving force behind theseactivities the initiative is characterised by the absence of publicised collaborative partner-ship This may reflect the terms of the TSB award positioning the City Council as the singlecontractor and requiring rapid project implementation within the two-year schedule Equallyit upholds the principle asserted in the Feasibility Study that lsquosmart cities are led from the topby a strong and visionary championrsquo (Glasgow City Council 2012 5) Either way the

Urban Research amp Practice 9

councilrsquos centrality appears to have left Glasgowrsquos official smart city activities in a state ofsuspension following the end of funding

413 London

Londonrsquos foray into smart city innovation is explicitly linked to the opportunities andchallenges facing the UKrsquos capital as a global city the smart city discourse deployedforms an integral part of the overarching narrative of London striving for continuous growthand consolidating its position as a leading international city (Mayor of London 2013 see alsoNESTA 2015) The lsquoSmart Londonrsquo initiative is primarily directed at forging a newcollaborative and entrepreneurial mode of governance in the service of sustaining economicgrowth to meet expected population growth The Greater London Authority (GLA) andparticularly the office of the Mayor of London is positioned at the centre of a wide range ofactivities It has co-opted a number of public and private actors including leading research-ers tech companies and larger utilities mainly through the Smart London Board andindividual project partnerships In promoting a co-creative governance mode for smart cityinnovation the GLArsquos role is more to lsquosteerrsquo than to direct outcomes

414 Manchester

Manchester is building on a legacy of digital innovations having published digitalstrategies in 2008 and 2012 and previously established a Digital DevelopmentAgency (MDDA) in 2003 (which was disbanded in 2015) Its 2012 FeasibilityStudy framed its smart aspirations as potentially consolidating recent successesincluding strong hi-tech industries infrastructural investments and repopulation ofthe urban core The lsquoDefining visionrsquo of Manchester was presented as lsquothe birthplaceof the industrial revolution re-inventing itself as a model of twenty-first centuryldquogreen growthrdquorsquo (Manchester City Council 2012 8) The Feasibility Study wastaken as a starting point for an ongoing programme of smart activities in theOxford Road Corridor (Manchester City Council 2013) running 2 km south fromthe city centre Corridor Manchester established as an incorporated body in 2007(CAICT and PDSF 2014 131) hopes that the district will continue to attract lsquoknowl-edge workersrsquo to become lsquoone of the top five innovation districts in Europersquo(Corridor Manchester 2015 4) achieving lsquolocal and global recognition as a placethat is original creative and smart where knowledge is put to workrsquo (4)

Its smart city activities exhibit a particularly networked style of governance withthe council just one of a series of actors allied in varying combinations ndash mostnoticeably the cityrsquos universities and large hospitals local engineering and hi-techfirms Transport for Greater Manchester and grass-roots digital organisation FutureEverything However the council appears to have reclaimed a more central rolethrough its 2016 lsquoSmarter Cityrsquo programme which promotes activities from acrossthe city

415 Milton Keynes

Milton Keynes consciously draws on its history of innovative urban planning andtechnology deployment in stating the aim of becoming the UKrsquos lsquoleading digital cityrsquo(Milton Keynes Council 2012 10) with an lsquounambiguous objective backed with

10 R Cowley et al

integrated city planning to reduce its carbon footprint with an energy-efficient high-techknowledgersquo (3) Although its 2012 Feasibility Study did not win funding it has sincelaunched a lsquoFuture Cityrsquo programme clearly framed by the goals of citizen co-creationand environmental improvements

Although universities typically play prominent partnership roles in other UK smartcity initiatives Milton Keynes is unusual in that the Open University is the dominantactor This may be one reason why the MK Smart programme strongly emphasisescitizen engagement as an end in itself rather than ndash as is more the case in London andPeterborough ndash a source of entrepreneurial ideas

416 Peterborough

The smart activities taking place under the lsquoPeterborough DNArsquo programme finally areclearly shaped by a green growth strategy Peterborough aims to become the lsquoSustainabilityCapital of the UKrsquo and as such lsquothat ldquocapitalrdquo will be exploited to the maximum to ensurethat it delivers true economic prosperity and well-being through job creation and theintegration of employment skills and innovationrsquo (Peterborough City Council 2012 4)The lsquofundamental goalrsquo of its smart activities is one of lsquogrowth innovation and sustain-abilityrsquo (Peterborough City Council 2014 4)

As a runner-up in the TSB competition Peterborough was awarded pound3m While its moreexpensive proposals including significant investment in the transport system were notfunded the four strands of its lsquoDNArsquo programme are similar to those proposed in its 2012Feasibility Study lsquosmart businessrsquo lsquoliving datarsquo lsquoskillsrsquo and lsquoinnovationrsquo In accordancewith the strong economic focus of the programme Peterborough DNA is led collaborativelyby the council and the Local Economic Partnership lsquoOpportunity Peterboroughrsquo

42 The four modalities of publicness and their associated forms of assemblage

Despite the variety suggested above some pertinent observations can be made about bothcommon tendencies and significant differences in the types of publicness invoked by thevarious smart city initatives across the six cities As noted we distinguish four modalities ofpublicness each of which correlates broadly with particular forms of assemblage

421 Service-user publicness

What we term the lsquoservice userrsquomodality of publicness relates the consumption of everydayurban services when for example a person travels by public transport consumes water orelectricity or uses broadband infrastructure Smart technology offers the promise of poten-tially enhancing such public interactions with service providers by providing more accurateor lsquoreal-timersquo data for decision-making new possibilities for users to contribute to servicesthrough automated or voluntary feedback and new channels of accountability

By our assessment this modality was dominant in 25 of the 68 activities analysedmaking it the most common form of publicness across the six cities as a whole Examples ofrelevant activities include Milton Keynesrsquo smart parking initiatives the lsquoIntelligent StreetLightingrsquo and lsquoEnergy Efficiency Demonstratorrsquo pilots in Glasgow and ManchesterrsquoslsquoTriangulumrsquo project which aims to reduce energy use and improve local transport Mosttypically such initiatives are characterised by relatively direct local council involvementThe issues addressed vary depending on the type of infrastructure in question but transport

Urban Research amp Practice 11

congestion resource consumption carbon emissions and digital inclusion are repeatedlymentioned in the documentation A commonality then is a normative framing in which thegoal of improved efficiency is highlighted

Service user-oriented smart city projects are most typically associated with two types ofspatiality The first relates to the traditional materiality of systems operating across the citydigital technology serves to improve the functional efficiency of these existing systemsWhile then the new technology may have clear spatial effects (eg in reworking trafficflows or recalibrating energy distribution) the spatialised phenomena to be rendered moreefficient are already present

Crucially this is the most passive of the four modalities identified The public ispositioned as part of the cityrsquos routine functionality rather than assigned lsquoco-creationalrsquoagency This then does not radically depart from the traditional relationship of the public toinfrastructural services Of course the provision of improved services does not contradict aclaim to being lsquocitizen-centricrsquo or lsquoputting people firstrsquo its conceptualisation neither deniesnor acknowledges that publicness may be assembled otherwise

422 Entrepreneurial publicness

If lsquoservice userrsquo publicness implies a relatively compliant reactive collectivity a more activelsquoentrepreneurialrsquo sense of the public is conjured up in other activities which enrol citizensinto co-creating and innovating in the smart arena This resonates with findings elsewhereidentifying a strong entrepreneurial governance mode at work in smart cities (eg Hollands2015 Wiig 2015) The entrepreneurial modality relates less to the everyday functioning ofthe city and more to the expectation that residents will be involved in creating services andeconomic value Rather than addressing particular thematic issues it is framed by an unmetneed to harness the economic and service-related possibilities afforded by new digitaltechnologies and big data We identified this modality as dominant for 19 of the 68 activitiesconsidered

Examples of related initiatives include the lsquohackathonrsquo events in several cities the lsquoTechLondonersrsquo initiative (aiming to bring lsquoLondonersrsquo and entrepreneurs together to co-createdigital solutions to predefined problems) Peterboroughrsquos lsquoInnovationWeekrsquoworkshops andlsquoBrainwave Innovation Portalrsquo and Manchesterrsquos Digital Laboratory (lsquoMadLabrsquo) whichencouraged local residents to find solutions to social problems through lsquoco-creative human-centric and user-driven research development and innovationrsquo (Ruijsink and Smith 2016 4)Bristolrsquos lsquoIoTMeshrsquo scheme will lsquoopen-up the test-bed to a wide range of Internet-of-Things(IoT) developers In doing so Bristol Is Open will enable companies to perfect their newtechnology solutions for everything from smart rubbish bins to connected streetlamps and awide range of IoTsensorsrsquo (Bristol is Open 2016b) The various lsquoopen datarsquo initiatives acrossthe cities serve directly to allow members of the public to make connections between thedatasets provided (and with their own data if they wish) Public involvement in suchactivities is often explicitly incentivised by commercial possibilities and no clear conceptualdistinction is evident between the public sphere and the market Glasgowrsquos lsquoOpen DataCataloguersquo for example promises to lsquoempower everybody (the public voluntary academicprivate sectors and communities) to harness [data] use it and combine it in new ways Wecan all contribute to making Glasgow a better place to live work and playrsquo (Future CityGlasgow 2016b)

In some cases such as hackathon events the practices associated with this entrepre-neurialism take place in traditional fora or make fairly conventional uses of internet sites (as

12 R Cowley et al

in the case of Tech Londoners) But a more distinctively lsquosmartrsquo spatiality may sometimes beobserved in the various attempts to add a lsquodigital layerrsquo to the city creating what might betermed a ubiquitous network of connectivity The digital infrastructure projects within theBristol is Open programme exemplify this spatiality particularly well in a literal sense theywill add a layer of digital connectivity to the city centre The lsquoWireless Milersquo for exampleaims at the creation of a lsquoheterogeneous technology environmentrsquo (Bristol is Open 2016c 1)which integrates differently formatted wifi signals such that lsquocomplex multi-layered net-works of overlapping big and small cells supply smartphones tablets cars drones and evenbuildings with a huge amount of cheap connectivityrsquo (Bristol is Open 2016d2) The variousopen data initiatives also fall into this category insofar as they enable datasets about existingservices and amenities to be linked together

Again this invocation of entrepreneurial public agency sits comfortably with claims thatpeople are being put at the centre of smart city development it explicitly invites publiccontributions to the ongoing forms that this will take However like the service-usermodality it says little about the more democratic dimensions of publicness A more roundedsense of lsquocitizenshiprsquo as traditionally conceived encompasses not only lsquosocial rightsrsquo (ieaccess to services) but also lsquopolitical rightsrsquo (contributing to decision-making processes) andlsquocivilrsquo ones (relating to freedom of speech) (Isin and Ruppert 2015) Accordingly we furtherpropose and distinguish between a lsquopoliticalrsquo and a lsquocivicrsquo modality of publicness

423 Political publicness

We use the label lsquopoliticalrsquo here in the narrow sense of public involvement in decision-making and deliberation through institutional channels or through novel extensions of theseExamples include the lsquoTalk Londonrsquo online platform which hosts a mixture of surveysblogs and discussion boards promoting itself as a lsquoplace to discuss Londonrsquos big issuesrsquo(Talk London 2016) and Bristolrsquos lsquoDemocratreersquo app which encouraged residents to nomi-nate and vote on suitable locations for planting new trees (While the latter was not initiateddirectly by the council it nevertheless provided a direct means for residents to influenceofficial decisions on resource allocation) If there is a commonality in the issues addressedthrough such activities it relates to a perceived lack of participation ndash often with certainsocial groups in mind ndash in local decision-making

Overall this is by far the least commonmodality of publicness invoked it is dominant inonly three of the 68 activities considered This is perhaps surprising given that the potentialfor digital technologies to reinvigorate democratic deliberation and decision-making hasbeen enthusiastically envisioned and debated since the 1990s (Isin and Ruppert 2015) Thelack of experimentation in this respect may partly be explained by the marginality of smartcity activities to traditional policy-making processes

The uses of online fora (as in the case of the Talk London initiative) or voting apps(Democratree) clearly depart from traditional modes of political deliberation ndash for exampleface-to-face settings ndash and yet nevertheless describe rather conventional uses of the internetHowever there are too few examples in the set of activities analysed for us to drawconclusions about the types of spatialities or spatial effects associated with this modalityof publicness

We highlight the paucity of political publicness specifically because strategy documentsmake repeated claims that citizen engagement is vital to the successful implementation of thesmart city and that related initiatives will enable wider citizen engagement with decision-making processes Its absence points more to a situation in which the smart city not only

Urban Research amp Practice 13

operates at the margins of normal institutional processes but might even be criticallyinterpreted as seeking to bypass them ndash a possibility raised by Shearmur (2016) in recountinghow delegates at a technology conference imagined the public sector as merely an obstacle tosmart city implementation

424 Civic publicness

Decision-making mediated through official processes only captures part of a cityrsquos politicallife and may tend to frame issues in certain ways for the purposes of voting or other forms ofdeliberation We therefore distinguish the lsquopoliticalrsquo from a rather less structured lsquocivicrsquomodality of publicness which loosely maps onto a traditional sense of the broader lsquopublicspherersquo In other words it inheres in those activities taking place in spaces beyond stateinstitutions but which are not directly oriented towards market activity A local councilrsquosinvolvement in such activities is necessarily more at armrsquos length it may enable or merelyapprove of such activities in its own promotional documents The types of issues shaping itsassemblage should then emerge lsquofrom belowrsquo Equally however this modality of public-ness may be more immediately associated with leisure activities or lsquoplayfulnessrsquo ndash suchactivities in public space may constitute a performative type of claim making within thebroader democratic process (see eg Hou 2010 Parkinson 2012) The invocation of civicpublicness is far from uncommon across the six cities considered here on a par with theentrepreneurial it is dominant for 21 of the 68 activities (and the most common modality inLondon)

Examples include the lsquoCommunity Wellnessrsquo strand of Manchesterrsquos lsquoCityVerversquo pro-ject aiming to encourage schoolchildren and commuters to take exercise in parks BristolrsquoslsquoMyKWrsquo community social media platform the lsquoBristol Approach to Citizen Sensingrsquo andlsquoPlayable Cityrsquo initiatives Glasgowrsquos lsquoActive Travelrsquo demonstrator initiative insofar as itencouraged cyclists to share data and experiences of cycling in the city and Londonrsquos lsquoSpeedVolunteeringrsquo app which seeks to put those wishing to volunteer in touch with peopleseeking help

We discern two distinctive spatialities as characteristic of assemblages of civic public-ness First relevant initiatives are often constituted by the goal of manifesting the virtualdigital in traditional (physical) public space Peterborough for example has planned a largelsquoOpenCityrsquo digital screen in the city centre Bristolrsquos lsquoPlayable Citiesrsquo competition has beenrunning annually since 2013 to fund temporary artistic installations in the city centre Theproject also taking place elsewhere internationally aims to put lsquopeople and play at the heartof the future city Through interaction and creative installations it unlocks a socialdialogue bringing the citizens into a city development conversationrsquo (Watershed 2016)Examples have included the 2013 winner Hello Lamp Post which allowed members of thepublic to have text message conversations with various items of street furniture andUrbanimals in 2015 in which digitally projected animals would appear unexpectedly acrossthe city and interact with the public (Watershed 2016) Manchesterrsquos lsquoCityVerversquo Internet ofThings demonstrator project mentioned above plans to install lsquotalkative bus stopsrsquo and alsquoCommunity Wellnessrsquo sensor network in parks along school and commuter routes toencourage exercise (UK Government 2015)

The second characteristic spatiality of civic publicness relates to varied attempts toreclaim the digital sphere from the private sector The idea of lsquoreclamationrsquo may not beexplicit in the documentation but such initiatives are typically driven by civil society actorsand aim variously to empower citizens to use and have a presence through new digital urban

14 R Cowley et al

technologies Manchesterrsquos lsquoLiving Labrsquo programme (whose current status is unclearfollowing the disbandment of the Manchester Digital Development Authority) includedthe development of an interactive local news and information web portal featuring contentcreated by residents The lsquoManchester Digital Laboratoryrsquo describes itself as a lsquograssrootsinnovation organisationrsquo (MadLab 2016a) which organises various events and digital train-ing courses with a core mission to allow the general public to lsquohelp people to make thingsbetter togetherrsquo through lsquoexperimentationrsquo lsquoplayrsquo and lsquofunrsquo and the promotion of craftman-ship (MadLab 2016b) In Bristol a local social networking site (first trialled as lsquoMyKWrsquo inthe Knowle West district) has been extended to the city as a whole (as lsquoMyBristolrsquo) Theplanned lsquoBristol Approach to Citizen Sensingrsquo initiative meanwhile mentioned above mostexplicitly displays the aim of reconfiguring virtual space in this way in its vision of a lsquoco-created city commonsrsquo which lsquosupports the deployment of new or adapted technologies intoeveryday environmentsrsquo (KWMC 2016 1)

425 Summary of relative prominence of different modalities of publicness

Table 2 summarises the relative prominence of the four modalities of publicness in eachcity and across all six cities

Analysing these data too closely would potentially yield spurious findings for severalreasons our six cities were not chosen to yield a somehow statistically representative sampleof activities for the purposes of quantitative research the coding of their modalities involvedsome subjective judgement and all activities are equally weighted regardless of scale timeperiod budget and policy significance These reservations aside the findings provide anindicative overview of the variations in the publicness assembled in these six leading citiesand in this spirit two broad observations are ventured

First the relative prominence of the four modalities differs considerably by city In thissense again lsquosmart publicnessrsquo is evidently not determined by globally circulating dis-courses but at least partly reflects its immediate governance and policy context The relativeabsence of entrepreneurial publicness in Glasgow for example communicates the councilrsquossole responsibility for delivering activities In Bristol the dominant entrepreneurial and civicmodalities chime with an overall strategic goal of expanding the knowledge economy bytapping into a strong tradition of grass-roots innovation The lack of service-user publicnessin Peterborough reflects the limited funding available for hard infrastructural projects theemphasis on entrepreneurial and civic publicness evinces the shared responsibility of thecityrsquos economic development agency and the council in managing the Peterborough DNAprogramme Londonrsquos relatively weak service use focus differently confirms the GLArsquos roleas steering and advisory actor rather than as funder of large-scale material interventions Thecity-level assemblages in Manchester and Milton Keynes display similarity in their strongoverall service-use sense of publicness and relatively weak civic modality While civicpublicness may come to the fore in Manchester in future given Corridor Manchesterrsquos statedlsquoplace-makingrsquo goals (Corridor Manchester 2015 24ndash25) its current relative absenceimplies a lack of active engagement on the part of the general public Milton Keynes isperhaps more surprising in this respect given its clear strategic claim to be civically engagedIts relatively weak civic publicness underlines the opportunistic nature of smart urbanactivities those coming to be implemented or funded may reflect strategic goals unevenlysmart policy documents themselves carry relatively little weight in the urban developmentprocess

Urban Research amp Practice 15

Table

2Relativeprom

inence

ofdominantmodalitiesof

publicness

insm

artcity

activities

across

sixUK

cities

Dom

inantmodality

Bristol

Glasgow

London

Manchester

MiltonKeynes

Peterborough

Allactivities

Meanfor6cities

Service

User

1457

1156

530

3732

Entrepreneurial

367

3333

2460

2832

Political

140

110

00

44

Civic

3636

4411

2440

3132

(Total

no

ofactivities)

(14)

(14)

(9)

(9)

(17)

(5)

(68)

16 R Cowley et al

Second the proportion of initiatives oriented towards civic publicness is not insig-nificant these account for approximately a third of all the activities examined On thisbasis it would be oversimplistic to dismiss the claims that the lsquoactually existingrsquocontemporary UK smart city pays only lip service to the importance of public claim-making Nevertheless this embrace of the democratic process does not extend to theprovision of significant opportunities for citizens to engage directly with the formalpolitical system in innovative ways In itself the absence of envisaged political public-ness does not undermine the possibility of more traditional public engagement withgovernmental institutions elsewhere yet the smart city does not provide channels for thedirect expression of public contestation or more radical forms of dissent

In this sense the smart city may appear to be aligned with broader depoliticising or lsquopost-politicalrsquo tendencies in governance generally and urban planning specifically (Swyngedouw2007 2011 Allmendinger and Haughton 2012 Joss 2015) In a post-political reading itsassemblage across UK cities would reflect the nature of its conceptual underpinnings thesmart city can only lsquocommand agreement as a result of [its] broadly progressive if non-specific framingrsquo (Allmendinger and Haughton 2012 94) and is therefore lsquounable to arouseconflicts among political ideasrsquo (Crivello 2015 919) Alternatively following Newman andClarke (2009) it illustrates the apparent paradox of the decline of the traditional lsquopublicrsquobeing accompanied by its simultaneous proliferation as a fragmented mulitiplicity politicalpublicness may be assembling elsewhere but is not associated with the intended role of thesmart city in the United Kingdom

426 Obduracy

Political publicness aside our findings have at least provided convincing evidence that UKsmart city initiatives are guided by a genuine desire to encourage civic engagement ofvarious kinds Even here however a more nuanced picture emerges when the relativeobduracy of individual activities is factored in Based on the available information weflagged each of the 68 activities as either lsquopermanentrsquo (to indicate ongoing operation orpresence in the city) or lsquotemporaryrsquo (to indicate a one-off or time-limited activity) As Table 3shows civic (and political) activities tend to be less permanent in nature than those invokingentrepreneurial and service-user publicness

In an important sense the relatively temporary nature of activities oriented towardspolitical and civic publicness is unsurprising particularly when contrasted with the service-user modality which is more often associated ndash as discussed above ndash with lsquohardrsquo infra-structural interventions The consequences of such activities may be long-lasting even whenthe activity itself is short-lived Nevertheless these findings fall short of convincinglyheralding a situation in which citizenship is prioritised as the central ongoing concern ofthe UK smart city

Table 3 Obduracy of smart city activities invoking each modality of publicness

Dominant modalityPermanent

Temporary

Base (number of activities)

Service-user 76 24 (25)Entrepreneurial 58 42 (19)Political 33 67 (3)Civic 48 52 (21)

Urban Research amp Practice 17

Significantly furthermore a degree of bifurcation is evident in the overall techno-publicassemblages such that civic and political publicness are sidelined within less obduratestrands of programmatic activity In Glasgow the enduring legacy of the lsquoFuture Cityrsquoprogramme is most visible in the service-user-oriented Operation Centre However manyof its other activities characterised by a more interactive and participatory mode of publicengagement were one-off events As lsquodemonstrator projectsrsquo they served in principle to helpdefine rather than enact the smart city ndash but there is little evidence that this more temporarystrand of the lsquoFuture Cityrsquo programme has subsequently been embedded in mainstreammunicipal activities In Bristol too a clear bifurcation is evident On one side the lsquoBristol isOpenrsquo improvements to the cityrsquos digital infrastructure and the lsquoOpen Data Bristolrsquo initiative(all of which might be expected to be relatively durable) invoke primarily entrepreneurialpublicness On the other the Connecting Bristol partnership promotes diverse lsquosofterrsquo civicand political activities led by grass-roots organisations which exhibit rather less obduracy assmall-scale pilot schemes or activities with limited public participation Evidently then lesscommitment and resources are available for experiments in the field of citizenship under-stood in more traditional liberal democratic ways than in those which conjure up a passive orentrepreneurial public

5 Discussion

Our reading of the smart city consciously departs from critical presentations of the smart cityas a lsquotop-downrsquo imposition and towards a foregrounding and more nuanced appreciation ofits practical variety But the observation that this variety is skewed towards the assemblage ofservice-user and entrepreneurial senses of the public does not constitute a straightforwardlyuseful critique of its current local manifestations The focus on service-user publicness atleast is unsurprising to the extent that local authorities are arguably seen by default asprimarily service providers To observe that civic and political publicness by way ofcontrast are less well considered and often only tokenistically accommodated is not tomake the normative case that these should necessarily or could realistically be privileged inlocal techno-public smart assemblages Rather the prevalence of this more passive modalityof publicness becomes significant when set against rhetorical claims that the smart city iseffecting transformational lsquocitizen-centricrsquo change

The dominance of service-user publicness does little to counter a broader trend identifiedby Powell (2014 15) towards lsquoa shift in the notion of citizenship away from civicresponsibilities and engagements to classifying [citizens] as consumers who purchaseservices from providersrsquo Although Powellrsquos discussion relates to the role of digitised datamore generally it is clearly relevant to the smart cityrsquos focus on providing greater efficien-cies Insofar as the lsquorelationship between government individuals and corporate entitiesrsquo (15)is viewed through the lens of the lsquocitizen as consumerrsquo its quality is only improved by theefficiencies which datafication enables Citizenship in this narrow sense is not related toaltruism or responsibilities but rather based on a principle of exchange and enacted throughlsquocollecting and sharing personal datarsquo (15) Drawing on Dean (2005) Powell highlights therisk that lsquothe norms of publicity ndash information communication and participation ndash havecome to stand for the political ends that they were presumed to serversquo (Powell 2014 16) Thisperspective raises various questions about many of the goals of UK smart city initiatives inrelation to the broader dimensions of citizenship For example the aim of lsquodigital inclusionrsquocommonly asserted among these six cases may appear laudable and yet it pushes the deeperpurpose of digital inclusion into the background smart connectivity itself becomes the goal

18 R Cowley et al

Similarly ideals of lsquotransparent governancersquo or lsquoopen datarsquo may end up being fetishisedwithin a discourse of efficiency even though this discourse tells us little about the normativebasis of the relationship between the public and the state beyond its passive lsquoservice-userrsquomodality

Although again our analysis opposes the existence of a deterministic link betweenglobal smart discourse and local practices the focus on efficiency of different types(including resource use provision of services and access to information) clearly resonateswith Whitersquos (2016) identification of an international discursive storyline in which the smartcity responds to lsquoresource pressures brought on by rapid urbanization and an ageing popula-tion the effects of anthropogenic global climate change and the twinned pressure of fiscalausterity and inter-urban competitionrsquo (577) We would at least suggest that the narrative ofthe lsquoage of crisisrsquo which accompanies much of the contemporary envisionment of futurecities (Caprotti 2015) has had a shaping influence on the prominence given to efficientservice provision in smart activities implemented to date

Equally given the broader UK policy context it would seem eccentric for local autho-rities to discourage entrepreneurialism On the immediate pragmatic level of funding andresources it must be significant that the governmentrsquos Department for Business Skills andInnovation has played a significant catalytic role smart city initiatives have not emergedunder the auspices of say the Department for Communities and Local Government But theprominence of entrepreneurial publicness raises a separate set of concerns echoing Dattarsquos(2015) diagnosis ndash albeit with reference to the rather different context of the Indian city ofDholera ndash of the smart city promoting lsquourbanization as a business model rather than a modelof social justicersquo Across our UK cases issues of social sustainability are far from absent inpolicy documents but their range tends to be limited for example focusing on health ande-inclusion or educating residents to participate in the digital economy In Glasgow suchquestions are subsumed within overall questions of efficiency and relate to very specificfactors such as public safety and reporting problems with services Milton Keynes claimsconsiderable interest in citizen co-creation but its initiatives are not primarily aimed attargeting social problems Although Peterboroughrsquos 2012 Feasibility Study prominentlyflagged up inequalities social cohesion and health improvements among other issues(Peterborough City Council 2012 3) its current strategy is addressed towards developingskills which lsquomeet local business demandrsquo and lsquoput Peterboroughrsquo in lsquothe best possibleposition to take advantage of emerging marketsrsquo (Peterborough City Council 2014 5)

One final way in which the lsquocitizen-centricrsquo nature of the UK smart city is questionablerelates to an apparent straightforward lack of public interest On one level this simplyreminds us of the peripherality of the smart city many of the associated activities only claimto be small-scale experimental trials and are not deeply embedded into the mainstream policyprocess While the actual numbers of local residents involved with many civic and politicalschemes are often negligible we found no convincing evidence either of broader enthusiasmor emergent public counter-discourse in any city4 While emergent political or civic con-testation is clearly not something which local authorities might lsquoplanrsquo for ndash it would beabsurd to expect local authorities to devise problems for frustrated publics to assemblearound ndash its absence does not provide evidence of acquiescence or approval or guarantee thesmooth passage of smart technology into urban life more broadly in future It more obviouslyreflects the survey evidence suggesting that general public awareness of any lsquosmartrsquo plans oractivities undertaken by local councils is neglible (Arqiva 2015) and that only one in five UKadults even recognises the term smart city (IET 2016)

Urban Research amp Practice 19

6 Conclusions towards a new lsquosmart urban publicnessrsquo

In studying and comparing a series of relatively well-developed smart city programmes aslsquotechno-public assemblagesrsquo we have responded to a series of policy claims made about therelationships between smart urban technologies and the public Our analysis reveals that thepublicness envisaged and enacted in the UK smart city is far from one-dimensional Citizensare not merely absent as the earlier critiques of the smart city would have it nor do smart cityactivities necessarily invoke a particular stunted notion of publicness in all cases Rather thegreat variety of types of publicness in evidence leads us to conclude that the rhetorical claimsabout the smart city being citizen-centric are not straightforwardly empty ones Rather thanagreeing with the speculative critiques of the smart city as a devious attempt to exclude thepublic we would urge commentators to begin from the assumption that its institutionalprotagonists do have a vested interest in questions of democracy

That said it also seems fair to conclude that the smart does not yet evince a convincinglyrounded sense of the lsquopublic cityrsquo The opportunistic nature of smart city development inother words gives rise to unique local forms but simultaneously holds these hostage tobroader societal and economic agendas the forms of their assemblage have remained shapedby immediate policy contexts and broader smart city policy discourse Thinking in terms ofits experimental shifting and peripheral assemblage in practice nevertheless opens upagentive space for actors involved to influence smart development in ways which moreconvincingly invoke a more rounded sense of publicness and in turn enable a moreconvincing sense of public ownership and enthusiasm

For more fully public smart city assemblages to emerge in future the civic and politicalmay need to be more obviously accommodated within the service-user and entrepreneurialThis need not relate to heavy-handed attempts to co-opt the civic which risk neutralising itsinnovative potential but the civic should at least not be siloed into more ephemeral strands ofactivity A lack of civic engagement with large infrastructural projects for example seemsunlikely to be successfully mitigated by a series of parallel participatory events which passunnoticed by most residents Similarly entrepreneurial activities are to be welcomed whichare more obviously oriented towards finding solutions to problems defined by citizensalongside those oriented at the creation of wealth through hi-tech innovations The possibi-lities for smart city technology to enable or engender more formal political participationfurthermore appear to have remained largely unexplored in practical terms

If only because the lsquoactually existingrsquo smart city is still at an experimental stage ofdevelopment we note that it has effected only marginal reconfigurations of the materialspaces of the city to date Nevertheless looking forward we urge researchers and practi-tioners to pay attention to the distinctive spatialities of the lsquosmart publicrsquo particularly in theinterfaces between public and private space and between virtual space and the traditionalmaterial public realm There is considerable scope in this regard to reverse the tendencyidentified by Kinsley (2013) to assign the digital to a parallel disembodied lsquohyperspacersquorather our understandings might more fruitfully be grounded in the relationships betweenhumans and technology in local contexts For policy-makers and practitioners activelyseeking a more widespread and involved sense of public debate around and engagementwith the implications of smart technology it may be rewarding to focus on the visibility ofnew innovations This may involve moving towards a more active consideration of themultiple roles of public space and more imaginatively using smart technologies to moveaway from more traditional fora as spaces of public engagement

Overall we resist from concluding that contemporary UK smart initiatives alreadyconstitute a qualitatively novel recasting of the public In relying on dominant political

20 R Cowley et al

structures and economic actors they have come to promote incremental change at best bothin terms of publicness and the material space of the city But assessing the long-termimpacts of smart innovations on urban space will be an ongoing project indeed the conceptlsquosmartrsquo itself may in future lose currency as a label or be reworked as a signifier In themeantime insofar as the smart city is indicative of broader contemporary attempts to shapeurban change in a time of austerity its lsquoexperimentalrsquo nature may appear rather moreproblematically reflective of a bypassing of the traditional democratic process And if wetoo may be allowed to propose a dystopian scenario it is one where in spite of the bestintentions of policy-makers the dominant norms of emerging smart city practices becomesedimented into novel twenty-first century institutional processes whose pragmatic world-view does not extend beyond that of a society of entrepreneurs and service users

AcknowledgementsThis study was undertaken at the University of Westminster with financial support from ESRC grantESL0159781 Youri Dayot was Visiting Fellow from the University of Grenoble

Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors

FundingThis study was undertaken at the University of Westminster as part of the ESRC-funded projectlsquoSmart Eco-cities for a Green Economy a Comparative Study of Europe and Chinarsquo (grant ESL0159781)

Notes1 The two terms (lsquosmart cityrsquo lsquofuture cityrsquo) are complementary and often used interchangeably

especially in the UK national policy context (see eg BSI 2014 3 also Joss Cook andDayot forthcoming) It is beyond the scope of this paper to delve into the conceptualinterrelationship of these recent policy terms in more detail

2 A fuller list of the key documents and links to relevant web pages consulted has been madepublicly available on the lead authorrsquos ResearchGate web pages httpswwwresearchgatenetprofileRobert_Cowley

3 More detailed descriptions of many of the individual activities and bodies analysed in thepresent research may be found in the lsquogrey literaturersquo (see eg Caprotti et al 2016 Woodset al 2016)

4 With the exception of some concerns in Glasgow about the use of facial recognition softwarein the cityrsquos CCTV system linked to the Operation Centre (Sunday Herald 2014 Aitchinson2015)

ReferencesAitchinson J 2015 ldquoShould We Be Worried about Glasgowrsquos New Hi-Tech Surveillance Systemrdquo

STV News February 23 httpglasgowstvtvarticles310713-glasgows-new-surveillance-installed-by-israeli-firm-nice-systems

Allmendinger P and G Haughton 2012 ldquoPost-Political Spatial Planning in England A Crisis ofConsensusrdquo Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37 (1) 89ndash103 doi101111j1475-5661201100468x

Arqiva 2015 ldquoAre Cities Really Getting Smarterrdquo httpswwwarqivacomnewspress-releasesare-our-cities-really-getting-smarter

Urban Research amp Practice 21

Manchester

MiltonKeynes

Peterborough

Key

PolicyDocuments

Digital

Strategy(2008)

Digital

Manchester(2012)

ManchesterFutureCity(2012)

SmarterCityProgram

me(2016)

Key

PolicyDocuments

Future-Ready

MK

(2012)

MK

SmartAWater

strategy

forMiltonKeynes

(2016)

Key

PolicyDocuments

PeterboroughDNA

(2012)

Deliveringatrulysm

artcity

(2014)

Program

meorganisation

Activities(yearlaunched

ortook

place)

Program

me

organisation

Activities(yearlaunched

ortook

place)

Program

me

organisation

Activities(yearlaunched

ortook

place)

ManchesterDigital

Develop

mentAgency

ManchesterLivingLab

(2006)

MKSmart

MK

DataHub

(2016)

Our

MK

(2015)

GardenMonitor

(planned)

Water

Monitor

(2016)

Water

measurementschool

kits

(2014)

SmartMeters(2015)

ApexSuite

business

engagement

programme(2015)

MK

Hackathon

(2016)

MotionMap

(2015)

SmartParking

(2015)

OpenEnergyMap

(2016)

Electricity

Dem

andShifting

(2013)

SmartGridDynam

icDem

and

Response(2014)

SmartLighting(2014)

Peterborough

DNA

BrainwavePortal(2014)

OpenC

ityScreen(planned)

Hackathon

(2014)

Innovation

Week(2014)

LivingDataPortal(2015)

CorridorManchester

Triangulum

(2015)

CityV

erve

(2016)

SmarterCityProgram

me

ManchesterDigital

Laboratory(M

adLab)

(2009)

DIM

MER(2013)

MiGuide

(2013)

Central

Library

Digital

Dem

onstrator(2014)

IntelligentLighting(2015)

Greater

ManchesterData

Synchronisation

Program

me

DataG

M(2011)

Transport

Systems

Catapult

Imagined

FestivalIntelligent

MobilityHackathon

(2016)

Feasibility

Study

for2012

FutureCitiesDem

onstratorCom

petition

Urban Research amp Practice 7

involved and (4) the variegated spatiality produced And second to identify the dominantmodality of publicness thus invoked service user entrepreneurial political or civic (asdiscussed in the previous section)

By taking into account the linkages between individual activities and the wider policylandscape a profile of each smart city assemblage as a whole was built up For the purposesof triangulation the results were aggregated following separate initial analyses and jointlyreviewed by the three authors Finally a transversal analysis was conducted across the sixcities in order to identify common patterns as well as divergent practices

Basing the analysis on detailed evidence has allowed for some of the variety acrossparticular locations to be captured in partial response to Kitchinrsquos (2015) call to movebeyond critiques of the lsquoplace-lessrsquo corporate and governmental promotional literature Ourresponse is a partial one since given the emergent nature of much smart city activity even inthese six locations the research neither investigates practices of implementation in depth norprovides a long-term perspective on the smart cityrsquos impact on the lived experience of thecity The aim rather has been to investigate the outcomes of the processes whereby thelsquoplace-lessrsquo smart city has been translated into locally specific projects through the lens ofthe documentation surrounding these

The high-level findings reported below relate to our conclusions about the relativeprominence of different modalities of publicness Although the discussion is illustratedwith particular examples of activity space does not permit a thorough presentation of thedetailed elements of the six assemblages3 Any of these elements can itself be seen as atechno-public assemblage and the analytical framework is offered as a tool for otherswishing to explore the public dimensions of current and future smart city activities at agranular level

4 Findings

41 The smart city in six municipal contexts initial findings and observations

It is worth noting first that the policy documents analysed generally operate at the peripheryof traditional urban planning frameworks local authorities are not formally obliged toinclude smart city principles within statutory planning processes Instead these policiesare often championed by overarching strategy boards economic development agencies andsimilar municipal bodies As such they typically seek to promote cohesive socio-economicinnovation policy to a range of actors both internally and externally for the purpose ofleveraging inward investment Thus they will have been shaped by their imagined receptionby varied audiences (Freeman and Maybin 2011 163ndash164) rather than by the specificintention that they should serve as traditional planning tools The varying status of thisdocumentation is significantly reflective of the often opportunistic nature of smart cityactivity but also points to the often complicated governance arrangements in placeImportantly then the relationship between the policy documents and activities shown inTable 1 is not consistent across the six cities For Glasgow which presents itself as havingrelatively straightforward governance arrangements there is clear linearity between the plansoutlined in its 2012 Feasibility Study and the resulting initiatives At the other end of thespectrum Manchesterrsquos recent Smarter City Programme for example essentially collates aseries of activities already planned or taking place

The activities themselves range from small-scale pilot scheme to major infrastructuralprojects from interventions into specific spatially bounded areas to initiatives operating invirtual space city-wide from lsquotop-downrsquo technological innovations to grass-roots

8 R Cowley et al

community activities and from one-off events to ongoing activities and services alreadywell-embedded into the urban fabric Despite the identification in the academic literaturethen of broad commonalities in variously conceived smart city lsquoimaginariesrsquo its manifesta-tions on the ground in the United Kingdom defy simple categorisation at first sight

The policy documents also display noticeable city-specific inflections in their narrativeframings reflecting the local contextual factors through which the translation of smart citydiscourse into practical activity has been mediated To provide some background for themain analysis an overview of the key framing principles in each cityrsquos policy documents isprovided below along with the varied governance structures that have emerged in dynamicrelationship with both the policy documents and the activities themselves Such differences ndashas will be discussed ndash help to explain some of the forms that local assemblages take withimplications in turn for the nature of the publicness invoked

411 Bristol

Bristolrsquos stated overall smart city goals are to expand the cityrsquos knowledge economy in a waywhich furthers its image as a pioneer in environmental sustainability and a centre of grass-roots innovation Its 2012 Feasibility Study (Bristol City Council 2012) broadened the remitof the earlier Smart City Bristol report (Bristol City Council 2011) which focused largely oncarbon emissions and transport issues to develop a narrative of enabling environmentallyand socially sustainable growth at a time of economic expansion in recognition of the cityrsquossignificant health and wealth inequalities

The council is one actor among many in Bristolrsquos current smart city activities which arenot orchestrated by an overarching policy document Nevertheless the dual focus of its 2012Feasibility Study which proposed a mixture of lsquohardrsquo infrastructure and a parallel pro-gramme of citizen engagement resembles the two-stranded nature of what has emerged inpractice The first strand delivering digital infrastructure is coordinated by the lsquoBristol isOpenrsquo partnership between the council and the University of Bristol with support from otherprivate public and charitable organisations The second collates various activities mostlyrelated to citizen and SME engagement within the lsquoConnecting Bristolrsquo initiative Here thecouncilrsquos role is more lsquohands-offrsquo specific activities are typically directly led by socialenterprises such as the Knowle West Media Centre

412 Glasgow

As the overall winner of the Future Cities Demonstrator competition in 2012 Glasgow wasawarded pound24m to implement its Feasibility Study proposals Approximately half the award(Davies 2014) was spent on a smart Operations Centre fully operational since 2014 whichmonitors real-time transport and public safety data Meanwhile a spread of smaller initia-tives took place many of which were participatory and interactive and were concluded (asproject deliverables) by the end of the TSB grant period

Glasgow City Council clearly positions itself as the key driving force behind theseactivities the initiative is characterised by the absence of publicised collaborative partner-ship This may reflect the terms of the TSB award positioning the City Council as the singlecontractor and requiring rapid project implementation within the two-year schedule Equallyit upholds the principle asserted in the Feasibility Study that lsquosmart cities are led from the topby a strong and visionary championrsquo (Glasgow City Council 2012 5) Either way the

Urban Research amp Practice 9

councilrsquos centrality appears to have left Glasgowrsquos official smart city activities in a state ofsuspension following the end of funding

413 London

Londonrsquos foray into smart city innovation is explicitly linked to the opportunities andchallenges facing the UKrsquos capital as a global city the smart city discourse deployedforms an integral part of the overarching narrative of London striving for continuous growthand consolidating its position as a leading international city (Mayor of London 2013 see alsoNESTA 2015) The lsquoSmart Londonrsquo initiative is primarily directed at forging a newcollaborative and entrepreneurial mode of governance in the service of sustaining economicgrowth to meet expected population growth The Greater London Authority (GLA) andparticularly the office of the Mayor of London is positioned at the centre of a wide range ofactivities It has co-opted a number of public and private actors including leading research-ers tech companies and larger utilities mainly through the Smart London Board andindividual project partnerships In promoting a co-creative governance mode for smart cityinnovation the GLArsquos role is more to lsquosteerrsquo than to direct outcomes

414 Manchester

Manchester is building on a legacy of digital innovations having published digitalstrategies in 2008 and 2012 and previously established a Digital DevelopmentAgency (MDDA) in 2003 (which was disbanded in 2015) Its 2012 FeasibilityStudy framed its smart aspirations as potentially consolidating recent successesincluding strong hi-tech industries infrastructural investments and repopulation ofthe urban core The lsquoDefining visionrsquo of Manchester was presented as lsquothe birthplaceof the industrial revolution re-inventing itself as a model of twenty-first centuryldquogreen growthrdquorsquo (Manchester City Council 2012 8) The Feasibility Study wastaken as a starting point for an ongoing programme of smart activities in theOxford Road Corridor (Manchester City Council 2013) running 2 km south fromthe city centre Corridor Manchester established as an incorporated body in 2007(CAICT and PDSF 2014 131) hopes that the district will continue to attract lsquoknowl-edge workersrsquo to become lsquoone of the top five innovation districts in Europersquo(Corridor Manchester 2015 4) achieving lsquolocal and global recognition as a placethat is original creative and smart where knowledge is put to workrsquo (4)

Its smart city activities exhibit a particularly networked style of governance withthe council just one of a series of actors allied in varying combinations ndash mostnoticeably the cityrsquos universities and large hospitals local engineering and hi-techfirms Transport for Greater Manchester and grass-roots digital organisation FutureEverything However the council appears to have reclaimed a more central rolethrough its 2016 lsquoSmarter Cityrsquo programme which promotes activities from acrossthe city

415 Milton Keynes

Milton Keynes consciously draws on its history of innovative urban planning andtechnology deployment in stating the aim of becoming the UKrsquos lsquoleading digital cityrsquo(Milton Keynes Council 2012 10) with an lsquounambiguous objective backed with

10 R Cowley et al

integrated city planning to reduce its carbon footprint with an energy-efficient high-techknowledgersquo (3) Although its 2012 Feasibility Study did not win funding it has sincelaunched a lsquoFuture Cityrsquo programme clearly framed by the goals of citizen co-creationand environmental improvements

Although universities typically play prominent partnership roles in other UK smartcity initiatives Milton Keynes is unusual in that the Open University is the dominantactor This may be one reason why the MK Smart programme strongly emphasisescitizen engagement as an end in itself rather than ndash as is more the case in London andPeterborough ndash a source of entrepreneurial ideas

416 Peterborough

The smart activities taking place under the lsquoPeterborough DNArsquo programme finally areclearly shaped by a green growth strategy Peterborough aims to become the lsquoSustainabilityCapital of the UKrsquo and as such lsquothat ldquocapitalrdquo will be exploited to the maximum to ensurethat it delivers true economic prosperity and well-being through job creation and theintegration of employment skills and innovationrsquo (Peterborough City Council 2012 4)The lsquofundamental goalrsquo of its smart activities is one of lsquogrowth innovation and sustain-abilityrsquo (Peterborough City Council 2014 4)

As a runner-up in the TSB competition Peterborough was awarded pound3m While its moreexpensive proposals including significant investment in the transport system were notfunded the four strands of its lsquoDNArsquo programme are similar to those proposed in its 2012Feasibility Study lsquosmart businessrsquo lsquoliving datarsquo lsquoskillsrsquo and lsquoinnovationrsquo In accordancewith the strong economic focus of the programme Peterborough DNA is led collaborativelyby the council and the Local Economic Partnership lsquoOpportunity Peterboroughrsquo

42 The four modalities of publicness and their associated forms of assemblage

Despite the variety suggested above some pertinent observations can be made about bothcommon tendencies and significant differences in the types of publicness invoked by thevarious smart city initatives across the six cities As noted we distinguish four modalities ofpublicness each of which correlates broadly with particular forms of assemblage

421 Service-user publicness

What we term the lsquoservice userrsquomodality of publicness relates the consumption of everydayurban services when for example a person travels by public transport consumes water orelectricity or uses broadband infrastructure Smart technology offers the promise of poten-tially enhancing such public interactions with service providers by providing more accurateor lsquoreal-timersquo data for decision-making new possibilities for users to contribute to servicesthrough automated or voluntary feedback and new channels of accountability

By our assessment this modality was dominant in 25 of the 68 activities analysedmaking it the most common form of publicness across the six cities as a whole Examples ofrelevant activities include Milton Keynesrsquo smart parking initiatives the lsquoIntelligent StreetLightingrsquo and lsquoEnergy Efficiency Demonstratorrsquo pilots in Glasgow and ManchesterrsquoslsquoTriangulumrsquo project which aims to reduce energy use and improve local transport Mosttypically such initiatives are characterised by relatively direct local council involvementThe issues addressed vary depending on the type of infrastructure in question but transport

Urban Research amp Practice 11

congestion resource consumption carbon emissions and digital inclusion are repeatedlymentioned in the documentation A commonality then is a normative framing in which thegoal of improved efficiency is highlighted

Service user-oriented smart city projects are most typically associated with two types ofspatiality The first relates to the traditional materiality of systems operating across the citydigital technology serves to improve the functional efficiency of these existing systemsWhile then the new technology may have clear spatial effects (eg in reworking trafficflows or recalibrating energy distribution) the spatialised phenomena to be rendered moreefficient are already present

Crucially this is the most passive of the four modalities identified The public ispositioned as part of the cityrsquos routine functionality rather than assigned lsquoco-creationalrsquoagency This then does not radically depart from the traditional relationship of the public toinfrastructural services Of course the provision of improved services does not contradict aclaim to being lsquocitizen-centricrsquo or lsquoputting people firstrsquo its conceptualisation neither deniesnor acknowledges that publicness may be assembled otherwise

422 Entrepreneurial publicness

If lsquoservice userrsquo publicness implies a relatively compliant reactive collectivity a more activelsquoentrepreneurialrsquo sense of the public is conjured up in other activities which enrol citizensinto co-creating and innovating in the smart arena This resonates with findings elsewhereidentifying a strong entrepreneurial governance mode at work in smart cities (eg Hollands2015 Wiig 2015) The entrepreneurial modality relates less to the everyday functioning ofthe city and more to the expectation that residents will be involved in creating services andeconomic value Rather than addressing particular thematic issues it is framed by an unmetneed to harness the economic and service-related possibilities afforded by new digitaltechnologies and big data We identified this modality as dominant for 19 of the 68 activitiesconsidered

Examples of related initiatives include the lsquohackathonrsquo events in several cities the lsquoTechLondonersrsquo initiative (aiming to bring lsquoLondonersrsquo and entrepreneurs together to co-createdigital solutions to predefined problems) Peterboroughrsquos lsquoInnovationWeekrsquoworkshops andlsquoBrainwave Innovation Portalrsquo and Manchesterrsquos Digital Laboratory (lsquoMadLabrsquo) whichencouraged local residents to find solutions to social problems through lsquoco-creative human-centric and user-driven research development and innovationrsquo (Ruijsink and Smith 2016 4)Bristolrsquos lsquoIoTMeshrsquo scheme will lsquoopen-up the test-bed to a wide range of Internet-of-Things(IoT) developers In doing so Bristol Is Open will enable companies to perfect their newtechnology solutions for everything from smart rubbish bins to connected streetlamps and awide range of IoTsensorsrsquo (Bristol is Open 2016b) The various lsquoopen datarsquo initiatives acrossthe cities serve directly to allow members of the public to make connections between thedatasets provided (and with their own data if they wish) Public involvement in suchactivities is often explicitly incentivised by commercial possibilities and no clear conceptualdistinction is evident between the public sphere and the market Glasgowrsquos lsquoOpen DataCataloguersquo for example promises to lsquoempower everybody (the public voluntary academicprivate sectors and communities) to harness [data] use it and combine it in new ways Wecan all contribute to making Glasgow a better place to live work and playrsquo (Future CityGlasgow 2016b)

In some cases such as hackathon events the practices associated with this entrepre-neurialism take place in traditional fora or make fairly conventional uses of internet sites (as

12 R Cowley et al

in the case of Tech Londoners) But a more distinctively lsquosmartrsquo spatiality may sometimes beobserved in the various attempts to add a lsquodigital layerrsquo to the city creating what might betermed a ubiquitous network of connectivity The digital infrastructure projects within theBristol is Open programme exemplify this spatiality particularly well in a literal sense theywill add a layer of digital connectivity to the city centre The lsquoWireless Milersquo for exampleaims at the creation of a lsquoheterogeneous technology environmentrsquo (Bristol is Open 2016c 1)which integrates differently formatted wifi signals such that lsquocomplex multi-layered net-works of overlapping big and small cells supply smartphones tablets cars drones and evenbuildings with a huge amount of cheap connectivityrsquo (Bristol is Open 2016d2) The variousopen data initiatives also fall into this category insofar as they enable datasets about existingservices and amenities to be linked together

Again this invocation of entrepreneurial public agency sits comfortably with claims thatpeople are being put at the centre of smart city development it explicitly invites publiccontributions to the ongoing forms that this will take However like the service-usermodality it says little about the more democratic dimensions of publicness A more roundedsense of lsquocitizenshiprsquo as traditionally conceived encompasses not only lsquosocial rightsrsquo (ieaccess to services) but also lsquopolitical rightsrsquo (contributing to decision-making processes) andlsquocivilrsquo ones (relating to freedom of speech) (Isin and Ruppert 2015) Accordingly we furtherpropose and distinguish between a lsquopoliticalrsquo and a lsquocivicrsquo modality of publicness

423 Political publicness

We use the label lsquopoliticalrsquo here in the narrow sense of public involvement in decision-making and deliberation through institutional channels or through novel extensions of theseExamples include the lsquoTalk Londonrsquo online platform which hosts a mixture of surveysblogs and discussion boards promoting itself as a lsquoplace to discuss Londonrsquos big issuesrsquo(Talk London 2016) and Bristolrsquos lsquoDemocratreersquo app which encouraged residents to nomi-nate and vote on suitable locations for planting new trees (While the latter was not initiateddirectly by the council it nevertheless provided a direct means for residents to influenceofficial decisions on resource allocation) If there is a commonality in the issues addressedthrough such activities it relates to a perceived lack of participation ndash often with certainsocial groups in mind ndash in local decision-making

Overall this is by far the least commonmodality of publicness invoked it is dominant inonly three of the 68 activities considered This is perhaps surprising given that the potentialfor digital technologies to reinvigorate democratic deliberation and decision-making hasbeen enthusiastically envisioned and debated since the 1990s (Isin and Ruppert 2015) Thelack of experimentation in this respect may partly be explained by the marginality of smartcity activities to traditional policy-making processes

The uses of online fora (as in the case of the Talk London initiative) or voting apps(Democratree) clearly depart from traditional modes of political deliberation ndash for exampleface-to-face settings ndash and yet nevertheless describe rather conventional uses of the internetHowever there are too few examples in the set of activities analysed for us to drawconclusions about the types of spatialities or spatial effects associated with this modalityof publicness

We highlight the paucity of political publicness specifically because strategy documentsmake repeated claims that citizen engagement is vital to the successful implementation of thesmart city and that related initiatives will enable wider citizen engagement with decision-making processes Its absence points more to a situation in which the smart city not only

Urban Research amp Practice 13

operates at the margins of normal institutional processes but might even be criticallyinterpreted as seeking to bypass them ndash a possibility raised by Shearmur (2016) in recountinghow delegates at a technology conference imagined the public sector as merely an obstacle tosmart city implementation

424 Civic publicness

Decision-making mediated through official processes only captures part of a cityrsquos politicallife and may tend to frame issues in certain ways for the purposes of voting or other forms ofdeliberation We therefore distinguish the lsquopoliticalrsquo from a rather less structured lsquocivicrsquomodality of publicness which loosely maps onto a traditional sense of the broader lsquopublicspherersquo In other words it inheres in those activities taking place in spaces beyond stateinstitutions but which are not directly oriented towards market activity A local councilrsquosinvolvement in such activities is necessarily more at armrsquos length it may enable or merelyapprove of such activities in its own promotional documents The types of issues shaping itsassemblage should then emerge lsquofrom belowrsquo Equally however this modality of public-ness may be more immediately associated with leisure activities or lsquoplayfulnessrsquo ndash suchactivities in public space may constitute a performative type of claim making within thebroader democratic process (see eg Hou 2010 Parkinson 2012) The invocation of civicpublicness is far from uncommon across the six cities considered here on a par with theentrepreneurial it is dominant for 21 of the 68 activities (and the most common modality inLondon)

Examples include the lsquoCommunity Wellnessrsquo strand of Manchesterrsquos lsquoCityVerversquo pro-ject aiming to encourage schoolchildren and commuters to take exercise in parks BristolrsquoslsquoMyKWrsquo community social media platform the lsquoBristol Approach to Citizen Sensingrsquo andlsquoPlayable Cityrsquo initiatives Glasgowrsquos lsquoActive Travelrsquo demonstrator initiative insofar as itencouraged cyclists to share data and experiences of cycling in the city and Londonrsquos lsquoSpeedVolunteeringrsquo app which seeks to put those wishing to volunteer in touch with peopleseeking help

We discern two distinctive spatialities as characteristic of assemblages of civic public-ness First relevant initiatives are often constituted by the goal of manifesting the virtualdigital in traditional (physical) public space Peterborough for example has planned a largelsquoOpenCityrsquo digital screen in the city centre Bristolrsquos lsquoPlayable Citiesrsquo competition has beenrunning annually since 2013 to fund temporary artistic installations in the city centre Theproject also taking place elsewhere internationally aims to put lsquopeople and play at the heartof the future city Through interaction and creative installations it unlocks a socialdialogue bringing the citizens into a city development conversationrsquo (Watershed 2016)Examples have included the 2013 winner Hello Lamp Post which allowed members of thepublic to have text message conversations with various items of street furniture andUrbanimals in 2015 in which digitally projected animals would appear unexpectedly acrossthe city and interact with the public (Watershed 2016) Manchesterrsquos lsquoCityVerversquo Internet ofThings demonstrator project mentioned above plans to install lsquotalkative bus stopsrsquo and alsquoCommunity Wellnessrsquo sensor network in parks along school and commuter routes toencourage exercise (UK Government 2015)

The second characteristic spatiality of civic publicness relates to varied attempts toreclaim the digital sphere from the private sector The idea of lsquoreclamationrsquo may not beexplicit in the documentation but such initiatives are typically driven by civil society actorsand aim variously to empower citizens to use and have a presence through new digital urban

14 R Cowley et al

technologies Manchesterrsquos lsquoLiving Labrsquo programme (whose current status is unclearfollowing the disbandment of the Manchester Digital Development Authority) includedthe development of an interactive local news and information web portal featuring contentcreated by residents The lsquoManchester Digital Laboratoryrsquo describes itself as a lsquograssrootsinnovation organisationrsquo (MadLab 2016a) which organises various events and digital train-ing courses with a core mission to allow the general public to lsquohelp people to make thingsbetter togetherrsquo through lsquoexperimentationrsquo lsquoplayrsquo and lsquofunrsquo and the promotion of craftman-ship (MadLab 2016b) In Bristol a local social networking site (first trialled as lsquoMyKWrsquo inthe Knowle West district) has been extended to the city as a whole (as lsquoMyBristolrsquo) Theplanned lsquoBristol Approach to Citizen Sensingrsquo initiative meanwhile mentioned above mostexplicitly displays the aim of reconfiguring virtual space in this way in its vision of a lsquoco-created city commonsrsquo which lsquosupports the deployment of new or adapted technologies intoeveryday environmentsrsquo (KWMC 2016 1)

425 Summary of relative prominence of different modalities of publicness

Table 2 summarises the relative prominence of the four modalities of publicness in eachcity and across all six cities

Analysing these data too closely would potentially yield spurious findings for severalreasons our six cities were not chosen to yield a somehow statistically representative sampleof activities for the purposes of quantitative research the coding of their modalities involvedsome subjective judgement and all activities are equally weighted regardless of scale timeperiod budget and policy significance These reservations aside the findings provide anindicative overview of the variations in the publicness assembled in these six leading citiesand in this spirit two broad observations are ventured

First the relative prominence of the four modalities differs considerably by city In thissense again lsquosmart publicnessrsquo is evidently not determined by globally circulating dis-courses but at least partly reflects its immediate governance and policy context The relativeabsence of entrepreneurial publicness in Glasgow for example communicates the councilrsquossole responsibility for delivering activities In Bristol the dominant entrepreneurial and civicmodalities chime with an overall strategic goal of expanding the knowledge economy bytapping into a strong tradition of grass-roots innovation The lack of service-user publicnessin Peterborough reflects the limited funding available for hard infrastructural projects theemphasis on entrepreneurial and civic publicness evinces the shared responsibility of thecityrsquos economic development agency and the council in managing the Peterborough DNAprogramme Londonrsquos relatively weak service use focus differently confirms the GLArsquos roleas steering and advisory actor rather than as funder of large-scale material interventions Thecity-level assemblages in Manchester and Milton Keynes display similarity in their strongoverall service-use sense of publicness and relatively weak civic modality While civicpublicness may come to the fore in Manchester in future given Corridor Manchesterrsquos statedlsquoplace-makingrsquo goals (Corridor Manchester 2015 24ndash25) its current relative absenceimplies a lack of active engagement on the part of the general public Milton Keynes isperhaps more surprising in this respect given its clear strategic claim to be civically engagedIts relatively weak civic publicness underlines the opportunistic nature of smart urbanactivities those coming to be implemented or funded may reflect strategic goals unevenlysmart policy documents themselves carry relatively little weight in the urban developmentprocess

Urban Research amp Practice 15

Table

2Relativeprom

inence

ofdominantmodalitiesof

publicness

insm

artcity

activities

across

sixUK

cities

Dom

inantmodality

Bristol

Glasgow

London

Manchester

MiltonKeynes

Peterborough

Allactivities

Meanfor6cities

Service

User

1457

1156

530

3732

Entrepreneurial

367

3333

2460

2832

Political

140

110

00

44

Civic

3636

4411

2440

3132

(Total

no

ofactivities)

(14)

(14)

(9)

(9)

(17)

(5)

(68)

16 R Cowley et al

Second the proportion of initiatives oriented towards civic publicness is not insig-nificant these account for approximately a third of all the activities examined On thisbasis it would be oversimplistic to dismiss the claims that the lsquoactually existingrsquocontemporary UK smart city pays only lip service to the importance of public claim-making Nevertheless this embrace of the democratic process does not extend to theprovision of significant opportunities for citizens to engage directly with the formalpolitical system in innovative ways In itself the absence of envisaged political public-ness does not undermine the possibility of more traditional public engagement withgovernmental institutions elsewhere yet the smart city does not provide channels for thedirect expression of public contestation or more radical forms of dissent

In this sense the smart city may appear to be aligned with broader depoliticising or lsquopost-politicalrsquo tendencies in governance generally and urban planning specifically (Swyngedouw2007 2011 Allmendinger and Haughton 2012 Joss 2015) In a post-political reading itsassemblage across UK cities would reflect the nature of its conceptual underpinnings thesmart city can only lsquocommand agreement as a result of [its] broadly progressive if non-specific framingrsquo (Allmendinger and Haughton 2012 94) and is therefore lsquounable to arouseconflicts among political ideasrsquo (Crivello 2015 919) Alternatively following Newman andClarke (2009) it illustrates the apparent paradox of the decline of the traditional lsquopublicrsquobeing accompanied by its simultaneous proliferation as a fragmented mulitiplicity politicalpublicness may be assembling elsewhere but is not associated with the intended role of thesmart city in the United Kingdom

426 Obduracy

Political publicness aside our findings have at least provided convincing evidence that UKsmart city initiatives are guided by a genuine desire to encourage civic engagement ofvarious kinds Even here however a more nuanced picture emerges when the relativeobduracy of individual activities is factored in Based on the available information weflagged each of the 68 activities as either lsquopermanentrsquo (to indicate ongoing operation orpresence in the city) or lsquotemporaryrsquo (to indicate a one-off or time-limited activity) As Table 3shows civic (and political) activities tend to be less permanent in nature than those invokingentrepreneurial and service-user publicness

In an important sense the relatively temporary nature of activities oriented towardspolitical and civic publicness is unsurprising particularly when contrasted with the service-user modality which is more often associated ndash as discussed above ndash with lsquohardrsquo infra-structural interventions The consequences of such activities may be long-lasting even whenthe activity itself is short-lived Nevertheless these findings fall short of convincinglyheralding a situation in which citizenship is prioritised as the central ongoing concern ofthe UK smart city

Table 3 Obduracy of smart city activities invoking each modality of publicness

Dominant modalityPermanent

Temporary

Base (number of activities)

Service-user 76 24 (25)Entrepreneurial 58 42 (19)Political 33 67 (3)Civic 48 52 (21)

Urban Research amp Practice 17

Significantly furthermore a degree of bifurcation is evident in the overall techno-publicassemblages such that civic and political publicness are sidelined within less obduratestrands of programmatic activity In Glasgow the enduring legacy of the lsquoFuture Cityrsquoprogramme is most visible in the service-user-oriented Operation Centre However manyof its other activities characterised by a more interactive and participatory mode of publicengagement were one-off events As lsquodemonstrator projectsrsquo they served in principle to helpdefine rather than enact the smart city ndash but there is little evidence that this more temporarystrand of the lsquoFuture Cityrsquo programme has subsequently been embedded in mainstreammunicipal activities In Bristol too a clear bifurcation is evident On one side the lsquoBristol isOpenrsquo improvements to the cityrsquos digital infrastructure and the lsquoOpen Data Bristolrsquo initiative(all of which might be expected to be relatively durable) invoke primarily entrepreneurialpublicness On the other the Connecting Bristol partnership promotes diverse lsquosofterrsquo civicand political activities led by grass-roots organisations which exhibit rather less obduracy assmall-scale pilot schemes or activities with limited public participation Evidently then lesscommitment and resources are available for experiments in the field of citizenship under-stood in more traditional liberal democratic ways than in those which conjure up a passive orentrepreneurial public

5 Discussion

Our reading of the smart city consciously departs from critical presentations of the smart cityas a lsquotop-downrsquo imposition and towards a foregrounding and more nuanced appreciation ofits practical variety But the observation that this variety is skewed towards the assemblage ofservice-user and entrepreneurial senses of the public does not constitute a straightforwardlyuseful critique of its current local manifestations The focus on service-user publicness atleast is unsurprising to the extent that local authorities are arguably seen by default asprimarily service providers To observe that civic and political publicness by way ofcontrast are less well considered and often only tokenistically accommodated is not tomake the normative case that these should necessarily or could realistically be privileged inlocal techno-public smart assemblages Rather the prevalence of this more passive modalityof publicness becomes significant when set against rhetorical claims that the smart city iseffecting transformational lsquocitizen-centricrsquo change

The dominance of service-user publicness does little to counter a broader trend identifiedby Powell (2014 15) towards lsquoa shift in the notion of citizenship away from civicresponsibilities and engagements to classifying [citizens] as consumers who purchaseservices from providersrsquo Although Powellrsquos discussion relates to the role of digitised datamore generally it is clearly relevant to the smart cityrsquos focus on providing greater efficien-cies Insofar as the lsquorelationship between government individuals and corporate entitiesrsquo (15)is viewed through the lens of the lsquocitizen as consumerrsquo its quality is only improved by theefficiencies which datafication enables Citizenship in this narrow sense is not related toaltruism or responsibilities but rather based on a principle of exchange and enacted throughlsquocollecting and sharing personal datarsquo (15) Drawing on Dean (2005) Powell highlights therisk that lsquothe norms of publicity ndash information communication and participation ndash havecome to stand for the political ends that they were presumed to serversquo (Powell 2014 16) Thisperspective raises various questions about many of the goals of UK smart city initiatives inrelation to the broader dimensions of citizenship For example the aim of lsquodigital inclusionrsquocommonly asserted among these six cases may appear laudable and yet it pushes the deeperpurpose of digital inclusion into the background smart connectivity itself becomes the goal

18 R Cowley et al

Similarly ideals of lsquotransparent governancersquo or lsquoopen datarsquo may end up being fetishisedwithin a discourse of efficiency even though this discourse tells us little about the normativebasis of the relationship between the public and the state beyond its passive lsquoservice-userrsquomodality

Although again our analysis opposes the existence of a deterministic link betweenglobal smart discourse and local practices the focus on efficiency of different types(including resource use provision of services and access to information) clearly resonateswith Whitersquos (2016) identification of an international discursive storyline in which the smartcity responds to lsquoresource pressures brought on by rapid urbanization and an ageing popula-tion the effects of anthropogenic global climate change and the twinned pressure of fiscalausterity and inter-urban competitionrsquo (577) We would at least suggest that the narrative ofthe lsquoage of crisisrsquo which accompanies much of the contemporary envisionment of futurecities (Caprotti 2015) has had a shaping influence on the prominence given to efficientservice provision in smart activities implemented to date

Equally given the broader UK policy context it would seem eccentric for local autho-rities to discourage entrepreneurialism On the immediate pragmatic level of funding andresources it must be significant that the governmentrsquos Department for Business Skills andInnovation has played a significant catalytic role smart city initiatives have not emergedunder the auspices of say the Department for Communities and Local Government But theprominence of entrepreneurial publicness raises a separate set of concerns echoing Dattarsquos(2015) diagnosis ndash albeit with reference to the rather different context of the Indian city ofDholera ndash of the smart city promoting lsquourbanization as a business model rather than a modelof social justicersquo Across our UK cases issues of social sustainability are far from absent inpolicy documents but their range tends to be limited for example focusing on health ande-inclusion or educating residents to participate in the digital economy In Glasgow suchquestions are subsumed within overall questions of efficiency and relate to very specificfactors such as public safety and reporting problems with services Milton Keynes claimsconsiderable interest in citizen co-creation but its initiatives are not primarily aimed attargeting social problems Although Peterboroughrsquos 2012 Feasibility Study prominentlyflagged up inequalities social cohesion and health improvements among other issues(Peterborough City Council 2012 3) its current strategy is addressed towards developingskills which lsquomeet local business demandrsquo and lsquoput Peterboroughrsquo in lsquothe best possibleposition to take advantage of emerging marketsrsquo (Peterborough City Council 2014 5)

One final way in which the lsquocitizen-centricrsquo nature of the UK smart city is questionablerelates to an apparent straightforward lack of public interest On one level this simplyreminds us of the peripherality of the smart city many of the associated activities only claimto be small-scale experimental trials and are not deeply embedded into the mainstream policyprocess While the actual numbers of local residents involved with many civic and politicalschemes are often negligible we found no convincing evidence either of broader enthusiasmor emergent public counter-discourse in any city4 While emergent political or civic con-testation is clearly not something which local authorities might lsquoplanrsquo for ndash it would beabsurd to expect local authorities to devise problems for frustrated publics to assemblearound ndash its absence does not provide evidence of acquiescence or approval or guarantee thesmooth passage of smart technology into urban life more broadly in future It more obviouslyreflects the survey evidence suggesting that general public awareness of any lsquosmartrsquo plans oractivities undertaken by local councils is neglible (Arqiva 2015) and that only one in five UKadults even recognises the term smart city (IET 2016)

Urban Research amp Practice 19

6 Conclusions towards a new lsquosmart urban publicnessrsquo

In studying and comparing a series of relatively well-developed smart city programmes aslsquotechno-public assemblagesrsquo we have responded to a series of policy claims made about therelationships between smart urban technologies and the public Our analysis reveals that thepublicness envisaged and enacted in the UK smart city is far from one-dimensional Citizensare not merely absent as the earlier critiques of the smart city would have it nor do smart cityactivities necessarily invoke a particular stunted notion of publicness in all cases Rather thegreat variety of types of publicness in evidence leads us to conclude that the rhetorical claimsabout the smart city being citizen-centric are not straightforwardly empty ones Rather thanagreeing with the speculative critiques of the smart city as a devious attempt to exclude thepublic we would urge commentators to begin from the assumption that its institutionalprotagonists do have a vested interest in questions of democracy

That said it also seems fair to conclude that the smart does not yet evince a convincinglyrounded sense of the lsquopublic cityrsquo The opportunistic nature of smart city development inother words gives rise to unique local forms but simultaneously holds these hostage tobroader societal and economic agendas the forms of their assemblage have remained shapedby immediate policy contexts and broader smart city policy discourse Thinking in terms ofits experimental shifting and peripheral assemblage in practice nevertheless opens upagentive space for actors involved to influence smart development in ways which moreconvincingly invoke a more rounded sense of publicness and in turn enable a moreconvincing sense of public ownership and enthusiasm

For more fully public smart city assemblages to emerge in future the civic and politicalmay need to be more obviously accommodated within the service-user and entrepreneurialThis need not relate to heavy-handed attempts to co-opt the civic which risk neutralising itsinnovative potential but the civic should at least not be siloed into more ephemeral strands ofactivity A lack of civic engagement with large infrastructural projects for example seemsunlikely to be successfully mitigated by a series of parallel participatory events which passunnoticed by most residents Similarly entrepreneurial activities are to be welcomed whichare more obviously oriented towards finding solutions to problems defined by citizensalongside those oriented at the creation of wealth through hi-tech innovations The possibi-lities for smart city technology to enable or engender more formal political participationfurthermore appear to have remained largely unexplored in practical terms

If only because the lsquoactually existingrsquo smart city is still at an experimental stage ofdevelopment we note that it has effected only marginal reconfigurations of the materialspaces of the city to date Nevertheless looking forward we urge researchers and practi-tioners to pay attention to the distinctive spatialities of the lsquosmart publicrsquo particularly in theinterfaces between public and private space and between virtual space and the traditionalmaterial public realm There is considerable scope in this regard to reverse the tendencyidentified by Kinsley (2013) to assign the digital to a parallel disembodied lsquohyperspacersquorather our understandings might more fruitfully be grounded in the relationships betweenhumans and technology in local contexts For policy-makers and practitioners activelyseeking a more widespread and involved sense of public debate around and engagementwith the implications of smart technology it may be rewarding to focus on the visibility ofnew innovations This may involve moving towards a more active consideration of themultiple roles of public space and more imaginatively using smart technologies to moveaway from more traditional fora as spaces of public engagement

Overall we resist from concluding that contemporary UK smart initiatives alreadyconstitute a qualitatively novel recasting of the public In relying on dominant political

20 R Cowley et al

structures and economic actors they have come to promote incremental change at best bothin terms of publicness and the material space of the city But assessing the long-termimpacts of smart innovations on urban space will be an ongoing project indeed the conceptlsquosmartrsquo itself may in future lose currency as a label or be reworked as a signifier In themeantime insofar as the smart city is indicative of broader contemporary attempts to shapeurban change in a time of austerity its lsquoexperimentalrsquo nature may appear rather moreproblematically reflective of a bypassing of the traditional democratic process And if wetoo may be allowed to propose a dystopian scenario it is one where in spite of the bestintentions of policy-makers the dominant norms of emerging smart city practices becomesedimented into novel twenty-first century institutional processes whose pragmatic world-view does not extend beyond that of a society of entrepreneurs and service users

AcknowledgementsThis study was undertaken at the University of Westminster with financial support from ESRC grantESL0159781 Youri Dayot was Visiting Fellow from the University of Grenoble

Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors

FundingThis study was undertaken at the University of Westminster as part of the ESRC-funded projectlsquoSmart Eco-cities for a Green Economy a Comparative Study of Europe and Chinarsquo (grant ESL0159781)

Notes1 The two terms (lsquosmart cityrsquo lsquofuture cityrsquo) are complementary and often used interchangeably

especially in the UK national policy context (see eg BSI 2014 3 also Joss Cook andDayot forthcoming) It is beyond the scope of this paper to delve into the conceptualinterrelationship of these recent policy terms in more detail

2 A fuller list of the key documents and links to relevant web pages consulted has been madepublicly available on the lead authorrsquos ResearchGate web pages httpswwwresearchgatenetprofileRobert_Cowley

3 More detailed descriptions of many of the individual activities and bodies analysed in thepresent research may be found in the lsquogrey literaturersquo (see eg Caprotti et al 2016 Woodset al 2016)

4 With the exception of some concerns in Glasgow about the use of facial recognition softwarein the cityrsquos CCTV system linked to the Operation Centre (Sunday Herald 2014 Aitchinson2015)

ReferencesAitchinson J 2015 ldquoShould We Be Worried about Glasgowrsquos New Hi-Tech Surveillance Systemrdquo

STV News February 23 httpglasgowstvtvarticles310713-glasgows-new-surveillance-installed-by-israeli-firm-nice-systems

Allmendinger P and G Haughton 2012 ldquoPost-Political Spatial Planning in England A Crisis ofConsensusrdquo Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37 (1) 89ndash103 doi101111j1475-5661201100468x

Arqiva 2015 ldquoAre Cities Really Getting Smarterrdquo httpswwwarqivacomnewspress-releasesare-our-cities-really-getting-smarter

Urban Research amp Practice 21

involved and (4) the variegated spatiality produced And second to identify the dominantmodality of publicness thus invoked service user entrepreneurial political or civic (asdiscussed in the previous section)

By taking into account the linkages between individual activities and the wider policylandscape a profile of each smart city assemblage as a whole was built up For the purposesof triangulation the results were aggregated following separate initial analyses and jointlyreviewed by the three authors Finally a transversal analysis was conducted across the sixcities in order to identify common patterns as well as divergent practices

Basing the analysis on detailed evidence has allowed for some of the variety acrossparticular locations to be captured in partial response to Kitchinrsquos (2015) call to movebeyond critiques of the lsquoplace-lessrsquo corporate and governmental promotional literature Ourresponse is a partial one since given the emergent nature of much smart city activity even inthese six locations the research neither investigates practices of implementation in depth norprovides a long-term perspective on the smart cityrsquos impact on the lived experience of thecity The aim rather has been to investigate the outcomes of the processes whereby thelsquoplace-lessrsquo smart city has been translated into locally specific projects through the lens ofthe documentation surrounding these

The high-level findings reported below relate to our conclusions about the relativeprominence of different modalities of publicness Although the discussion is illustratedwith particular examples of activity space does not permit a thorough presentation of thedetailed elements of the six assemblages3 Any of these elements can itself be seen as atechno-public assemblage and the analytical framework is offered as a tool for otherswishing to explore the public dimensions of current and future smart city activities at agranular level

4 Findings

41 The smart city in six municipal contexts initial findings and observations

It is worth noting first that the policy documents analysed generally operate at the peripheryof traditional urban planning frameworks local authorities are not formally obliged toinclude smart city principles within statutory planning processes Instead these policiesare often championed by overarching strategy boards economic development agencies andsimilar municipal bodies As such they typically seek to promote cohesive socio-economicinnovation policy to a range of actors both internally and externally for the purpose ofleveraging inward investment Thus they will have been shaped by their imagined receptionby varied audiences (Freeman and Maybin 2011 163ndash164) rather than by the specificintention that they should serve as traditional planning tools The varying status of thisdocumentation is significantly reflective of the often opportunistic nature of smart cityactivity but also points to the often complicated governance arrangements in placeImportantly then the relationship between the policy documents and activities shown inTable 1 is not consistent across the six cities For Glasgow which presents itself as havingrelatively straightforward governance arrangements there is clear linearity between the plansoutlined in its 2012 Feasibility Study and the resulting initiatives At the other end of thespectrum Manchesterrsquos recent Smarter City Programme for example essentially collates aseries of activities already planned or taking place

The activities themselves range from small-scale pilot scheme to major infrastructuralprojects from interventions into specific spatially bounded areas to initiatives operating invirtual space city-wide from lsquotop-downrsquo technological innovations to grass-roots

8 R Cowley et al

community activities and from one-off events to ongoing activities and services alreadywell-embedded into the urban fabric Despite the identification in the academic literaturethen of broad commonalities in variously conceived smart city lsquoimaginariesrsquo its manifesta-tions on the ground in the United Kingdom defy simple categorisation at first sight

The policy documents also display noticeable city-specific inflections in their narrativeframings reflecting the local contextual factors through which the translation of smart citydiscourse into practical activity has been mediated To provide some background for themain analysis an overview of the key framing principles in each cityrsquos policy documents isprovided below along with the varied governance structures that have emerged in dynamicrelationship with both the policy documents and the activities themselves Such differences ndashas will be discussed ndash help to explain some of the forms that local assemblages take withimplications in turn for the nature of the publicness invoked

411 Bristol

Bristolrsquos stated overall smart city goals are to expand the cityrsquos knowledge economy in a waywhich furthers its image as a pioneer in environmental sustainability and a centre of grass-roots innovation Its 2012 Feasibility Study (Bristol City Council 2012) broadened the remitof the earlier Smart City Bristol report (Bristol City Council 2011) which focused largely oncarbon emissions and transport issues to develop a narrative of enabling environmentallyand socially sustainable growth at a time of economic expansion in recognition of the cityrsquossignificant health and wealth inequalities

The council is one actor among many in Bristolrsquos current smart city activities which arenot orchestrated by an overarching policy document Nevertheless the dual focus of its 2012Feasibility Study which proposed a mixture of lsquohardrsquo infrastructure and a parallel pro-gramme of citizen engagement resembles the two-stranded nature of what has emerged inpractice The first strand delivering digital infrastructure is coordinated by the lsquoBristol isOpenrsquo partnership between the council and the University of Bristol with support from otherprivate public and charitable organisations The second collates various activities mostlyrelated to citizen and SME engagement within the lsquoConnecting Bristolrsquo initiative Here thecouncilrsquos role is more lsquohands-offrsquo specific activities are typically directly led by socialenterprises such as the Knowle West Media Centre

412 Glasgow

As the overall winner of the Future Cities Demonstrator competition in 2012 Glasgow wasawarded pound24m to implement its Feasibility Study proposals Approximately half the award(Davies 2014) was spent on a smart Operations Centre fully operational since 2014 whichmonitors real-time transport and public safety data Meanwhile a spread of smaller initia-tives took place many of which were participatory and interactive and were concluded (asproject deliverables) by the end of the TSB grant period

Glasgow City Council clearly positions itself as the key driving force behind theseactivities the initiative is characterised by the absence of publicised collaborative partner-ship This may reflect the terms of the TSB award positioning the City Council as the singlecontractor and requiring rapid project implementation within the two-year schedule Equallyit upholds the principle asserted in the Feasibility Study that lsquosmart cities are led from the topby a strong and visionary championrsquo (Glasgow City Council 2012 5) Either way the

Urban Research amp Practice 9

councilrsquos centrality appears to have left Glasgowrsquos official smart city activities in a state ofsuspension following the end of funding

413 London

Londonrsquos foray into smart city innovation is explicitly linked to the opportunities andchallenges facing the UKrsquos capital as a global city the smart city discourse deployedforms an integral part of the overarching narrative of London striving for continuous growthand consolidating its position as a leading international city (Mayor of London 2013 see alsoNESTA 2015) The lsquoSmart Londonrsquo initiative is primarily directed at forging a newcollaborative and entrepreneurial mode of governance in the service of sustaining economicgrowth to meet expected population growth The Greater London Authority (GLA) andparticularly the office of the Mayor of London is positioned at the centre of a wide range ofactivities It has co-opted a number of public and private actors including leading research-ers tech companies and larger utilities mainly through the Smart London Board andindividual project partnerships In promoting a co-creative governance mode for smart cityinnovation the GLArsquos role is more to lsquosteerrsquo than to direct outcomes

414 Manchester

Manchester is building on a legacy of digital innovations having published digitalstrategies in 2008 and 2012 and previously established a Digital DevelopmentAgency (MDDA) in 2003 (which was disbanded in 2015) Its 2012 FeasibilityStudy framed its smart aspirations as potentially consolidating recent successesincluding strong hi-tech industries infrastructural investments and repopulation ofthe urban core The lsquoDefining visionrsquo of Manchester was presented as lsquothe birthplaceof the industrial revolution re-inventing itself as a model of twenty-first centuryldquogreen growthrdquorsquo (Manchester City Council 2012 8) The Feasibility Study wastaken as a starting point for an ongoing programme of smart activities in theOxford Road Corridor (Manchester City Council 2013) running 2 km south fromthe city centre Corridor Manchester established as an incorporated body in 2007(CAICT and PDSF 2014 131) hopes that the district will continue to attract lsquoknowl-edge workersrsquo to become lsquoone of the top five innovation districts in Europersquo(Corridor Manchester 2015 4) achieving lsquolocal and global recognition as a placethat is original creative and smart where knowledge is put to workrsquo (4)

Its smart city activities exhibit a particularly networked style of governance withthe council just one of a series of actors allied in varying combinations ndash mostnoticeably the cityrsquos universities and large hospitals local engineering and hi-techfirms Transport for Greater Manchester and grass-roots digital organisation FutureEverything However the council appears to have reclaimed a more central rolethrough its 2016 lsquoSmarter Cityrsquo programme which promotes activities from acrossthe city

415 Milton Keynes

Milton Keynes consciously draws on its history of innovative urban planning andtechnology deployment in stating the aim of becoming the UKrsquos lsquoleading digital cityrsquo(Milton Keynes Council 2012 10) with an lsquounambiguous objective backed with

10 R Cowley et al

integrated city planning to reduce its carbon footprint with an energy-efficient high-techknowledgersquo (3) Although its 2012 Feasibility Study did not win funding it has sincelaunched a lsquoFuture Cityrsquo programme clearly framed by the goals of citizen co-creationand environmental improvements

Although universities typically play prominent partnership roles in other UK smartcity initiatives Milton Keynes is unusual in that the Open University is the dominantactor This may be one reason why the MK Smart programme strongly emphasisescitizen engagement as an end in itself rather than ndash as is more the case in London andPeterborough ndash a source of entrepreneurial ideas

416 Peterborough

The smart activities taking place under the lsquoPeterborough DNArsquo programme finally areclearly shaped by a green growth strategy Peterborough aims to become the lsquoSustainabilityCapital of the UKrsquo and as such lsquothat ldquocapitalrdquo will be exploited to the maximum to ensurethat it delivers true economic prosperity and well-being through job creation and theintegration of employment skills and innovationrsquo (Peterborough City Council 2012 4)The lsquofundamental goalrsquo of its smart activities is one of lsquogrowth innovation and sustain-abilityrsquo (Peterborough City Council 2014 4)

As a runner-up in the TSB competition Peterborough was awarded pound3m While its moreexpensive proposals including significant investment in the transport system were notfunded the four strands of its lsquoDNArsquo programme are similar to those proposed in its 2012Feasibility Study lsquosmart businessrsquo lsquoliving datarsquo lsquoskillsrsquo and lsquoinnovationrsquo In accordancewith the strong economic focus of the programme Peterborough DNA is led collaborativelyby the council and the Local Economic Partnership lsquoOpportunity Peterboroughrsquo

42 The four modalities of publicness and their associated forms of assemblage

Despite the variety suggested above some pertinent observations can be made about bothcommon tendencies and significant differences in the types of publicness invoked by thevarious smart city initatives across the six cities As noted we distinguish four modalities ofpublicness each of which correlates broadly with particular forms of assemblage

421 Service-user publicness

What we term the lsquoservice userrsquomodality of publicness relates the consumption of everydayurban services when for example a person travels by public transport consumes water orelectricity or uses broadband infrastructure Smart technology offers the promise of poten-tially enhancing such public interactions with service providers by providing more accurateor lsquoreal-timersquo data for decision-making new possibilities for users to contribute to servicesthrough automated or voluntary feedback and new channels of accountability

By our assessment this modality was dominant in 25 of the 68 activities analysedmaking it the most common form of publicness across the six cities as a whole Examples ofrelevant activities include Milton Keynesrsquo smart parking initiatives the lsquoIntelligent StreetLightingrsquo and lsquoEnergy Efficiency Demonstratorrsquo pilots in Glasgow and ManchesterrsquoslsquoTriangulumrsquo project which aims to reduce energy use and improve local transport Mosttypically such initiatives are characterised by relatively direct local council involvementThe issues addressed vary depending on the type of infrastructure in question but transport

Urban Research amp Practice 11

congestion resource consumption carbon emissions and digital inclusion are repeatedlymentioned in the documentation A commonality then is a normative framing in which thegoal of improved efficiency is highlighted

Service user-oriented smart city projects are most typically associated with two types ofspatiality The first relates to the traditional materiality of systems operating across the citydigital technology serves to improve the functional efficiency of these existing systemsWhile then the new technology may have clear spatial effects (eg in reworking trafficflows or recalibrating energy distribution) the spatialised phenomena to be rendered moreefficient are already present

Crucially this is the most passive of the four modalities identified The public ispositioned as part of the cityrsquos routine functionality rather than assigned lsquoco-creationalrsquoagency This then does not radically depart from the traditional relationship of the public toinfrastructural services Of course the provision of improved services does not contradict aclaim to being lsquocitizen-centricrsquo or lsquoputting people firstrsquo its conceptualisation neither deniesnor acknowledges that publicness may be assembled otherwise

422 Entrepreneurial publicness

If lsquoservice userrsquo publicness implies a relatively compliant reactive collectivity a more activelsquoentrepreneurialrsquo sense of the public is conjured up in other activities which enrol citizensinto co-creating and innovating in the smart arena This resonates with findings elsewhereidentifying a strong entrepreneurial governance mode at work in smart cities (eg Hollands2015 Wiig 2015) The entrepreneurial modality relates less to the everyday functioning ofthe city and more to the expectation that residents will be involved in creating services andeconomic value Rather than addressing particular thematic issues it is framed by an unmetneed to harness the economic and service-related possibilities afforded by new digitaltechnologies and big data We identified this modality as dominant for 19 of the 68 activitiesconsidered

Examples of related initiatives include the lsquohackathonrsquo events in several cities the lsquoTechLondonersrsquo initiative (aiming to bring lsquoLondonersrsquo and entrepreneurs together to co-createdigital solutions to predefined problems) Peterboroughrsquos lsquoInnovationWeekrsquoworkshops andlsquoBrainwave Innovation Portalrsquo and Manchesterrsquos Digital Laboratory (lsquoMadLabrsquo) whichencouraged local residents to find solutions to social problems through lsquoco-creative human-centric and user-driven research development and innovationrsquo (Ruijsink and Smith 2016 4)Bristolrsquos lsquoIoTMeshrsquo scheme will lsquoopen-up the test-bed to a wide range of Internet-of-Things(IoT) developers In doing so Bristol Is Open will enable companies to perfect their newtechnology solutions for everything from smart rubbish bins to connected streetlamps and awide range of IoTsensorsrsquo (Bristol is Open 2016b) The various lsquoopen datarsquo initiatives acrossthe cities serve directly to allow members of the public to make connections between thedatasets provided (and with their own data if they wish) Public involvement in suchactivities is often explicitly incentivised by commercial possibilities and no clear conceptualdistinction is evident between the public sphere and the market Glasgowrsquos lsquoOpen DataCataloguersquo for example promises to lsquoempower everybody (the public voluntary academicprivate sectors and communities) to harness [data] use it and combine it in new ways Wecan all contribute to making Glasgow a better place to live work and playrsquo (Future CityGlasgow 2016b)

In some cases such as hackathon events the practices associated with this entrepre-neurialism take place in traditional fora or make fairly conventional uses of internet sites (as

12 R Cowley et al

in the case of Tech Londoners) But a more distinctively lsquosmartrsquo spatiality may sometimes beobserved in the various attempts to add a lsquodigital layerrsquo to the city creating what might betermed a ubiquitous network of connectivity The digital infrastructure projects within theBristol is Open programme exemplify this spatiality particularly well in a literal sense theywill add a layer of digital connectivity to the city centre The lsquoWireless Milersquo for exampleaims at the creation of a lsquoheterogeneous technology environmentrsquo (Bristol is Open 2016c 1)which integrates differently formatted wifi signals such that lsquocomplex multi-layered net-works of overlapping big and small cells supply smartphones tablets cars drones and evenbuildings with a huge amount of cheap connectivityrsquo (Bristol is Open 2016d2) The variousopen data initiatives also fall into this category insofar as they enable datasets about existingservices and amenities to be linked together

Again this invocation of entrepreneurial public agency sits comfortably with claims thatpeople are being put at the centre of smart city development it explicitly invites publiccontributions to the ongoing forms that this will take However like the service-usermodality it says little about the more democratic dimensions of publicness A more roundedsense of lsquocitizenshiprsquo as traditionally conceived encompasses not only lsquosocial rightsrsquo (ieaccess to services) but also lsquopolitical rightsrsquo (contributing to decision-making processes) andlsquocivilrsquo ones (relating to freedom of speech) (Isin and Ruppert 2015) Accordingly we furtherpropose and distinguish between a lsquopoliticalrsquo and a lsquocivicrsquo modality of publicness

423 Political publicness

We use the label lsquopoliticalrsquo here in the narrow sense of public involvement in decision-making and deliberation through institutional channels or through novel extensions of theseExamples include the lsquoTalk Londonrsquo online platform which hosts a mixture of surveysblogs and discussion boards promoting itself as a lsquoplace to discuss Londonrsquos big issuesrsquo(Talk London 2016) and Bristolrsquos lsquoDemocratreersquo app which encouraged residents to nomi-nate and vote on suitable locations for planting new trees (While the latter was not initiateddirectly by the council it nevertheless provided a direct means for residents to influenceofficial decisions on resource allocation) If there is a commonality in the issues addressedthrough such activities it relates to a perceived lack of participation ndash often with certainsocial groups in mind ndash in local decision-making

Overall this is by far the least commonmodality of publicness invoked it is dominant inonly three of the 68 activities considered This is perhaps surprising given that the potentialfor digital technologies to reinvigorate democratic deliberation and decision-making hasbeen enthusiastically envisioned and debated since the 1990s (Isin and Ruppert 2015) Thelack of experimentation in this respect may partly be explained by the marginality of smartcity activities to traditional policy-making processes

The uses of online fora (as in the case of the Talk London initiative) or voting apps(Democratree) clearly depart from traditional modes of political deliberation ndash for exampleface-to-face settings ndash and yet nevertheless describe rather conventional uses of the internetHowever there are too few examples in the set of activities analysed for us to drawconclusions about the types of spatialities or spatial effects associated with this modalityof publicness

We highlight the paucity of political publicness specifically because strategy documentsmake repeated claims that citizen engagement is vital to the successful implementation of thesmart city and that related initiatives will enable wider citizen engagement with decision-making processes Its absence points more to a situation in which the smart city not only

Urban Research amp Practice 13

operates at the margins of normal institutional processes but might even be criticallyinterpreted as seeking to bypass them ndash a possibility raised by Shearmur (2016) in recountinghow delegates at a technology conference imagined the public sector as merely an obstacle tosmart city implementation

424 Civic publicness

Decision-making mediated through official processes only captures part of a cityrsquos politicallife and may tend to frame issues in certain ways for the purposes of voting or other forms ofdeliberation We therefore distinguish the lsquopoliticalrsquo from a rather less structured lsquocivicrsquomodality of publicness which loosely maps onto a traditional sense of the broader lsquopublicspherersquo In other words it inheres in those activities taking place in spaces beyond stateinstitutions but which are not directly oriented towards market activity A local councilrsquosinvolvement in such activities is necessarily more at armrsquos length it may enable or merelyapprove of such activities in its own promotional documents The types of issues shaping itsassemblage should then emerge lsquofrom belowrsquo Equally however this modality of public-ness may be more immediately associated with leisure activities or lsquoplayfulnessrsquo ndash suchactivities in public space may constitute a performative type of claim making within thebroader democratic process (see eg Hou 2010 Parkinson 2012) The invocation of civicpublicness is far from uncommon across the six cities considered here on a par with theentrepreneurial it is dominant for 21 of the 68 activities (and the most common modality inLondon)

Examples include the lsquoCommunity Wellnessrsquo strand of Manchesterrsquos lsquoCityVerversquo pro-ject aiming to encourage schoolchildren and commuters to take exercise in parks BristolrsquoslsquoMyKWrsquo community social media platform the lsquoBristol Approach to Citizen Sensingrsquo andlsquoPlayable Cityrsquo initiatives Glasgowrsquos lsquoActive Travelrsquo demonstrator initiative insofar as itencouraged cyclists to share data and experiences of cycling in the city and Londonrsquos lsquoSpeedVolunteeringrsquo app which seeks to put those wishing to volunteer in touch with peopleseeking help

We discern two distinctive spatialities as characteristic of assemblages of civic public-ness First relevant initiatives are often constituted by the goal of manifesting the virtualdigital in traditional (physical) public space Peterborough for example has planned a largelsquoOpenCityrsquo digital screen in the city centre Bristolrsquos lsquoPlayable Citiesrsquo competition has beenrunning annually since 2013 to fund temporary artistic installations in the city centre Theproject also taking place elsewhere internationally aims to put lsquopeople and play at the heartof the future city Through interaction and creative installations it unlocks a socialdialogue bringing the citizens into a city development conversationrsquo (Watershed 2016)Examples have included the 2013 winner Hello Lamp Post which allowed members of thepublic to have text message conversations with various items of street furniture andUrbanimals in 2015 in which digitally projected animals would appear unexpectedly acrossthe city and interact with the public (Watershed 2016) Manchesterrsquos lsquoCityVerversquo Internet ofThings demonstrator project mentioned above plans to install lsquotalkative bus stopsrsquo and alsquoCommunity Wellnessrsquo sensor network in parks along school and commuter routes toencourage exercise (UK Government 2015)

The second characteristic spatiality of civic publicness relates to varied attempts toreclaim the digital sphere from the private sector The idea of lsquoreclamationrsquo may not beexplicit in the documentation but such initiatives are typically driven by civil society actorsand aim variously to empower citizens to use and have a presence through new digital urban

14 R Cowley et al

technologies Manchesterrsquos lsquoLiving Labrsquo programme (whose current status is unclearfollowing the disbandment of the Manchester Digital Development Authority) includedthe development of an interactive local news and information web portal featuring contentcreated by residents The lsquoManchester Digital Laboratoryrsquo describes itself as a lsquograssrootsinnovation organisationrsquo (MadLab 2016a) which organises various events and digital train-ing courses with a core mission to allow the general public to lsquohelp people to make thingsbetter togetherrsquo through lsquoexperimentationrsquo lsquoplayrsquo and lsquofunrsquo and the promotion of craftman-ship (MadLab 2016b) In Bristol a local social networking site (first trialled as lsquoMyKWrsquo inthe Knowle West district) has been extended to the city as a whole (as lsquoMyBristolrsquo) Theplanned lsquoBristol Approach to Citizen Sensingrsquo initiative meanwhile mentioned above mostexplicitly displays the aim of reconfiguring virtual space in this way in its vision of a lsquoco-created city commonsrsquo which lsquosupports the deployment of new or adapted technologies intoeveryday environmentsrsquo (KWMC 2016 1)

425 Summary of relative prominence of different modalities of publicness

Table 2 summarises the relative prominence of the four modalities of publicness in eachcity and across all six cities

Analysing these data too closely would potentially yield spurious findings for severalreasons our six cities were not chosen to yield a somehow statistically representative sampleof activities for the purposes of quantitative research the coding of their modalities involvedsome subjective judgement and all activities are equally weighted regardless of scale timeperiod budget and policy significance These reservations aside the findings provide anindicative overview of the variations in the publicness assembled in these six leading citiesand in this spirit two broad observations are ventured

First the relative prominence of the four modalities differs considerably by city In thissense again lsquosmart publicnessrsquo is evidently not determined by globally circulating dis-courses but at least partly reflects its immediate governance and policy context The relativeabsence of entrepreneurial publicness in Glasgow for example communicates the councilrsquossole responsibility for delivering activities In Bristol the dominant entrepreneurial and civicmodalities chime with an overall strategic goal of expanding the knowledge economy bytapping into a strong tradition of grass-roots innovation The lack of service-user publicnessin Peterborough reflects the limited funding available for hard infrastructural projects theemphasis on entrepreneurial and civic publicness evinces the shared responsibility of thecityrsquos economic development agency and the council in managing the Peterborough DNAprogramme Londonrsquos relatively weak service use focus differently confirms the GLArsquos roleas steering and advisory actor rather than as funder of large-scale material interventions Thecity-level assemblages in Manchester and Milton Keynes display similarity in their strongoverall service-use sense of publicness and relatively weak civic modality While civicpublicness may come to the fore in Manchester in future given Corridor Manchesterrsquos statedlsquoplace-makingrsquo goals (Corridor Manchester 2015 24ndash25) its current relative absenceimplies a lack of active engagement on the part of the general public Milton Keynes isperhaps more surprising in this respect given its clear strategic claim to be civically engagedIts relatively weak civic publicness underlines the opportunistic nature of smart urbanactivities those coming to be implemented or funded may reflect strategic goals unevenlysmart policy documents themselves carry relatively little weight in the urban developmentprocess

Urban Research amp Practice 15

Table

2Relativeprom

inence

ofdominantmodalitiesof

publicness

insm

artcity

activities

across

sixUK

cities

Dom

inantmodality

Bristol

Glasgow

London

Manchester

MiltonKeynes

Peterborough

Allactivities

Meanfor6cities

Service

User

1457

1156

530

3732

Entrepreneurial

367

3333

2460

2832

Political

140

110

00

44

Civic

3636

4411

2440

3132

(Total

no

ofactivities)

(14)

(14)

(9)

(9)

(17)

(5)

(68)

16 R Cowley et al

Second the proportion of initiatives oriented towards civic publicness is not insig-nificant these account for approximately a third of all the activities examined On thisbasis it would be oversimplistic to dismiss the claims that the lsquoactually existingrsquocontemporary UK smart city pays only lip service to the importance of public claim-making Nevertheless this embrace of the democratic process does not extend to theprovision of significant opportunities for citizens to engage directly with the formalpolitical system in innovative ways In itself the absence of envisaged political public-ness does not undermine the possibility of more traditional public engagement withgovernmental institutions elsewhere yet the smart city does not provide channels for thedirect expression of public contestation or more radical forms of dissent

In this sense the smart city may appear to be aligned with broader depoliticising or lsquopost-politicalrsquo tendencies in governance generally and urban planning specifically (Swyngedouw2007 2011 Allmendinger and Haughton 2012 Joss 2015) In a post-political reading itsassemblage across UK cities would reflect the nature of its conceptual underpinnings thesmart city can only lsquocommand agreement as a result of [its] broadly progressive if non-specific framingrsquo (Allmendinger and Haughton 2012 94) and is therefore lsquounable to arouseconflicts among political ideasrsquo (Crivello 2015 919) Alternatively following Newman andClarke (2009) it illustrates the apparent paradox of the decline of the traditional lsquopublicrsquobeing accompanied by its simultaneous proliferation as a fragmented mulitiplicity politicalpublicness may be assembling elsewhere but is not associated with the intended role of thesmart city in the United Kingdom

426 Obduracy

Political publicness aside our findings have at least provided convincing evidence that UKsmart city initiatives are guided by a genuine desire to encourage civic engagement ofvarious kinds Even here however a more nuanced picture emerges when the relativeobduracy of individual activities is factored in Based on the available information weflagged each of the 68 activities as either lsquopermanentrsquo (to indicate ongoing operation orpresence in the city) or lsquotemporaryrsquo (to indicate a one-off or time-limited activity) As Table 3shows civic (and political) activities tend to be less permanent in nature than those invokingentrepreneurial and service-user publicness

In an important sense the relatively temporary nature of activities oriented towardspolitical and civic publicness is unsurprising particularly when contrasted with the service-user modality which is more often associated ndash as discussed above ndash with lsquohardrsquo infra-structural interventions The consequences of such activities may be long-lasting even whenthe activity itself is short-lived Nevertheless these findings fall short of convincinglyheralding a situation in which citizenship is prioritised as the central ongoing concern ofthe UK smart city

Table 3 Obduracy of smart city activities invoking each modality of publicness

Dominant modalityPermanent

Temporary

Base (number of activities)

Service-user 76 24 (25)Entrepreneurial 58 42 (19)Political 33 67 (3)Civic 48 52 (21)

Urban Research amp Practice 17

Significantly furthermore a degree of bifurcation is evident in the overall techno-publicassemblages such that civic and political publicness are sidelined within less obduratestrands of programmatic activity In Glasgow the enduring legacy of the lsquoFuture Cityrsquoprogramme is most visible in the service-user-oriented Operation Centre However manyof its other activities characterised by a more interactive and participatory mode of publicengagement were one-off events As lsquodemonstrator projectsrsquo they served in principle to helpdefine rather than enact the smart city ndash but there is little evidence that this more temporarystrand of the lsquoFuture Cityrsquo programme has subsequently been embedded in mainstreammunicipal activities In Bristol too a clear bifurcation is evident On one side the lsquoBristol isOpenrsquo improvements to the cityrsquos digital infrastructure and the lsquoOpen Data Bristolrsquo initiative(all of which might be expected to be relatively durable) invoke primarily entrepreneurialpublicness On the other the Connecting Bristol partnership promotes diverse lsquosofterrsquo civicand political activities led by grass-roots organisations which exhibit rather less obduracy assmall-scale pilot schemes or activities with limited public participation Evidently then lesscommitment and resources are available for experiments in the field of citizenship under-stood in more traditional liberal democratic ways than in those which conjure up a passive orentrepreneurial public

5 Discussion

Our reading of the smart city consciously departs from critical presentations of the smart cityas a lsquotop-downrsquo imposition and towards a foregrounding and more nuanced appreciation ofits practical variety But the observation that this variety is skewed towards the assemblage ofservice-user and entrepreneurial senses of the public does not constitute a straightforwardlyuseful critique of its current local manifestations The focus on service-user publicness atleast is unsurprising to the extent that local authorities are arguably seen by default asprimarily service providers To observe that civic and political publicness by way ofcontrast are less well considered and often only tokenistically accommodated is not tomake the normative case that these should necessarily or could realistically be privileged inlocal techno-public smart assemblages Rather the prevalence of this more passive modalityof publicness becomes significant when set against rhetorical claims that the smart city iseffecting transformational lsquocitizen-centricrsquo change

The dominance of service-user publicness does little to counter a broader trend identifiedby Powell (2014 15) towards lsquoa shift in the notion of citizenship away from civicresponsibilities and engagements to classifying [citizens] as consumers who purchaseservices from providersrsquo Although Powellrsquos discussion relates to the role of digitised datamore generally it is clearly relevant to the smart cityrsquos focus on providing greater efficien-cies Insofar as the lsquorelationship between government individuals and corporate entitiesrsquo (15)is viewed through the lens of the lsquocitizen as consumerrsquo its quality is only improved by theefficiencies which datafication enables Citizenship in this narrow sense is not related toaltruism or responsibilities but rather based on a principle of exchange and enacted throughlsquocollecting and sharing personal datarsquo (15) Drawing on Dean (2005) Powell highlights therisk that lsquothe norms of publicity ndash information communication and participation ndash havecome to stand for the political ends that they were presumed to serversquo (Powell 2014 16) Thisperspective raises various questions about many of the goals of UK smart city initiatives inrelation to the broader dimensions of citizenship For example the aim of lsquodigital inclusionrsquocommonly asserted among these six cases may appear laudable and yet it pushes the deeperpurpose of digital inclusion into the background smart connectivity itself becomes the goal

18 R Cowley et al

Similarly ideals of lsquotransparent governancersquo or lsquoopen datarsquo may end up being fetishisedwithin a discourse of efficiency even though this discourse tells us little about the normativebasis of the relationship between the public and the state beyond its passive lsquoservice-userrsquomodality

Although again our analysis opposes the existence of a deterministic link betweenglobal smart discourse and local practices the focus on efficiency of different types(including resource use provision of services and access to information) clearly resonateswith Whitersquos (2016) identification of an international discursive storyline in which the smartcity responds to lsquoresource pressures brought on by rapid urbanization and an ageing popula-tion the effects of anthropogenic global climate change and the twinned pressure of fiscalausterity and inter-urban competitionrsquo (577) We would at least suggest that the narrative ofthe lsquoage of crisisrsquo which accompanies much of the contemporary envisionment of futurecities (Caprotti 2015) has had a shaping influence on the prominence given to efficientservice provision in smart activities implemented to date

Equally given the broader UK policy context it would seem eccentric for local autho-rities to discourage entrepreneurialism On the immediate pragmatic level of funding andresources it must be significant that the governmentrsquos Department for Business Skills andInnovation has played a significant catalytic role smart city initiatives have not emergedunder the auspices of say the Department for Communities and Local Government But theprominence of entrepreneurial publicness raises a separate set of concerns echoing Dattarsquos(2015) diagnosis ndash albeit with reference to the rather different context of the Indian city ofDholera ndash of the smart city promoting lsquourbanization as a business model rather than a modelof social justicersquo Across our UK cases issues of social sustainability are far from absent inpolicy documents but their range tends to be limited for example focusing on health ande-inclusion or educating residents to participate in the digital economy In Glasgow suchquestions are subsumed within overall questions of efficiency and relate to very specificfactors such as public safety and reporting problems with services Milton Keynes claimsconsiderable interest in citizen co-creation but its initiatives are not primarily aimed attargeting social problems Although Peterboroughrsquos 2012 Feasibility Study prominentlyflagged up inequalities social cohesion and health improvements among other issues(Peterborough City Council 2012 3) its current strategy is addressed towards developingskills which lsquomeet local business demandrsquo and lsquoput Peterboroughrsquo in lsquothe best possibleposition to take advantage of emerging marketsrsquo (Peterborough City Council 2014 5)

One final way in which the lsquocitizen-centricrsquo nature of the UK smart city is questionablerelates to an apparent straightforward lack of public interest On one level this simplyreminds us of the peripherality of the smart city many of the associated activities only claimto be small-scale experimental trials and are not deeply embedded into the mainstream policyprocess While the actual numbers of local residents involved with many civic and politicalschemes are often negligible we found no convincing evidence either of broader enthusiasmor emergent public counter-discourse in any city4 While emergent political or civic con-testation is clearly not something which local authorities might lsquoplanrsquo for ndash it would beabsurd to expect local authorities to devise problems for frustrated publics to assemblearound ndash its absence does not provide evidence of acquiescence or approval or guarantee thesmooth passage of smart technology into urban life more broadly in future It more obviouslyreflects the survey evidence suggesting that general public awareness of any lsquosmartrsquo plans oractivities undertaken by local councils is neglible (Arqiva 2015) and that only one in five UKadults even recognises the term smart city (IET 2016)

Urban Research amp Practice 19

6 Conclusions towards a new lsquosmart urban publicnessrsquo

In studying and comparing a series of relatively well-developed smart city programmes aslsquotechno-public assemblagesrsquo we have responded to a series of policy claims made about therelationships between smart urban technologies and the public Our analysis reveals that thepublicness envisaged and enacted in the UK smart city is far from one-dimensional Citizensare not merely absent as the earlier critiques of the smart city would have it nor do smart cityactivities necessarily invoke a particular stunted notion of publicness in all cases Rather thegreat variety of types of publicness in evidence leads us to conclude that the rhetorical claimsabout the smart city being citizen-centric are not straightforwardly empty ones Rather thanagreeing with the speculative critiques of the smart city as a devious attempt to exclude thepublic we would urge commentators to begin from the assumption that its institutionalprotagonists do have a vested interest in questions of democracy

That said it also seems fair to conclude that the smart does not yet evince a convincinglyrounded sense of the lsquopublic cityrsquo The opportunistic nature of smart city development inother words gives rise to unique local forms but simultaneously holds these hostage tobroader societal and economic agendas the forms of their assemblage have remained shapedby immediate policy contexts and broader smart city policy discourse Thinking in terms ofits experimental shifting and peripheral assemblage in practice nevertheless opens upagentive space for actors involved to influence smart development in ways which moreconvincingly invoke a more rounded sense of publicness and in turn enable a moreconvincing sense of public ownership and enthusiasm

For more fully public smart city assemblages to emerge in future the civic and politicalmay need to be more obviously accommodated within the service-user and entrepreneurialThis need not relate to heavy-handed attempts to co-opt the civic which risk neutralising itsinnovative potential but the civic should at least not be siloed into more ephemeral strands ofactivity A lack of civic engagement with large infrastructural projects for example seemsunlikely to be successfully mitigated by a series of parallel participatory events which passunnoticed by most residents Similarly entrepreneurial activities are to be welcomed whichare more obviously oriented towards finding solutions to problems defined by citizensalongside those oriented at the creation of wealth through hi-tech innovations The possibi-lities for smart city technology to enable or engender more formal political participationfurthermore appear to have remained largely unexplored in practical terms

If only because the lsquoactually existingrsquo smart city is still at an experimental stage ofdevelopment we note that it has effected only marginal reconfigurations of the materialspaces of the city to date Nevertheless looking forward we urge researchers and practi-tioners to pay attention to the distinctive spatialities of the lsquosmart publicrsquo particularly in theinterfaces between public and private space and between virtual space and the traditionalmaterial public realm There is considerable scope in this regard to reverse the tendencyidentified by Kinsley (2013) to assign the digital to a parallel disembodied lsquohyperspacersquorather our understandings might more fruitfully be grounded in the relationships betweenhumans and technology in local contexts For policy-makers and practitioners activelyseeking a more widespread and involved sense of public debate around and engagementwith the implications of smart technology it may be rewarding to focus on the visibility ofnew innovations This may involve moving towards a more active consideration of themultiple roles of public space and more imaginatively using smart technologies to moveaway from more traditional fora as spaces of public engagement

Overall we resist from concluding that contemporary UK smart initiatives alreadyconstitute a qualitatively novel recasting of the public In relying on dominant political

20 R Cowley et al

structures and economic actors they have come to promote incremental change at best bothin terms of publicness and the material space of the city But assessing the long-termimpacts of smart innovations on urban space will be an ongoing project indeed the conceptlsquosmartrsquo itself may in future lose currency as a label or be reworked as a signifier In themeantime insofar as the smart city is indicative of broader contemporary attempts to shapeurban change in a time of austerity its lsquoexperimentalrsquo nature may appear rather moreproblematically reflective of a bypassing of the traditional democratic process And if wetoo may be allowed to propose a dystopian scenario it is one where in spite of the bestintentions of policy-makers the dominant norms of emerging smart city practices becomesedimented into novel twenty-first century institutional processes whose pragmatic world-view does not extend beyond that of a society of entrepreneurs and service users

AcknowledgementsThis study was undertaken at the University of Westminster with financial support from ESRC grantESL0159781 Youri Dayot was Visiting Fellow from the University of Grenoble

Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors

FundingThis study was undertaken at the University of Westminster as part of the ESRC-funded projectlsquoSmart Eco-cities for a Green Economy a Comparative Study of Europe and Chinarsquo (grant ESL0159781)

Notes1 The two terms (lsquosmart cityrsquo lsquofuture cityrsquo) are complementary and often used interchangeably

especially in the UK national policy context (see eg BSI 2014 3 also Joss Cook andDayot forthcoming) It is beyond the scope of this paper to delve into the conceptualinterrelationship of these recent policy terms in more detail

2 A fuller list of the key documents and links to relevant web pages consulted has been madepublicly available on the lead authorrsquos ResearchGate web pages httpswwwresearchgatenetprofileRobert_Cowley

3 More detailed descriptions of many of the individual activities and bodies analysed in thepresent research may be found in the lsquogrey literaturersquo (see eg Caprotti et al 2016 Woodset al 2016)

4 With the exception of some concerns in Glasgow about the use of facial recognition softwarein the cityrsquos CCTV system linked to the Operation Centre (Sunday Herald 2014 Aitchinson2015)

ReferencesAitchinson J 2015 ldquoShould We Be Worried about Glasgowrsquos New Hi-Tech Surveillance Systemrdquo

STV News February 23 httpglasgowstvtvarticles310713-glasgows-new-surveillance-installed-by-israeli-firm-nice-systems

Allmendinger P and G Haughton 2012 ldquoPost-Political Spatial Planning in England A Crisis ofConsensusrdquo Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37 (1) 89ndash103 doi101111j1475-5661201100468x

Arqiva 2015 ldquoAre Cities Really Getting Smarterrdquo httpswwwarqivacomnewspress-releasesare-our-cities-really-getting-smarter

Urban Research amp Practice 21

community activities and from one-off events to ongoing activities and services alreadywell-embedded into the urban fabric Despite the identification in the academic literaturethen of broad commonalities in variously conceived smart city lsquoimaginariesrsquo its manifesta-tions on the ground in the United Kingdom defy simple categorisation at first sight

The policy documents also display noticeable city-specific inflections in their narrativeframings reflecting the local contextual factors through which the translation of smart citydiscourse into practical activity has been mediated To provide some background for themain analysis an overview of the key framing principles in each cityrsquos policy documents isprovided below along with the varied governance structures that have emerged in dynamicrelationship with both the policy documents and the activities themselves Such differences ndashas will be discussed ndash help to explain some of the forms that local assemblages take withimplications in turn for the nature of the publicness invoked

411 Bristol

Bristolrsquos stated overall smart city goals are to expand the cityrsquos knowledge economy in a waywhich furthers its image as a pioneer in environmental sustainability and a centre of grass-roots innovation Its 2012 Feasibility Study (Bristol City Council 2012) broadened the remitof the earlier Smart City Bristol report (Bristol City Council 2011) which focused largely oncarbon emissions and transport issues to develop a narrative of enabling environmentallyand socially sustainable growth at a time of economic expansion in recognition of the cityrsquossignificant health and wealth inequalities

The council is one actor among many in Bristolrsquos current smart city activities which arenot orchestrated by an overarching policy document Nevertheless the dual focus of its 2012Feasibility Study which proposed a mixture of lsquohardrsquo infrastructure and a parallel pro-gramme of citizen engagement resembles the two-stranded nature of what has emerged inpractice The first strand delivering digital infrastructure is coordinated by the lsquoBristol isOpenrsquo partnership between the council and the University of Bristol with support from otherprivate public and charitable organisations The second collates various activities mostlyrelated to citizen and SME engagement within the lsquoConnecting Bristolrsquo initiative Here thecouncilrsquos role is more lsquohands-offrsquo specific activities are typically directly led by socialenterprises such as the Knowle West Media Centre

412 Glasgow

As the overall winner of the Future Cities Demonstrator competition in 2012 Glasgow wasawarded pound24m to implement its Feasibility Study proposals Approximately half the award(Davies 2014) was spent on a smart Operations Centre fully operational since 2014 whichmonitors real-time transport and public safety data Meanwhile a spread of smaller initia-tives took place many of which were participatory and interactive and were concluded (asproject deliverables) by the end of the TSB grant period

Glasgow City Council clearly positions itself as the key driving force behind theseactivities the initiative is characterised by the absence of publicised collaborative partner-ship This may reflect the terms of the TSB award positioning the City Council as the singlecontractor and requiring rapid project implementation within the two-year schedule Equallyit upholds the principle asserted in the Feasibility Study that lsquosmart cities are led from the topby a strong and visionary championrsquo (Glasgow City Council 2012 5) Either way the

Urban Research amp Practice 9

councilrsquos centrality appears to have left Glasgowrsquos official smart city activities in a state ofsuspension following the end of funding

413 London

Londonrsquos foray into smart city innovation is explicitly linked to the opportunities andchallenges facing the UKrsquos capital as a global city the smart city discourse deployedforms an integral part of the overarching narrative of London striving for continuous growthand consolidating its position as a leading international city (Mayor of London 2013 see alsoNESTA 2015) The lsquoSmart Londonrsquo initiative is primarily directed at forging a newcollaborative and entrepreneurial mode of governance in the service of sustaining economicgrowth to meet expected population growth The Greater London Authority (GLA) andparticularly the office of the Mayor of London is positioned at the centre of a wide range ofactivities It has co-opted a number of public and private actors including leading research-ers tech companies and larger utilities mainly through the Smart London Board andindividual project partnerships In promoting a co-creative governance mode for smart cityinnovation the GLArsquos role is more to lsquosteerrsquo than to direct outcomes

414 Manchester

Manchester is building on a legacy of digital innovations having published digitalstrategies in 2008 and 2012 and previously established a Digital DevelopmentAgency (MDDA) in 2003 (which was disbanded in 2015) Its 2012 FeasibilityStudy framed its smart aspirations as potentially consolidating recent successesincluding strong hi-tech industries infrastructural investments and repopulation ofthe urban core The lsquoDefining visionrsquo of Manchester was presented as lsquothe birthplaceof the industrial revolution re-inventing itself as a model of twenty-first centuryldquogreen growthrdquorsquo (Manchester City Council 2012 8) The Feasibility Study wastaken as a starting point for an ongoing programme of smart activities in theOxford Road Corridor (Manchester City Council 2013) running 2 km south fromthe city centre Corridor Manchester established as an incorporated body in 2007(CAICT and PDSF 2014 131) hopes that the district will continue to attract lsquoknowl-edge workersrsquo to become lsquoone of the top five innovation districts in Europersquo(Corridor Manchester 2015 4) achieving lsquolocal and global recognition as a placethat is original creative and smart where knowledge is put to workrsquo (4)

Its smart city activities exhibit a particularly networked style of governance withthe council just one of a series of actors allied in varying combinations ndash mostnoticeably the cityrsquos universities and large hospitals local engineering and hi-techfirms Transport for Greater Manchester and grass-roots digital organisation FutureEverything However the council appears to have reclaimed a more central rolethrough its 2016 lsquoSmarter Cityrsquo programme which promotes activities from acrossthe city

415 Milton Keynes

Milton Keynes consciously draws on its history of innovative urban planning andtechnology deployment in stating the aim of becoming the UKrsquos lsquoleading digital cityrsquo(Milton Keynes Council 2012 10) with an lsquounambiguous objective backed with

10 R Cowley et al

integrated city planning to reduce its carbon footprint with an energy-efficient high-techknowledgersquo (3) Although its 2012 Feasibility Study did not win funding it has sincelaunched a lsquoFuture Cityrsquo programme clearly framed by the goals of citizen co-creationand environmental improvements

Although universities typically play prominent partnership roles in other UK smartcity initiatives Milton Keynes is unusual in that the Open University is the dominantactor This may be one reason why the MK Smart programme strongly emphasisescitizen engagement as an end in itself rather than ndash as is more the case in London andPeterborough ndash a source of entrepreneurial ideas

416 Peterborough

The smart activities taking place under the lsquoPeterborough DNArsquo programme finally areclearly shaped by a green growth strategy Peterborough aims to become the lsquoSustainabilityCapital of the UKrsquo and as such lsquothat ldquocapitalrdquo will be exploited to the maximum to ensurethat it delivers true economic prosperity and well-being through job creation and theintegration of employment skills and innovationrsquo (Peterborough City Council 2012 4)The lsquofundamental goalrsquo of its smart activities is one of lsquogrowth innovation and sustain-abilityrsquo (Peterborough City Council 2014 4)

As a runner-up in the TSB competition Peterborough was awarded pound3m While its moreexpensive proposals including significant investment in the transport system were notfunded the four strands of its lsquoDNArsquo programme are similar to those proposed in its 2012Feasibility Study lsquosmart businessrsquo lsquoliving datarsquo lsquoskillsrsquo and lsquoinnovationrsquo In accordancewith the strong economic focus of the programme Peterborough DNA is led collaborativelyby the council and the Local Economic Partnership lsquoOpportunity Peterboroughrsquo

42 The four modalities of publicness and their associated forms of assemblage

Despite the variety suggested above some pertinent observations can be made about bothcommon tendencies and significant differences in the types of publicness invoked by thevarious smart city initatives across the six cities As noted we distinguish four modalities ofpublicness each of which correlates broadly with particular forms of assemblage

421 Service-user publicness

What we term the lsquoservice userrsquomodality of publicness relates the consumption of everydayurban services when for example a person travels by public transport consumes water orelectricity or uses broadband infrastructure Smart technology offers the promise of poten-tially enhancing such public interactions with service providers by providing more accurateor lsquoreal-timersquo data for decision-making new possibilities for users to contribute to servicesthrough automated or voluntary feedback and new channels of accountability

By our assessment this modality was dominant in 25 of the 68 activities analysedmaking it the most common form of publicness across the six cities as a whole Examples ofrelevant activities include Milton Keynesrsquo smart parking initiatives the lsquoIntelligent StreetLightingrsquo and lsquoEnergy Efficiency Demonstratorrsquo pilots in Glasgow and ManchesterrsquoslsquoTriangulumrsquo project which aims to reduce energy use and improve local transport Mosttypically such initiatives are characterised by relatively direct local council involvementThe issues addressed vary depending on the type of infrastructure in question but transport

Urban Research amp Practice 11

congestion resource consumption carbon emissions and digital inclusion are repeatedlymentioned in the documentation A commonality then is a normative framing in which thegoal of improved efficiency is highlighted

Service user-oriented smart city projects are most typically associated with two types ofspatiality The first relates to the traditional materiality of systems operating across the citydigital technology serves to improve the functional efficiency of these existing systemsWhile then the new technology may have clear spatial effects (eg in reworking trafficflows or recalibrating energy distribution) the spatialised phenomena to be rendered moreefficient are already present

Crucially this is the most passive of the four modalities identified The public ispositioned as part of the cityrsquos routine functionality rather than assigned lsquoco-creationalrsquoagency This then does not radically depart from the traditional relationship of the public toinfrastructural services Of course the provision of improved services does not contradict aclaim to being lsquocitizen-centricrsquo or lsquoputting people firstrsquo its conceptualisation neither deniesnor acknowledges that publicness may be assembled otherwise

422 Entrepreneurial publicness

If lsquoservice userrsquo publicness implies a relatively compliant reactive collectivity a more activelsquoentrepreneurialrsquo sense of the public is conjured up in other activities which enrol citizensinto co-creating and innovating in the smart arena This resonates with findings elsewhereidentifying a strong entrepreneurial governance mode at work in smart cities (eg Hollands2015 Wiig 2015) The entrepreneurial modality relates less to the everyday functioning ofthe city and more to the expectation that residents will be involved in creating services andeconomic value Rather than addressing particular thematic issues it is framed by an unmetneed to harness the economic and service-related possibilities afforded by new digitaltechnologies and big data We identified this modality as dominant for 19 of the 68 activitiesconsidered

Examples of related initiatives include the lsquohackathonrsquo events in several cities the lsquoTechLondonersrsquo initiative (aiming to bring lsquoLondonersrsquo and entrepreneurs together to co-createdigital solutions to predefined problems) Peterboroughrsquos lsquoInnovationWeekrsquoworkshops andlsquoBrainwave Innovation Portalrsquo and Manchesterrsquos Digital Laboratory (lsquoMadLabrsquo) whichencouraged local residents to find solutions to social problems through lsquoco-creative human-centric and user-driven research development and innovationrsquo (Ruijsink and Smith 2016 4)Bristolrsquos lsquoIoTMeshrsquo scheme will lsquoopen-up the test-bed to a wide range of Internet-of-Things(IoT) developers In doing so Bristol Is Open will enable companies to perfect their newtechnology solutions for everything from smart rubbish bins to connected streetlamps and awide range of IoTsensorsrsquo (Bristol is Open 2016b) The various lsquoopen datarsquo initiatives acrossthe cities serve directly to allow members of the public to make connections between thedatasets provided (and with their own data if they wish) Public involvement in suchactivities is often explicitly incentivised by commercial possibilities and no clear conceptualdistinction is evident between the public sphere and the market Glasgowrsquos lsquoOpen DataCataloguersquo for example promises to lsquoempower everybody (the public voluntary academicprivate sectors and communities) to harness [data] use it and combine it in new ways Wecan all contribute to making Glasgow a better place to live work and playrsquo (Future CityGlasgow 2016b)

In some cases such as hackathon events the practices associated with this entrepre-neurialism take place in traditional fora or make fairly conventional uses of internet sites (as

12 R Cowley et al

in the case of Tech Londoners) But a more distinctively lsquosmartrsquo spatiality may sometimes beobserved in the various attempts to add a lsquodigital layerrsquo to the city creating what might betermed a ubiquitous network of connectivity The digital infrastructure projects within theBristol is Open programme exemplify this spatiality particularly well in a literal sense theywill add a layer of digital connectivity to the city centre The lsquoWireless Milersquo for exampleaims at the creation of a lsquoheterogeneous technology environmentrsquo (Bristol is Open 2016c 1)which integrates differently formatted wifi signals such that lsquocomplex multi-layered net-works of overlapping big and small cells supply smartphones tablets cars drones and evenbuildings with a huge amount of cheap connectivityrsquo (Bristol is Open 2016d2) The variousopen data initiatives also fall into this category insofar as they enable datasets about existingservices and amenities to be linked together

Again this invocation of entrepreneurial public agency sits comfortably with claims thatpeople are being put at the centre of smart city development it explicitly invites publiccontributions to the ongoing forms that this will take However like the service-usermodality it says little about the more democratic dimensions of publicness A more roundedsense of lsquocitizenshiprsquo as traditionally conceived encompasses not only lsquosocial rightsrsquo (ieaccess to services) but also lsquopolitical rightsrsquo (contributing to decision-making processes) andlsquocivilrsquo ones (relating to freedom of speech) (Isin and Ruppert 2015) Accordingly we furtherpropose and distinguish between a lsquopoliticalrsquo and a lsquocivicrsquo modality of publicness

423 Political publicness

We use the label lsquopoliticalrsquo here in the narrow sense of public involvement in decision-making and deliberation through institutional channels or through novel extensions of theseExamples include the lsquoTalk Londonrsquo online platform which hosts a mixture of surveysblogs and discussion boards promoting itself as a lsquoplace to discuss Londonrsquos big issuesrsquo(Talk London 2016) and Bristolrsquos lsquoDemocratreersquo app which encouraged residents to nomi-nate and vote on suitable locations for planting new trees (While the latter was not initiateddirectly by the council it nevertheless provided a direct means for residents to influenceofficial decisions on resource allocation) If there is a commonality in the issues addressedthrough such activities it relates to a perceived lack of participation ndash often with certainsocial groups in mind ndash in local decision-making

Overall this is by far the least commonmodality of publicness invoked it is dominant inonly three of the 68 activities considered This is perhaps surprising given that the potentialfor digital technologies to reinvigorate democratic deliberation and decision-making hasbeen enthusiastically envisioned and debated since the 1990s (Isin and Ruppert 2015) Thelack of experimentation in this respect may partly be explained by the marginality of smartcity activities to traditional policy-making processes

The uses of online fora (as in the case of the Talk London initiative) or voting apps(Democratree) clearly depart from traditional modes of political deliberation ndash for exampleface-to-face settings ndash and yet nevertheless describe rather conventional uses of the internetHowever there are too few examples in the set of activities analysed for us to drawconclusions about the types of spatialities or spatial effects associated with this modalityof publicness

We highlight the paucity of political publicness specifically because strategy documentsmake repeated claims that citizen engagement is vital to the successful implementation of thesmart city and that related initiatives will enable wider citizen engagement with decision-making processes Its absence points more to a situation in which the smart city not only

Urban Research amp Practice 13

operates at the margins of normal institutional processes but might even be criticallyinterpreted as seeking to bypass them ndash a possibility raised by Shearmur (2016) in recountinghow delegates at a technology conference imagined the public sector as merely an obstacle tosmart city implementation

424 Civic publicness

Decision-making mediated through official processes only captures part of a cityrsquos politicallife and may tend to frame issues in certain ways for the purposes of voting or other forms ofdeliberation We therefore distinguish the lsquopoliticalrsquo from a rather less structured lsquocivicrsquomodality of publicness which loosely maps onto a traditional sense of the broader lsquopublicspherersquo In other words it inheres in those activities taking place in spaces beyond stateinstitutions but which are not directly oriented towards market activity A local councilrsquosinvolvement in such activities is necessarily more at armrsquos length it may enable or merelyapprove of such activities in its own promotional documents The types of issues shaping itsassemblage should then emerge lsquofrom belowrsquo Equally however this modality of public-ness may be more immediately associated with leisure activities or lsquoplayfulnessrsquo ndash suchactivities in public space may constitute a performative type of claim making within thebroader democratic process (see eg Hou 2010 Parkinson 2012) The invocation of civicpublicness is far from uncommon across the six cities considered here on a par with theentrepreneurial it is dominant for 21 of the 68 activities (and the most common modality inLondon)

Examples include the lsquoCommunity Wellnessrsquo strand of Manchesterrsquos lsquoCityVerversquo pro-ject aiming to encourage schoolchildren and commuters to take exercise in parks BristolrsquoslsquoMyKWrsquo community social media platform the lsquoBristol Approach to Citizen Sensingrsquo andlsquoPlayable Cityrsquo initiatives Glasgowrsquos lsquoActive Travelrsquo demonstrator initiative insofar as itencouraged cyclists to share data and experiences of cycling in the city and Londonrsquos lsquoSpeedVolunteeringrsquo app which seeks to put those wishing to volunteer in touch with peopleseeking help

We discern two distinctive spatialities as characteristic of assemblages of civic public-ness First relevant initiatives are often constituted by the goal of manifesting the virtualdigital in traditional (physical) public space Peterborough for example has planned a largelsquoOpenCityrsquo digital screen in the city centre Bristolrsquos lsquoPlayable Citiesrsquo competition has beenrunning annually since 2013 to fund temporary artistic installations in the city centre Theproject also taking place elsewhere internationally aims to put lsquopeople and play at the heartof the future city Through interaction and creative installations it unlocks a socialdialogue bringing the citizens into a city development conversationrsquo (Watershed 2016)Examples have included the 2013 winner Hello Lamp Post which allowed members of thepublic to have text message conversations with various items of street furniture andUrbanimals in 2015 in which digitally projected animals would appear unexpectedly acrossthe city and interact with the public (Watershed 2016) Manchesterrsquos lsquoCityVerversquo Internet ofThings demonstrator project mentioned above plans to install lsquotalkative bus stopsrsquo and alsquoCommunity Wellnessrsquo sensor network in parks along school and commuter routes toencourage exercise (UK Government 2015)

The second characteristic spatiality of civic publicness relates to varied attempts toreclaim the digital sphere from the private sector The idea of lsquoreclamationrsquo may not beexplicit in the documentation but such initiatives are typically driven by civil society actorsand aim variously to empower citizens to use and have a presence through new digital urban

14 R Cowley et al

technologies Manchesterrsquos lsquoLiving Labrsquo programme (whose current status is unclearfollowing the disbandment of the Manchester Digital Development Authority) includedthe development of an interactive local news and information web portal featuring contentcreated by residents The lsquoManchester Digital Laboratoryrsquo describes itself as a lsquograssrootsinnovation organisationrsquo (MadLab 2016a) which organises various events and digital train-ing courses with a core mission to allow the general public to lsquohelp people to make thingsbetter togetherrsquo through lsquoexperimentationrsquo lsquoplayrsquo and lsquofunrsquo and the promotion of craftman-ship (MadLab 2016b) In Bristol a local social networking site (first trialled as lsquoMyKWrsquo inthe Knowle West district) has been extended to the city as a whole (as lsquoMyBristolrsquo) Theplanned lsquoBristol Approach to Citizen Sensingrsquo initiative meanwhile mentioned above mostexplicitly displays the aim of reconfiguring virtual space in this way in its vision of a lsquoco-created city commonsrsquo which lsquosupports the deployment of new or adapted technologies intoeveryday environmentsrsquo (KWMC 2016 1)

425 Summary of relative prominence of different modalities of publicness

Table 2 summarises the relative prominence of the four modalities of publicness in eachcity and across all six cities

Analysing these data too closely would potentially yield spurious findings for severalreasons our six cities were not chosen to yield a somehow statistically representative sampleof activities for the purposes of quantitative research the coding of their modalities involvedsome subjective judgement and all activities are equally weighted regardless of scale timeperiod budget and policy significance These reservations aside the findings provide anindicative overview of the variations in the publicness assembled in these six leading citiesand in this spirit two broad observations are ventured

First the relative prominence of the four modalities differs considerably by city In thissense again lsquosmart publicnessrsquo is evidently not determined by globally circulating dis-courses but at least partly reflects its immediate governance and policy context The relativeabsence of entrepreneurial publicness in Glasgow for example communicates the councilrsquossole responsibility for delivering activities In Bristol the dominant entrepreneurial and civicmodalities chime with an overall strategic goal of expanding the knowledge economy bytapping into a strong tradition of grass-roots innovation The lack of service-user publicnessin Peterborough reflects the limited funding available for hard infrastructural projects theemphasis on entrepreneurial and civic publicness evinces the shared responsibility of thecityrsquos economic development agency and the council in managing the Peterborough DNAprogramme Londonrsquos relatively weak service use focus differently confirms the GLArsquos roleas steering and advisory actor rather than as funder of large-scale material interventions Thecity-level assemblages in Manchester and Milton Keynes display similarity in their strongoverall service-use sense of publicness and relatively weak civic modality While civicpublicness may come to the fore in Manchester in future given Corridor Manchesterrsquos statedlsquoplace-makingrsquo goals (Corridor Manchester 2015 24ndash25) its current relative absenceimplies a lack of active engagement on the part of the general public Milton Keynes isperhaps more surprising in this respect given its clear strategic claim to be civically engagedIts relatively weak civic publicness underlines the opportunistic nature of smart urbanactivities those coming to be implemented or funded may reflect strategic goals unevenlysmart policy documents themselves carry relatively little weight in the urban developmentprocess

Urban Research amp Practice 15

Table

2Relativeprom

inence

ofdominantmodalitiesof

publicness

insm

artcity

activities

across

sixUK

cities

Dom

inantmodality

Bristol

Glasgow

London

Manchester

MiltonKeynes

Peterborough

Allactivities

Meanfor6cities

Service

User

1457

1156

530

3732

Entrepreneurial

367

3333

2460

2832

Political

140

110

00

44

Civic

3636

4411

2440

3132

(Total

no

ofactivities)

(14)

(14)

(9)

(9)

(17)

(5)

(68)

16 R Cowley et al

Second the proportion of initiatives oriented towards civic publicness is not insig-nificant these account for approximately a third of all the activities examined On thisbasis it would be oversimplistic to dismiss the claims that the lsquoactually existingrsquocontemporary UK smart city pays only lip service to the importance of public claim-making Nevertheless this embrace of the democratic process does not extend to theprovision of significant opportunities for citizens to engage directly with the formalpolitical system in innovative ways In itself the absence of envisaged political public-ness does not undermine the possibility of more traditional public engagement withgovernmental institutions elsewhere yet the smart city does not provide channels for thedirect expression of public contestation or more radical forms of dissent

In this sense the smart city may appear to be aligned with broader depoliticising or lsquopost-politicalrsquo tendencies in governance generally and urban planning specifically (Swyngedouw2007 2011 Allmendinger and Haughton 2012 Joss 2015) In a post-political reading itsassemblage across UK cities would reflect the nature of its conceptual underpinnings thesmart city can only lsquocommand agreement as a result of [its] broadly progressive if non-specific framingrsquo (Allmendinger and Haughton 2012 94) and is therefore lsquounable to arouseconflicts among political ideasrsquo (Crivello 2015 919) Alternatively following Newman andClarke (2009) it illustrates the apparent paradox of the decline of the traditional lsquopublicrsquobeing accompanied by its simultaneous proliferation as a fragmented mulitiplicity politicalpublicness may be assembling elsewhere but is not associated with the intended role of thesmart city in the United Kingdom

426 Obduracy

Political publicness aside our findings have at least provided convincing evidence that UKsmart city initiatives are guided by a genuine desire to encourage civic engagement ofvarious kinds Even here however a more nuanced picture emerges when the relativeobduracy of individual activities is factored in Based on the available information weflagged each of the 68 activities as either lsquopermanentrsquo (to indicate ongoing operation orpresence in the city) or lsquotemporaryrsquo (to indicate a one-off or time-limited activity) As Table 3shows civic (and political) activities tend to be less permanent in nature than those invokingentrepreneurial and service-user publicness

In an important sense the relatively temporary nature of activities oriented towardspolitical and civic publicness is unsurprising particularly when contrasted with the service-user modality which is more often associated ndash as discussed above ndash with lsquohardrsquo infra-structural interventions The consequences of such activities may be long-lasting even whenthe activity itself is short-lived Nevertheless these findings fall short of convincinglyheralding a situation in which citizenship is prioritised as the central ongoing concern ofthe UK smart city

Table 3 Obduracy of smart city activities invoking each modality of publicness

Dominant modalityPermanent

Temporary

Base (number of activities)

Service-user 76 24 (25)Entrepreneurial 58 42 (19)Political 33 67 (3)Civic 48 52 (21)

Urban Research amp Practice 17

Significantly furthermore a degree of bifurcation is evident in the overall techno-publicassemblages such that civic and political publicness are sidelined within less obduratestrands of programmatic activity In Glasgow the enduring legacy of the lsquoFuture Cityrsquoprogramme is most visible in the service-user-oriented Operation Centre However manyof its other activities characterised by a more interactive and participatory mode of publicengagement were one-off events As lsquodemonstrator projectsrsquo they served in principle to helpdefine rather than enact the smart city ndash but there is little evidence that this more temporarystrand of the lsquoFuture Cityrsquo programme has subsequently been embedded in mainstreammunicipal activities In Bristol too a clear bifurcation is evident On one side the lsquoBristol isOpenrsquo improvements to the cityrsquos digital infrastructure and the lsquoOpen Data Bristolrsquo initiative(all of which might be expected to be relatively durable) invoke primarily entrepreneurialpublicness On the other the Connecting Bristol partnership promotes diverse lsquosofterrsquo civicand political activities led by grass-roots organisations which exhibit rather less obduracy assmall-scale pilot schemes or activities with limited public participation Evidently then lesscommitment and resources are available for experiments in the field of citizenship under-stood in more traditional liberal democratic ways than in those which conjure up a passive orentrepreneurial public

5 Discussion

Our reading of the smart city consciously departs from critical presentations of the smart cityas a lsquotop-downrsquo imposition and towards a foregrounding and more nuanced appreciation ofits practical variety But the observation that this variety is skewed towards the assemblage ofservice-user and entrepreneurial senses of the public does not constitute a straightforwardlyuseful critique of its current local manifestations The focus on service-user publicness atleast is unsurprising to the extent that local authorities are arguably seen by default asprimarily service providers To observe that civic and political publicness by way ofcontrast are less well considered and often only tokenistically accommodated is not tomake the normative case that these should necessarily or could realistically be privileged inlocal techno-public smart assemblages Rather the prevalence of this more passive modalityof publicness becomes significant when set against rhetorical claims that the smart city iseffecting transformational lsquocitizen-centricrsquo change

The dominance of service-user publicness does little to counter a broader trend identifiedby Powell (2014 15) towards lsquoa shift in the notion of citizenship away from civicresponsibilities and engagements to classifying [citizens] as consumers who purchaseservices from providersrsquo Although Powellrsquos discussion relates to the role of digitised datamore generally it is clearly relevant to the smart cityrsquos focus on providing greater efficien-cies Insofar as the lsquorelationship between government individuals and corporate entitiesrsquo (15)is viewed through the lens of the lsquocitizen as consumerrsquo its quality is only improved by theefficiencies which datafication enables Citizenship in this narrow sense is not related toaltruism or responsibilities but rather based on a principle of exchange and enacted throughlsquocollecting and sharing personal datarsquo (15) Drawing on Dean (2005) Powell highlights therisk that lsquothe norms of publicity ndash information communication and participation ndash havecome to stand for the political ends that they were presumed to serversquo (Powell 2014 16) Thisperspective raises various questions about many of the goals of UK smart city initiatives inrelation to the broader dimensions of citizenship For example the aim of lsquodigital inclusionrsquocommonly asserted among these six cases may appear laudable and yet it pushes the deeperpurpose of digital inclusion into the background smart connectivity itself becomes the goal

18 R Cowley et al

Similarly ideals of lsquotransparent governancersquo or lsquoopen datarsquo may end up being fetishisedwithin a discourse of efficiency even though this discourse tells us little about the normativebasis of the relationship between the public and the state beyond its passive lsquoservice-userrsquomodality

Although again our analysis opposes the existence of a deterministic link betweenglobal smart discourse and local practices the focus on efficiency of different types(including resource use provision of services and access to information) clearly resonateswith Whitersquos (2016) identification of an international discursive storyline in which the smartcity responds to lsquoresource pressures brought on by rapid urbanization and an ageing popula-tion the effects of anthropogenic global climate change and the twinned pressure of fiscalausterity and inter-urban competitionrsquo (577) We would at least suggest that the narrative ofthe lsquoage of crisisrsquo which accompanies much of the contemporary envisionment of futurecities (Caprotti 2015) has had a shaping influence on the prominence given to efficientservice provision in smart activities implemented to date

Equally given the broader UK policy context it would seem eccentric for local autho-rities to discourage entrepreneurialism On the immediate pragmatic level of funding andresources it must be significant that the governmentrsquos Department for Business Skills andInnovation has played a significant catalytic role smart city initiatives have not emergedunder the auspices of say the Department for Communities and Local Government But theprominence of entrepreneurial publicness raises a separate set of concerns echoing Dattarsquos(2015) diagnosis ndash albeit with reference to the rather different context of the Indian city ofDholera ndash of the smart city promoting lsquourbanization as a business model rather than a modelof social justicersquo Across our UK cases issues of social sustainability are far from absent inpolicy documents but their range tends to be limited for example focusing on health ande-inclusion or educating residents to participate in the digital economy In Glasgow suchquestions are subsumed within overall questions of efficiency and relate to very specificfactors such as public safety and reporting problems with services Milton Keynes claimsconsiderable interest in citizen co-creation but its initiatives are not primarily aimed attargeting social problems Although Peterboroughrsquos 2012 Feasibility Study prominentlyflagged up inequalities social cohesion and health improvements among other issues(Peterborough City Council 2012 3) its current strategy is addressed towards developingskills which lsquomeet local business demandrsquo and lsquoput Peterboroughrsquo in lsquothe best possibleposition to take advantage of emerging marketsrsquo (Peterborough City Council 2014 5)

One final way in which the lsquocitizen-centricrsquo nature of the UK smart city is questionablerelates to an apparent straightforward lack of public interest On one level this simplyreminds us of the peripherality of the smart city many of the associated activities only claimto be small-scale experimental trials and are not deeply embedded into the mainstream policyprocess While the actual numbers of local residents involved with many civic and politicalschemes are often negligible we found no convincing evidence either of broader enthusiasmor emergent public counter-discourse in any city4 While emergent political or civic con-testation is clearly not something which local authorities might lsquoplanrsquo for ndash it would beabsurd to expect local authorities to devise problems for frustrated publics to assemblearound ndash its absence does not provide evidence of acquiescence or approval or guarantee thesmooth passage of smart technology into urban life more broadly in future It more obviouslyreflects the survey evidence suggesting that general public awareness of any lsquosmartrsquo plans oractivities undertaken by local councils is neglible (Arqiva 2015) and that only one in five UKadults even recognises the term smart city (IET 2016)

Urban Research amp Practice 19

6 Conclusions towards a new lsquosmart urban publicnessrsquo

In studying and comparing a series of relatively well-developed smart city programmes aslsquotechno-public assemblagesrsquo we have responded to a series of policy claims made about therelationships between smart urban technologies and the public Our analysis reveals that thepublicness envisaged and enacted in the UK smart city is far from one-dimensional Citizensare not merely absent as the earlier critiques of the smart city would have it nor do smart cityactivities necessarily invoke a particular stunted notion of publicness in all cases Rather thegreat variety of types of publicness in evidence leads us to conclude that the rhetorical claimsabout the smart city being citizen-centric are not straightforwardly empty ones Rather thanagreeing with the speculative critiques of the smart city as a devious attempt to exclude thepublic we would urge commentators to begin from the assumption that its institutionalprotagonists do have a vested interest in questions of democracy

That said it also seems fair to conclude that the smart does not yet evince a convincinglyrounded sense of the lsquopublic cityrsquo The opportunistic nature of smart city development inother words gives rise to unique local forms but simultaneously holds these hostage tobroader societal and economic agendas the forms of their assemblage have remained shapedby immediate policy contexts and broader smart city policy discourse Thinking in terms ofits experimental shifting and peripheral assemblage in practice nevertheless opens upagentive space for actors involved to influence smart development in ways which moreconvincingly invoke a more rounded sense of publicness and in turn enable a moreconvincing sense of public ownership and enthusiasm

For more fully public smart city assemblages to emerge in future the civic and politicalmay need to be more obviously accommodated within the service-user and entrepreneurialThis need not relate to heavy-handed attempts to co-opt the civic which risk neutralising itsinnovative potential but the civic should at least not be siloed into more ephemeral strands ofactivity A lack of civic engagement with large infrastructural projects for example seemsunlikely to be successfully mitigated by a series of parallel participatory events which passunnoticed by most residents Similarly entrepreneurial activities are to be welcomed whichare more obviously oriented towards finding solutions to problems defined by citizensalongside those oriented at the creation of wealth through hi-tech innovations The possibi-lities for smart city technology to enable or engender more formal political participationfurthermore appear to have remained largely unexplored in practical terms

If only because the lsquoactually existingrsquo smart city is still at an experimental stage ofdevelopment we note that it has effected only marginal reconfigurations of the materialspaces of the city to date Nevertheless looking forward we urge researchers and practi-tioners to pay attention to the distinctive spatialities of the lsquosmart publicrsquo particularly in theinterfaces between public and private space and between virtual space and the traditionalmaterial public realm There is considerable scope in this regard to reverse the tendencyidentified by Kinsley (2013) to assign the digital to a parallel disembodied lsquohyperspacersquorather our understandings might more fruitfully be grounded in the relationships betweenhumans and technology in local contexts For policy-makers and practitioners activelyseeking a more widespread and involved sense of public debate around and engagementwith the implications of smart technology it may be rewarding to focus on the visibility ofnew innovations This may involve moving towards a more active consideration of themultiple roles of public space and more imaginatively using smart technologies to moveaway from more traditional fora as spaces of public engagement

Overall we resist from concluding that contemporary UK smart initiatives alreadyconstitute a qualitatively novel recasting of the public In relying on dominant political

20 R Cowley et al

structures and economic actors they have come to promote incremental change at best bothin terms of publicness and the material space of the city But assessing the long-termimpacts of smart innovations on urban space will be an ongoing project indeed the conceptlsquosmartrsquo itself may in future lose currency as a label or be reworked as a signifier In themeantime insofar as the smart city is indicative of broader contemporary attempts to shapeurban change in a time of austerity its lsquoexperimentalrsquo nature may appear rather moreproblematically reflective of a bypassing of the traditional democratic process And if wetoo may be allowed to propose a dystopian scenario it is one where in spite of the bestintentions of policy-makers the dominant norms of emerging smart city practices becomesedimented into novel twenty-first century institutional processes whose pragmatic world-view does not extend beyond that of a society of entrepreneurs and service users

AcknowledgementsThis study was undertaken at the University of Westminster with financial support from ESRC grantESL0159781 Youri Dayot was Visiting Fellow from the University of Grenoble

Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors

FundingThis study was undertaken at the University of Westminster as part of the ESRC-funded projectlsquoSmart Eco-cities for a Green Economy a Comparative Study of Europe and Chinarsquo (grant ESL0159781)

Notes1 The two terms (lsquosmart cityrsquo lsquofuture cityrsquo) are complementary and often used interchangeably

especially in the UK national policy context (see eg BSI 2014 3 also Joss Cook andDayot forthcoming) It is beyond the scope of this paper to delve into the conceptualinterrelationship of these recent policy terms in more detail

2 A fuller list of the key documents and links to relevant web pages consulted has been madepublicly available on the lead authorrsquos ResearchGate web pages httpswwwresearchgatenetprofileRobert_Cowley

3 More detailed descriptions of many of the individual activities and bodies analysed in thepresent research may be found in the lsquogrey literaturersquo (see eg Caprotti et al 2016 Woodset al 2016)

4 With the exception of some concerns in Glasgow about the use of facial recognition softwarein the cityrsquos CCTV system linked to the Operation Centre (Sunday Herald 2014 Aitchinson2015)

ReferencesAitchinson J 2015 ldquoShould We Be Worried about Glasgowrsquos New Hi-Tech Surveillance Systemrdquo

STV News February 23 httpglasgowstvtvarticles310713-glasgows-new-surveillance-installed-by-israeli-firm-nice-systems

Allmendinger P and G Haughton 2012 ldquoPost-Political Spatial Planning in England A Crisis ofConsensusrdquo Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37 (1) 89ndash103 doi101111j1475-5661201100468x

Arqiva 2015 ldquoAre Cities Really Getting Smarterrdquo httpswwwarqivacomnewspress-releasesare-our-cities-really-getting-smarter

Urban Research amp Practice 21

councilrsquos centrality appears to have left Glasgowrsquos official smart city activities in a state ofsuspension following the end of funding

413 London

Londonrsquos foray into smart city innovation is explicitly linked to the opportunities andchallenges facing the UKrsquos capital as a global city the smart city discourse deployedforms an integral part of the overarching narrative of London striving for continuous growthand consolidating its position as a leading international city (Mayor of London 2013 see alsoNESTA 2015) The lsquoSmart Londonrsquo initiative is primarily directed at forging a newcollaborative and entrepreneurial mode of governance in the service of sustaining economicgrowth to meet expected population growth The Greater London Authority (GLA) andparticularly the office of the Mayor of London is positioned at the centre of a wide range ofactivities It has co-opted a number of public and private actors including leading research-ers tech companies and larger utilities mainly through the Smart London Board andindividual project partnerships In promoting a co-creative governance mode for smart cityinnovation the GLArsquos role is more to lsquosteerrsquo than to direct outcomes

414 Manchester

Manchester is building on a legacy of digital innovations having published digitalstrategies in 2008 and 2012 and previously established a Digital DevelopmentAgency (MDDA) in 2003 (which was disbanded in 2015) Its 2012 FeasibilityStudy framed its smart aspirations as potentially consolidating recent successesincluding strong hi-tech industries infrastructural investments and repopulation ofthe urban core The lsquoDefining visionrsquo of Manchester was presented as lsquothe birthplaceof the industrial revolution re-inventing itself as a model of twenty-first centuryldquogreen growthrdquorsquo (Manchester City Council 2012 8) The Feasibility Study wastaken as a starting point for an ongoing programme of smart activities in theOxford Road Corridor (Manchester City Council 2013) running 2 km south fromthe city centre Corridor Manchester established as an incorporated body in 2007(CAICT and PDSF 2014 131) hopes that the district will continue to attract lsquoknowl-edge workersrsquo to become lsquoone of the top five innovation districts in Europersquo(Corridor Manchester 2015 4) achieving lsquolocal and global recognition as a placethat is original creative and smart where knowledge is put to workrsquo (4)

Its smart city activities exhibit a particularly networked style of governance withthe council just one of a series of actors allied in varying combinations ndash mostnoticeably the cityrsquos universities and large hospitals local engineering and hi-techfirms Transport for Greater Manchester and grass-roots digital organisation FutureEverything However the council appears to have reclaimed a more central rolethrough its 2016 lsquoSmarter Cityrsquo programme which promotes activities from acrossthe city

415 Milton Keynes

Milton Keynes consciously draws on its history of innovative urban planning andtechnology deployment in stating the aim of becoming the UKrsquos lsquoleading digital cityrsquo(Milton Keynes Council 2012 10) with an lsquounambiguous objective backed with

10 R Cowley et al

integrated city planning to reduce its carbon footprint with an energy-efficient high-techknowledgersquo (3) Although its 2012 Feasibility Study did not win funding it has sincelaunched a lsquoFuture Cityrsquo programme clearly framed by the goals of citizen co-creationand environmental improvements

Although universities typically play prominent partnership roles in other UK smartcity initiatives Milton Keynes is unusual in that the Open University is the dominantactor This may be one reason why the MK Smart programme strongly emphasisescitizen engagement as an end in itself rather than ndash as is more the case in London andPeterborough ndash a source of entrepreneurial ideas

416 Peterborough

The smart activities taking place under the lsquoPeterborough DNArsquo programme finally areclearly shaped by a green growth strategy Peterborough aims to become the lsquoSustainabilityCapital of the UKrsquo and as such lsquothat ldquocapitalrdquo will be exploited to the maximum to ensurethat it delivers true economic prosperity and well-being through job creation and theintegration of employment skills and innovationrsquo (Peterborough City Council 2012 4)The lsquofundamental goalrsquo of its smart activities is one of lsquogrowth innovation and sustain-abilityrsquo (Peterborough City Council 2014 4)

As a runner-up in the TSB competition Peterborough was awarded pound3m While its moreexpensive proposals including significant investment in the transport system were notfunded the four strands of its lsquoDNArsquo programme are similar to those proposed in its 2012Feasibility Study lsquosmart businessrsquo lsquoliving datarsquo lsquoskillsrsquo and lsquoinnovationrsquo In accordancewith the strong economic focus of the programme Peterborough DNA is led collaborativelyby the council and the Local Economic Partnership lsquoOpportunity Peterboroughrsquo

42 The four modalities of publicness and their associated forms of assemblage

Despite the variety suggested above some pertinent observations can be made about bothcommon tendencies and significant differences in the types of publicness invoked by thevarious smart city initatives across the six cities As noted we distinguish four modalities ofpublicness each of which correlates broadly with particular forms of assemblage

421 Service-user publicness

What we term the lsquoservice userrsquomodality of publicness relates the consumption of everydayurban services when for example a person travels by public transport consumes water orelectricity or uses broadband infrastructure Smart technology offers the promise of poten-tially enhancing such public interactions with service providers by providing more accurateor lsquoreal-timersquo data for decision-making new possibilities for users to contribute to servicesthrough automated or voluntary feedback and new channels of accountability

By our assessment this modality was dominant in 25 of the 68 activities analysedmaking it the most common form of publicness across the six cities as a whole Examples ofrelevant activities include Milton Keynesrsquo smart parking initiatives the lsquoIntelligent StreetLightingrsquo and lsquoEnergy Efficiency Demonstratorrsquo pilots in Glasgow and ManchesterrsquoslsquoTriangulumrsquo project which aims to reduce energy use and improve local transport Mosttypically such initiatives are characterised by relatively direct local council involvementThe issues addressed vary depending on the type of infrastructure in question but transport

Urban Research amp Practice 11

congestion resource consumption carbon emissions and digital inclusion are repeatedlymentioned in the documentation A commonality then is a normative framing in which thegoal of improved efficiency is highlighted

Service user-oriented smart city projects are most typically associated with two types ofspatiality The first relates to the traditional materiality of systems operating across the citydigital technology serves to improve the functional efficiency of these existing systemsWhile then the new technology may have clear spatial effects (eg in reworking trafficflows or recalibrating energy distribution) the spatialised phenomena to be rendered moreefficient are already present

Crucially this is the most passive of the four modalities identified The public ispositioned as part of the cityrsquos routine functionality rather than assigned lsquoco-creationalrsquoagency This then does not radically depart from the traditional relationship of the public toinfrastructural services Of course the provision of improved services does not contradict aclaim to being lsquocitizen-centricrsquo or lsquoputting people firstrsquo its conceptualisation neither deniesnor acknowledges that publicness may be assembled otherwise

422 Entrepreneurial publicness

If lsquoservice userrsquo publicness implies a relatively compliant reactive collectivity a more activelsquoentrepreneurialrsquo sense of the public is conjured up in other activities which enrol citizensinto co-creating and innovating in the smart arena This resonates with findings elsewhereidentifying a strong entrepreneurial governance mode at work in smart cities (eg Hollands2015 Wiig 2015) The entrepreneurial modality relates less to the everyday functioning ofthe city and more to the expectation that residents will be involved in creating services andeconomic value Rather than addressing particular thematic issues it is framed by an unmetneed to harness the economic and service-related possibilities afforded by new digitaltechnologies and big data We identified this modality as dominant for 19 of the 68 activitiesconsidered

Examples of related initiatives include the lsquohackathonrsquo events in several cities the lsquoTechLondonersrsquo initiative (aiming to bring lsquoLondonersrsquo and entrepreneurs together to co-createdigital solutions to predefined problems) Peterboroughrsquos lsquoInnovationWeekrsquoworkshops andlsquoBrainwave Innovation Portalrsquo and Manchesterrsquos Digital Laboratory (lsquoMadLabrsquo) whichencouraged local residents to find solutions to social problems through lsquoco-creative human-centric and user-driven research development and innovationrsquo (Ruijsink and Smith 2016 4)Bristolrsquos lsquoIoTMeshrsquo scheme will lsquoopen-up the test-bed to a wide range of Internet-of-Things(IoT) developers In doing so Bristol Is Open will enable companies to perfect their newtechnology solutions for everything from smart rubbish bins to connected streetlamps and awide range of IoTsensorsrsquo (Bristol is Open 2016b) The various lsquoopen datarsquo initiatives acrossthe cities serve directly to allow members of the public to make connections between thedatasets provided (and with their own data if they wish) Public involvement in suchactivities is often explicitly incentivised by commercial possibilities and no clear conceptualdistinction is evident between the public sphere and the market Glasgowrsquos lsquoOpen DataCataloguersquo for example promises to lsquoempower everybody (the public voluntary academicprivate sectors and communities) to harness [data] use it and combine it in new ways Wecan all contribute to making Glasgow a better place to live work and playrsquo (Future CityGlasgow 2016b)

In some cases such as hackathon events the practices associated with this entrepre-neurialism take place in traditional fora or make fairly conventional uses of internet sites (as

12 R Cowley et al

in the case of Tech Londoners) But a more distinctively lsquosmartrsquo spatiality may sometimes beobserved in the various attempts to add a lsquodigital layerrsquo to the city creating what might betermed a ubiquitous network of connectivity The digital infrastructure projects within theBristol is Open programme exemplify this spatiality particularly well in a literal sense theywill add a layer of digital connectivity to the city centre The lsquoWireless Milersquo for exampleaims at the creation of a lsquoheterogeneous technology environmentrsquo (Bristol is Open 2016c 1)which integrates differently formatted wifi signals such that lsquocomplex multi-layered net-works of overlapping big and small cells supply smartphones tablets cars drones and evenbuildings with a huge amount of cheap connectivityrsquo (Bristol is Open 2016d2) The variousopen data initiatives also fall into this category insofar as they enable datasets about existingservices and amenities to be linked together

Again this invocation of entrepreneurial public agency sits comfortably with claims thatpeople are being put at the centre of smart city development it explicitly invites publiccontributions to the ongoing forms that this will take However like the service-usermodality it says little about the more democratic dimensions of publicness A more roundedsense of lsquocitizenshiprsquo as traditionally conceived encompasses not only lsquosocial rightsrsquo (ieaccess to services) but also lsquopolitical rightsrsquo (contributing to decision-making processes) andlsquocivilrsquo ones (relating to freedom of speech) (Isin and Ruppert 2015) Accordingly we furtherpropose and distinguish between a lsquopoliticalrsquo and a lsquocivicrsquo modality of publicness

423 Political publicness

We use the label lsquopoliticalrsquo here in the narrow sense of public involvement in decision-making and deliberation through institutional channels or through novel extensions of theseExamples include the lsquoTalk Londonrsquo online platform which hosts a mixture of surveysblogs and discussion boards promoting itself as a lsquoplace to discuss Londonrsquos big issuesrsquo(Talk London 2016) and Bristolrsquos lsquoDemocratreersquo app which encouraged residents to nomi-nate and vote on suitable locations for planting new trees (While the latter was not initiateddirectly by the council it nevertheless provided a direct means for residents to influenceofficial decisions on resource allocation) If there is a commonality in the issues addressedthrough such activities it relates to a perceived lack of participation ndash often with certainsocial groups in mind ndash in local decision-making

Overall this is by far the least commonmodality of publicness invoked it is dominant inonly three of the 68 activities considered This is perhaps surprising given that the potentialfor digital technologies to reinvigorate democratic deliberation and decision-making hasbeen enthusiastically envisioned and debated since the 1990s (Isin and Ruppert 2015) Thelack of experimentation in this respect may partly be explained by the marginality of smartcity activities to traditional policy-making processes

The uses of online fora (as in the case of the Talk London initiative) or voting apps(Democratree) clearly depart from traditional modes of political deliberation ndash for exampleface-to-face settings ndash and yet nevertheless describe rather conventional uses of the internetHowever there are too few examples in the set of activities analysed for us to drawconclusions about the types of spatialities or spatial effects associated with this modalityof publicness

We highlight the paucity of political publicness specifically because strategy documentsmake repeated claims that citizen engagement is vital to the successful implementation of thesmart city and that related initiatives will enable wider citizen engagement with decision-making processes Its absence points more to a situation in which the smart city not only

Urban Research amp Practice 13

operates at the margins of normal institutional processes but might even be criticallyinterpreted as seeking to bypass them ndash a possibility raised by Shearmur (2016) in recountinghow delegates at a technology conference imagined the public sector as merely an obstacle tosmart city implementation

424 Civic publicness

Decision-making mediated through official processes only captures part of a cityrsquos politicallife and may tend to frame issues in certain ways for the purposes of voting or other forms ofdeliberation We therefore distinguish the lsquopoliticalrsquo from a rather less structured lsquocivicrsquomodality of publicness which loosely maps onto a traditional sense of the broader lsquopublicspherersquo In other words it inheres in those activities taking place in spaces beyond stateinstitutions but which are not directly oriented towards market activity A local councilrsquosinvolvement in such activities is necessarily more at armrsquos length it may enable or merelyapprove of such activities in its own promotional documents The types of issues shaping itsassemblage should then emerge lsquofrom belowrsquo Equally however this modality of public-ness may be more immediately associated with leisure activities or lsquoplayfulnessrsquo ndash suchactivities in public space may constitute a performative type of claim making within thebroader democratic process (see eg Hou 2010 Parkinson 2012) The invocation of civicpublicness is far from uncommon across the six cities considered here on a par with theentrepreneurial it is dominant for 21 of the 68 activities (and the most common modality inLondon)

Examples include the lsquoCommunity Wellnessrsquo strand of Manchesterrsquos lsquoCityVerversquo pro-ject aiming to encourage schoolchildren and commuters to take exercise in parks BristolrsquoslsquoMyKWrsquo community social media platform the lsquoBristol Approach to Citizen Sensingrsquo andlsquoPlayable Cityrsquo initiatives Glasgowrsquos lsquoActive Travelrsquo demonstrator initiative insofar as itencouraged cyclists to share data and experiences of cycling in the city and Londonrsquos lsquoSpeedVolunteeringrsquo app which seeks to put those wishing to volunteer in touch with peopleseeking help

We discern two distinctive spatialities as characteristic of assemblages of civic public-ness First relevant initiatives are often constituted by the goal of manifesting the virtualdigital in traditional (physical) public space Peterborough for example has planned a largelsquoOpenCityrsquo digital screen in the city centre Bristolrsquos lsquoPlayable Citiesrsquo competition has beenrunning annually since 2013 to fund temporary artistic installations in the city centre Theproject also taking place elsewhere internationally aims to put lsquopeople and play at the heartof the future city Through interaction and creative installations it unlocks a socialdialogue bringing the citizens into a city development conversationrsquo (Watershed 2016)Examples have included the 2013 winner Hello Lamp Post which allowed members of thepublic to have text message conversations with various items of street furniture andUrbanimals in 2015 in which digitally projected animals would appear unexpectedly acrossthe city and interact with the public (Watershed 2016) Manchesterrsquos lsquoCityVerversquo Internet ofThings demonstrator project mentioned above plans to install lsquotalkative bus stopsrsquo and alsquoCommunity Wellnessrsquo sensor network in parks along school and commuter routes toencourage exercise (UK Government 2015)

The second characteristic spatiality of civic publicness relates to varied attempts toreclaim the digital sphere from the private sector The idea of lsquoreclamationrsquo may not beexplicit in the documentation but such initiatives are typically driven by civil society actorsand aim variously to empower citizens to use and have a presence through new digital urban

14 R Cowley et al

technologies Manchesterrsquos lsquoLiving Labrsquo programme (whose current status is unclearfollowing the disbandment of the Manchester Digital Development Authority) includedthe development of an interactive local news and information web portal featuring contentcreated by residents The lsquoManchester Digital Laboratoryrsquo describes itself as a lsquograssrootsinnovation organisationrsquo (MadLab 2016a) which organises various events and digital train-ing courses with a core mission to allow the general public to lsquohelp people to make thingsbetter togetherrsquo through lsquoexperimentationrsquo lsquoplayrsquo and lsquofunrsquo and the promotion of craftman-ship (MadLab 2016b) In Bristol a local social networking site (first trialled as lsquoMyKWrsquo inthe Knowle West district) has been extended to the city as a whole (as lsquoMyBristolrsquo) Theplanned lsquoBristol Approach to Citizen Sensingrsquo initiative meanwhile mentioned above mostexplicitly displays the aim of reconfiguring virtual space in this way in its vision of a lsquoco-created city commonsrsquo which lsquosupports the deployment of new or adapted technologies intoeveryday environmentsrsquo (KWMC 2016 1)

425 Summary of relative prominence of different modalities of publicness

Table 2 summarises the relative prominence of the four modalities of publicness in eachcity and across all six cities

Analysing these data too closely would potentially yield spurious findings for severalreasons our six cities were not chosen to yield a somehow statistically representative sampleof activities for the purposes of quantitative research the coding of their modalities involvedsome subjective judgement and all activities are equally weighted regardless of scale timeperiod budget and policy significance These reservations aside the findings provide anindicative overview of the variations in the publicness assembled in these six leading citiesand in this spirit two broad observations are ventured

First the relative prominence of the four modalities differs considerably by city In thissense again lsquosmart publicnessrsquo is evidently not determined by globally circulating dis-courses but at least partly reflects its immediate governance and policy context The relativeabsence of entrepreneurial publicness in Glasgow for example communicates the councilrsquossole responsibility for delivering activities In Bristol the dominant entrepreneurial and civicmodalities chime with an overall strategic goal of expanding the knowledge economy bytapping into a strong tradition of grass-roots innovation The lack of service-user publicnessin Peterborough reflects the limited funding available for hard infrastructural projects theemphasis on entrepreneurial and civic publicness evinces the shared responsibility of thecityrsquos economic development agency and the council in managing the Peterborough DNAprogramme Londonrsquos relatively weak service use focus differently confirms the GLArsquos roleas steering and advisory actor rather than as funder of large-scale material interventions Thecity-level assemblages in Manchester and Milton Keynes display similarity in their strongoverall service-use sense of publicness and relatively weak civic modality While civicpublicness may come to the fore in Manchester in future given Corridor Manchesterrsquos statedlsquoplace-makingrsquo goals (Corridor Manchester 2015 24ndash25) its current relative absenceimplies a lack of active engagement on the part of the general public Milton Keynes isperhaps more surprising in this respect given its clear strategic claim to be civically engagedIts relatively weak civic publicness underlines the opportunistic nature of smart urbanactivities those coming to be implemented or funded may reflect strategic goals unevenlysmart policy documents themselves carry relatively little weight in the urban developmentprocess

Urban Research amp Practice 15

Table

2Relativeprom

inence

ofdominantmodalitiesof

publicness

insm

artcity

activities

across

sixUK

cities

Dom

inantmodality

Bristol

Glasgow

London

Manchester

MiltonKeynes

Peterborough

Allactivities

Meanfor6cities

Service

User

1457

1156

530

3732

Entrepreneurial

367

3333

2460

2832

Political

140

110

00

44

Civic

3636

4411

2440

3132

(Total

no

ofactivities)

(14)

(14)

(9)

(9)

(17)

(5)

(68)

16 R Cowley et al

Second the proportion of initiatives oriented towards civic publicness is not insig-nificant these account for approximately a third of all the activities examined On thisbasis it would be oversimplistic to dismiss the claims that the lsquoactually existingrsquocontemporary UK smart city pays only lip service to the importance of public claim-making Nevertheless this embrace of the democratic process does not extend to theprovision of significant opportunities for citizens to engage directly with the formalpolitical system in innovative ways In itself the absence of envisaged political public-ness does not undermine the possibility of more traditional public engagement withgovernmental institutions elsewhere yet the smart city does not provide channels for thedirect expression of public contestation or more radical forms of dissent

In this sense the smart city may appear to be aligned with broader depoliticising or lsquopost-politicalrsquo tendencies in governance generally and urban planning specifically (Swyngedouw2007 2011 Allmendinger and Haughton 2012 Joss 2015) In a post-political reading itsassemblage across UK cities would reflect the nature of its conceptual underpinnings thesmart city can only lsquocommand agreement as a result of [its] broadly progressive if non-specific framingrsquo (Allmendinger and Haughton 2012 94) and is therefore lsquounable to arouseconflicts among political ideasrsquo (Crivello 2015 919) Alternatively following Newman andClarke (2009) it illustrates the apparent paradox of the decline of the traditional lsquopublicrsquobeing accompanied by its simultaneous proliferation as a fragmented mulitiplicity politicalpublicness may be assembling elsewhere but is not associated with the intended role of thesmart city in the United Kingdom

426 Obduracy

Political publicness aside our findings have at least provided convincing evidence that UKsmart city initiatives are guided by a genuine desire to encourage civic engagement ofvarious kinds Even here however a more nuanced picture emerges when the relativeobduracy of individual activities is factored in Based on the available information weflagged each of the 68 activities as either lsquopermanentrsquo (to indicate ongoing operation orpresence in the city) or lsquotemporaryrsquo (to indicate a one-off or time-limited activity) As Table 3shows civic (and political) activities tend to be less permanent in nature than those invokingentrepreneurial and service-user publicness

In an important sense the relatively temporary nature of activities oriented towardspolitical and civic publicness is unsurprising particularly when contrasted with the service-user modality which is more often associated ndash as discussed above ndash with lsquohardrsquo infra-structural interventions The consequences of such activities may be long-lasting even whenthe activity itself is short-lived Nevertheless these findings fall short of convincinglyheralding a situation in which citizenship is prioritised as the central ongoing concern ofthe UK smart city

Table 3 Obduracy of smart city activities invoking each modality of publicness

Dominant modalityPermanent

Temporary

Base (number of activities)

Service-user 76 24 (25)Entrepreneurial 58 42 (19)Political 33 67 (3)Civic 48 52 (21)

Urban Research amp Practice 17

Significantly furthermore a degree of bifurcation is evident in the overall techno-publicassemblages such that civic and political publicness are sidelined within less obduratestrands of programmatic activity In Glasgow the enduring legacy of the lsquoFuture Cityrsquoprogramme is most visible in the service-user-oriented Operation Centre However manyof its other activities characterised by a more interactive and participatory mode of publicengagement were one-off events As lsquodemonstrator projectsrsquo they served in principle to helpdefine rather than enact the smart city ndash but there is little evidence that this more temporarystrand of the lsquoFuture Cityrsquo programme has subsequently been embedded in mainstreammunicipal activities In Bristol too a clear bifurcation is evident On one side the lsquoBristol isOpenrsquo improvements to the cityrsquos digital infrastructure and the lsquoOpen Data Bristolrsquo initiative(all of which might be expected to be relatively durable) invoke primarily entrepreneurialpublicness On the other the Connecting Bristol partnership promotes diverse lsquosofterrsquo civicand political activities led by grass-roots organisations which exhibit rather less obduracy assmall-scale pilot schemes or activities with limited public participation Evidently then lesscommitment and resources are available for experiments in the field of citizenship under-stood in more traditional liberal democratic ways than in those which conjure up a passive orentrepreneurial public

5 Discussion

Our reading of the smart city consciously departs from critical presentations of the smart cityas a lsquotop-downrsquo imposition and towards a foregrounding and more nuanced appreciation ofits practical variety But the observation that this variety is skewed towards the assemblage ofservice-user and entrepreneurial senses of the public does not constitute a straightforwardlyuseful critique of its current local manifestations The focus on service-user publicness atleast is unsurprising to the extent that local authorities are arguably seen by default asprimarily service providers To observe that civic and political publicness by way ofcontrast are less well considered and often only tokenistically accommodated is not tomake the normative case that these should necessarily or could realistically be privileged inlocal techno-public smart assemblages Rather the prevalence of this more passive modalityof publicness becomes significant when set against rhetorical claims that the smart city iseffecting transformational lsquocitizen-centricrsquo change

The dominance of service-user publicness does little to counter a broader trend identifiedby Powell (2014 15) towards lsquoa shift in the notion of citizenship away from civicresponsibilities and engagements to classifying [citizens] as consumers who purchaseservices from providersrsquo Although Powellrsquos discussion relates to the role of digitised datamore generally it is clearly relevant to the smart cityrsquos focus on providing greater efficien-cies Insofar as the lsquorelationship between government individuals and corporate entitiesrsquo (15)is viewed through the lens of the lsquocitizen as consumerrsquo its quality is only improved by theefficiencies which datafication enables Citizenship in this narrow sense is not related toaltruism or responsibilities but rather based on a principle of exchange and enacted throughlsquocollecting and sharing personal datarsquo (15) Drawing on Dean (2005) Powell highlights therisk that lsquothe norms of publicity ndash information communication and participation ndash havecome to stand for the political ends that they were presumed to serversquo (Powell 2014 16) Thisperspective raises various questions about many of the goals of UK smart city initiatives inrelation to the broader dimensions of citizenship For example the aim of lsquodigital inclusionrsquocommonly asserted among these six cases may appear laudable and yet it pushes the deeperpurpose of digital inclusion into the background smart connectivity itself becomes the goal

18 R Cowley et al

Similarly ideals of lsquotransparent governancersquo or lsquoopen datarsquo may end up being fetishisedwithin a discourse of efficiency even though this discourse tells us little about the normativebasis of the relationship between the public and the state beyond its passive lsquoservice-userrsquomodality

Although again our analysis opposes the existence of a deterministic link betweenglobal smart discourse and local practices the focus on efficiency of different types(including resource use provision of services and access to information) clearly resonateswith Whitersquos (2016) identification of an international discursive storyline in which the smartcity responds to lsquoresource pressures brought on by rapid urbanization and an ageing popula-tion the effects of anthropogenic global climate change and the twinned pressure of fiscalausterity and inter-urban competitionrsquo (577) We would at least suggest that the narrative ofthe lsquoage of crisisrsquo which accompanies much of the contemporary envisionment of futurecities (Caprotti 2015) has had a shaping influence on the prominence given to efficientservice provision in smart activities implemented to date

Equally given the broader UK policy context it would seem eccentric for local autho-rities to discourage entrepreneurialism On the immediate pragmatic level of funding andresources it must be significant that the governmentrsquos Department for Business Skills andInnovation has played a significant catalytic role smart city initiatives have not emergedunder the auspices of say the Department for Communities and Local Government But theprominence of entrepreneurial publicness raises a separate set of concerns echoing Dattarsquos(2015) diagnosis ndash albeit with reference to the rather different context of the Indian city ofDholera ndash of the smart city promoting lsquourbanization as a business model rather than a modelof social justicersquo Across our UK cases issues of social sustainability are far from absent inpolicy documents but their range tends to be limited for example focusing on health ande-inclusion or educating residents to participate in the digital economy In Glasgow suchquestions are subsumed within overall questions of efficiency and relate to very specificfactors such as public safety and reporting problems with services Milton Keynes claimsconsiderable interest in citizen co-creation but its initiatives are not primarily aimed attargeting social problems Although Peterboroughrsquos 2012 Feasibility Study prominentlyflagged up inequalities social cohesion and health improvements among other issues(Peterborough City Council 2012 3) its current strategy is addressed towards developingskills which lsquomeet local business demandrsquo and lsquoput Peterboroughrsquo in lsquothe best possibleposition to take advantage of emerging marketsrsquo (Peterborough City Council 2014 5)

One final way in which the lsquocitizen-centricrsquo nature of the UK smart city is questionablerelates to an apparent straightforward lack of public interest On one level this simplyreminds us of the peripherality of the smart city many of the associated activities only claimto be small-scale experimental trials and are not deeply embedded into the mainstream policyprocess While the actual numbers of local residents involved with many civic and politicalschemes are often negligible we found no convincing evidence either of broader enthusiasmor emergent public counter-discourse in any city4 While emergent political or civic con-testation is clearly not something which local authorities might lsquoplanrsquo for ndash it would beabsurd to expect local authorities to devise problems for frustrated publics to assemblearound ndash its absence does not provide evidence of acquiescence or approval or guarantee thesmooth passage of smart technology into urban life more broadly in future It more obviouslyreflects the survey evidence suggesting that general public awareness of any lsquosmartrsquo plans oractivities undertaken by local councils is neglible (Arqiva 2015) and that only one in five UKadults even recognises the term smart city (IET 2016)

Urban Research amp Practice 19

6 Conclusions towards a new lsquosmart urban publicnessrsquo

In studying and comparing a series of relatively well-developed smart city programmes aslsquotechno-public assemblagesrsquo we have responded to a series of policy claims made about therelationships between smart urban technologies and the public Our analysis reveals that thepublicness envisaged and enacted in the UK smart city is far from one-dimensional Citizensare not merely absent as the earlier critiques of the smart city would have it nor do smart cityactivities necessarily invoke a particular stunted notion of publicness in all cases Rather thegreat variety of types of publicness in evidence leads us to conclude that the rhetorical claimsabout the smart city being citizen-centric are not straightforwardly empty ones Rather thanagreeing with the speculative critiques of the smart city as a devious attempt to exclude thepublic we would urge commentators to begin from the assumption that its institutionalprotagonists do have a vested interest in questions of democracy

That said it also seems fair to conclude that the smart does not yet evince a convincinglyrounded sense of the lsquopublic cityrsquo The opportunistic nature of smart city development inother words gives rise to unique local forms but simultaneously holds these hostage tobroader societal and economic agendas the forms of their assemblage have remained shapedby immediate policy contexts and broader smart city policy discourse Thinking in terms ofits experimental shifting and peripheral assemblage in practice nevertheless opens upagentive space for actors involved to influence smart development in ways which moreconvincingly invoke a more rounded sense of publicness and in turn enable a moreconvincing sense of public ownership and enthusiasm

For more fully public smart city assemblages to emerge in future the civic and politicalmay need to be more obviously accommodated within the service-user and entrepreneurialThis need not relate to heavy-handed attempts to co-opt the civic which risk neutralising itsinnovative potential but the civic should at least not be siloed into more ephemeral strands ofactivity A lack of civic engagement with large infrastructural projects for example seemsunlikely to be successfully mitigated by a series of parallel participatory events which passunnoticed by most residents Similarly entrepreneurial activities are to be welcomed whichare more obviously oriented towards finding solutions to problems defined by citizensalongside those oriented at the creation of wealth through hi-tech innovations The possibi-lities for smart city technology to enable or engender more formal political participationfurthermore appear to have remained largely unexplored in practical terms

If only because the lsquoactually existingrsquo smart city is still at an experimental stage ofdevelopment we note that it has effected only marginal reconfigurations of the materialspaces of the city to date Nevertheless looking forward we urge researchers and practi-tioners to pay attention to the distinctive spatialities of the lsquosmart publicrsquo particularly in theinterfaces between public and private space and between virtual space and the traditionalmaterial public realm There is considerable scope in this regard to reverse the tendencyidentified by Kinsley (2013) to assign the digital to a parallel disembodied lsquohyperspacersquorather our understandings might more fruitfully be grounded in the relationships betweenhumans and technology in local contexts For policy-makers and practitioners activelyseeking a more widespread and involved sense of public debate around and engagementwith the implications of smart technology it may be rewarding to focus on the visibility ofnew innovations This may involve moving towards a more active consideration of themultiple roles of public space and more imaginatively using smart technologies to moveaway from more traditional fora as spaces of public engagement

Overall we resist from concluding that contemporary UK smart initiatives alreadyconstitute a qualitatively novel recasting of the public In relying on dominant political

20 R Cowley et al

structures and economic actors they have come to promote incremental change at best bothin terms of publicness and the material space of the city But assessing the long-termimpacts of smart innovations on urban space will be an ongoing project indeed the conceptlsquosmartrsquo itself may in future lose currency as a label or be reworked as a signifier In themeantime insofar as the smart city is indicative of broader contemporary attempts to shapeurban change in a time of austerity its lsquoexperimentalrsquo nature may appear rather moreproblematically reflective of a bypassing of the traditional democratic process And if wetoo may be allowed to propose a dystopian scenario it is one where in spite of the bestintentions of policy-makers the dominant norms of emerging smart city practices becomesedimented into novel twenty-first century institutional processes whose pragmatic world-view does not extend beyond that of a society of entrepreneurs and service users

AcknowledgementsThis study was undertaken at the University of Westminster with financial support from ESRC grantESL0159781 Youri Dayot was Visiting Fellow from the University of Grenoble

Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors

FundingThis study was undertaken at the University of Westminster as part of the ESRC-funded projectlsquoSmart Eco-cities for a Green Economy a Comparative Study of Europe and Chinarsquo (grant ESL0159781)

Notes1 The two terms (lsquosmart cityrsquo lsquofuture cityrsquo) are complementary and often used interchangeably

especially in the UK national policy context (see eg BSI 2014 3 also Joss Cook andDayot forthcoming) It is beyond the scope of this paper to delve into the conceptualinterrelationship of these recent policy terms in more detail

2 A fuller list of the key documents and links to relevant web pages consulted has been madepublicly available on the lead authorrsquos ResearchGate web pages httpswwwresearchgatenetprofileRobert_Cowley

3 More detailed descriptions of many of the individual activities and bodies analysed in thepresent research may be found in the lsquogrey literaturersquo (see eg Caprotti et al 2016 Woodset al 2016)

4 With the exception of some concerns in Glasgow about the use of facial recognition softwarein the cityrsquos CCTV system linked to the Operation Centre (Sunday Herald 2014 Aitchinson2015)

ReferencesAitchinson J 2015 ldquoShould We Be Worried about Glasgowrsquos New Hi-Tech Surveillance Systemrdquo

STV News February 23 httpglasgowstvtvarticles310713-glasgows-new-surveillance-installed-by-israeli-firm-nice-systems

Allmendinger P and G Haughton 2012 ldquoPost-Political Spatial Planning in England A Crisis ofConsensusrdquo Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37 (1) 89ndash103 doi101111j1475-5661201100468x

Arqiva 2015 ldquoAre Cities Really Getting Smarterrdquo httpswwwarqivacomnewspress-releasesare-our-cities-really-getting-smarter

Urban Research amp Practice 21

integrated city planning to reduce its carbon footprint with an energy-efficient high-techknowledgersquo (3) Although its 2012 Feasibility Study did not win funding it has sincelaunched a lsquoFuture Cityrsquo programme clearly framed by the goals of citizen co-creationand environmental improvements

Although universities typically play prominent partnership roles in other UK smartcity initiatives Milton Keynes is unusual in that the Open University is the dominantactor This may be one reason why the MK Smart programme strongly emphasisescitizen engagement as an end in itself rather than ndash as is more the case in London andPeterborough ndash a source of entrepreneurial ideas

416 Peterborough

The smart activities taking place under the lsquoPeterborough DNArsquo programme finally areclearly shaped by a green growth strategy Peterborough aims to become the lsquoSustainabilityCapital of the UKrsquo and as such lsquothat ldquocapitalrdquo will be exploited to the maximum to ensurethat it delivers true economic prosperity and well-being through job creation and theintegration of employment skills and innovationrsquo (Peterborough City Council 2012 4)The lsquofundamental goalrsquo of its smart activities is one of lsquogrowth innovation and sustain-abilityrsquo (Peterborough City Council 2014 4)

As a runner-up in the TSB competition Peterborough was awarded pound3m While its moreexpensive proposals including significant investment in the transport system were notfunded the four strands of its lsquoDNArsquo programme are similar to those proposed in its 2012Feasibility Study lsquosmart businessrsquo lsquoliving datarsquo lsquoskillsrsquo and lsquoinnovationrsquo In accordancewith the strong economic focus of the programme Peterborough DNA is led collaborativelyby the council and the Local Economic Partnership lsquoOpportunity Peterboroughrsquo

42 The four modalities of publicness and their associated forms of assemblage

Despite the variety suggested above some pertinent observations can be made about bothcommon tendencies and significant differences in the types of publicness invoked by thevarious smart city initatives across the six cities As noted we distinguish four modalities ofpublicness each of which correlates broadly with particular forms of assemblage

421 Service-user publicness

What we term the lsquoservice userrsquomodality of publicness relates the consumption of everydayurban services when for example a person travels by public transport consumes water orelectricity or uses broadband infrastructure Smart technology offers the promise of poten-tially enhancing such public interactions with service providers by providing more accurateor lsquoreal-timersquo data for decision-making new possibilities for users to contribute to servicesthrough automated or voluntary feedback and new channels of accountability

By our assessment this modality was dominant in 25 of the 68 activities analysedmaking it the most common form of publicness across the six cities as a whole Examples ofrelevant activities include Milton Keynesrsquo smart parking initiatives the lsquoIntelligent StreetLightingrsquo and lsquoEnergy Efficiency Demonstratorrsquo pilots in Glasgow and ManchesterrsquoslsquoTriangulumrsquo project which aims to reduce energy use and improve local transport Mosttypically such initiatives are characterised by relatively direct local council involvementThe issues addressed vary depending on the type of infrastructure in question but transport

Urban Research amp Practice 11

congestion resource consumption carbon emissions and digital inclusion are repeatedlymentioned in the documentation A commonality then is a normative framing in which thegoal of improved efficiency is highlighted

Service user-oriented smart city projects are most typically associated with two types ofspatiality The first relates to the traditional materiality of systems operating across the citydigital technology serves to improve the functional efficiency of these existing systemsWhile then the new technology may have clear spatial effects (eg in reworking trafficflows or recalibrating energy distribution) the spatialised phenomena to be rendered moreefficient are already present

Crucially this is the most passive of the four modalities identified The public ispositioned as part of the cityrsquos routine functionality rather than assigned lsquoco-creationalrsquoagency This then does not radically depart from the traditional relationship of the public toinfrastructural services Of course the provision of improved services does not contradict aclaim to being lsquocitizen-centricrsquo or lsquoputting people firstrsquo its conceptualisation neither deniesnor acknowledges that publicness may be assembled otherwise

422 Entrepreneurial publicness

If lsquoservice userrsquo publicness implies a relatively compliant reactive collectivity a more activelsquoentrepreneurialrsquo sense of the public is conjured up in other activities which enrol citizensinto co-creating and innovating in the smart arena This resonates with findings elsewhereidentifying a strong entrepreneurial governance mode at work in smart cities (eg Hollands2015 Wiig 2015) The entrepreneurial modality relates less to the everyday functioning ofthe city and more to the expectation that residents will be involved in creating services andeconomic value Rather than addressing particular thematic issues it is framed by an unmetneed to harness the economic and service-related possibilities afforded by new digitaltechnologies and big data We identified this modality as dominant for 19 of the 68 activitiesconsidered

Examples of related initiatives include the lsquohackathonrsquo events in several cities the lsquoTechLondonersrsquo initiative (aiming to bring lsquoLondonersrsquo and entrepreneurs together to co-createdigital solutions to predefined problems) Peterboroughrsquos lsquoInnovationWeekrsquoworkshops andlsquoBrainwave Innovation Portalrsquo and Manchesterrsquos Digital Laboratory (lsquoMadLabrsquo) whichencouraged local residents to find solutions to social problems through lsquoco-creative human-centric and user-driven research development and innovationrsquo (Ruijsink and Smith 2016 4)Bristolrsquos lsquoIoTMeshrsquo scheme will lsquoopen-up the test-bed to a wide range of Internet-of-Things(IoT) developers In doing so Bristol Is Open will enable companies to perfect their newtechnology solutions for everything from smart rubbish bins to connected streetlamps and awide range of IoTsensorsrsquo (Bristol is Open 2016b) The various lsquoopen datarsquo initiatives acrossthe cities serve directly to allow members of the public to make connections between thedatasets provided (and with their own data if they wish) Public involvement in suchactivities is often explicitly incentivised by commercial possibilities and no clear conceptualdistinction is evident between the public sphere and the market Glasgowrsquos lsquoOpen DataCataloguersquo for example promises to lsquoempower everybody (the public voluntary academicprivate sectors and communities) to harness [data] use it and combine it in new ways Wecan all contribute to making Glasgow a better place to live work and playrsquo (Future CityGlasgow 2016b)

In some cases such as hackathon events the practices associated with this entrepre-neurialism take place in traditional fora or make fairly conventional uses of internet sites (as

12 R Cowley et al

in the case of Tech Londoners) But a more distinctively lsquosmartrsquo spatiality may sometimes beobserved in the various attempts to add a lsquodigital layerrsquo to the city creating what might betermed a ubiquitous network of connectivity The digital infrastructure projects within theBristol is Open programme exemplify this spatiality particularly well in a literal sense theywill add a layer of digital connectivity to the city centre The lsquoWireless Milersquo for exampleaims at the creation of a lsquoheterogeneous technology environmentrsquo (Bristol is Open 2016c 1)which integrates differently formatted wifi signals such that lsquocomplex multi-layered net-works of overlapping big and small cells supply smartphones tablets cars drones and evenbuildings with a huge amount of cheap connectivityrsquo (Bristol is Open 2016d2) The variousopen data initiatives also fall into this category insofar as they enable datasets about existingservices and amenities to be linked together

Again this invocation of entrepreneurial public agency sits comfortably with claims thatpeople are being put at the centre of smart city development it explicitly invites publiccontributions to the ongoing forms that this will take However like the service-usermodality it says little about the more democratic dimensions of publicness A more roundedsense of lsquocitizenshiprsquo as traditionally conceived encompasses not only lsquosocial rightsrsquo (ieaccess to services) but also lsquopolitical rightsrsquo (contributing to decision-making processes) andlsquocivilrsquo ones (relating to freedom of speech) (Isin and Ruppert 2015) Accordingly we furtherpropose and distinguish between a lsquopoliticalrsquo and a lsquocivicrsquo modality of publicness

423 Political publicness

We use the label lsquopoliticalrsquo here in the narrow sense of public involvement in decision-making and deliberation through institutional channels or through novel extensions of theseExamples include the lsquoTalk Londonrsquo online platform which hosts a mixture of surveysblogs and discussion boards promoting itself as a lsquoplace to discuss Londonrsquos big issuesrsquo(Talk London 2016) and Bristolrsquos lsquoDemocratreersquo app which encouraged residents to nomi-nate and vote on suitable locations for planting new trees (While the latter was not initiateddirectly by the council it nevertheless provided a direct means for residents to influenceofficial decisions on resource allocation) If there is a commonality in the issues addressedthrough such activities it relates to a perceived lack of participation ndash often with certainsocial groups in mind ndash in local decision-making

Overall this is by far the least commonmodality of publicness invoked it is dominant inonly three of the 68 activities considered This is perhaps surprising given that the potentialfor digital technologies to reinvigorate democratic deliberation and decision-making hasbeen enthusiastically envisioned and debated since the 1990s (Isin and Ruppert 2015) Thelack of experimentation in this respect may partly be explained by the marginality of smartcity activities to traditional policy-making processes

The uses of online fora (as in the case of the Talk London initiative) or voting apps(Democratree) clearly depart from traditional modes of political deliberation ndash for exampleface-to-face settings ndash and yet nevertheless describe rather conventional uses of the internetHowever there are too few examples in the set of activities analysed for us to drawconclusions about the types of spatialities or spatial effects associated with this modalityof publicness

We highlight the paucity of political publicness specifically because strategy documentsmake repeated claims that citizen engagement is vital to the successful implementation of thesmart city and that related initiatives will enable wider citizen engagement with decision-making processes Its absence points more to a situation in which the smart city not only

Urban Research amp Practice 13

operates at the margins of normal institutional processes but might even be criticallyinterpreted as seeking to bypass them ndash a possibility raised by Shearmur (2016) in recountinghow delegates at a technology conference imagined the public sector as merely an obstacle tosmart city implementation

424 Civic publicness

Decision-making mediated through official processes only captures part of a cityrsquos politicallife and may tend to frame issues in certain ways for the purposes of voting or other forms ofdeliberation We therefore distinguish the lsquopoliticalrsquo from a rather less structured lsquocivicrsquomodality of publicness which loosely maps onto a traditional sense of the broader lsquopublicspherersquo In other words it inheres in those activities taking place in spaces beyond stateinstitutions but which are not directly oriented towards market activity A local councilrsquosinvolvement in such activities is necessarily more at armrsquos length it may enable or merelyapprove of such activities in its own promotional documents The types of issues shaping itsassemblage should then emerge lsquofrom belowrsquo Equally however this modality of public-ness may be more immediately associated with leisure activities or lsquoplayfulnessrsquo ndash suchactivities in public space may constitute a performative type of claim making within thebroader democratic process (see eg Hou 2010 Parkinson 2012) The invocation of civicpublicness is far from uncommon across the six cities considered here on a par with theentrepreneurial it is dominant for 21 of the 68 activities (and the most common modality inLondon)

Examples include the lsquoCommunity Wellnessrsquo strand of Manchesterrsquos lsquoCityVerversquo pro-ject aiming to encourage schoolchildren and commuters to take exercise in parks BristolrsquoslsquoMyKWrsquo community social media platform the lsquoBristol Approach to Citizen Sensingrsquo andlsquoPlayable Cityrsquo initiatives Glasgowrsquos lsquoActive Travelrsquo demonstrator initiative insofar as itencouraged cyclists to share data and experiences of cycling in the city and Londonrsquos lsquoSpeedVolunteeringrsquo app which seeks to put those wishing to volunteer in touch with peopleseeking help

We discern two distinctive spatialities as characteristic of assemblages of civic public-ness First relevant initiatives are often constituted by the goal of manifesting the virtualdigital in traditional (physical) public space Peterborough for example has planned a largelsquoOpenCityrsquo digital screen in the city centre Bristolrsquos lsquoPlayable Citiesrsquo competition has beenrunning annually since 2013 to fund temporary artistic installations in the city centre Theproject also taking place elsewhere internationally aims to put lsquopeople and play at the heartof the future city Through interaction and creative installations it unlocks a socialdialogue bringing the citizens into a city development conversationrsquo (Watershed 2016)Examples have included the 2013 winner Hello Lamp Post which allowed members of thepublic to have text message conversations with various items of street furniture andUrbanimals in 2015 in which digitally projected animals would appear unexpectedly acrossthe city and interact with the public (Watershed 2016) Manchesterrsquos lsquoCityVerversquo Internet ofThings demonstrator project mentioned above plans to install lsquotalkative bus stopsrsquo and alsquoCommunity Wellnessrsquo sensor network in parks along school and commuter routes toencourage exercise (UK Government 2015)

The second characteristic spatiality of civic publicness relates to varied attempts toreclaim the digital sphere from the private sector The idea of lsquoreclamationrsquo may not beexplicit in the documentation but such initiatives are typically driven by civil society actorsand aim variously to empower citizens to use and have a presence through new digital urban

14 R Cowley et al

technologies Manchesterrsquos lsquoLiving Labrsquo programme (whose current status is unclearfollowing the disbandment of the Manchester Digital Development Authority) includedthe development of an interactive local news and information web portal featuring contentcreated by residents The lsquoManchester Digital Laboratoryrsquo describes itself as a lsquograssrootsinnovation organisationrsquo (MadLab 2016a) which organises various events and digital train-ing courses with a core mission to allow the general public to lsquohelp people to make thingsbetter togetherrsquo through lsquoexperimentationrsquo lsquoplayrsquo and lsquofunrsquo and the promotion of craftman-ship (MadLab 2016b) In Bristol a local social networking site (first trialled as lsquoMyKWrsquo inthe Knowle West district) has been extended to the city as a whole (as lsquoMyBristolrsquo) Theplanned lsquoBristol Approach to Citizen Sensingrsquo initiative meanwhile mentioned above mostexplicitly displays the aim of reconfiguring virtual space in this way in its vision of a lsquoco-created city commonsrsquo which lsquosupports the deployment of new or adapted technologies intoeveryday environmentsrsquo (KWMC 2016 1)

425 Summary of relative prominence of different modalities of publicness

Table 2 summarises the relative prominence of the four modalities of publicness in eachcity and across all six cities

Analysing these data too closely would potentially yield spurious findings for severalreasons our six cities were not chosen to yield a somehow statistically representative sampleof activities for the purposes of quantitative research the coding of their modalities involvedsome subjective judgement and all activities are equally weighted regardless of scale timeperiod budget and policy significance These reservations aside the findings provide anindicative overview of the variations in the publicness assembled in these six leading citiesand in this spirit two broad observations are ventured

First the relative prominence of the four modalities differs considerably by city In thissense again lsquosmart publicnessrsquo is evidently not determined by globally circulating dis-courses but at least partly reflects its immediate governance and policy context The relativeabsence of entrepreneurial publicness in Glasgow for example communicates the councilrsquossole responsibility for delivering activities In Bristol the dominant entrepreneurial and civicmodalities chime with an overall strategic goal of expanding the knowledge economy bytapping into a strong tradition of grass-roots innovation The lack of service-user publicnessin Peterborough reflects the limited funding available for hard infrastructural projects theemphasis on entrepreneurial and civic publicness evinces the shared responsibility of thecityrsquos economic development agency and the council in managing the Peterborough DNAprogramme Londonrsquos relatively weak service use focus differently confirms the GLArsquos roleas steering and advisory actor rather than as funder of large-scale material interventions Thecity-level assemblages in Manchester and Milton Keynes display similarity in their strongoverall service-use sense of publicness and relatively weak civic modality While civicpublicness may come to the fore in Manchester in future given Corridor Manchesterrsquos statedlsquoplace-makingrsquo goals (Corridor Manchester 2015 24ndash25) its current relative absenceimplies a lack of active engagement on the part of the general public Milton Keynes isperhaps more surprising in this respect given its clear strategic claim to be civically engagedIts relatively weak civic publicness underlines the opportunistic nature of smart urbanactivities those coming to be implemented or funded may reflect strategic goals unevenlysmart policy documents themselves carry relatively little weight in the urban developmentprocess

Urban Research amp Practice 15

Table

2Relativeprom

inence

ofdominantmodalitiesof

publicness

insm

artcity

activities

across

sixUK

cities

Dom

inantmodality

Bristol

Glasgow

London

Manchester

MiltonKeynes

Peterborough

Allactivities

Meanfor6cities

Service

User

1457

1156

530

3732

Entrepreneurial

367

3333

2460

2832

Political

140

110

00

44

Civic

3636

4411

2440

3132

(Total

no

ofactivities)

(14)

(14)

(9)

(9)

(17)

(5)

(68)

16 R Cowley et al

Second the proportion of initiatives oriented towards civic publicness is not insig-nificant these account for approximately a third of all the activities examined On thisbasis it would be oversimplistic to dismiss the claims that the lsquoactually existingrsquocontemporary UK smart city pays only lip service to the importance of public claim-making Nevertheless this embrace of the democratic process does not extend to theprovision of significant opportunities for citizens to engage directly with the formalpolitical system in innovative ways In itself the absence of envisaged political public-ness does not undermine the possibility of more traditional public engagement withgovernmental institutions elsewhere yet the smart city does not provide channels for thedirect expression of public contestation or more radical forms of dissent

In this sense the smart city may appear to be aligned with broader depoliticising or lsquopost-politicalrsquo tendencies in governance generally and urban planning specifically (Swyngedouw2007 2011 Allmendinger and Haughton 2012 Joss 2015) In a post-political reading itsassemblage across UK cities would reflect the nature of its conceptual underpinnings thesmart city can only lsquocommand agreement as a result of [its] broadly progressive if non-specific framingrsquo (Allmendinger and Haughton 2012 94) and is therefore lsquounable to arouseconflicts among political ideasrsquo (Crivello 2015 919) Alternatively following Newman andClarke (2009) it illustrates the apparent paradox of the decline of the traditional lsquopublicrsquobeing accompanied by its simultaneous proliferation as a fragmented mulitiplicity politicalpublicness may be assembling elsewhere but is not associated with the intended role of thesmart city in the United Kingdom

426 Obduracy

Political publicness aside our findings have at least provided convincing evidence that UKsmart city initiatives are guided by a genuine desire to encourage civic engagement ofvarious kinds Even here however a more nuanced picture emerges when the relativeobduracy of individual activities is factored in Based on the available information weflagged each of the 68 activities as either lsquopermanentrsquo (to indicate ongoing operation orpresence in the city) or lsquotemporaryrsquo (to indicate a one-off or time-limited activity) As Table 3shows civic (and political) activities tend to be less permanent in nature than those invokingentrepreneurial and service-user publicness

In an important sense the relatively temporary nature of activities oriented towardspolitical and civic publicness is unsurprising particularly when contrasted with the service-user modality which is more often associated ndash as discussed above ndash with lsquohardrsquo infra-structural interventions The consequences of such activities may be long-lasting even whenthe activity itself is short-lived Nevertheless these findings fall short of convincinglyheralding a situation in which citizenship is prioritised as the central ongoing concern ofthe UK smart city

Table 3 Obduracy of smart city activities invoking each modality of publicness

Dominant modalityPermanent

Temporary

Base (number of activities)

Service-user 76 24 (25)Entrepreneurial 58 42 (19)Political 33 67 (3)Civic 48 52 (21)

Urban Research amp Practice 17

Significantly furthermore a degree of bifurcation is evident in the overall techno-publicassemblages such that civic and political publicness are sidelined within less obduratestrands of programmatic activity In Glasgow the enduring legacy of the lsquoFuture Cityrsquoprogramme is most visible in the service-user-oriented Operation Centre However manyof its other activities characterised by a more interactive and participatory mode of publicengagement were one-off events As lsquodemonstrator projectsrsquo they served in principle to helpdefine rather than enact the smart city ndash but there is little evidence that this more temporarystrand of the lsquoFuture Cityrsquo programme has subsequently been embedded in mainstreammunicipal activities In Bristol too a clear bifurcation is evident On one side the lsquoBristol isOpenrsquo improvements to the cityrsquos digital infrastructure and the lsquoOpen Data Bristolrsquo initiative(all of which might be expected to be relatively durable) invoke primarily entrepreneurialpublicness On the other the Connecting Bristol partnership promotes diverse lsquosofterrsquo civicand political activities led by grass-roots organisations which exhibit rather less obduracy assmall-scale pilot schemes or activities with limited public participation Evidently then lesscommitment and resources are available for experiments in the field of citizenship under-stood in more traditional liberal democratic ways than in those which conjure up a passive orentrepreneurial public

5 Discussion

Our reading of the smart city consciously departs from critical presentations of the smart cityas a lsquotop-downrsquo imposition and towards a foregrounding and more nuanced appreciation ofits practical variety But the observation that this variety is skewed towards the assemblage ofservice-user and entrepreneurial senses of the public does not constitute a straightforwardlyuseful critique of its current local manifestations The focus on service-user publicness atleast is unsurprising to the extent that local authorities are arguably seen by default asprimarily service providers To observe that civic and political publicness by way ofcontrast are less well considered and often only tokenistically accommodated is not tomake the normative case that these should necessarily or could realistically be privileged inlocal techno-public smart assemblages Rather the prevalence of this more passive modalityof publicness becomes significant when set against rhetorical claims that the smart city iseffecting transformational lsquocitizen-centricrsquo change

The dominance of service-user publicness does little to counter a broader trend identifiedby Powell (2014 15) towards lsquoa shift in the notion of citizenship away from civicresponsibilities and engagements to classifying [citizens] as consumers who purchaseservices from providersrsquo Although Powellrsquos discussion relates to the role of digitised datamore generally it is clearly relevant to the smart cityrsquos focus on providing greater efficien-cies Insofar as the lsquorelationship between government individuals and corporate entitiesrsquo (15)is viewed through the lens of the lsquocitizen as consumerrsquo its quality is only improved by theefficiencies which datafication enables Citizenship in this narrow sense is not related toaltruism or responsibilities but rather based on a principle of exchange and enacted throughlsquocollecting and sharing personal datarsquo (15) Drawing on Dean (2005) Powell highlights therisk that lsquothe norms of publicity ndash information communication and participation ndash havecome to stand for the political ends that they were presumed to serversquo (Powell 2014 16) Thisperspective raises various questions about many of the goals of UK smart city initiatives inrelation to the broader dimensions of citizenship For example the aim of lsquodigital inclusionrsquocommonly asserted among these six cases may appear laudable and yet it pushes the deeperpurpose of digital inclusion into the background smart connectivity itself becomes the goal

18 R Cowley et al

Similarly ideals of lsquotransparent governancersquo or lsquoopen datarsquo may end up being fetishisedwithin a discourse of efficiency even though this discourse tells us little about the normativebasis of the relationship between the public and the state beyond its passive lsquoservice-userrsquomodality

Although again our analysis opposes the existence of a deterministic link betweenglobal smart discourse and local practices the focus on efficiency of different types(including resource use provision of services and access to information) clearly resonateswith Whitersquos (2016) identification of an international discursive storyline in which the smartcity responds to lsquoresource pressures brought on by rapid urbanization and an ageing popula-tion the effects of anthropogenic global climate change and the twinned pressure of fiscalausterity and inter-urban competitionrsquo (577) We would at least suggest that the narrative ofthe lsquoage of crisisrsquo which accompanies much of the contemporary envisionment of futurecities (Caprotti 2015) has had a shaping influence on the prominence given to efficientservice provision in smart activities implemented to date

Equally given the broader UK policy context it would seem eccentric for local autho-rities to discourage entrepreneurialism On the immediate pragmatic level of funding andresources it must be significant that the governmentrsquos Department for Business Skills andInnovation has played a significant catalytic role smart city initiatives have not emergedunder the auspices of say the Department for Communities and Local Government But theprominence of entrepreneurial publicness raises a separate set of concerns echoing Dattarsquos(2015) diagnosis ndash albeit with reference to the rather different context of the Indian city ofDholera ndash of the smart city promoting lsquourbanization as a business model rather than a modelof social justicersquo Across our UK cases issues of social sustainability are far from absent inpolicy documents but their range tends to be limited for example focusing on health ande-inclusion or educating residents to participate in the digital economy In Glasgow suchquestions are subsumed within overall questions of efficiency and relate to very specificfactors such as public safety and reporting problems with services Milton Keynes claimsconsiderable interest in citizen co-creation but its initiatives are not primarily aimed attargeting social problems Although Peterboroughrsquos 2012 Feasibility Study prominentlyflagged up inequalities social cohesion and health improvements among other issues(Peterborough City Council 2012 3) its current strategy is addressed towards developingskills which lsquomeet local business demandrsquo and lsquoput Peterboroughrsquo in lsquothe best possibleposition to take advantage of emerging marketsrsquo (Peterborough City Council 2014 5)

One final way in which the lsquocitizen-centricrsquo nature of the UK smart city is questionablerelates to an apparent straightforward lack of public interest On one level this simplyreminds us of the peripherality of the smart city many of the associated activities only claimto be small-scale experimental trials and are not deeply embedded into the mainstream policyprocess While the actual numbers of local residents involved with many civic and politicalschemes are often negligible we found no convincing evidence either of broader enthusiasmor emergent public counter-discourse in any city4 While emergent political or civic con-testation is clearly not something which local authorities might lsquoplanrsquo for ndash it would beabsurd to expect local authorities to devise problems for frustrated publics to assemblearound ndash its absence does not provide evidence of acquiescence or approval or guarantee thesmooth passage of smart technology into urban life more broadly in future It more obviouslyreflects the survey evidence suggesting that general public awareness of any lsquosmartrsquo plans oractivities undertaken by local councils is neglible (Arqiva 2015) and that only one in five UKadults even recognises the term smart city (IET 2016)

Urban Research amp Practice 19

6 Conclusions towards a new lsquosmart urban publicnessrsquo

In studying and comparing a series of relatively well-developed smart city programmes aslsquotechno-public assemblagesrsquo we have responded to a series of policy claims made about therelationships between smart urban technologies and the public Our analysis reveals that thepublicness envisaged and enacted in the UK smart city is far from one-dimensional Citizensare not merely absent as the earlier critiques of the smart city would have it nor do smart cityactivities necessarily invoke a particular stunted notion of publicness in all cases Rather thegreat variety of types of publicness in evidence leads us to conclude that the rhetorical claimsabout the smart city being citizen-centric are not straightforwardly empty ones Rather thanagreeing with the speculative critiques of the smart city as a devious attempt to exclude thepublic we would urge commentators to begin from the assumption that its institutionalprotagonists do have a vested interest in questions of democracy

That said it also seems fair to conclude that the smart does not yet evince a convincinglyrounded sense of the lsquopublic cityrsquo The opportunistic nature of smart city development inother words gives rise to unique local forms but simultaneously holds these hostage tobroader societal and economic agendas the forms of their assemblage have remained shapedby immediate policy contexts and broader smart city policy discourse Thinking in terms ofits experimental shifting and peripheral assemblage in practice nevertheless opens upagentive space for actors involved to influence smart development in ways which moreconvincingly invoke a more rounded sense of publicness and in turn enable a moreconvincing sense of public ownership and enthusiasm

For more fully public smart city assemblages to emerge in future the civic and politicalmay need to be more obviously accommodated within the service-user and entrepreneurialThis need not relate to heavy-handed attempts to co-opt the civic which risk neutralising itsinnovative potential but the civic should at least not be siloed into more ephemeral strands ofactivity A lack of civic engagement with large infrastructural projects for example seemsunlikely to be successfully mitigated by a series of parallel participatory events which passunnoticed by most residents Similarly entrepreneurial activities are to be welcomed whichare more obviously oriented towards finding solutions to problems defined by citizensalongside those oriented at the creation of wealth through hi-tech innovations The possibi-lities for smart city technology to enable or engender more formal political participationfurthermore appear to have remained largely unexplored in practical terms

If only because the lsquoactually existingrsquo smart city is still at an experimental stage ofdevelopment we note that it has effected only marginal reconfigurations of the materialspaces of the city to date Nevertheless looking forward we urge researchers and practi-tioners to pay attention to the distinctive spatialities of the lsquosmart publicrsquo particularly in theinterfaces between public and private space and between virtual space and the traditionalmaterial public realm There is considerable scope in this regard to reverse the tendencyidentified by Kinsley (2013) to assign the digital to a parallel disembodied lsquohyperspacersquorather our understandings might more fruitfully be grounded in the relationships betweenhumans and technology in local contexts For policy-makers and practitioners activelyseeking a more widespread and involved sense of public debate around and engagementwith the implications of smart technology it may be rewarding to focus on the visibility ofnew innovations This may involve moving towards a more active consideration of themultiple roles of public space and more imaginatively using smart technologies to moveaway from more traditional fora as spaces of public engagement

Overall we resist from concluding that contemporary UK smart initiatives alreadyconstitute a qualitatively novel recasting of the public In relying on dominant political

20 R Cowley et al

structures and economic actors they have come to promote incremental change at best bothin terms of publicness and the material space of the city But assessing the long-termimpacts of smart innovations on urban space will be an ongoing project indeed the conceptlsquosmartrsquo itself may in future lose currency as a label or be reworked as a signifier In themeantime insofar as the smart city is indicative of broader contemporary attempts to shapeurban change in a time of austerity its lsquoexperimentalrsquo nature may appear rather moreproblematically reflective of a bypassing of the traditional democratic process And if wetoo may be allowed to propose a dystopian scenario it is one where in spite of the bestintentions of policy-makers the dominant norms of emerging smart city practices becomesedimented into novel twenty-first century institutional processes whose pragmatic world-view does not extend beyond that of a society of entrepreneurs and service users

AcknowledgementsThis study was undertaken at the University of Westminster with financial support from ESRC grantESL0159781 Youri Dayot was Visiting Fellow from the University of Grenoble

Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors

FundingThis study was undertaken at the University of Westminster as part of the ESRC-funded projectlsquoSmart Eco-cities for a Green Economy a Comparative Study of Europe and Chinarsquo (grant ESL0159781)

Notes1 The two terms (lsquosmart cityrsquo lsquofuture cityrsquo) are complementary and often used interchangeably

especially in the UK national policy context (see eg BSI 2014 3 also Joss Cook andDayot forthcoming) It is beyond the scope of this paper to delve into the conceptualinterrelationship of these recent policy terms in more detail

2 A fuller list of the key documents and links to relevant web pages consulted has been madepublicly available on the lead authorrsquos ResearchGate web pages httpswwwresearchgatenetprofileRobert_Cowley

3 More detailed descriptions of many of the individual activities and bodies analysed in thepresent research may be found in the lsquogrey literaturersquo (see eg Caprotti et al 2016 Woodset al 2016)

4 With the exception of some concerns in Glasgow about the use of facial recognition softwarein the cityrsquos CCTV system linked to the Operation Centre (Sunday Herald 2014 Aitchinson2015)

ReferencesAitchinson J 2015 ldquoShould We Be Worried about Glasgowrsquos New Hi-Tech Surveillance Systemrdquo

STV News February 23 httpglasgowstvtvarticles310713-glasgows-new-surveillance-installed-by-israeli-firm-nice-systems

Allmendinger P and G Haughton 2012 ldquoPost-Political Spatial Planning in England A Crisis ofConsensusrdquo Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37 (1) 89ndash103 doi101111j1475-5661201100468x

Arqiva 2015 ldquoAre Cities Really Getting Smarterrdquo httpswwwarqivacomnewspress-releasesare-our-cities-really-getting-smarter

Urban Research amp Practice 21

congestion resource consumption carbon emissions and digital inclusion are repeatedlymentioned in the documentation A commonality then is a normative framing in which thegoal of improved efficiency is highlighted

Service user-oriented smart city projects are most typically associated with two types ofspatiality The first relates to the traditional materiality of systems operating across the citydigital technology serves to improve the functional efficiency of these existing systemsWhile then the new technology may have clear spatial effects (eg in reworking trafficflows or recalibrating energy distribution) the spatialised phenomena to be rendered moreefficient are already present

Crucially this is the most passive of the four modalities identified The public ispositioned as part of the cityrsquos routine functionality rather than assigned lsquoco-creationalrsquoagency This then does not radically depart from the traditional relationship of the public toinfrastructural services Of course the provision of improved services does not contradict aclaim to being lsquocitizen-centricrsquo or lsquoputting people firstrsquo its conceptualisation neither deniesnor acknowledges that publicness may be assembled otherwise

422 Entrepreneurial publicness

If lsquoservice userrsquo publicness implies a relatively compliant reactive collectivity a more activelsquoentrepreneurialrsquo sense of the public is conjured up in other activities which enrol citizensinto co-creating and innovating in the smart arena This resonates with findings elsewhereidentifying a strong entrepreneurial governance mode at work in smart cities (eg Hollands2015 Wiig 2015) The entrepreneurial modality relates less to the everyday functioning ofthe city and more to the expectation that residents will be involved in creating services andeconomic value Rather than addressing particular thematic issues it is framed by an unmetneed to harness the economic and service-related possibilities afforded by new digitaltechnologies and big data We identified this modality as dominant for 19 of the 68 activitiesconsidered

Examples of related initiatives include the lsquohackathonrsquo events in several cities the lsquoTechLondonersrsquo initiative (aiming to bring lsquoLondonersrsquo and entrepreneurs together to co-createdigital solutions to predefined problems) Peterboroughrsquos lsquoInnovationWeekrsquoworkshops andlsquoBrainwave Innovation Portalrsquo and Manchesterrsquos Digital Laboratory (lsquoMadLabrsquo) whichencouraged local residents to find solutions to social problems through lsquoco-creative human-centric and user-driven research development and innovationrsquo (Ruijsink and Smith 2016 4)Bristolrsquos lsquoIoTMeshrsquo scheme will lsquoopen-up the test-bed to a wide range of Internet-of-Things(IoT) developers In doing so Bristol Is Open will enable companies to perfect their newtechnology solutions for everything from smart rubbish bins to connected streetlamps and awide range of IoTsensorsrsquo (Bristol is Open 2016b) The various lsquoopen datarsquo initiatives acrossthe cities serve directly to allow members of the public to make connections between thedatasets provided (and with their own data if they wish) Public involvement in suchactivities is often explicitly incentivised by commercial possibilities and no clear conceptualdistinction is evident between the public sphere and the market Glasgowrsquos lsquoOpen DataCataloguersquo for example promises to lsquoempower everybody (the public voluntary academicprivate sectors and communities) to harness [data] use it and combine it in new ways Wecan all contribute to making Glasgow a better place to live work and playrsquo (Future CityGlasgow 2016b)

In some cases such as hackathon events the practices associated with this entrepre-neurialism take place in traditional fora or make fairly conventional uses of internet sites (as

12 R Cowley et al

in the case of Tech Londoners) But a more distinctively lsquosmartrsquo spatiality may sometimes beobserved in the various attempts to add a lsquodigital layerrsquo to the city creating what might betermed a ubiquitous network of connectivity The digital infrastructure projects within theBristol is Open programme exemplify this spatiality particularly well in a literal sense theywill add a layer of digital connectivity to the city centre The lsquoWireless Milersquo for exampleaims at the creation of a lsquoheterogeneous technology environmentrsquo (Bristol is Open 2016c 1)which integrates differently formatted wifi signals such that lsquocomplex multi-layered net-works of overlapping big and small cells supply smartphones tablets cars drones and evenbuildings with a huge amount of cheap connectivityrsquo (Bristol is Open 2016d2) The variousopen data initiatives also fall into this category insofar as they enable datasets about existingservices and amenities to be linked together

Again this invocation of entrepreneurial public agency sits comfortably with claims thatpeople are being put at the centre of smart city development it explicitly invites publiccontributions to the ongoing forms that this will take However like the service-usermodality it says little about the more democratic dimensions of publicness A more roundedsense of lsquocitizenshiprsquo as traditionally conceived encompasses not only lsquosocial rightsrsquo (ieaccess to services) but also lsquopolitical rightsrsquo (contributing to decision-making processes) andlsquocivilrsquo ones (relating to freedom of speech) (Isin and Ruppert 2015) Accordingly we furtherpropose and distinguish between a lsquopoliticalrsquo and a lsquocivicrsquo modality of publicness

423 Political publicness

We use the label lsquopoliticalrsquo here in the narrow sense of public involvement in decision-making and deliberation through institutional channels or through novel extensions of theseExamples include the lsquoTalk Londonrsquo online platform which hosts a mixture of surveysblogs and discussion boards promoting itself as a lsquoplace to discuss Londonrsquos big issuesrsquo(Talk London 2016) and Bristolrsquos lsquoDemocratreersquo app which encouraged residents to nomi-nate and vote on suitable locations for planting new trees (While the latter was not initiateddirectly by the council it nevertheless provided a direct means for residents to influenceofficial decisions on resource allocation) If there is a commonality in the issues addressedthrough such activities it relates to a perceived lack of participation ndash often with certainsocial groups in mind ndash in local decision-making

Overall this is by far the least commonmodality of publicness invoked it is dominant inonly three of the 68 activities considered This is perhaps surprising given that the potentialfor digital technologies to reinvigorate democratic deliberation and decision-making hasbeen enthusiastically envisioned and debated since the 1990s (Isin and Ruppert 2015) Thelack of experimentation in this respect may partly be explained by the marginality of smartcity activities to traditional policy-making processes

The uses of online fora (as in the case of the Talk London initiative) or voting apps(Democratree) clearly depart from traditional modes of political deliberation ndash for exampleface-to-face settings ndash and yet nevertheless describe rather conventional uses of the internetHowever there are too few examples in the set of activities analysed for us to drawconclusions about the types of spatialities or spatial effects associated with this modalityof publicness

We highlight the paucity of political publicness specifically because strategy documentsmake repeated claims that citizen engagement is vital to the successful implementation of thesmart city and that related initiatives will enable wider citizen engagement with decision-making processes Its absence points more to a situation in which the smart city not only

Urban Research amp Practice 13

operates at the margins of normal institutional processes but might even be criticallyinterpreted as seeking to bypass them ndash a possibility raised by Shearmur (2016) in recountinghow delegates at a technology conference imagined the public sector as merely an obstacle tosmart city implementation

424 Civic publicness

Decision-making mediated through official processes only captures part of a cityrsquos politicallife and may tend to frame issues in certain ways for the purposes of voting or other forms ofdeliberation We therefore distinguish the lsquopoliticalrsquo from a rather less structured lsquocivicrsquomodality of publicness which loosely maps onto a traditional sense of the broader lsquopublicspherersquo In other words it inheres in those activities taking place in spaces beyond stateinstitutions but which are not directly oriented towards market activity A local councilrsquosinvolvement in such activities is necessarily more at armrsquos length it may enable or merelyapprove of such activities in its own promotional documents The types of issues shaping itsassemblage should then emerge lsquofrom belowrsquo Equally however this modality of public-ness may be more immediately associated with leisure activities or lsquoplayfulnessrsquo ndash suchactivities in public space may constitute a performative type of claim making within thebroader democratic process (see eg Hou 2010 Parkinson 2012) The invocation of civicpublicness is far from uncommon across the six cities considered here on a par with theentrepreneurial it is dominant for 21 of the 68 activities (and the most common modality inLondon)

Examples include the lsquoCommunity Wellnessrsquo strand of Manchesterrsquos lsquoCityVerversquo pro-ject aiming to encourage schoolchildren and commuters to take exercise in parks BristolrsquoslsquoMyKWrsquo community social media platform the lsquoBristol Approach to Citizen Sensingrsquo andlsquoPlayable Cityrsquo initiatives Glasgowrsquos lsquoActive Travelrsquo demonstrator initiative insofar as itencouraged cyclists to share data and experiences of cycling in the city and Londonrsquos lsquoSpeedVolunteeringrsquo app which seeks to put those wishing to volunteer in touch with peopleseeking help

We discern two distinctive spatialities as characteristic of assemblages of civic public-ness First relevant initiatives are often constituted by the goal of manifesting the virtualdigital in traditional (physical) public space Peterborough for example has planned a largelsquoOpenCityrsquo digital screen in the city centre Bristolrsquos lsquoPlayable Citiesrsquo competition has beenrunning annually since 2013 to fund temporary artistic installations in the city centre Theproject also taking place elsewhere internationally aims to put lsquopeople and play at the heartof the future city Through interaction and creative installations it unlocks a socialdialogue bringing the citizens into a city development conversationrsquo (Watershed 2016)Examples have included the 2013 winner Hello Lamp Post which allowed members of thepublic to have text message conversations with various items of street furniture andUrbanimals in 2015 in which digitally projected animals would appear unexpectedly acrossthe city and interact with the public (Watershed 2016) Manchesterrsquos lsquoCityVerversquo Internet ofThings demonstrator project mentioned above plans to install lsquotalkative bus stopsrsquo and alsquoCommunity Wellnessrsquo sensor network in parks along school and commuter routes toencourage exercise (UK Government 2015)

The second characteristic spatiality of civic publicness relates to varied attempts toreclaim the digital sphere from the private sector The idea of lsquoreclamationrsquo may not beexplicit in the documentation but such initiatives are typically driven by civil society actorsand aim variously to empower citizens to use and have a presence through new digital urban

14 R Cowley et al

technologies Manchesterrsquos lsquoLiving Labrsquo programme (whose current status is unclearfollowing the disbandment of the Manchester Digital Development Authority) includedthe development of an interactive local news and information web portal featuring contentcreated by residents The lsquoManchester Digital Laboratoryrsquo describes itself as a lsquograssrootsinnovation organisationrsquo (MadLab 2016a) which organises various events and digital train-ing courses with a core mission to allow the general public to lsquohelp people to make thingsbetter togetherrsquo through lsquoexperimentationrsquo lsquoplayrsquo and lsquofunrsquo and the promotion of craftman-ship (MadLab 2016b) In Bristol a local social networking site (first trialled as lsquoMyKWrsquo inthe Knowle West district) has been extended to the city as a whole (as lsquoMyBristolrsquo) Theplanned lsquoBristol Approach to Citizen Sensingrsquo initiative meanwhile mentioned above mostexplicitly displays the aim of reconfiguring virtual space in this way in its vision of a lsquoco-created city commonsrsquo which lsquosupports the deployment of new or adapted technologies intoeveryday environmentsrsquo (KWMC 2016 1)

425 Summary of relative prominence of different modalities of publicness

Table 2 summarises the relative prominence of the four modalities of publicness in eachcity and across all six cities

Analysing these data too closely would potentially yield spurious findings for severalreasons our six cities were not chosen to yield a somehow statistically representative sampleof activities for the purposes of quantitative research the coding of their modalities involvedsome subjective judgement and all activities are equally weighted regardless of scale timeperiod budget and policy significance These reservations aside the findings provide anindicative overview of the variations in the publicness assembled in these six leading citiesand in this spirit two broad observations are ventured

First the relative prominence of the four modalities differs considerably by city In thissense again lsquosmart publicnessrsquo is evidently not determined by globally circulating dis-courses but at least partly reflects its immediate governance and policy context The relativeabsence of entrepreneurial publicness in Glasgow for example communicates the councilrsquossole responsibility for delivering activities In Bristol the dominant entrepreneurial and civicmodalities chime with an overall strategic goal of expanding the knowledge economy bytapping into a strong tradition of grass-roots innovation The lack of service-user publicnessin Peterborough reflects the limited funding available for hard infrastructural projects theemphasis on entrepreneurial and civic publicness evinces the shared responsibility of thecityrsquos economic development agency and the council in managing the Peterborough DNAprogramme Londonrsquos relatively weak service use focus differently confirms the GLArsquos roleas steering and advisory actor rather than as funder of large-scale material interventions Thecity-level assemblages in Manchester and Milton Keynes display similarity in their strongoverall service-use sense of publicness and relatively weak civic modality While civicpublicness may come to the fore in Manchester in future given Corridor Manchesterrsquos statedlsquoplace-makingrsquo goals (Corridor Manchester 2015 24ndash25) its current relative absenceimplies a lack of active engagement on the part of the general public Milton Keynes isperhaps more surprising in this respect given its clear strategic claim to be civically engagedIts relatively weak civic publicness underlines the opportunistic nature of smart urbanactivities those coming to be implemented or funded may reflect strategic goals unevenlysmart policy documents themselves carry relatively little weight in the urban developmentprocess

Urban Research amp Practice 15

Table

2Relativeprom

inence

ofdominantmodalitiesof

publicness

insm

artcity

activities

across

sixUK

cities

Dom

inantmodality

Bristol

Glasgow

London

Manchester

MiltonKeynes

Peterborough

Allactivities

Meanfor6cities

Service

User

1457

1156

530

3732

Entrepreneurial

367

3333

2460

2832

Political

140

110

00

44

Civic

3636

4411

2440

3132

(Total

no

ofactivities)

(14)

(14)

(9)

(9)

(17)

(5)

(68)

16 R Cowley et al

Second the proportion of initiatives oriented towards civic publicness is not insig-nificant these account for approximately a third of all the activities examined On thisbasis it would be oversimplistic to dismiss the claims that the lsquoactually existingrsquocontemporary UK smart city pays only lip service to the importance of public claim-making Nevertheless this embrace of the democratic process does not extend to theprovision of significant opportunities for citizens to engage directly with the formalpolitical system in innovative ways In itself the absence of envisaged political public-ness does not undermine the possibility of more traditional public engagement withgovernmental institutions elsewhere yet the smart city does not provide channels for thedirect expression of public contestation or more radical forms of dissent

In this sense the smart city may appear to be aligned with broader depoliticising or lsquopost-politicalrsquo tendencies in governance generally and urban planning specifically (Swyngedouw2007 2011 Allmendinger and Haughton 2012 Joss 2015) In a post-political reading itsassemblage across UK cities would reflect the nature of its conceptual underpinnings thesmart city can only lsquocommand agreement as a result of [its] broadly progressive if non-specific framingrsquo (Allmendinger and Haughton 2012 94) and is therefore lsquounable to arouseconflicts among political ideasrsquo (Crivello 2015 919) Alternatively following Newman andClarke (2009) it illustrates the apparent paradox of the decline of the traditional lsquopublicrsquobeing accompanied by its simultaneous proliferation as a fragmented mulitiplicity politicalpublicness may be assembling elsewhere but is not associated with the intended role of thesmart city in the United Kingdom

426 Obduracy

Political publicness aside our findings have at least provided convincing evidence that UKsmart city initiatives are guided by a genuine desire to encourage civic engagement ofvarious kinds Even here however a more nuanced picture emerges when the relativeobduracy of individual activities is factored in Based on the available information weflagged each of the 68 activities as either lsquopermanentrsquo (to indicate ongoing operation orpresence in the city) or lsquotemporaryrsquo (to indicate a one-off or time-limited activity) As Table 3shows civic (and political) activities tend to be less permanent in nature than those invokingentrepreneurial and service-user publicness

In an important sense the relatively temporary nature of activities oriented towardspolitical and civic publicness is unsurprising particularly when contrasted with the service-user modality which is more often associated ndash as discussed above ndash with lsquohardrsquo infra-structural interventions The consequences of such activities may be long-lasting even whenthe activity itself is short-lived Nevertheless these findings fall short of convincinglyheralding a situation in which citizenship is prioritised as the central ongoing concern ofthe UK smart city

Table 3 Obduracy of smart city activities invoking each modality of publicness

Dominant modalityPermanent

Temporary

Base (number of activities)

Service-user 76 24 (25)Entrepreneurial 58 42 (19)Political 33 67 (3)Civic 48 52 (21)

Urban Research amp Practice 17

Significantly furthermore a degree of bifurcation is evident in the overall techno-publicassemblages such that civic and political publicness are sidelined within less obduratestrands of programmatic activity In Glasgow the enduring legacy of the lsquoFuture Cityrsquoprogramme is most visible in the service-user-oriented Operation Centre However manyof its other activities characterised by a more interactive and participatory mode of publicengagement were one-off events As lsquodemonstrator projectsrsquo they served in principle to helpdefine rather than enact the smart city ndash but there is little evidence that this more temporarystrand of the lsquoFuture Cityrsquo programme has subsequently been embedded in mainstreammunicipal activities In Bristol too a clear bifurcation is evident On one side the lsquoBristol isOpenrsquo improvements to the cityrsquos digital infrastructure and the lsquoOpen Data Bristolrsquo initiative(all of which might be expected to be relatively durable) invoke primarily entrepreneurialpublicness On the other the Connecting Bristol partnership promotes diverse lsquosofterrsquo civicand political activities led by grass-roots organisations which exhibit rather less obduracy assmall-scale pilot schemes or activities with limited public participation Evidently then lesscommitment and resources are available for experiments in the field of citizenship under-stood in more traditional liberal democratic ways than in those which conjure up a passive orentrepreneurial public

5 Discussion

Our reading of the smart city consciously departs from critical presentations of the smart cityas a lsquotop-downrsquo imposition and towards a foregrounding and more nuanced appreciation ofits practical variety But the observation that this variety is skewed towards the assemblage ofservice-user and entrepreneurial senses of the public does not constitute a straightforwardlyuseful critique of its current local manifestations The focus on service-user publicness atleast is unsurprising to the extent that local authorities are arguably seen by default asprimarily service providers To observe that civic and political publicness by way ofcontrast are less well considered and often only tokenistically accommodated is not tomake the normative case that these should necessarily or could realistically be privileged inlocal techno-public smart assemblages Rather the prevalence of this more passive modalityof publicness becomes significant when set against rhetorical claims that the smart city iseffecting transformational lsquocitizen-centricrsquo change

The dominance of service-user publicness does little to counter a broader trend identifiedby Powell (2014 15) towards lsquoa shift in the notion of citizenship away from civicresponsibilities and engagements to classifying [citizens] as consumers who purchaseservices from providersrsquo Although Powellrsquos discussion relates to the role of digitised datamore generally it is clearly relevant to the smart cityrsquos focus on providing greater efficien-cies Insofar as the lsquorelationship between government individuals and corporate entitiesrsquo (15)is viewed through the lens of the lsquocitizen as consumerrsquo its quality is only improved by theefficiencies which datafication enables Citizenship in this narrow sense is not related toaltruism or responsibilities but rather based on a principle of exchange and enacted throughlsquocollecting and sharing personal datarsquo (15) Drawing on Dean (2005) Powell highlights therisk that lsquothe norms of publicity ndash information communication and participation ndash havecome to stand for the political ends that they were presumed to serversquo (Powell 2014 16) Thisperspective raises various questions about many of the goals of UK smart city initiatives inrelation to the broader dimensions of citizenship For example the aim of lsquodigital inclusionrsquocommonly asserted among these six cases may appear laudable and yet it pushes the deeperpurpose of digital inclusion into the background smart connectivity itself becomes the goal

18 R Cowley et al

Similarly ideals of lsquotransparent governancersquo or lsquoopen datarsquo may end up being fetishisedwithin a discourse of efficiency even though this discourse tells us little about the normativebasis of the relationship between the public and the state beyond its passive lsquoservice-userrsquomodality

Although again our analysis opposes the existence of a deterministic link betweenglobal smart discourse and local practices the focus on efficiency of different types(including resource use provision of services and access to information) clearly resonateswith Whitersquos (2016) identification of an international discursive storyline in which the smartcity responds to lsquoresource pressures brought on by rapid urbanization and an ageing popula-tion the effects of anthropogenic global climate change and the twinned pressure of fiscalausterity and inter-urban competitionrsquo (577) We would at least suggest that the narrative ofthe lsquoage of crisisrsquo which accompanies much of the contemporary envisionment of futurecities (Caprotti 2015) has had a shaping influence on the prominence given to efficientservice provision in smart activities implemented to date

Equally given the broader UK policy context it would seem eccentric for local autho-rities to discourage entrepreneurialism On the immediate pragmatic level of funding andresources it must be significant that the governmentrsquos Department for Business Skills andInnovation has played a significant catalytic role smart city initiatives have not emergedunder the auspices of say the Department for Communities and Local Government But theprominence of entrepreneurial publicness raises a separate set of concerns echoing Dattarsquos(2015) diagnosis ndash albeit with reference to the rather different context of the Indian city ofDholera ndash of the smart city promoting lsquourbanization as a business model rather than a modelof social justicersquo Across our UK cases issues of social sustainability are far from absent inpolicy documents but their range tends to be limited for example focusing on health ande-inclusion or educating residents to participate in the digital economy In Glasgow suchquestions are subsumed within overall questions of efficiency and relate to very specificfactors such as public safety and reporting problems with services Milton Keynes claimsconsiderable interest in citizen co-creation but its initiatives are not primarily aimed attargeting social problems Although Peterboroughrsquos 2012 Feasibility Study prominentlyflagged up inequalities social cohesion and health improvements among other issues(Peterborough City Council 2012 3) its current strategy is addressed towards developingskills which lsquomeet local business demandrsquo and lsquoput Peterboroughrsquo in lsquothe best possibleposition to take advantage of emerging marketsrsquo (Peterborough City Council 2014 5)

One final way in which the lsquocitizen-centricrsquo nature of the UK smart city is questionablerelates to an apparent straightforward lack of public interest On one level this simplyreminds us of the peripherality of the smart city many of the associated activities only claimto be small-scale experimental trials and are not deeply embedded into the mainstream policyprocess While the actual numbers of local residents involved with many civic and politicalschemes are often negligible we found no convincing evidence either of broader enthusiasmor emergent public counter-discourse in any city4 While emergent political or civic con-testation is clearly not something which local authorities might lsquoplanrsquo for ndash it would beabsurd to expect local authorities to devise problems for frustrated publics to assemblearound ndash its absence does not provide evidence of acquiescence or approval or guarantee thesmooth passage of smart technology into urban life more broadly in future It more obviouslyreflects the survey evidence suggesting that general public awareness of any lsquosmartrsquo plans oractivities undertaken by local councils is neglible (Arqiva 2015) and that only one in five UKadults even recognises the term smart city (IET 2016)

Urban Research amp Practice 19

6 Conclusions towards a new lsquosmart urban publicnessrsquo

In studying and comparing a series of relatively well-developed smart city programmes aslsquotechno-public assemblagesrsquo we have responded to a series of policy claims made about therelationships between smart urban technologies and the public Our analysis reveals that thepublicness envisaged and enacted in the UK smart city is far from one-dimensional Citizensare not merely absent as the earlier critiques of the smart city would have it nor do smart cityactivities necessarily invoke a particular stunted notion of publicness in all cases Rather thegreat variety of types of publicness in evidence leads us to conclude that the rhetorical claimsabout the smart city being citizen-centric are not straightforwardly empty ones Rather thanagreeing with the speculative critiques of the smart city as a devious attempt to exclude thepublic we would urge commentators to begin from the assumption that its institutionalprotagonists do have a vested interest in questions of democracy

That said it also seems fair to conclude that the smart does not yet evince a convincinglyrounded sense of the lsquopublic cityrsquo The opportunistic nature of smart city development inother words gives rise to unique local forms but simultaneously holds these hostage tobroader societal and economic agendas the forms of their assemblage have remained shapedby immediate policy contexts and broader smart city policy discourse Thinking in terms ofits experimental shifting and peripheral assemblage in practice nevertheless opens upagentive space for actors involved to influence smart development in ways which moreconvincingly invoke a more rounded sense of publicness and in turn enable a moreconvincing sense of public ownership and enthusiasm

For more fully public smart city assemblages to emerge in future the civic and politicalmay need to be more obviously accommodated within the service-user and entrepreneurialThis need not relate to heavy-handed attempts to co-opt the civic which risk neutralising itsinnovative potential but the civic should at least not be siloed into more ephemeral strands ofactivity A lack of civic engagement with large infrastructural projects for example seemsunlikely to be successfully mitigated by a series of parallel participatory events which passunnoticed by most residents Similarly entrepreneurial activities are to be welcomed whichare more obviously oriented towards finding solutions to problems defined by citizensalongside those oriented at the creation of wealth through hi-tech innovations The possibi-lities for smart city technology to enable or engender more formal political participationfurthermore appear to have remained largely unexplored in practical terms

If only because the lsquoactually existingrsquo smart city is still at an experimental stage ofdevelopment we note that it has effected only marginal reconfigurations of the materialspaces of the city to date Nevertheless looking forward we urge researchers and practi-tioners to pay attention to the distinctive spatialities of the lsquosmart publicrsquo particularly in theinterfaces between public and private space and between virtual space and the traditionalmaterial public realm There is considerable scope in this regard to reverse the tendencyidentified by Kinsley (2013) to assign the digital to a parallel disembodied lsquohyperspacersquorather our understandings might more fruitfully be grounded in the relationships betweenhumans and technology in local contexts For policy-makers and practitioners activelyseeking a more widespread and involved sense of public debate around and engagementwith the implications of smart technology it may be rewarding to focus on the visibility ofnew innovations This may involve moving towards a more active consideration of themultiple roles of public space and more imaginatively using smart technologies to moveaway from more traditional fora as spaces of public engagement

Overall we resist from concluding that contemporary UK smart initiatives alreadyconstitute a qualitatively novel recasting of the public In relying on dominant political

20 R Cowley et al

structures and economic actors they have come to promote incremental change at best bothin terms of publicness and the material space of the city But assessing the long-termimpacts of smart innovations on urban space will be an ongoing project indeed the conceptlsquosmartrsquo itself may in future lose currency as a label or be reworked as a signifier In themeantime insofar as the smart city is indicative of broader contemporary attempts to shapeurban change in a time of austerity its lsquoexperimentalrsquo nature may appear rather moreproblematically reflective of a bypassing of the traditional democratic process And if wetoo may be allowed to propose a dystopian scenario it is one where in spite of the bestintentions of policy-makers the dominant norms of emerging smart city practices becomesedimented into novel twenty-first century institutional processes whose pragmatic world-view does not extend beyond that of a society of entrepreneurs and service users

AcknowledgementsThis study was undertaken at the University of Westminster with financial support from ESRC grantESL0159781 Youri Dayot was Visiting Fellow from the University of Grenoble

Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors

FundingThis study was undertaken at the University of Westminster as part of the ESRC-funded projectlsquoSmart Eco-cities for a Green Economy a Comparative Study of Europe and Chinarsquo (grant ESL0159781)

Notes1 The two terms (lsquosmart cityrsquo lsquofuture cityrsquo) are complementary and often used interchangeably

especially in the UK national policy context (see eg BSI 2014 3 also Joss Cook andDayot forthcoming) It is beyond the scope of this paper to delve into the conceptualinterrelationship of these recent policy terms in more detail

2 A fuller list of the key documents and links to relevant web pages consulted has been madepublicly available on the lead authorrsquos ResearchGate web pages httpswwwresearchgatenetprofileRobert_Cowley

3 More detailed descriptions of many of the individual activities and bodies analysed in thepresent research may be found in the lsquogrey literaturersquo (see eg Caprotti et al 2016 Woodset al 2016)

4 With the exception of some concerns in Glasgow about the use of facial recognition softwarein the cityrsquos CCTV system linked to the Operation Centre (Sunday Herald 2014 Aitchinson2015)

ReferencesAitchinson J 2015 ldquoShould We Be Worried about Glasgowrsquos New Hi-Tech Surveillance Systemrdquo

STV News February 23 httpglasgowstvtvarticles310713-glasgows-new-surveillance-installed-by-israeli-firm-nice-systems

Allmendinger P and G Haughton 2012 ldquoPost-Political Spatial Planning in England A Crisis ofConsensusrdquo Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37 (1) 89ndash103 doi101111j1475-5661201100468x

Arqiva 2015 ldquoAre Cities Really Getting Smarterrdquo httpswwwarqivacomnewspress-releasesare-our-cities-really-getting-smarter

Urban Research amp Practice 21

in the case of Tech Londoners) But a more distinctively lsquosmartrsquo spatiality may sometimes beobserved in the various attempts to add a lsquodigital layerrsquo to the city creating what might betermed a ubiquitous network of connectivity The digital infrastructure projects within theBristol is Open programme exemplify this spatiality particularly well in a literal sense theywill add a layer of digital connectivity to the city centre The lsquoWireless Milersquo for exampleaims at the creation of a lsquoheterogeneous technology environmentrsquo (Bristol is Open 2016c 1)which integrates differently formatted wifi signals such that lsquocomplex multi-layered net-works of overlapping big and small cells supply smartphones tablets cars drones and evenbuildings with a huge amount of cheap connectivityrsquo (Bristol is Open 2016d2) The variousopen data initiatives also fall into this category insofar as they enable datasets about existingservices and amenities to be linked together

Again this invocation of entrepreneurial public agency sits comfortably with claims thatpeople are being put at the centre of smart city development it explicitly invites publiccontributions to the ongoing forms that this will take However like the service-usermodality it says little about the more democratic dimensions of publicness A more roundedsense of lsquocitizenshiprsquo as traditionally conceived encompasses not only lsquosocial rightsrsquo (ieaccess to services) but also lsquopolitical rightsrsquo (contributing to decision-making processes) andlsquocivilrsquo ones (relating to freedom of speech) (Isin and Ruppert 2015) Accordingly we furtherpropose and distinguish between a lsquopoliticalrsquo and a lsquocivicrsquo modality of publicness

423 Political publicness

We use the label lsquopoliticalrsquo here in the narrow sense of public involvement in decision-making and deliberation through institutional channels or through novel extensions of theseExamples include the lsquoTalk Londonrsquo online platform which hosts a mixture of surveysblogs and discussion boards promoting itself as a lsquoplace to discuss Londonrsquos big issuesrsquo(Talk London 2016) and Bristolrsquos lsquoDemocratreersquo app which encouraged residents to nomi-nate and vote on suitable locations for planting new trees (While the latter was not initiateddirectly by the council it nevertheless provided a direct means for residents to influenceofficial decisions on resource allocation) If there is a commonality in the issues addressedthrough such activities it relates to a perceived lack of participation ndash often with certainsocial groups in mind ndash in local decision-making

Overall this is by far the least commonmodality of publicness invoked it is dominant inonly three of the 68 activities considered This is perhaps surprising given that the potentialfor digital technologies to reinvigorate democratic deliberation and decision-making hasbeen enthusiastically envisioned and debated since the 1990s (Isin and Ruppert 2015) Thelack of experimentation in this respect may partly be explained by the marginality of smartcity activities to traditional policy-making processes

The uses of online fora (as in the case of the Talk London initiative) or voting apps(Democratree) clearly depart from traditional modes of political deliberation ndash for exampleface-to-face settings ndash and yet nevertheless describe rather conventional uses of the internetHowever there are too few examples in the set of activities analysed for us to drawconclusions about the types of spatialities or spatial effects associated with this modalityof publicness

We highlight the paucity of political publicness specifically because strategy documentsmake repeated claims that citizen engagement is vital to the successful implementation of thesmart city and that related initiatives will enable wider citizen engagement with decision-making processes Its absence points more to a situation in which the smart city not only

Urban Research amp Practice 13

operates at the margins of normal institutional processes but might even be criticallyinterpreted as seeking to bypass them ndash a possibility raised by Shearmur (2016) in recountinghow delegates at a technology conference imagined the public sector as merely an obstacle tosmart city implementation

424 Civic publicness

Decision-making mediated through official processes only captures part of a cityrsquos politicallife and may tend to frame issues in certain ways for the purposes of voting or other forms ofdeliberation We therefore distinguish the lsquopoliticalrsquo from a rather less structured lsquocivicrsquomodality of publicness which loosely maps onto a traditional sense of the broader lsquopublicspherersquo In other words it inheres in those activities taking place in spaces beyond stateinstitutions but which are not directly oriented towards market activity A local councilrsquosinvolvement in such activities is necessarily more at armrsquos length it may enable or merelyapprove of such activities in its own promotional documents The types of issues shaping itsassemblage should then emerge lsquofrom belowrsquo Equally however this modality of public-ness may be more immediately associated with leisure activities or lsquoplayfulnessrsquo ndash suchactivities in public space may constitute a performative type of claim making within thebroader democratic process (see eg Hou 2010 Parkinson 2012) The invocation of civicpublicness is far from uncommon across the six cities considered here on a par with theentrepreneurial it is dominant for 21 of the 68 activities (and the most common modality inLondon)

Examples include the lsquoCommunity Wellnessrsquo strand of Manchesterrsquos lsquoCityVerversquo pro-ject aiming to encourage schoolchildren and commuters to take exercise in parks BristolrsquoslsquoMyKWrsquo community social media platform the lsquoBristol Approach to Citizen Sensingrsquo andlsquoPlayable Cityrsquo initiatives Glasgowrsquos lsquoActive Travelrsquo demonstrator initiative insofar as itencouraged cyclists to share data and experiences of cycling in the city and Londonrsquos lsquoSpeedVolunteeringrsquo app which seeks to put those wishing to volunteer in touch with peopleseeking help

We discern two distinctive spatialities as characteristic of assemblages of civic public-ness First relevant initiatives are often constituted by the goal of manifesting the virtualdigital in traditional (physical) public space Peterborough for example has planned a largelsquoOpenCityrsquo digital screen in the city centre Bristolrsquos lsquoPlayable Citiesrsquo competition has beenrunning annually since 2013 to fund temporary artistic installations in the city centre Theproject also taking place elsewhere internationally aims to put lsquopeople and play at the heartof the future city Through interaction and creative installations it unlocks a socialdialogue bringing the citizens into a city development conversationrsquo (Watershed 2016)Examples have included the 2013 winner Hello Lamp Post which allowed members of thepublic to have text message conversations with various items of street furniture andUrbanimals in 2015 in which digitally projected animals would appear unexpectedly acrossthe city and interact with the public (Watershed 2016) Manchesterrsquos lsquoCityVerversquo Internet ofThings demonstrator project mentioned above plans to install lsquotalkative bus stopsrsquo and alsquoCommunity Wellnessrsquo sensor network in parks along school and commuter routes toencourage exercise (UK Government 2015)

The second characteristic spatiality of civic publicness relates to varied attempts toreclaim the digital sphere from the private sector The idea of lsquoreclamationrsquo may not beexplicit in the documentation but such initiatives are typically driven by civil society actorsand aim variously to empower citizens to use and have a presence through new digital urban

14 R Cowley et al

technologies Manchesterrsquos lsquoLiving Labrsquo programme (whose current status is unclearfollowing the disbandment of the Manchester Digital Development Authority) includedthe development of an interactive local news and information web portal featuring contentcreated by residents The lsquoManchester Digital Laboratoryrsquo describes itself as a lsquograssrootsinnovation organisationrsquo (MadLab 2016a) which organises various events and digital train-ing courses with a core mission to allow the general public to lsquohelp people to make thingsbetter togetherrsquo through lsquoexperimentationrsquo lsquoplayrsquo and lsquofunrsquo and the promotion of craftman-ship (MadLab 2016b) In Bristol a local social networking site (first trialled as lsquoMyKWrsquo inthe Knowle West district) has been extended to the city as a whole (as lsquoMyBristolrsquo) Theplanned lsquoBristol Approach to Citizen Sensingrsquo initiative meanwhile mentioned above mostexplicitly displays the aim of reconfiguring virtual space in this way in its vision of a lsquoco-created city commonsrsquo which lsquosupports the deployment of new or adapted technologies intoeveryday environmentsrsquo (KWMC 2016 1)

425 Summary of relative prominence of different modalities of publicness

Table 2 summarises the relative prominence of the four modalities of publicness in eachcity and across all six cities

Analysing these data too closely would potentially yield spurious findings for severalreasons our six cities were not chosen to yield a somehow statistically representative sampleof activities for the purposes of quantitative research the coding of their modalities involvedsome subjective judgement and all activities are equally weighted regardless of scale timeperiod budget and policy significance These reservations aside the findings provide anindicative overview of the variations in the publicness assembled in these six leading citiesand in this spirit two broad observations are ventured

First the relative prominence of the four modalities differs considerably by city In thissense again lsquosmart publicnessrsquo is evidently not determined by globally circulating dis-courses but at least partly reflects its immediate governance and policy context The relativeabsence of entrepreneurial publicness in Glasgow for example communicates the councilrsquossole responsibility for delivering activities In Bristol the dominant entrepreneurial and civicmodalities chime with an overall strategic goal of expanding the knowledge economy bytapping into a strong tradition of grass-roots innovation The lack of service-user publicnessin Peterborough reflects the limited funding available for hard infrastructural projects theemphasis on entrepreneurial and civic publicness evinces the shared responsibility of thecityrsquos economic development agency and the council in managing the Peterborough DNAprogramme Londonrsquos relatively weak service use focus differently confirms the GLArsquos roleas steering and advisory actor rather than as funder of large-scale material interventions Thecity-level assemblages in Manchester and Milton Keynes display similarity in their strongoverall service-use sense of publicness and relatively weak civic modality While civicpublicness may come to the fore in Manchester in future given Corridor Manchesterrsquos statedlsquoplace-makingrsquo goals (Corridor Manchester 2015 24ndash25) its current relative absenceimplies a lack of active engagement on the part of the general public Milton Keynes isperhaps more surprising in this respect given its clear strategic claim to be civically engagedIts relatively weak civic publicness underlines the opportunistic nature of smart urbanactivities those coming to be implemented or funded may reflect strategic goals unevenlysmart policy documents themselves carry relatively little weight in the urban developmentprocess

Urban Research amp Practice 15

Table

2Relativeprom

inence

ofdominantmodalitiesof

publicness

insm

artcity

activities

across

sixUK

cities

Dom

inantmodality

Bristol

Glasgow

London

Manchester

MiltonKeynes

Peterborough

Allactivities

Meanfor6cities

Service

User

1457

1156

530

3732

Entrepreneurial

367

3333

2460

2832

Political

140

110

00

44

Civic

3636

4411

2440

3132

(Total

no

ofactivities)

(14)

(14)

(9)

(9)

(17)

(5)

(68)

16 R Cowley et al

Second the proportion of initiatives oriented towards civic publicness is not insig-nificant these account for approximately a third of all the activities examined On thisbasis it would be oversimplistic to dismiss the claims that the lsquoactually existingrsquocontemporary UK smart city pays only lip service to the importance of public claim-making Nevertheless this embrace of the democratic process does not extend to theprovision of significant opportunities for citizens to engage directly with the formalpolitical system in innovative ways In itself the absence of envisaged political public-ness does not undermine the possibility of more traditional public engagement withgovernmental institutions elsewhere yet the smart city does not provide channels for thedirect expression of public contestation or more radical forms of dissent

In this sense the smart city may appear to be aligned with broader depoliticising or lsquopost-politicalrsquo tendencies in governance generally and urban planning specifically (Swyngedouw2007 2011 Allmendinger and Haughton 2012 Joss 2015) In a post-political reading itsassemblage across UK cities would reflect the nature of its conceptual underpinnings thesmart city can only lsquocommand agreement as a result of [its] broadly progressive if non-specific framingrsquo (Allmendinger and Haughton 2012 94) and is therefore lsquounable to arouseconflicts among political ideasrsquo (Crivello 2015 919) Alternatively following Newman andClarke (2009) it illustrates the apparent paradox of the decline of the traditional lsquopublicrsquobeing accompanied by its simultaneous proliferation as a fragmented mulitiplicity politicalpublicness may be assembling elsewhere but is not associated with the intended role of thesmart city in the United Kingdom

426 Obduracy

Political publicness aside our findings have at least provided convincing evidence that UKsmart city initiatives are guided by a genuine desire to encourage civic engagement ofvarious kinds Even here however a more nuanced picture emerges when the relativeobduracy of individual activities is factored in Based on the available information weflagged each of the 68 activities as either lsquopermanentrsquo (to indicate ongoing operation orpresence in the city) or lsquotemporaryrsquo (to indicate a one-off or time-limited activity) As Table 3shows civic (and political) activities tend to be less permanent in nature than those invokingentrepreneurial and service-user publicness

In an important sense the relatively temporary nature of activities oriented towardspolitical and civic publicness is unsurprising particularly when contrasted with the service-user modality which is more often associated ndash as discussed above ndash with lsquohardrsquo infra-structural interventions The consequences of such activities may be long-lasting even whenthe activity itself is short-lived Nevertheless these findings fall short of convincinglyheralding a situation in which citizenship is prioritised as the central ongoing concern ofthe UK smart city

Table 3 Obduracy of smart city activities invoking each modality of publicness

Dominant modalityPermanent

Temporary

Base (number of activities)

Service-user 76 24 (25)Entrepreneurial 58 42 (19)Political 33 67 (3)Civic 48 52 (21)

Urban Research amp Practice 17

Significantly furthermore a degree of bifurcation is evident in the overall techno-publicassemblages such that civic and political publicness are sidelined within less obduratestrands of programmatic activity In Glasgow the enduring legacy of the lsquoFuture Cityrsquoprogramme is most visible in the service-user-oriented Operation Centre However manyof its other activities characterised by a more interactive and participatory mode of publicengagement were one-off events As lsquodemonstrator projectsrsquo they served in principle to helpdefine rather than enact the smart city ndash but there is little evidence that this more temporarystrand of the lsquoFuture Cityrsquo programme has subsequently been embedded in mainstreammunicipal activities In Bristol too a clear bifurcation is evident On one side the lsquoBristol isOpenrsquo improvements to the cityrsquos digital infrastructure and the lsquoOpen Data Bristolrsquo initiative(all of which might be expected to be relatively durable) invoke primarily entrepreneurialpublicness On the other the Connecting Bristol partnership promotes diverse lsquosofterrsquo civicand political activities led by grass-roots organisations which exhibit rather less obduracy assmall-scale pilot schemes or activities with limited public participation Evidently then lesscommitment and resources are available for experiments in the field of citizenship under-stood in more traditional liberal democratic ways than in those which conjure up a passive orentrepreneurial public

5 Discussion

Our reading of the smart city consciously departs from critical presentations of the smart cityas a lsquotop-downrsquo imposition and towards a foregrounding and more nuanced appreciation ofits practical variety But the observation that this variety is skewed towards the assemblage ofservice-user and entrepreneurial senses of the public does not constitute a straightforwardlyuseful critique of its current local manifestations The focus on service-user publicness atleast is unsurprising to the extent that local authorities are arguably seen by default asprimarily service providers To observe that civic and political publicness by way ofcontrast are less well considered and often only tokenistically accommodated is not tomake the normative case that these should necessarily or could realistically be privileged inlocal techno-public smart assemblages Rather the prevalence of this more passive modalityof publicness becomes significant when set against rhetorical claims that the smart city iseffecting transformational lsquocitizen-centricrsquo change

The dominance of service-user publicness does little to counter a broader trend identifiedby Powell (2014 15) towards lsquoa shift in the notion of citizenship away from civicresponsibilities and engagements to classifying [citizens] as consumers who purchaseservices from providersrsquo Although Powellrsquos discussion relates to the role of digitised datamore generally it is clearly relevant to the smart cityrsquos focus on providing greater efficien-cies Insofar as the lsquorelationship between government individuals and corporate entitiesrsquo (15)is viewed through the lens of the lsquocitizen as consumerrsquo its quality is only improved by theefficiencies which datafication enables Citizenship in this narrow sense is not related toaltruism or responsibilities but rather based on a principle of exchange and enacted throughlsquocollecting and sharing personal datarsquo (15) Drawing on Dean (2005) Powell highlights therisk that lsquothe norms of publicity ndash information communication and participation ndash havecome to stand for the political ends that they were presumed to serversquo (Powell 2014 16) Thisperspective raises various questions about many of the goals of UK smart city initiatives inrelation to the broader dimensions of citizenship For example the aim of lsquodigital inclusionrsquocommonly asserted among these six cases may appear laudable and yet it pushes the deeperpurpose of digital inclusion into the background smart connectivity itself becomes the goal

18 R Cowley et al

Similarly ideals of lsquotransparent governancersquo or lsquoopen datarsquo may end up being fetishisedwithin a discourse of efficiency even though this discourse tells us little about the normativebasis of the relationship between the public and the state beyond its passive lsquoservice-userrsquomodality

Although again our analysis opposes the existence of a deterministic link betweenglobal smart discourse and local practices the focus on efficiency of different types(including resource use provision of services and access to information) clearly resonateswith Whitersquos (2016) identification of an international discursive storyline in which the smartcity responds to lsquoresource pressures brought on by rapid urbanization and an ageing popula-tion the effects of anthropogenic global climate change and the twinned pressure of fiscalausterity and inter-urban competitionrsquo (577) We would at least suggest that the narrative ofthe lsquoage of crisisrsquo which accompanies much of the contemporary envisionment of futurecities (Caprotti 2015) has had a shaping influence on the prominence given to efficientservice provision in smart activities implemented to date

Equally given the broader UK policy context it would seem eccentric for local autho-rities to discourage entrepreneurialism On the immediate pragmatic level of funding andresources it must be significant that the governmentrsquos Department for Business Skills andInnovation has played a significant catalytic role smart city initiatives have not emergedunder the auspices of say the Department for Communities and Local Government But theprominence of entrepreneurial publicness raises a separate set of concerns echoing Dattarsquos(2015) diagnosis ndash albeit with reference to the rather different context of the Indian city ofDholera ndash of the smart city promoting lsquourbanization as a business model rather than a modelof social justicersquo Across our UK cases issues of social sustainability are far from absent inpolicy documents but their range tends to be limited for example focusing on health ande-inclusion or educating residents to participate in the digital economy In Glasgow suchquestions are subsumed within overall questions of efficiency and relate to very specificfactors such as public safety and reporting problems with services Milton Keynes claimsconsiderable interest in citizen co-creation but its initiatives are not primarily aimed attargeting social problems Although Peterboroughrsquos 2012 Feasibility Study prominentlyflagged up inequalities social cohesion and health improvements among other issues(Peterborough City Council 2012 3) its current strategy is addressed towards developingskills which lsquomeet local business demandrsquo and lsquoput Peterboroughrsquo in lsquothe best possibleposition to take advantage of emerging marketsrsquo (Peterborough City Council 2014 5)

One final way in which the lsquocitizen-centricrsquo nature of the UK smart city is questionablerelates to an apparent straightforward lack of public interest On one level this simplyreminds us of the peripherality of the smart city many of the associated activities only claimto be small-scale experimental trials and are not deeply embedded into the mainstream policyprocess While the actual numbers of local residents involved with many civic and politicalschemes are often negligible we found no convincing evidence either of broader enthusiasmor emergent public counter-discourse in any city4 While emergent political or civic con-testation is clearly not something which local authorities might lsquoplanrsquo for ndash it would beabsurd to expect local authorities to devise problems for frustrated publics to assemblearound ndash its absence does not provide evidence of acquiescence or approval or guarantee thesmooth passage of smart technology into urban life more broadly in future It more obviouslyreflects the survey evidence suggesting that general public awareness of any lsquosmartrsquo plans oractivities undertaken by local councils is neglible (Arqiva 2015) and that only one in five UKadults even recognises the term smart city (IET 2016)

Urban Research amp Practice 19

6 Conclusions towards a new lsquosmart urban publicnessrsquo

In studying and comparing a series of relatively well-developed smart city programmes aslsquotechno-public assemblagesrsquo we have responded to a series of policy claims made about therelationships between smart urban technologies and the public Our analysis reveals that thepublicness envisaged and enacted in the UK smart city is far from one-dimensional Citizensare not merely absent as the earlier critiques of the smart city would have it nor do smart cityactivities necessarily invoke a particular stunted notion of publicness in all cases Rather thegreat variety of types of publicness in evidence leads us to conclude that the rhetorical claimsabout the smart city being citizen-centric are not straightforwardly empty ones Rather thanagreeing with the speculative critiques of the smart city as a devious attempt to exclude thepublic we would urge commentators to begin from the assumption that its institutionalprotagonists do have a vested interest in questions of democracy

That said it also seems fair to conclude that the smart does not yet evince a convincinglyrounded sense of the lsquopublic cityrsquo The opportunistic nature of smart city development inother words gives rise to unique local forms but simultaneously holds these hostage tobroader societal and economic agendas the forms of their assemblage have remained shapedby immediate policy contexts and broader smart city policy discourse Thinking in terms ofits experimental shifting and peripheral assemblage in practice nevertheless opens upagentive space for actors involved to influence smart development in ways which moreconvincingly invoke a more rounded sense of publicness and in turn enable a moreconvincing sense of public ownership and enthusiasm

For more fully public smart city assemblages to emerge in future the civic and politicalmay need to be more obviously accommodated within the service-user and entrepreneurialThis need not relate to heavy-handed attempts to co-opt the civic which risk neutralising itsinnovative potential but the civic should at least not be siloed into more ephemeral strands ofactivity A lack of civic engagement with large infrastructural projects for example seemsunlikely to be successfully mitigated by a series of parallel participatory events which passunnoticed by most residents Similarly entrepreneurial activities are to be welcomed whichare more obviously oriented towards finding solutions to problems defined by citizensalongside those oriented at the creation of wealth through hi-tech innovations The possibi-lities for smart city technology to enable or engender more formal political participationfurthermore appear to have remained largely unexplored in practical terms

If only because the lsquoactually existingrsquo smart city is still at an experimental stage ofdevelopment we note that it has effected only marginal reconfigurations of the materialspaces of the city to date Nevertheless looking forward we urge researchers and practi-tioners to pay attention to the distinctive spatialities of the lsquosmart publicrsquo particularly in theinterfaces between public and private space and between virtual space and the traditionalmaterial public realm There is considerable scope in this regard to reverse the tendencyidentified by Kinsley (2013) to assign the digital to a parallel disembodied lsquohyperspacersquorather our understandings might more fruitfully be grounded in the relationships betweenhumans and technology in local contexts For policy-makers and practitioners activelyseeking a more widespread and involved sense of public debate around and engagementwith the implications of smart technology it may be rewarding to focus on the visibility ofnew innovations This may involve moving towards a more active consideration of themultiple roles of public space and more imaginatively using smart technologies to moveaway from more traditional fora as spaces of public engagement

Overall we resist from concluding that contemporary UK smart initiatives alreadyconstitute a qualitatively novel recasting of the public In relying on dominant political

20 R Cowley et al

structures and economic actors they have come to promote incremental change at best bothin terms of publicness and the material space of the city But assessing the long-termimpacts of smart innovations on urban space will be an ongoing project indeed the conceptlsquosmartrsquo itself may in future lose currency as a label or be reworked as a signifier In themeantime insofar as the smart city is indicative of broader contemporary attempts to shapeurban change in a time of austerity its lsquoexperimentalrsquo nature may appear rather moreproblematically reflective of a bypassing of the traditional democratic process And if wetoo may be allowed to propose a dystopian scenario it is one where in spite of the bestintentions of policy-makers the dominant norms of emerging smart city practices becomesedimented into novel twenty-first century institutional processes whose pragmatic world-view does not extend beyond that of a society of entrepreneurs and service users

AcknowledgementsThis study was undertaken at the University of Westminster with financial support from ESRC grantESL0159781 Youri Dayot was Visiting Fellow from the University of Grenoble

Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors

FundingThis study was undertaken at the University of Westminster as part of the ESRC-funded projectlsquoSmart Eco-cities for a Green Economy a Comparative Study of Europe and Chinarsquo (grant ESL0159781)

Notes1 The two terms (lsquosmart cityrsquo lsquofuture cityrsquo) are complementary and often used interchangeably

especially in the UK national policy context (see eg BSI 2014 3 also Joss Cook andDayot forthcoming) It is beyond the scope of this paper to delve into the conceptualinterrelationship of these recent policy terms in more detail

2 A fuller list of the key documents and links to relevant web pages consulted has been madepublicly available on the lead authorrsquos ResearchGate web pages httpswwwresearchgatenetprofileRobert_Cowley

3 More detailed descriptions of many of the individual activities and bodies analysed in thepresent research may be found in the lsquogrey literaturersquo (see eg Caprotti et al 2016 Woodset al 2016)

4 With the exception of some concerns in Glasgow about the use of facial recognition softwarein the cityrsquos CCTV system linked to the Operation Centre (Sunday Herald 2014 Aitchinson2015)

ReferencesAitchinson J 2015 ldquoShould We Be Worried about Glasgowrsquos New Hi-Tech Surveillance Systemrdquo

STV News February 23 httpglasgowstvtvarticles310713-glasgows-new-surveillance-installed-by-israeli-firm-nice-systems

Allmendinger P and G Haughton 2012 ldquoPost-Political Spatial Planning in England A Crisis ofConsensusrdquo Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37 (1) 89ndash103 doi101111j1475-5661201100468x

Arqiva 2015 ldquoAre Cities Really Getting Smarterrdquo httpswwwarqivacomnewspress-releasesare-our-cities-really-getting-smarter

Urban Research amp Practice 21

operates at the margins of normal institutional processes but might even be criticallyinterpreted as seeking to bypass them ndash a possibility raised by Shearmur (2016) in recountinghow delegates at a technology conference imagined the public sector as merely an obstacle tosmart city implementation

424 Civic publicness

Decision-making mediated through official processes only captures part of a cityrsquos politicallife and may tend to frame issues in certain ways for the purposes of voting or other forms ofdeliberation We therefore distinguish the lsquopoliticalrsquo from a rather less structured lsquocivicrsquomodality of publicness which loosely maps onto a traditional sense of the broader lsquopublicspherersquo In other words it inheres in those activities taking place in spaces beyond stateinstitutions but which are not directly oriented towards market activity A local councilrsquosinvolvement in such activities is necessarily more at armrsquos length it may enable or merelyapprove of such activities in its own promotional documents The types of issues shaping itsassemblage should then emerge lsquofrom belowrsquo Equally however this modality of public-ness may be more immediately associated with leisure activities or lsquoplayfulnessrsquo ndash suchactivities in public space may constitute a performative type of claim making within thebroader democratic process (see eg Hou 2010 Parkinson 2012) The invocation of civicpublicness is far from uncommon across the six cities considered here on a par with theentrepreneurial it is dominant for 21 of the 68 activities (and the most common modality inLondon)

Examples include the lsquoCommunity Wellnessrsquo strand of Manchesterrsquos lsquoCityVerversquo pro-ject aiming to encourage schoolchildren and commuters to take exercise in parks BristolrsquoslsquoMyKWrsquo community social media platform the lsquoBristol Approach to Citizen Sensingrsquo andlsquoPlayable Cityrsquo initiatives Glasgowrsquos lsquoActive Travelrsquo demonstrator initiative insofar as itencouraged cyclists to share data and experiences of cycling in the city and Londonrsquos lsquoSpeedVolunteeringrsquo app which seeks to put those wishing to volunteer in touch with peopleseeking help

We discern two distinctive spatialities as characteristic of assemblages of civic public-ness First relevant initiatives are often constituted by the goal of manifesting the virtualdigital in traditional (physical) public space Peterborough for example has planned a largelsquoOpenCityrsquo digital screen in the city centre Bristolrsquos lsquoPlayable Citiesrsquo competition has beenrunning annually since 2013 to fund temporary artistic installations in the city centre Theproject also taking place elsewhere internationally aims to put lsquopeople and play at the heartof the future city Through interaction and creative installations it unlocks a socialdialogue bringing the citizens into a city development conversationrsquo (Watershed 2016)Examples have included the 2013 winner Hello Lamp Post which allowed members of thepublic to have text message conversations with various items of street furniture andUrbanimals in 2015 in which digitally projected animals would appear unexpectedly acrossthe city and interact with the public (Watershed 2016) Manchesterrsquos lsquoCityVerversquo Internet ofThings demonstrator project mentioned above plans to install lsquotalkative bus stopsrsquo and alsquoCommunity Wellnessrsquo sensor network in parks along school and commuter routes toencourage exercise (UK Government 2015)

The second characteristic spatiality of civic publicness relates to varied attempts toreclaim the digital sphere from the private sector The idea of lsquoreclamationrsquo may not beexplicit in the documentation but such initiatives are typically driven by civil society actorsand aim variously to empower citizens to use and have a presence through new digital urban

14 R Cowley et al

technologies Manchesterrsquos lsquoLiving Labrsquo programme (whose current status is unclearfollowing the disbandment of the Manchester Digital Development Authority) includedthe development of an interactive local news and information web portal featuring contentcreated by residents The lsquoManchester Digital Laboratoryrsquo describes itself as a lsquograssrootsinnovation organisationrsquo (MadLab 2016a) which organises various events and digital train-ing courses with a core mission to allow the general public to lsquohelp people to make thingsbetter togetherrsquo through lsquoexperimentationrsquo lsquoplayrsquo and lsquofunrsquo and the promotion of craftman-ship (MadLab 2016b) In Bristol a local social networking site (first trialled as lsquoMyKWrsquo inthe Knowle West district) has been extended to the city as a whole (as lsquoMyBristolrsquo) Theplanned lsquoBristol Approach to Citizen Sensingrsquo initiative meanwhile mentioned above mostexplicitly displays the aim of reconfiguring virtual space in this way in its vision of a lsquoco-created city commonsrsquo which lsquosupports the deployment of new or adapted technologies intoeveryday environmentsrsquo (KWMC 2016 1)

425 Summary of relative prominence of different modalities of publicness

Table 2 summarises the relative prominence of the four modalities of publicness in eachcity and across all six cities

Analysing these data too closely would potentially yield spurious findings for severalreasons our six cities were not chosen to yield a somehow statistically representative sampleof activities for the purposes of quantitative research the coding of their modalities involvedsome subjective judgement and all activities are equally weighted regardless of scale timeperiod budget and policy significance These reservations aside the findings provide anindicative overview of the variations in the publicness assembled in these six leading citiesand in this spirit two broad observations are ventured

First the relative prominence of the four modalities differs considerably by city In thissense again lsquosmart publicnessrsquo is evidently not determined by globally circulating dis-courses but at least partly reflects its immediate governance and policy context The relativeabsence of entrepreneurial publicness in Glasgow for example communicates the councilrsquossole responsibility for delivering activities In Bristol the dominant entrepreneurial and civicmodalities chime with an overall strategic goal of expanding the knowledge economy bytapping into a strong tradition of grass-roots innovation The lack of service-user publicnessin Peterborough reflects the limited funding available for hard infrastructural projects theemphasis on entrepreneurial and civic publicness evinces the shared responsibility of thecityrsquos economic development agency and the council in managing the Peterborough DNAprogramme Londonrsquos relatively weak service use focus differently confirms the GLArsquos roleas steering and advisory actor rather than as funder of large-scale material interventions Thecity-level assemblages in Manchester and Milton Keynes display similarity in their strongoverall service-use sense of publicness and relatively weak civic modality While civicpublicness may come to the fore in Manchester in future given Corridor Manchesterrsquos statedlsquoplace-makingrsquo goals (Corridor Manchester 2015 24ndash25) its current relative absenceimplies a lack of active engagement on the part of the general public Milton Keynes isperhaps more surprising in this respect given its clear strategic claim to be civically engagedIts relatively weak civic publicness underlines the opportunistic nature of smart urbanactivities those coming to be implemented or funded may reflect strategic goals unevenlysmart policy documents themselves carry relatively little weight in the urban developmentprocess

Urban Research amp Practice 15

Table

2Relativeprom

inence

ofdominantmodalitiesof

publicness

insm

artcity

activities

across

sixUK

cities

Dom

inantmodality

Bristol

Glasgow

London

Manchester

MiltonKeynes

Peterborough

Allactivities

Meanfor6cities

Service

User

1457

1156

530

3732

Entrepreneurial

367

3333

2460

2832

Political

140

110

00

44

Civic

3636

4411

2440

3132

(Total

no

ofactivities)

(14)

(14)

(9)

(9)

(17)

(5)

(68)

16 R Cowley et al

Second the proportion of initiatives oriented towards civic publicness is not insig-nificant these account for approximately a third of all the activities examined On thisbasis it would be oversimplistic to dismiss the claims that the lsquoactually existingrsquocontemporary UK smart city pays only lip service to the importance of public claim-making Nevertheless this embrace of the democratic process does not extend to theprovision of significant opportunities for citizens to engage directly with the formalpolitical system in innovative ways In itself the absence of envisaged political public-ness does not undermine the possibility of more traditional public engagement withgovernmental institutions elsewhere yet the smart city does not provide channels for thedirect expression of public contestation or more radical forms of dissent

In this sense the smart city may appear to be aligned with broader depoliticising or lsquopost-politicalrsquo tendencies in governance generally and urban planning specifically (Swyngedouw2007 2011 Allmendinger and Haughton 2012 Joss 2015) In a post-political reading itsassemblage across UK cities would reflect the nature of its conceptual underpinnings thesmart city can only lsquocommand agreement as a result of [its] broadly progressive if non-specific framingrsquo (Allmendinger and Haughton 2012 94) and is therefore lsquounable to arouseconflicts among political ideasrsquo (Crivello 2015 919) Alternatively following Newman andClarke (2009) it illustrates the apparent paradox of the decline of the traditional lsquopublicrsquobeing accompanied by its simultaneous proliferation as a fragmented mulitiplicity politicalpublicness may be assembling elsewhere but is not associated with the intended role of thesmart city in the United Kingdom

426 Obduracy

Political publicness aside our findings have at least provided convincing evidence that UKsmart city initiatives are guided by a genuine desire to encourage civic engagement ofvarious kinds Even here however a more nuanced picture emerges when the relativeobduracy of individual activities is factored in Based on the available information weflagged each of the 68 activities as either lsquopermanentrsquo (to indicate ongoing operation orpresence in the city) or lsquotemporaryrsquo (to indicate a one-off or time-limited activity) As Table 3shows civic (and political) activities tend to be less permanent in nature than those invokingentrepreneurial and service-user publicness

In an important sense the relatively temporary nature of activities oriented towardspolitical and civic publicness is unsurprising particularly when contrasted with the service-user modality which is more often associated ndash as discussed above ndash with lsquohardrsquo infra-structural interventions The consequences of such activities may be long-lasting even whenthe activity itself is short-lived Nevertheless these findings fall short of convincinglyheralding a situation in which citizenship is prioritised as the central ongoing concern ofthe UK smart city

Table 3 Obduracy of smart city activities invoking each modality of publicness

Dominant modalityPermanent

Temporary

Base (number of activities)

Service-user 76 24 (25)Entrepreneurial 58 42 (19)Political 33 67 (3)Civic 48 52 (21)

Urban Research amp Practice 17

Significantly furthermore a degree of bifurcation is evident in the overall techno-publicassemblages such that civic and political publicness are sidelined within less obduratestrands of programmatic activity In Glasgow the enduring legacy of the lsquoFuture Cityrsquoprogramme is most visible in the service-user-oriented Operation Centre However manyof its other activities characterised by a more interactive and participatory mode of publicengagement were one-off events As lsquodemonstrator projectsrsquo they served in principle to helpdefine rather than enact the smart city ndash but there is little evidence that this more temporarystrand of the lsquoFuture Cityrsquo programme has subsequently been embedded in mainstreammunicipal activities In Bristol too a clear bifurcation is evident On one side the lsquoBristol isOpenrsquo improvements to the cityrsquos digital infrastructure and the lsquoOpen Data Bristolrsquo initiative(all of which might be expected to be relatively durable) invoke primarily entrepreneurialpublicness On the other the Connecting Bristol partnership promotes diverse lsquosofterrsquo civicand political activities led by grass-roots organisations which exhibit rather less obduracy assmall-scale pilot schemes or activities with limited public participation Evidently then lesscommitment and resources are available for experiments in the field of citizenship under-stood in more traditional liberal democratic ways than in those which conjure up a passive orentrepreneurial public

5 Discussion

Our reading of the smart city consciously departs from critical presentations of the smart cityas a lsquotop-downrsquo imposition and towards a foregrounding and more nuanced appreciation ofits practical variety But the observation that this variety is skewed towards the assemblage ofservice-user and entrepreneurial senses of the public does not constitute a straightforwardlyuseful critique of its current local manifestations The focus on service-user publicness atleast is unsurprising to the extent that local authorities are arguably seen by default asprimarily service providers To observe that civic and political publicness by way ofcontrast are less well considered and often only tokenistically accommodated is not tomake the normative case that these should necessarily or could realistically be privileged inlocal techno-public smart assemblages Rather the prevalence of this more passive modalityof publicness becomes significant when set against rhetorical claims that the smart city iseffecting transformational lsquocitizen-centricrsquo change

The dominance of service-user publicness does little to counter a broader trend identifiedby Powell (2014 15) towards lsquoa shift in the notion of citizenship away from civicresponsibilities and engagements to classifying [citizens] as consumers who purchaseservices from providersrsquo Although Powellrsquos discussion relates to the role of digitised datamore generally it is clearly relevant to the smart cityrsquos focus on providing greater efficien-cies Insofar as the lsquorelationship between government individuals and corporate entitiesrsquo (15)is viewed through the lens of the lsquocitizen as consumerrsquo its quality is only improved by theefficiencies which datafication enables Citizenship in this narrow sense is not related toaltruism or responsibilities but rather based on a principle of exchange and enacted throughlsquocollecting and sharing personal datarsquo (15) Drawing on Dean (2005) Powell highlights therisk that lsquothe norms of publicity ndash information communication and participation ndash havecome to stand for the political ends that they were presumed to serversquo (Powell 2014 16) Thisperspective raises various questions about many of the goals of UK smart city initiatives inrelation to the broader dimensions of citizenship For example the aim of lsquodigital inclusionrsquocommonly asserted among these six cases may appear laudable and yet it pushes the deeperpurpose of digital inclusion into the background smart connectivity itself becomes the goal

18 R Cowley et al

Similarly ideals of lsquotransparent governancersquo or lsquoopen datarsquo may end up being fetishisedwithin a discourse of efficiency even though this discourse tells us little about the normativebasis of the relationship between the public and the state beyond its passive lsquoservice-userrsquomodality

Although again our analysis opposes the existence of a deterministic link betweenglobal smart discourse and local practices the focus on efficiency of different types(including resource use provision of services and access to information) clearly resonateswith Whitersquos (2016) identification of an international discursive storyline in which the smartcity responds to lsquoresource pressures brought on by rapid urbanization and an ageing popula-tion the effects of anthropogenic global climate change and the twinned pressure of fiscalausterity and inter-urban competitionrsquo (577) We would at least suggest that the narrative ofthe lsquoage of crisisrsquo which accompanies much of the contemporary envisionment of futurecities (Caprotti 2015) has had a shaping influence on the prominence given to efficientservice provision in smart activities implemented to date

Equally given the broader UK policy context it would seem eccentric for local autho-rities to discourage entrepreneurialism On the immediate pragmatic level of funding andresources it must be significant that the governmentrsquos Department for Business Skills andInnovation has played a significant catalytic role smart city initiatives have not emergedunder the auspices of say the Department for Communities and Local Government But theprominence of entrepreneurial publicness raises a separate set of concerns echoing Dattarsquos(2015) diagnosis ndash albeit with reference to the rather different context of the Indian city ofDholera ndash of the smart city promoting lsquourbanization as a business model rather than a modelof social justicersquo Across our UK cases issues of social sustainability are far from absent inpolicy documents but their range tends to be limited for example focusing on health ande-inclusion or educating residents to participate in the digital economy In Glasgow suchquestions are subsumed within overall questions of efficiency and relate to very specificfactors such as public safety and reporting problems with services Milton Keynes claimsconsiderable interest in citizen co-creation but its initiatives are not primarily aimed attargeting social problems Although Peterboroughrsquos 2012 Feasibility Study prominentlyflagged up inequalities social cohesion and health improvements among other issues(Peterborough City Council 2012 3) its current strategy is addressed towards developingskills which lsquomeet local business demandrsquo and lsquoput Peterboroughrsquo in lsquothe best possibleposition to take advantage of emerging marketsrsquo (Peterborough City Council 2014 5)

One final way in which the lsquocitizen-centricrsquo nature of the UK smart city is questionablerelates to an apparent straightforward lack of public interest On one level this simplyreminds us of the peripherality of the smart city many of the associated activities only claimto be small-scale experimental trials and are not deeply embedded into the mainstream policyprocess While the actual numbers of local residents involved with many civic and politicalschemes are often negligible we found no convincing evidence either of broader enthusiasmor emergent public counter-discourse in any city4 While emergent political or civic con-testation is clearly not something which local authorities might lsquoplanrsquo for ndash it would beabsurd to expect local authorities to devise problems for frustrated publics to assemblearound ndash its absence does not provide evidence of acquiescence or approval or guarantee thesmooth passage of smart technology into urban life more broadly in future It more obviouslyreflects the survey evidence suggesting that general public awareness of any lsquosmartrsquo plans oractivities undertaken by local councils is neglible (Arqiva 2015) and that only one in five UKadults even recognises the term smart city (IET 2016)

Urban Research amp Practice 19

6 Conclusions towards a new lsquosmart urban publicnessrsquo

In studying and comparing a series of relatively well-developed smart city programmes aslsquotechno-public assemblagesrsquo we have responded to a series of policy claims made about therelationships between smart urban technologies and the public Our analysis reveals that thepublicness envisaged and enacted in the UK smart city is far from one-dimensional Citizensare not merely absent as the earlier critiques of the smart city would have it nor do smart cityactivities necessarily invoke a particular stunted notion of publicness in all cases Rather thegreat variety of types of publicness in evidence leads us to conclude that the rhetorical claimsabout the smart city being citizen-centric are not straightforwardly empty ones Rather thanagreeing with the speculative critiques of the smart city as a devious attempt to exclude thepublic we would urge commentators to begin from the assumption that its institutionalprotagonists do have a vested interest in questions of democracy

That said it also seems fair to conclude that the smart does not yet evince a convincinglyrounded sense of the lsquopublic cityrsquo The opportunistic nature of smart city development inother words gives rise to unique local forms but simultaneously holds these hostage tobroader societal and economic agendas the forms of their assemblage have remained shapedby immediate policy contexts and broader smart city policy discourse Thinking in terms ofits experimental shifting and peripheral assemblage in practice nevertheless opens upagentive space for actors involved to influence smart development in ways which moreconvincingly invoke a more rounded sense of publicness and in turn enable a moreconvincing sense of public ownership and enthusiasm

For more fully public smart city assemblages to emerge in future the civic and politicalmay need to be more obviously accommodated within the service-user and entrepreneurialThis need not relate to heavy-handed attempts to co-opt the civic which risk neutralising itsinnovative potential but the civic should at least not be siloed into more ephemeral strands ofactivity A lack of civic engagement with large infrastructural projects for example seemsunlikely to be successfully mitigated by a series of parallel participatory events which passunnoticed by most residents Similarly entrepreneurial activities are to be welcomed whichare more obviously oriented towards finding solutions to problems defined by citizensalongside those oriented at the creation of wealth through hi-tech innovations The possibi-lities for smart city technology to enable or engender more formal political participationfurthermore appear to have remained largely unexplored in practical terms

If only because the lsquoactually existingrsquo smart city is still at an experimental stage ofdevelopment we note that it has effected only marginal reconfigurations of the materialspaces of the city to date Nevertheless looking forward we urge researchers and practi-tioners to pay attention to the distinctive spatialities of the lsquosmart publicrsquo particularly in theinterfaces between public and private space and between virtual space and the traditionalmaterial public realm There is considerable scope in this regard to reverse the tendencyidentified by Kinsley (2013) to assign the digital to a parallel disembodied lsquohyperspacersquorather our understandings might more fruitfully be grounded in the relationships betweenhumans and technology in local contexts For policy-makers and practitioners activelyseeking a more widespread and involved sense of public debate around and engagementwith the implications of smart technology it may be rewarding to focus on the visibility ofnew innovations This may involve moving towards a more active consideration of themultiple roles of public space and more imaginatively using smart technologies to moveaway from more traditional fora as spaces of public engagement

Overall we resist from concluding that contemporary UK smart initiatives alreadyconstitute a qualitatively novel recasting of the public In relying on dominant political

20 R Cowley et al

structures and economic actors they have come to promote incremental change at best bothin terms of publicness and the material space of the city But assessing the long-termimpacts of smart innovations on urban space will be an ongoing project indeed the conceptlsquosmartrsquo itself may in future lose currency as a label or be reworked as a signifier In themeantime insofar as the smart city is indicative of broader contemporary attempts to shapeurban change in a time of austerity its lsquoexperimentalrsquo nature may appear rather moreproblematically reflective of a bypassing of the traditional democratic process And if wetoo may be allowed to propose a dystopian scenario it is one where in spite of the bestintentions of policy-makers the dominant norms of emerging smart city practices becomesedimented into novel twenty-first century institutional processes whose pragmatic world-view does not extend beyond that of a society of entrepreneurs and service users

AcknowledgementsThis study was undertaken at the University of Westminster with financial support from ESRC grantESL0159781 Youri Dayot was Visiting Fellow from the University of Grenoble

Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors

FundingThis study was undertaken at the University of Westminster as part of the ESRC-funded projectlsquoSmart Eco-cities for a Green Economy a Comparative Study of Europe and Chinarsquo (grant ESL0159781)

Notes1 The two terms (lsquosmart cityrsquo lsquofuture cityrsquo) are complementary and often used interchangeably

especially in the UK national policy context (see eg BSI 2014 3 also Joss Cook andDayot forthcoming) It is beyond the scope of this paper to delve into the conceptualinterrelationship of these recent policy terms in more detail

2 A fuller list of the key documents and links to relevant web pages consulted has been madepublicly available on the lead authorrsquos ResearchGate web pages httpswwwresearchgatenetprofileRobert_Cowley

3 More detailed descriptions of many of the individual activities and bodies analysed in thepresent research may be found in the lsquogrey literaturersquo (see eg Caprotti et al 2016 Woodset al 2016)

4 With the exception of some concerns in Glasgow about the use of facial recognition softwarein the cityrsquos CCTV system linked to the Operation Centre (Sunday Herald 2014 Aitchinson2015)

ReferencesAitchinson J 2015 ldquoShould We Be Worried about Glasgowrsquos New Hi-Tech Surveillance Systemrdquo

STV News February 23 httpglasgowstvtvarticles310713-glasgows-new-surveillance-installed-by-israeli-firm-nice-systems

Allmendinger P and G Haughton 2012 ldquoPost-Political Spatial Planning in England A Crisis ofConsensusrdquo Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37 (1) 89ndash103 doi101111j1475-5661201100468x

Arqiva 2015 ldquoAre Cities Really Getting Smarterrdquo httpswwwarqivacomnewspress-releasesare-our-cities-really-getting-smarter

Urban Research amp Practice 21

technologies Manchesterrsquos lsquoLiving Labrsquo programme (whose current status is unclearfollowing the disbandment of the Manchester Digital Development Authority) includedthe development of an interactive local news and information web portal featuring contentcreated by residents The lsquoManchester Digital Laboratoryrsquo describes itself as a lsquograssrootsinnovation organisationrsquo (MadLab 2016a) which organises various events and digital train-ing courses with a core mission to allow the general public to lsquohelp people to make thingsbetter togetherrsquo through lsquoexperimentationrsquo lsquoplayrsquo and lsquofunrsquo and the promotion of craftman-ship (MadLab 2016b) In Bristol a local social networking site (first trialled as lsquoMyKWrsquo inthe Knowle West district) has been extended to the city as a whole (as lsquoMyBristolrsquo) Theplanned lsquoBristol Approach to Citizen Sensingrsquo initiative meanwhile mentioned above mostexplicitly displays the aim of reconfiguring virtual space in this way in its vision of a lsquoco-created city commonsrsquo which lsquosupports the deployment of new or adapted technologies intoeveryday environmentsrsquo (KWMC 2016 1)

425 Summary of relative prominence of different modalities of publicness

Table 2 summarises the relative prominence of the four modalities of publicness in eachcity and across all six cities

Analysing these data too closely would potentially yield spurious findings for severalreasons our six cities were not chosen to yield a somehow statistically representative sampleof activities for the purposes of quantitative research the coding of their modalities involvedsome subjective judgement and all activities are equally weighted regardless of scale timeperiod budget and policy significance These reservations aside the findings provide anindicative overview of the variations in the publicness assembled in these six leading citiesand in this spirit two broad observations are ventured

First the relative prominence of the four modalities differs considerably by city In thissense again lsquosmart publicnessrsquo is evidently not determined by globally circulating dis-courses but at least partly reflects its immediate governance and policy context The relativeabsence of entrepreneurial publicness in Glasgow for example communicates the councilrsquossole responsibility for delivering activities In Bristol the dominant entrepreneurial and civicmodalities chime with an overall strategic goal of expanding the knowledge economy bytapping into a strong tradition of grass-roots innovation The lack of service-user publicnessin Peterborough reflects the limited funding available for hard infrastructural projects theemphasis on entrepreneurial and civic publicness evinces the shared responsibility of thecityrsquos economic development agency and the council in managing the Peterborough DNAprogramme Londonrsquos relatively weak service use focus differently confirms the GLArsquos roleas steering and advisory actor rather than as funder of large-scale material interventions Thecity-level assemblages in Manchester and Milton Keynes display similarity in their strongoverall service-use sense of publicness and relatively weak civic modality While civicpublicness may come to the fore in Manchester in future given Corridor Manchesterrsquos statedlsquoplace-makingrsquo goals (Corridor Manchester 2015 24ndash25) its current relative absenceimplies a lack of active engagement on the part of the general public Milton Keynes isperhaps more surprising in this respect given its clear strategic claim to be civically engagedIts relatively weak civic publicness underlines the opportunistic nature of smart urbanactivities those coming to be implemented or funded may reflect strategic goals unevenlysmart policy documents themselves carry relatively little weight in the urban developmentprocess

Urban Research amp Practice 15

Table

2Relativeprom

inence

ofdominantmodalitiesof

publicness

insm

artcity

activities

across

sixUK

cities

Dom

inantmodality

Bristol

Glasgow

London

Manchester

MiltonKeynes

Peterborough

Allactivities

Meanfor6cities

Service

User

1457

1156

530

3732

Entrepreneurial

367

3333

2460

2832

Political

140

110

00

44

Civic

3636

4411

2440

3132

(Total

no

ofactivities)

(14)

(14)

(9)

(9)

(17)

(5)

(68)

16 R Cowley et al

Second the proportion of initiatives oriented towards civic publicness is not insig-nificant these account for approximately a third of all the activities examined On thisbasis it would be oversimplistic to dismiss the claims that the lsquoactually existingrsquocontemporary UK smart city pays only lip service to the importance of public claim-making Nevertheless this embrace of the democratic process does not extend to theprovision of significant opportunities for citizens to engage directly with the formalpolitical system in innovative ways In itself the absence of envisaged political public-ness does not undermine the possibility of more traditional public engagement withgovernmental institutions elsewhere yet the smart city does not provide channels for thedirect expression of public contestation or more radical forms of dissent

In this sense the smart city may appear to be aligned with broader depoliticising or lsquopost-politicalrsquo tendencies in governance generally and urban planning specifically (Swyngedouw2007 2011 Allmendinger and Haughton 2012 Joss 2015) In a post-political reading itsassemblage across UK cities would reflect the nature of its conceptual underpinnings thesmart city can only lsquocommand agreement as a result of [its] broadly progressive if non-specific framingrsquo (Allmendinger and Haughton 2012 94) and is therefore lsquounable to arouseconflicts among political ideasrsquo (Crivello 2015 919) Alternatively following Newman andClarke (2009) it illustrates the apparent paradox of the decline of the traditional lsquopublicrsquobeing accompanied by its simultaneous proliferation as a fragmented mulitiplicity politicalpublicness may be assembling elsewhere but is not associated with the intended role of thesmart city in the United Kingdom

426 Obduracy

Political publicness aside our findings have at least provided convincing evidence that UKsmart city initiatives are guided by a genuine desire to encourage civic engagement ofvarious kinds Even here however a more nuanced picture emerges when the relativeobduracy of individual activities is factored in Based on the available information weflagged each of the 68 activities as either lsquopermanentrsquo (to indicate ongoing operation orpresence in the city) or lsquotemporaryrsquo (to indicate a one-off or time-limited activity) As Table 3shows civic (and political) activities tend to be less permanent in nature than those invokingentrepreneurial and service-user publicness

In an important sense the relatively temporary nature of activities oriented towardspolitical and civic publicness is unsurprising particularly when contrasted with the service-user modality which is more often associated ndash as discussed above ndash with lsquohardrsquo infra-structural interventions The consequences of such activities may be long-lasting even whenthe activity itself is short-lived Nevertheless these findings fall short of convincinglyheralding a situation in which citizenship is prioritised as the central ongoing concern ofthe UK smart city

Table 3 Obduracy of smart city activities invoking each modality of publicness

Dominant modalityPermanent

Temporary

Base (number of activities)

Service-user 76 24 (25)Entrepreneurial 58 42 (19)Political 33 67 (3)Civic 48 52 (21)

Urban Research amp Practice 17

Significantly furthermore a degree of bifurcation is evident in the overall techno-publicassemblages such that civic and political publicness are sidelined within less obduratestrands of programmatic activity In Glasgow the enduring legacy of the lsquoFuture Cityrsquoprogramme is most visible in the service-user-oriented Operation Centre However manyof its other activities characterised by a more interactive and participatory mode of publicengagement were one-off events As lsquodemonstrator projectsrsquo they served in principle to helpdefine rather than enact the smart city ndash but there is little evidence that this more temporarystrand of the lsquoFuture Cityrsquo programme has subsequently been embedded in mainstreammunicipal activities In Bristol too a clear bifurcation is evident On one side the lsquoBristol isOpenrsquo improvements to the cityrsquos digital infrastructure and the lsquoOpen Data Bristolrsquo initiative(all of which might be expected to be relatively durable) invoke primarily entrepreneurialpublicness On the other the Connecting Bristol partnership promotes diverse lsquosofterrsquo civicand political activities led by grass-roots organisations which exhibit rather less obduracy assmall-scale pilot schemes or activities with limited public participation Evidently then lesscommitment and resources are available for experiments in the field of citizenship under-stood in more traditional liberal democratic ways than in those which conjure up a passive orentrepreneurial public

5 Discussion

Our reading of the smart city consciously departs from critical presentations of the smart cityas a lsquotop-downrsquo imposition and towards a foregrounding and more nuanced appreciation ofits practical variety But the observation that this variety is skewed towards the assemblage ofservice-user and entrepreneurial senses of the public does not constitute a straightforwardlyuseful critique of its current local manifestations The focus on service-user publicness atleast is unsurprising to the extent that local authorities are arguably seen by default asprimarily service providers To observe that civic and political publicness by way ofcontrast are less well considered and often only tokenistically accommodated is not tomake the normative case that these should necessarily or could realistically be privileged inlocal techno-public smart assemblages Rather the prevalence of this more passive modalityof publicness becomes significant when set against rhetorical claims that the smart city iseffecting transformational lsquocitizen-centricrsquo change

The dominance of service-user publicness does little to counter a broader trend identifiedby Powell (2014 15) towards lsquoa shift in the notion of citizenship away from civicresponsibilities and engagements to classifying [citizens] as consumers who purchaseservices from providersrsquo Although Powellrsquos discussion relates to the role of digitised datamore generally it is clearly relevant to the smart cityrsquos focus on providing greater efficien-cies Insofar as the lsquorelationship between government individuals and corporate entitiesrsquo (15)is viewed through the lens of the lsquocitizen as consumerrsquo its quality is only improved by theefficiencies which datafication enables Citizenship in this narrow sense is not related toaltruism or responsibilities but rather based on a principle of exchange and enacted throughlsquocollecting and sharing personal datarsquo (15) Drawing on Dean (2005) Powell highlights therisk that lsquothe norms of publicity ndash information communication and participation ndash havecome to stand for the political ends that they were presumed to serversquo (Powell 2014 16) Thisperspective raises various questions about many of the goals of UK smart city initiatives inrelation to the broader dimensions of citizenship For example the aim of lsquodigital inclusionrsquocommonly asserted among these six cases may appear laudable and yet it pushes the deeperpurpose of digital inclusion into the background smart connectivity itself becomes the goal

18 R Cowley et al

Similarly ideals of lsquotransparent governancersquo or lsquoopen datarsquo may end up being fetishisedwithin a discourse of efficiency even though this discourse tells us little about the normativebasis of the relationship between the public and the state beyond its passive lsquoservice-userrsquomodality

Although again our analysis opposes the existence of a deterministic link betweenglobal smart discourse and local practices the focus on efficiency of different types(including resource use provision of services and access to information) clearly resonateswith Whitersquos (2016) identification of an international discursive storyline in which the smartcity responds to lsquoresource pressures brought on by rapid urbanization and an ageing popula-tion the effects of anthropogenic global climate change and the twinned pressure of fiscalausterity and inter-urban competitionrsquo (577) We would at least suggest that the narrative ofthe lsquoage of crisisrsquo which accompanies much of the contemporary envisionment of futurecities (Caprotti 2015) has had a shaping influence on the prominence given to efficientservice provision in smart activities implemented to date

Equally given the broader UK policy context it would seem eccentric for local autho-rities to discourage entrepreneurialism On the immediate pragmatic level of funding andresources it must be significant that the governmentrsquos Department for Business Skills andInnovation has played a significant catalytic role smart city initiatives have not emergedunder the auspices of say the Department for Communities and Local Government But theprominence of entrepreneurial publicness raises a separate set of concerns echoing Dattarsquos(2015) diagnosis ndash albeit with reference to the rather different context of the Indian city ofDholera ndash of the smart city promoting lsquourbanization as a business model rather than a modelof social justicersquo Across our UK cases issues of social sustainability are far from absent inpolicy documents but their range tends to be limited for example focusing on health ande-inclusion or educating residents to participate in the digital economy In Glasgow suchquestions are subsumed within overall questions of efficiency and relate to very specificfactors such as public safety and reporting problems with services Milton Keynes claimsconsiderable interest in citizen co-creation but its initiatives are not primarily aimed attargeting social problems Although Peterboroughrsquos 2012 Feasibility Study prominentlyflagged up inequalities social cohesion and health improvements among other issues(Peterborough City Council 2012 3) its current strategy is addressed towards developingskills which lsquomeet local business demandrsquo and lsquoput Peterboroughrsquo in lsquothe best possibleposition to take advantage of emerging marketsrsquo (Peterborough City Council 2014 5)

One final way in which the lsquocitizen-centricrsquo nature of the UK smart city is questionablerelates to an apparent straightforward lack of public interest On one level this simplyreminds us of the peripherality of the smart city many of the associated activities only claimto be small-scale experimental trials and are not deeply embedded into the mainstream policyprocess While the actual numbers of local residents involved with many civic and politicalschemes are often negligible we found no convincing evidence either of broader enthusiasmor emergent public counter-discourse in any city4 While emergent political or civic con-testation is clearly not something which local authorities might lsquoplanrsquo for ndash it would beabsurd to expect local authorities to devise problems for frustrated publics to assemblearound ndash its absence does not provide evidence of acquiescence or approval or guarantee thesmooth passage of smart technology into urban life more broadly in future It more obviouslyreflects the survey evidence suggesting that general public awareness of any lsquosmartrsquo plans oractivities undertaken by local councils is neglible (Arqiva 2015) and that only one in five UKadults even recognises the term smart city (IET 2016)

Urban Research amp Practice 19

6 Conclusions towards a new lsquosmart urban publicnessrsquo

In studying and comparing a series of relatively well-developed smart city programmes aslsquotechno-public assemblagesrsquo we have responded to a series of policy claims made about therelationships between smart urban technologies and the public Our analysis reveals that thepublicness envisaged and enacted in the UK smart city is far from one-dimensional Citizensare not merely absent as the earlier critiques of the smart city would have it nor do smart cityactivities necessarily invoke a particular stunted notion of publicness in all cases Rather thegreat variety of types of publicness in evidence leads us to conclude that the rhetorical claimsabout the smart city being citizen-centric are not straightforwardly empty ones Rather thanagreeing with the speculative critiques of the smart city as a devious attempt to exclude thepublic we would urge commentators to begin from the assumption that its institutionalprotagonists do have a vested interest in questions of democracy

That said it also seems fair to conclude that the smart does not yet evince a convincinglyrounded sense of the lsquopublic cityrsquo The opportunistic nature of smart city development inother words gives rise to unique local forms but simultaneously holds these hostage tobroader societal and economic agendas the forms of their assemblage have remained shapedby immediate policy contexts and broader smart city policy discourse Thinking in terms ofits experimental shifting and peripheral assemblage in practice nevertheless opens upagentive space for actors involved to influence smart development in ways which moreconvincingly invoke a more rounded sense of publicness and in turn enable a moreconvincing sense of public ownership and enthusiasm

For more fully public smart city assemblages to emerge in future the civic and politicalmay need to be more obviously accommodated within the service-user and entrepreneurialThis need not relate to heavy-handed attempts to co-opt the civic which risk neutralising itsinnovative potential but the civic should at least not be siloed into more ephemeral strands ofactivity A lack of civic engagement with large infrastructural projects for example seemsunlikely to be successfully mitigated by a series of parallel participatory events which passunnoticed by most residents Similarly entrepreneurial activities are to be welcomed whichare more obviously oriented towards finding solutions to problems defined by citizensalongside those oriented at the creation of wealth through hi-tech innovations The possibi-lities for smart city technology to enable or engender more formal political participationfurthermore appear to have remained largely unexplored in practical terms

If only because the lsquoactually existingrsquo smart city is still at an experimental stage ofdevelopment we note that it has effected only marginal reconfigurations of the materialspaces of the city to date Nevertheless looking forward we urge researchers and practi-tioners to pay attention to the distinctive spatialities of the lsquosmart publicrsquo particularly in theinterfaces between public and private space and between virtual space and the traditionalmaterial public realm There is considerable scope in this regard to reverse the tendencyidentified by Kinsley (2013) to assign the digital to a parallel disembodied lsquohyperspacersquorather our understandings might more fruitfully be grounded in the relationships betweenhumans and technology in local contexts For policy-makers and practitioners activelyseeking a more widespread and involved sense of public debate around and engagementwith the implications of smart technology it may be rewarding to focus on the visibility ofnew innovations This may involve moving towards a more active consideration of themultiple roles of public space and more imaginatively using smart technologies to moveaway from more traditional fora as spaces of public engagement

Overall we resist from concluding that contemporary UK smart initiatives alreadyconstitute a qualitatively novel recasting of the public In relying on dominant political

20 R Cowley et al

structures and economic actors they have come to promote incremental change at best bothin terms of publicness and the material space of the city But assessing the long-termimpacts of smart innovations on urban space will be an ongoing project indeed the conceptlsquosmartrsquo itself may in future lose currency as a label or be reworked as a signifier In themeantime insofar as the smart city is indicative of broader contemporary attempts to shapeurban change in a time of austerity its lsquoexperimentalrsquo nature may appear rather moreproblematically reflective of a bypassing of the traditional democratic process And if wetoo may be allowed to propose a dystopian scenario it is one where in spite of the bestintentions of policy-makers the dominant norms of emerging smart city practices becomesedimented into novel twenty-first century institutional processes whose pragmatic world-view does not extend beyond that of a society of entrepreneurs and service users

AcknowledgementsThis study was undertaken at the University of Westminster with financial support from ESRC grantESL0159781 Youri Dayot was Visiting Fellow from the University of Grenoble

Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors

FundingThis study was undertaken at the University of Westminster as part of the ESRC-funded projectlsquoSmart Eco-cities for a Green Economy a Comparative Study of Europe and Chinarsquo (grant ESL0159781)

Notes1 The two terms (lsquosmart cityrsquo lsquofuture cityrsquo) are complementary and often used interchangeably

especially in the UK national policy context (see eg BSI 2014 3 also Joss Cook andDayot forthcoming) It is beyond the scope of this paper to delve into the conceptualinterrelationship of these recent policy terms in more detail

2 A fuller list of the key documents and links to relevant web pages consulted has been madepublicly available on the lead authorrsquos ResearchGate web pages httpswwwresearchgatenetprofileRobert_Cowley

3 More detailed descriptions of many of the individual activities and bodies analysed in thepresent research may be found in the lsquogrey literaturersquo (see eg Caprotti et al 2016 Woodset al 2016)

4 With the exception of some concerns in Glasgow about the use of facial recognition softwarein the cityrsquos CCTV system linked to the Operation Centre (Sunday Herald 2014 Aitchinson2015)

ReferencesAitchinson J 2015 ldquoShould We Be Worried about Glasgowrsquos New Hi-Tech Surveillance Systemrdquo

STV News February 23 httpglasgowstvtvarticles310713-glasgows-new-surveillance-installed-by-israeli-firm-nice-systems

Allmendinger P and G Haughton 2012 ldquoPost-Political Spatial Planning in England A Crisis ofConsensusrdquo Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37 (1) 89ndash103 doi101111j1475-5661201100468x

Arqiva 2015 ldquoAre Cities Really Getting Smarterrdquo httpswwwarqivacomnewspress-releasesare-our-cities-really-getting-smarter

Urban Research amp Practice 21

Table

2Relativeprom

inence

ofdominantmodalitiesof

publicness

insm

artcity

activities

across

sixUK

cities

Dom

inantmodality

Bristol

Glasgow

London

Manchester

MiltonKeynes

Peterborough

Allactivities

Meanfor6cities

Service

User

1457

1156

530

3732

Entrepreneurial

367

3333

2460

2832

Political

140

110

00

44

Civic

3636

4411

2440

3132

(Total

no

ofactivities)

(14)

(14)

(9)

(9)

(17)

(5)

(68)

16 R Cowley et al

Second the proportion of initiatives oriented towards civic publicness is not insig-nificant these account for approximately a third of all the activities examined On thisbasis it would be oversimplistic to dismiss the claims that the lsquoactually existingrsquocontemporary UK smart city pays only lip service to the importance of public claim-making Nevertheless this embrace of the democratic process does not extend to theprovision of significant opportunities for citizens to engage directly with the formalpolitical system in innovative ways In itself the absence of envisaged political public-ness does not undermine the possibility of more traditional public engagement withgovernmental institutions elsewhere yet the smart city does not provide channels for thedirect expression of public contestation or more radical forms of dissent

In this sense the smart city may appear to be aligned with broader depoliticising or lsquopost-politicalrsquo tendencies in governance generally and urban planning specifically (Swyngedouw2007 2011 Allmendinger and Haughton 2012 Joss 2015) In a post-political reading itsassemblage across UK cities would reflect the nature of its conceptual underpinnings thesmart city can only lsquocommand agreement as a result of [its] broadly progressive if non-specific framingrsquo (Allmendinger and Haughton 2012 94) and is therefore lsquounable to arouseconflicts among political ideasrsquo (Crivello 2015 919) Alternatively following Newman andClarke (2009) it illustrates the apparent paradox of the decline of the traditional lsquopublicrsquobeing accompanied by its simultaneous proliferation as a fragmented mulitiplicity politicalpublicness may be assembling elsewhere but is not associated with the intended role of thesmart city in the United Kingdom

426 Obduracy

Political publicness aside our findings have at least provided convincing evidence that UKsmart city initiatives are guided by a genuine desire to encourage civic engagement ofvarious kinds Even here however a more nuanced picture emerges when the relativeobduracy of individual activities is factored in Based on the available information weflagged each of the 68 activities as either lsquopermanentrsquo (to indicate ongoing operation orpresence in the city) or lsquotemporaryrsquo (to indicate a one-off or time-limited activity) As Table 3shows civic (and political) activities tend to be less permanent in nature than those invokingentrepreneurial and service-user publicness

In an important sense the relatively temporary nature of activities oriented towardspolitical and civic publicness is unsurprising particularly when contrasted with the service-user modality which is more often associated ndash as discussed above ndash with lsquohardrsquo infra-structural interventions The consequences of such activities may be long-lasting even whenthe activity itself is short-lived Nevertheless these findings fall short of convincinglyheralding a situation in which citizenship is prioritised as the central ongoing concern ofthe UK smart city

Table 3 Obduracy of smart city activities invoking each modality of publicness

Dominant modalityPermanent

Temporary

Base (number of activities)

Service-user 76 24 (25)Entrepreneurial 58 42 (19)Political 33 67 (3)Civic 48 52 (21)

Urban Research amp Practice 17

Significantly furthermore a degree of bifurcation is evident in the overall techno-publicassemblages such that civic and political publicness are sidelined within less obduratestrands of programmatic activity In Glasgow the enduring legacy of the lsquoFuture Cityrsquoprogramme is most visible in the service-user-oriented Operation Centre However manyof its other activities characterised by a more interactive and participatory mode of publicengagement were one-off events As lsquodemonstrator projectsrsquo they served in principle to helpdefine rather than enact the smart city ndash but there is little evidence that this more temporarystrand of the lsquoFuture Cityrsquo programme has subsequently been embedded in mainstreammunicipal activities In Bristol too a clear bifurcation is evident On one side the lsquoBristol isOpenrsquo improvements to the cityrsquos digital infrastructure and the lsquoOpen Data Bristolrsquo initiative(all of which might be expected to be relatively durable) invoke primarily entrepreneurialpublicness On the other the Connecting Bristol partnership promotes diverse lsquosofterrsquo civicand political activities led by grass-roots organisations which exhibit rather less obduracy assmall-scale pilot schemes or activities with limited public participation Evidently then lesscommitment and resources are available for experiments in the field of citizenship under-stood in more traditional liberal democratic ways than in those which conjure up a passive orentrepreneurial public

5 Discussion

Our reading of the smart city consciously departs from critical presentations of the smart cityas a lsquotop-downrsquo imposition and towards a foregrounding and more nuanced appreciation ofits practical variety But the observation that this variety is skewed towards the assemblage ofservice-user and entrepreneurial senses of the public does not constitute a straightforwardlyuseful critique of its current local manifestations The focus on service-user publicness atleast is unsurprising to the extent that local authorities are arguably seen by default asprimarily service providers To observe that civic and political publicness by way ofcontrast are less well considered and often only tokenistically accommodated is not tomake the normative case that these should necessarily or could realistically be privileged inlocal techno-public smart assemblages Rather the prevalence of this more passive modalityof publicness becomes significant when set against rhetorical claims that the smart city iseffecting transformational lsquocitizen-centricrsquo change

The dominance of service-user publicness does little to counter a broader trend identifiedby Powell (2014 15) towards lsquoa shift in the notion of citizenship away from civicresponsibilities and engagements to classifying [citizens] as consumers who purchaseservices from providersrsquo Although Powellrsquos discussion relates to the role of digitised datamore generally it is clearly relevant to the smart cityrsquos focus on providing greater efficien-cies Insofar as the lsquorelationship between government individuals and corporate entitiesrsquo (15)is viewed through the lens of the lsquocitizen as consumerrsquo its quality is only improved by theefficiencies which datafication enables Citizenship in this narrow sense is not related toaltruism or responsibilities but rather based on a principle of exchange and enacted throughlsquocollecting and sharing personal datarsquo (15) Drawing on Dean (2005) Powell highlights therisk that lsquothe norms of publicity ndash information communication and participation ndash havecome to stand for the political ends that they were presumed to serversquo (Powell 2014 16) Thisperspective raises various questions about many of the goals of UK smart city initiatives inrelation to the broader dimensions of citizenship For example the aim of lsquodigital inclusionrsquocommonly asserted among these six cases may appear laudable and yet it pushes the deeperpurpose of digital inclusion into the background smart connectivity itself becomes the goal

18 R Cowley et al

Similarly ideals of lsquotransparent governancersquo or lsquoopen datarsquo may end up being fetishisedwithin a discourse of efficiency even though this discourse tells us little about the normativebasis of the relationship between the public and the state beyond its passive lsquoservice-userrsquomodality

Although again our analysis opposes the existence of a deterministic link betweenglobal smart discourse and local practices the focus on efficiency of different types(including resource use provision of services and access to information) clearly resonateswith Whitersquos (2016) identification of an international discursive storyline in which the smartcity responds to lsquoresource pressures brought on by rapid urbanization and an ageing popula-tion the effects of anthropogenic global climate change and the twinned pressure of fiscalausterity and inter-urban competitionrsquo (577) We would at least suggest that the narrative ofthe lsquoage of crisisrsquo which accompanies much of the contemporary envisionment of futurecities (Caprotti 2015) has had a shaping influence on the prominence given to efficientservice provision in smart activities implemented to date

Equally given the broader UK policy context it would seem eccentric for local autho-rities to discourage entrepreneurialism On the immediate pragmatic level of funding andresources it must be significant that the governmentrsquos Department for Business Skills andInnovation has played a significant catalytic role smart city initiatives have not emergedunder the auspices of say the Department for Communities and Local Government But theprominence of entrepreneurial publicness raises a separate set of concerns echoing Dattarsquos(2015) diagnosis ndash albeit with reference to the rather different context of the Indian city ofDholera ndash of the smart city promoting lsquourbanization as a business model rather than a modelof social justicersquo Across our UK cases issues of social sustainability are far from absent inpolicy documents but their range tends to be limited for example focusing on health ande-inclusion or educating residents to participate in the digital economy In Glasgow suchquestions are subsumed within overall questions of efficiency and relate to very specificfactors such as public safety and reporting problems with services Milton Keynes claimsconsiderable interest in citizen co-creation but its initiatives are not primarily aimed attargeting social problems Although Peterboroughrsquos 2012 Feasibility Study prominentlyflagged up inequalities social cohesion and health improvements among other issues(Peterborough City Council 2012 3) its current strategy is addressed towards developingskills which lsquomeet local business demandrsquo and lsquoput Peterboroughrsquo in lsquothe best possibleposition to take advantage of emerging marketsrsquo (Peterborough City Council 2014 5)

One final way in which the lsquocitizen-centricrsquo nature of the UK smart city is questionablerelates to an apparent straightforward lack of public interest On one level this simplyreminds us of the peripherality of the smart city many of the associated activities only claimto be small-scale experimental trials and are not deeply embedded into the mainstream policyprocess While the actual numbers of local residents involved with many civic and politicalschemes are often negligible we found no convincing evidence either of broader enthusiasmor emergent public counter-discourse in any city4 While emergent political or civic con-testation is clearly not something which local authorities might lsquoplanrsquo for ndash it would beabsurd to expect local authorities to devise problems for frustrated publics to assemblearound ndash its absence does not provide evidence of acquiescence or approval or guarantee thesmooth passage of smart technology into urban life more broadly in future It more obviouslyreflects the survey evidence suggesting that general public awareness of any lsquosmartrsquo plans oractivities undertaken by local councils is neglible (Arqiva 2015) and that only one in five UKadults even recognises the term smart city (IET 2016)

Urban Research amp Practice 19

6 Conclusions towards a new lsquosmart urban publicnessrsquo

In studying and comparing a series of relatively well-developed smart city programmes aslsquotechno-public assemblagesrsquo we have responded to a series of policy claims made about therelationships between smart urban technologies and the public Our analysis reveals that thepublicness envisaged and enacted in the UK smart city is far from one-dimensional Citizensare not merely absent as the earlier critiques of the smart city would have it nor do smart cityactivities necessarily invoke a particular stunted notion of publicness in all cases Rather thegreat variety of types of publicness in evidence leads us to conclude that the rhetorical claimsabout the smart city being citizen-centric are not straightforwardly empty ones Rather thanagreeing with the speculative critiques of the smart city as a devious attempt to exclude thepublic we would urge commentators to begin from the assumption that its institutionalprotagonists do have a vested interest in questions of democracy

That said it also seems fair to conclude that the smart does not yet evince a convincinglyrounded sense of the lsquopublic cityrsquo The opportunistic nature of smart city development inother words gives rise to unique local forms but simultaneously holds these hostage tobroader societal and economic agendas the forms of their assemblage have remained shapedby immediate policy contexts and broader smart city policy discourse Thinking in terms ofits experimental shifting and peripheral assemblage in practice nevertheless opens upagentive space for actors involved to influence smart development in ways which moreconvincingly invoke a more rounded sense of publicness and in turn enable a moreconvincing sense of public ownership and enthusiasm

For more fully public smart city assemblages to emerge in future the civic and politicalmay need to be more obviously accommodated within the service-user and entrepreneurialThis need not relate to heavy-handed attempts to co-opt the civic which risk neutralising itsinnovative potential but the civic should at least not be siloed into more ephemeral strands ofactivity A lack of civic engagement with large infrastructural projects for example seemsunlikely to be successfully mitigated by a series of parallel participatory events which passunnoticed by most residents Similarly entrepreneurial activities are to be welcomed whichare more obviously oriented towards finding solutions to problems defined by citizensalongside those oriented at the creation of wealth through hi-tech innovations The possibi-lities for smart city technology to enable or engender more formal political participationfurthermore appear to have remained largely unexplored in practical terms

If only because the lsquoactually existingrsquo smart city is still at an experimental stage ofdevelopment we note that it has effected only marginal reconfigurations of the materialspaces of the city to date Nevertheless looking forward we urge researchers and practi-tioners to pay attention to the distinctive spatialities of the lsquosmart publicrsquo particularly in theinterfaces between public and private space and between virtual space and the traditionalmaterial public realm There is considerable scope in this regard to reverse the tendencyidentified by Kinsley (2013) to assign the digital to a parallel disembodied lsquohyperspacersquorather our understandings might more fruitfully be grounded in the relationships betweenhumans and technology in local contexts For policy-makers and practitioners activelyseeking a more widespread and involved sense of public debate around and engagementwith the implications of smart technology it may be rewarding to focus on the visibility ofnew innovations This may involve moving towards a more active consideration of themultiple roles of public space and more imaginatively using smart technologies to moveaway from more traditional fora as spaces of public engagement

Overall we resist from concluding that contemporary UK smart initiatives alreadyconstitute a qualitatively novel recasting of the public In relying on dominant political

20 R Cowley et al

structures and economic actors they have come to promote incremental change at best bothin terms of publicness and the material space of the city But assessing the long-termimpacts of smart innovations on urban space will be an ongoing project indeed the conceptlsquosmartrsquo itself may in future lose currency as a label or be reworked as a signifier In themeantime insofar as the smart city is indicative of broader contemporary attempts to shapeurban change in a time of austerity its lsquoexperimentalrsquo nature may appear rather moreproblematically reflective of a bypassing of the traditional democratic process And if wetoo may be allowed to propose a dystopian scenario it is one where in spite of the bestintentions of policy-makers the dominant norms of emerging smart city practices becomesedimented into novel twenty-first century institutional processes whose pragmatic world-view does not extend beyond that of a society of entrepreneurs and service users

AcknowledgementsThis study was undertaken at the University of Westminster with financial support from ESRC grantESL0159781 Youri Dayot was Visiting Fellow from the University of Grenoble

Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors

FundingThis study was undertaken at the University of Westminster as part of the ESRC-funded projectlsquoSmart Eco-cities for a Green Economy a Comparative Study of Europe and Chinarsquo (grant ESL0159781)

Notes1 The two terms (lsquosmart cityrsquo lsquofuture cityrsquo) are complementary and often used interchangeably

especially in the UK national policy context (see eg BSI 2014 3 also Joss Cook andDayot forthcoming) It is beyond the scope of this paper to delve into the conceptualinterrelationship of these recent policy terms in more detail

2 A fuller list of the key documents and links to relevant web pages consulted has been madepublicly available on the lead authorrsquos ResearchGate web pages httpswwwresearchgatenetprofileRobert_Cowley

3 More detailed descriptions of many of the individual activities and bodies analysed in thepresent research may be found in the lsquogrey literaturersquo (see eg Caprotti et al 2016 Woodset al 2016)

4 With the exception of some concerns in Glasgow about the use of facial recognition softwarein the cityrsquos CCTV system linked to the Operation Centre (Sunday Herald 2014 Aitchinson2015)

ReferencesAitchinson J 2015 ldquoShould We Be Worried about Glasgowrsquos New Hi-Tech Surveillance Systemrdquo

STV News February 23 httpglasgowstvtvarticles310713-glasgows-new-surveillance-installed-by-israeli-firm-nice-systems

Allmendinger P and G Haughton 2012 ldquoPost-Political Spatial Planning in England A Crisis ofConsensusrdquo Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37 (1) 89ndash103 doi101111j1475-5661201100468x

Arqiva 2015 ldquoAre Cities Really Getting Smarterrdquo httpswwwarqivacomnewspress-releasesare-our-cities-really-getting-smarter

Urban Research amp Practice 21

Second the proportion of initiatives oriented towards civic publicness is not insig-nificant these account for approximately a third of all the activities examined On thisbasis it would be oversimplistic to dismiss the claims that the lsquoactually existingrsquocontemporary UK smart city pays only lip service to the importance of public claim-making Nevertheless this embrace of the democratic process does not extend to theprovision of significant opportunities for citizens to engage directly with the formalpolitical system in innovative ways In itself the absence of envisaged political public-ness does not undermine the possibility of more traditional public engagement withgovernmental institutions elsewhere yet the smart city does not provide channels for thedirect expression of public contestation or more radical forms of dissent

In this sense the smart city may appear to be aligned with broader depoliticising or lsquopost-politicalrsquo tendencies in governance generally and urban planning specifically (Swyngedouw2007 2011 Allmendinger and Haughton 2012 Joss 2015) In a post-political reading itsassemblage across UK cities would reflect the nature of its conceptual underpinnings thesmart city can only lsquocommand agreement as a result of [its] broadly progressive if non-specific framingrsquo (Allmendinger and Haughton 2012 94) and is therefore lsquounable to arouseconflicts among political ideasrsquo (Crivello 2015 919) Alternatively following Newman andClarke (2009) it illustrates the apparent paradox of the decline of the traditional lsquopublicrsquobeing accompanied by its simultaneous proliferation as a fragmented mulitiplicity politicalpublicness may be assembling elsewhere but is not associated with the intended role of thesmart city in the United Kingdom

426 Obduracy

Political publicness aside our findings have at least provided convincing evidence that UKsmart city initiatives are guided by a genuine desire to encourage civic engagement ofvarious kinds Even here however a more nuanced picture emerges when the relativeobduracy of individual activities is factored in Based on the available information weflagged each of the 68 activities as either lsquopermanentrsquo (to indicate ongoing operation orpresence in the city) or lsquotemporaryrsquo (to indicate a one-off or time-limited activity) As Table 3shows civic (and political) activities tend to be less permanent in nature than those invokingentrepreneurial and service-user publicness

In an important sense the relatively temporary nature of activities oriented towardspolitical and civic publicness is unsurprising particularly when contrasted with the service-user modality which is more often associated ndash as discussed above ndash with lsquohardrsquo infra-structural interventions The consequences of such activities may be long-lasting even whenthe activity itself is short-lived Nevertheless these findings fall short of convincinglyheralding a situation in which citizenship is prioritised as the central ongoing concern ofthe UK smart city

Table 3 Obduracy of smart city activities invoking each modality of publicness

Dominant modalityPermanent

Temporary

Base (number of activities)

Service-user 76 24 (25)Entrepreneurial 58 42 (19)Political 33 67 (3)Civic 48 52 (21)

Urban Research amp Practice 17

Significantly furthermore a degree of bifurcation is evident in the overall techno-publicassemblages such that civic and political publicness are sidelined within less obduratestrands of programmatic activity In Glasgow the enduring legacy of the lsquoFuture Cityrsquoprogramme is most visible in the service-user-oriented Operation Centre However manyof its other activities characterised by a more interactive and participatory mode of publicengagement were one-off events As lsquodemonstrator projectsrsquo they served in principle to helpdefine rather than enact the smart city ndash but there is little evidence that this more temporarystrand of the lsquoFuture Cityrsquo programme has subsequently been embedded in mainstreammunicipal activities In Bristol too a clear bifurcation is evident On one side the lsquoBristol isOpenrsquo improvements to the cityrsquos digital infrastructure and the lsquoOpen Data Bristolrsquo initiative(all of which might be expected to be relatively durable) invoke primarily entrepreneurialpublicness On the other the Connecting Bristol partnership promotes diverse lsquosofterrsquo civicand political activities led by grass-roots organisations which exhibit rather less obduracy assmall-scale pilot schemes or activities with limited public participation Evidently then lesscommitment and resources are available for experiments in the field of citizenship under-stood in more traditional liberal democratic ways than in those which conjure up a passive orentrepreneurial public

5 Discussion

Our reading of the smart city consciously departs from critical presentations of the smart cityas a lsquotop-downrsquo imposition and towards a foregrounding and more nuanced appreciation ofits practical variety But the observation that this variety is skewed towards the assemblage ofservice-user and entrepreneurial senses of the public does not constitute a straightforwardlyuseful critique of its current local manifestations The focus on service-user publicness atleast is unsurprising to the extent that local authorities are arguably seen by default asprimarily service providers To observe that civic and political publicness by way ofcontrast are less well considered and often only tokenistically accommodated is not tomake the normative case that these should necessarily or could realistically be privileged inlocal techno-public smart assemblages Rather the prevalence of this more passive modalityof publicness becomes significant when set against rhetorical claims that the smart city iseffecting transformational lsquocitizen-centricrsquo change

The dominance of service-user publicness does little to counter a broader trend identifiedby Powell (2014 15) towards lsquoa shift in the notion of citizenship away from civicresponsibilities and engagements to classifying [citizens] as consumers who purchaseservices from providersrsquo Although Powellrsquos discussion relates to the role of digitised datamore generally it is clearly relevant to the smart cityrsquos focus on providing greater efficien-cies Insofar as the lsquorelationship between government individuals and corporate entitiesrsquo (15)is viewed through the lens of the lsquocitizen as consumerrsquo its quality is only improved by theefficiencies which datafication enables Citizenship in this narrow sense is not related toaltruism or responsibilities but rather based on a principle of exchange and enacted throughlsquocollecting and sharing personal datarsquo (15) Drawing on Dean (2005) Powell highlights therisk that lsquothe norms of publicity ndash information communication and participation ndash havecome to stand for the political ends that they were presumed to serversquo (Powell 2014 16) Thisperspective raises various questions about many of the goals of UK smart city initiatives inrelation to the broader dimensions of citizenship For example the aim of lsquodigital inclusionrsquocommonly asserted among these six cases may appear laudable and yet it pushes the deeperpurpose of digital inclusion into the background smart connectivity itself becomes the goal

18 R Cowley et al

Similarly ideals of lsquotransparent governancersquo or lsquoopen datarsquo may end up being fetishisedwithin a discourse of efficiency even though this discourse tells us little about the normativebasis of the relationship between the public and the state beyond its passive lsquoservice-userrsquomodality

Although again our analysis opposes the existence of a deterministic link betweenglobal smart discourse and local practices the focus on efficiency of different types(including resource use provision of services and access to information) clearly resonateswith Whitersquos (2016) identification of an international discursive storyline in which the smartcity responds to lsquoresource pressures brought on by rapid urbanization and an ageing popula-tion the effects of anthropogenic global climate change and the twinned pressure of fiscalausterity and inter-urban competitionrsquo (577) We would at least suggest that the narrative ofthe lsquoage of crisisrsquo which accompanies much of the contemporary envisionment of futurecities (Caprotti 2015) has had a shaping influence on the prominence given to efficientservice provision in smart activities implemented to date

Equally given the broader UK policy context it would seem eccentric for local autho-rities to discourage entrepreneurialism On the immediate pragmatic level of funding andresources it must be significant that the governmentrsquos Department for Business Skills andInnovation has played a significant catalytic role smart city initiatives have not emergedunder the auspices of say the Department for Communities and Local Government But theprominence of entrepreneurial publicness raises a separate set of concerns echoing Dattarsquos(2015) diagnosis ndash albeit with reference to the rather different context of the Indian city ofDholera ndash of the smart city promoting lsquourbanization as a business model rather than a modelof social justicersquo Across our UK cases issues of social sustainability are far from absent inpolicy documents but their range tends to be limited for example focusing on health ande-inclusion or educating residents to participate in the digital economy In Glasgow suchquestions are subsumed within overall questions of efficiency and relate to very specificfactors such as public safety and reporting problems with services Milton Keynes claimsconsiderable interest in citizen co-creation but its initiatives are not primarily aimed attargeting social problems Although Peterboroughrsquos 2012 Feasibility Study prominentlyflagged up inequalities social cohesion and health improvements among other issues(Peterborough City Council 2012 3) its current strategy is addressed towards developingskills which lsquomeet local business demandrsquo and lsquoput Peterboroughrsquo in lsquothe best possibleposition to take advantage of emerging marketsrsquo (Peterborough City Council 2014 5)

One final way in which the lsquocitizen-centricrsquo nature of the UK smart city is questionablerelates to an apparent straightforward lack of public interest On one level this simplyreminds us of the peripherality of the smart city many of the associated activities only claimto be small-scale experimental trials and are not deeply embedded into the mainstream policyprocess While the actual numbers of local residents involved with many civic and politicalschemes are often negligible we found no convincing evidence either of broader enthusiasmor emergent public counter-discourse in any city4 While emergent political or civic con-testation is clearly not something which local authorities might lsquoplanrsquo for ndash it would beabsurd to expect local authorities to devise problems for frustrated publics to assemblearound ndash its absence does not provide evidence of acquiescence or approval or guarantee thesmooth passage of smart technology into urban life more broadly in future It more obviouslyreflects the survey evidence suggesting that general public awareness of any lsquosmartrsquo plans oractivities undertaken by local councils is neglible (Arqiva 2015) and that only one in five UKadults even recognises the term smart city (IET 2016)

Urban Research amp Practice 19

6 Conclusions towards a new lsquosmart urban publicnessrsquo

In studying and comparing a series of relatively well-developed smart city programmes aslsquotechno-public assemblagesrsquo we have responded to a series of policy claims made about therelationships between smart urban technologies and the public Our analysis reveals that thepublicness envisaged and enacted in the UK smart city is far from one-dimensional Citizensare not merely absent as the earlier critiques of the smart city would have it nor do smart cityactivities necessarily invoke a particular stunted notion of publicness in all cases Rather thegreat variety of types of publicness in evidence leads us to conclude that the rhetorical claimsabout the smart city being citizen-centric are not straightforwardly empty ones Rather thanagreeing with the speculative critiques of the smart city as a devious attempt to exclude thepublic we would urge commentators to begin from the assumption that its institutionalprotagonists do have a vested interest in questions of democracy

That said it also seems fair to conclude that the smart does not yet evince a convincinglyrounded sense of the lsquopublic cityrsquo The opportunistic nature of smart city development inother words gives rise to unique local forms but simultaneously holds these hostage tobroader societal and economic agendas the forms of their assemblage have remained shapedby immediate policy contexts and broader smart city policy discourse Thinking in terms ofits experimental shifting and peripheral assemblage in practice nevertheless opens upagentive space for actors involved to influence smart development in ways which moreconvincingly invoke a more rounded sense of publicness and in turn enable a moreconvincing sense of public ownership and enthusiasm

For more fully public smart city assemblages to emerge in future the civic and politicalmay need to be more obviously accommodated within the service-user and entrepreneurialThis need not relate to heavy-handed attempts to co-opt the civic which risk neutralising itsinnovative potential but the civic should at least not be siloed into more ephemeral strands ofactivity A lack of civic engagement with large infrastructural projects for example seemsunlikely to be successfully mitigated by a series of parallel participatory events which passunnoticed by most residents Similarly entrepreneurial activities are to be welcomed whichare more obviously oriented towards finding solutions to problems defined by citizensalongside those oriented at the creation of wealth through hi-tech innovations The possibi-lities for smart city technology to enable or engender more formal political participationfurthermore appear to have remained largely unexplored in practical terms

If only because the lsquoactually existingrsquo smart city is still at an experimental stage ofdevelopment we note that it has effected only marginal reconfigurations of the materialspaces of the city to date Nevertheless looking forward we urge researchers and practi-tioners to pay attention to the distinctive spatialities of the lsquosmart publicrsquo particularly in theinterfaces between public and private space and between virtual space and the traditionalmaterial public realm There is considerable scope in this regard to reverse the tendencyidentified by Kinsley (2013) to assign the digital to a parallel disembodied lsquohyperspacersquorather our understandings might more fruitfully be grounded in the relationships betweenhumans and technology in local contexts For policy-makers and practitioners activelyseeking a more widespread and involved sense of public debate around and engagementwith the implications of smart technology it may be rewarding to focus on the visibility ofnew innovations This may involve moving towards a more active consideration of themultiple roles of public space and more imaginatively using smart technologies to moveaway from more traditional fora as spaces of public engagement

Overall we resist from concluding that contemporary UK smart initiatives alreadyconstitute a qualitatively novel recasting of the public In relying on dominant political

20 R Cowley et al

structures and economic actors they have come to promote incremental change at best bothin terms of publicness and the material space of the city But assessing the long-termimpacts of smart innovations on urban space will be an ongoing project indeed the conceptlsquosmartrsquo itself may in future lose currency as a label or be reworked as a signifier In themeantime insofar as the smart city is indicative of broader contemporary attempts to shapeurban change in a time of austerity its lsquoexperimentalrsquo nature may appear rather moreproblematically reflective of a bypassing of the traditional democratic process And if wetoo may be allowed to propose a dystopian scenario it is one where in spite of the bestintentions of policy-makers the dominant norms of emerging smart city practices becomesedimented into novel twenty-first century institutional processes whose pragmatic world-view does not extend beyond that of a society of entrepreneurs and service users

AcknowledgementsThis study was undertaken at the University of Westminster with financial support from ESRC grantESL0159781 Youri Dayot was Visiting Fellow from the University of Grenoble

Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors

FundingThis study was undertaken at the University of Westminster as part of the ESRC-funded projectlsquoSmart Eco-cities for a Green Economy a Comparative Study of Europe and Chinarsquo (grant ESL0159781)

Notes1 The two terms (lsquosmart cityrsquo lsquofuture cityrsquo) are complementary and often used interchangeably

especially in the UK national policy context (see eg BSI 2014 3 also Joss Cook andDayot forthcoming) It is beyond the scope of this paper to delve into the conceptualinterrelationship of these recent policy terms in more detail

2 A fuller list of the key documents and links to relevant web pages consulted has been madepublicly available on the lead authorrsquos ResearchGate web pages httpswwwresearchgatenetprofileRobert_Cowley

3 More detailed descriptions of many of the individual activities and bodies analysed in thepresent research may be found in the lsquogrey literaturersquo (see eg Caprotti et al 2016 Woodset al 2016)

4 With the exception of some concerns in Glasgow about the use of facial recognition softwarein the cityrsquos CCTV system linked to the Operation Centre (Sunday Herald 2014 Aitchinson2015)

ReferencesAitchinson J 2015 ldquoShould We Be Worried about Glasgowrsquos New Hi-Tech Surveillance Systemrdquo

STV News February 23 httpglasgowstvtvarticles310713-glasgows-new-surveillance-installed-by-israeli-firm-nice-systems

Allmendinger P and G Haughton 2012 ldquoPost-Political Spatial Planning in England A Crisis ofConsensusrdquo Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37 (1) 89ndash103 doi101111j1475-5661201100468x

Arqiva 2015 ldquoAre Cities Really Getting Smarterrdquo httpswwwarqivacomnewspress-releasesare-our-cities-really-getting-smarter

Urban Research amp Practice 21

Significantly furthermore a degree of bifurcation is evident in the overall techno-publicassemblages such that civic and political publicness are sidelined within less obduratestrands of programmatic activity In Glasgow the enduring legacy of the lsquoFuture Cityrsquoprogramme is most visible in the service-user-oriented Operation Centre However manyof its other activities characterised by a more interactive and participatory mode of publicengagement were one-off events As lsquodemonstrator projectsrsquo they served in principle to helpdefine rather than enact the smart city ndash but there is little evidence that this more temporarystrand of the lsquoFuture Cityrsquo programme has subsequently been embedded in mainstreammunicipal activities In Bristol too a clear bifurcation is evident On one side the lsquoBristol isOpenrsquo improvements to the cityrsquos digital infrastructure and the lsquoOpen Data Bristolrsquo initiative(all of which might be expected to be relatively durable) invoke primarily entrepreneurialpublicness On the other the Connecting Bristol partnership promotes diverse lsquosofterrsquo civicand political activities led by grass-roots organisations which exhibit rather less obduracy assmall-scale pilot schemes or activities with limited public participation Evidently then lesscommitment and resources are available for experiments in the field of citizenship under-stood in more traditional liberal democratic ways than in those which conjure up a passive orentrepreneurial public

5 Discussion

Our reading of the smart city consciously departs from critical presentations of the smart cityas a lsquotop-downrsquo imposition and towards a foregrounding and more nuanced appreciation ofits practical variety But the observation that this variety is skewed towards the assemblage ofservice-user and entrepreneurial senses of the public does not constitute a straightforwardlyuseful critique of its current local manifestations The focus on service-user publicness atleast is unsurprising to the extent that local authorities are arguably seen by default asprimarily service providers To observe that civic and political publicness by way ofcontrast are less well considered and often only tokenistically accommodated is not tomake the normative case that these should necessarily or could realistically be privileged inlocal techno-public smart assemblages Rather the prevalence of this more passive modalityof publicness becomes significant when set against rhetorical claims that the smart city iseffecting transformational lsquocitizen-centricrsquo change

The dominance of service-user publicness does little to counter a broader trend identifiedby Powell (2014 15) towards lsquoa shift in the notion of citizenship away from civicresponsibilities and engagements to classifying [citizens] as consumers who purchaseservices from providersrsquo Although Powellrsquos discussion relates to the role of digitised datamore generally it is clearly relevant to the smart cityrsquos focus on providing greater efficien-cies Insofar as the lsquorelationship between government individuals and corporate entitiesrsquo (15)is viewed through the lens of the lsquocitizen as consumerrsquo its quality is only improved by theefficiencies which datafication enables Citizenship in this narrow sense is not related toaltruism or responsibilities but rather based on a principle of exchange and enacted throughlsquocollecting and sharing personal datarsquo (15) Drawing on Dean (2005) Powell highlights therisk that lsquothe norms of publicity ndash information communication and participation ndash havecome to stand for the political ends that they were presumed to serversquo (Powell 2014 16) Thisperspective raises various questions about many of the goals of UK smart city initiatives inrelation to the broader dimensions of citizenship For example the aim of lsquodigital inclusionrsquocommonly asserted among these six cases may appear laudable and yet it pushes the deeperpurpose of digital inclusion into the background smart connectivity itself becomes the goal

18 R Cowley et al

Similarly ideals of lsquotransparent governancersquo or lsquoopen datarsquo may end up being fetishisedwithin a discourse of efficiency even though this discourse tells us little about the normativebasis of the relationship between the public and the state beyond its passive lsquoservice-userrsquomodality

Although again our analysis opposes the existence of a deterministic link betweenglobal smart discourse and local practices the focus on efficiency of different types(including resource use provision of services and access to information) clearly resonateswith Whitersquos (2016) identification of an international discursive storyline in which the smartcity responds to lsquoresource pressures brought on by rapid urbanization and an ageing popula-tion the effects of anthropogenic global climate change and the twinned pressure of fiscalausterity and inter-urban competitionrsquo (577) We would at least suggest that the narrative ofthe lsquoage of crisisrsquo which accompanies much of the contemporary envisionment of futurecities (Caprotti 2015) has had a shaping influence on the prominence given to efficientservice provision in smart activities implemented to date

Equally given the broader UK policy context it would seem eccentric for local autho-rities to discourage entrepreneurialism On the immediate pragmatic level of funding andresources it must be significant that the governmentrsquos Department for Business Skills andInnovation has played a significant catalytic role smart city initiatives have not emergedunder the auspices of say the Department for Communities and Local Government But theprominence of entrepreneurial publicness raises a separate set of concerns echoing Dattarsquos(2015) diagnosis ndash albeit with reference to the rather different context of the Indian city ofDholera ndash of the smart city promoting lsquourbanization as a business model rather than a modelof social justicersquo Across our UK cases issues of social sustainability are far from absent inpolicy documents but their range tends to be limited for example focusing on health ande-inclusion or educating residents to participate in the digital economy In Glasgow suchquestions are subsumed within overall questions of efficiency and relate to very specificfactors such as public safety and reporting problems with services Milton Keynes claimsconsiderable interest in citizen co-creation but its initiatives are not primarily aimed attargeting social problems Although Peterboroughrsquos 2012 Feasibility Study prominentlyflagged up inequalities social cohesion and health improvements among other issues(Peterborough City Council 2012 3) its current strategy is addressed towards developingskills which lsquomeet local business demandrsquo and lsquoput Peterboroughrsquo in lsquothe best possibleposition to take advantage of emerging marketsrsquo (Peterborough City Council 2014 5)

One final way in which the lsquocitizen-centricrsquo nature of the UK smart city is questionablerelates to an apparent straightforward lack of public interest On one level this simplyreminds us of the peripherality of the smart city many of the associated activities only claimto be small-scale experimental trials and are not deeply embedded into the mainstream policyprocess While the actual numbers of local residents involved with many civic and politicalschemes are often negligible we found no convincing evidence either of broader enthusiasmor emergent public counter-discourse in any city4 While emergent political or civic con-testation is clearly not something which local authorities might lsquoplanrsquo for ndash it would beabsurd to expect local authorities to devise problems for frustrated publics to assemblearound ndash its absence does not provide evidence of acquiescence or approval or guarantee thesmooth passage of smart technology into urban life more broadly in future It more obviouslyreflects the survey evidence suggesting that general public awareness of any lsquosmartrsquo plans oractivities undertaken by local councils is neglible (Arqiva 2015) and that only one in five UKadults even recognises the term smart city (IET 2016)

Urban Research amp Practice 19

6 Conclusions towards a new lsquosmart urban publicnessrsquo

In studying and comparing a series of relatively well-developed smart city programmes aslsquotechno-public assemblagesrsquo we have responded to a series of policy claims made about therelationships between smart urban technologies and the public Our analysis reveals that thepublicness envisaged and enacted in the UK smart city is far from one-dimensional Citizensare not merely absent as the earlier critiques of the smart city would have it nor do smart cityactivities necessarily invoke a particular stunted notion of publicness in all cases Rather thegreat variety of types of publicness in evidence leads us to conclude that the rhetorical claimsabout the smart city being citizen-centric are not straightforwardly empty ones Rather thanagreeing with the speculative critiques of the smart city as a devious attempt to exclude thepublic we would urge commentators to begin from the assumption that its institutionalprotagonists do have a vested interest in questions of democracy

That said it also seems fair to conclude that the smart does not yet evince a convincinglyrounded sense of the lsquopublic cityrsquo The opportunistic nature of smart city development inother words gives rise to unique local forms but simultaneously holds these hostage tobroader societal and economic agendas the forms of their assemblage have remained shapedby immediate policy contexts and broader smart city policy discourse Thinking in terms ofits experimental shifting and peripheral assemblage in practice nevertheless opens upagentive space for actors involved to influence smart development in ways which moreconvincingly invoke a more rounded sense of publicness and in turn enable a moreconvincing sense of public ownership and enthusiasm

For more fully public smart city assemblages to emerge in future the civic and politicalmay need to be more obviously accommodated within the service-user and entrepreneurialThis need not relate to heavy-handed attempts to co-opt the civic which risk neutralising itsinnovative potential but the civic should at least not be siloed into more ephemeral strands ofactivity A lack of civic engagement with large infrastructural projects for example seemsunlikely to be successfully mitigated by a series of parallel participatory events which passunnoticed by most residents Similarly entrepreneurial activities are to be welcomed whichare more obviously oriented towards finding solutions to problems defined by citizensalongside those oriented at the creation of wealth through hi-tech innovations The possibi-lities for smart city technology to enable or engender more formal political participationfurthermore appear to have remained largely unexplored in practical terms

If only because the lsquoactually existingrsquo smart city is still at an experimental stage ofdevelopment we note that it has effected only marginal reconfigurations of the materialspaces of the city to date Nevertheless looking forward we urge researchers and practi-tioners to pay attention to the distinctive spatialities of the lsquosmart publicrsquo particularly in theinterfaces between public and private space and between virtual space and the traditionalmaterial public realm There is considerable scope in this regard to reverse the tendencyidentified by Kinsley (2013) to assign the digital to a parallel disembodied lsquohyperspacersquorather our understandings might more fruitfully be grounded in the relationships betweenhumans and technology in local contexts For policy-makers and practitioners activelyseeking a more widespread and involved sense of public debate around and engagementwith the implications of smart technology it may be rewarding to focus on the visibility ofnew innovations This may involve moving towards a more active consideration of themultiple roles of public space and more imaginatively using smart technologies to moveaway from more traditional fora as spaces of public engagement

Overall we resist from concluding that contemporary UK smart initiatives alreadyconstitute a qualitatively novel recasting of the public In relying on dominant political

20 R Cowley et al

structures and economic actors they have come to promote incremental change at best bothin terms of publicness and the material space of the city But assessing the long-termimpacts of smart innovations on urban space will be an ongoing project indeed the conceptlsquosmartrsquo itself may in future lose currency as a label or be reworked as a signifier In themeantime insofar as the smart city is indicative of broader contemporary attempts to shapeurban change in a time of austerity its lsquoexperimentalrsquo nature may appear rather moreproblematically reflective of a bypassing of the traditional democratic process And if wetoo may be allowed to propose a dystopian scenario it is one where in spite of the bestintentions of policy-makers the dominant norms of emerging smart city practices becomesedimented into novel twenty-first century institutional processes whose pragmatic world-view does not extend beyond that of a society of entrepreneurs and service users

AcknowledgementsThis study was undertaken at the University of Westminster with financial support from ESRC grantESL0159781 Youri Dayot was Visiting Fellow from the University of Grenoble

Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors

FundingThis study was undertaken at the University of Westminster as part of the ESRC-funded projectlsquoSmart Eco-cities for a Green Economy a Comparative Study of Europe and Chinarsquo (grant ESL0159781)

Notes1 The two terms (lsquosmart cityrsquo lsquofuture cityrsquo) are complementary and often used interchangeably

especially in the UK national policy context (see eg BSI 2014 3 also Joss Cook andDayot forthcoming) It is beyond the scope of this paper to delve into the conceptualinterrelationship of these recent policy terms in more detail

2 A fuller list of the key documents and links to relevant web pages consulted has been madepublicly available on the lead authorrsquos ResearchGate web pages httpswwwresearchgatenetprofileRobert_Cowley

3 More detailed descriptions of many of the individual activities and bodies analysed in thepresent research may be found in the lsquogrey literaturersquo (see eg Caprotti et al 2016 Woodset al 2016)

4 With the exception of some concerns in Glasgow about the use of facial recognition softwarein the cityrsquos CCTV system linked to the Operation Centre (Sunday Herald 2014 Aitchinson2015)

ReferencesAitchinson J 2015 ldquoShould We Be Worried about Glasgowrsquos New Hi-Tech Surveillance Systemrdquo

STV News February 23 httpglasgowstvtvarticles310713-glasgows-new-surveillance-installed-by-israeli-firm-nice-systems

Allmendinger P and G Haughton 2012 ldquoPost-Political Spatial Planning in England A Crisis ofConsensusrdquo Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37 (1) 89ndash103 doi101111j1475-5661201100468x

Arqiva 2015 ldquoAre Cities Really Getting Smarterrdquo httpswwwarqivacomnewspress-releasesare-our-cities-really-getting-smarter

Urban Research amp Practice 21

Similarly ideals of lsquotransparent governancersquo or lsquoopen datarsquo may end up being fetishisedwithin a discourse of efficiency even though this discourse tells us little about the normativebasis of the relationship between the public and the state beyond its passive lsquoservice-userrsquomodality

Although again our analysis opposes the existence of a deterministic link betweenglobal smart discourse and local practices the focus on efficiency of different types(including resource use provision of services and access to information) clearly resonateswith Whitersquos (2016) identification of an international discursive storyline in which the smartcity responds to lsquoresource pressures brought on by rapid urbanization and an ageing popula-tion the effects of anthropogenic global climate change and the twinned pressure of fiscalausterity and inter-urban competitionrsquo (577) We would at least suggest that the narrative ofthe lsquoage of crisisrsquo which accompanies much of the contemporary envisionment of futurecities (Caprotti 2015) has had a shaping influence on the prominence given to efficientservice provision in smart activities implemented to date

Equally given the broader UK policy context it would seem eccentric for local autho-rities to discourage entrepreneurialism On the immediate pragmatic level of funding andresources it must be significant that the governmentrsquos Department for Business Skills andInnovation has played a significant catalytic role smart city initiatives have not emergedunder the auspices of say the Department for Communities and Local Government But theprominence of entrepreneurial publicness raises a separate set of concerns echoing Dattarsquos(2015) diagnosis ndash albeit with reference to the rather different context of the Indian city ofDholera ndash of the smart city promoting lsquourbanization as a business model rather than a modelof social justicersquo Across our UK cases issues of social sustainability are far from absent inpolicy documents but their range tends to be limited for example focusing on health ande-inclusion or educating residents to participate in the digital economy In Glasgow suchquestions are subsumed within overall questions of efficiency and relate to very specificfactors such as public safety and reporting problems with services Milton Keynes claimsconsiderable interest in citizen co-creation but its initiatives are not primarily aimed attargeting social problems Although Peterboroughrsquos 2012 Feasibility Study prominentlyflagged up inequalities social cohesion and health improvements among other issues(Peterborough City Council 2012 3) its current strategy is addressed towards developingskills which lsquomeet local business demandrsquo and lsquoput Peterboroughrsquo in lsquothe best possibleposition to take advantage of emerging marketsrsquo (Peterborough City Council 2014 5)

One final way in which the lsquocitizen-centricrsquo nature of the UK smart city is questionablerelates to an apparent straightforward lack of public interest On one level this simplyreminds us of the peripherality of the smart city many of the associated activities only claimto be small-scale experimental trials and are not deeply embedded into the mainstream policyprocess While the actual numbers of local residents involved with many civic and politicalschemes are often negligible we found no convincing evidence either of broader enthusiasmor emergent public counter-discourse in any city4 While emergent political or civic con-testation is clearly not something which local authorities might lsquoplanrsquo for ndash it would beabsurd to expect local authorities to devise problems for frustrated publics to assemblearound ndash its absence does not provide evidence of acquiescence or approval or guarantee thesmooth passage of smart technology into urban life more broadly in future It more obviouslyreflects the survey evidence suggesting that general public awareness of any lsquosmartrsquo plans oractivities undertaken by local councils is neglible (Arqiva 2015) and that only one in five UKadults even recognises the term smart city (IET 2016)

Urban Research amp Practice 19

6 Conclusions towards a new lsquosmart urban publicnessrsquo

In studying and comparing a series of relatively well-developed smart city programmes aslsquotechno-public assemblagesrsquo we have responded to a series of policy claims made about therelationships between smart urban technologies and the public Our analysis reveals that thepublicness envisaged and enacted in the UK smart city is far from one-dimensional Citizensare not merely absent as the earlier critiques of the smart city would have it nor do smart cityactivities necessarily invoke a particular stunted notion of publicness in all cases Rather thegreat variety of types of publicness in evidence leads us to conclude that the rhetorical claimsabout the smart city being citizen-centric are not straightforwardly empty ones Rather thanagreeing with the speculative critiques of the smart city as a devious attempt to exclude thepublic we would urge commentators to begin from the assumption that its institutionalprotagonists do have a vested interest in questions of democracy

That said it also seems fair to conclude that the smart does not yet evince a convincinglyrounded sense of the lsquopublic cityrsquo The opportunistic nature of smart city development inother words gives rise to unique local forms but simultaneously holds these hostage tobroader societal and economic agendas the forms of their assemblage have remained shapedby immediate policy contexts and broader smart city policy discourse Thinking in terms ofits experimental shifting and peripheral assemblage in practice nevertheless opens upagentive space for actors involved to influence smart development in ways which moreconvincingly invoke a more rounded sense of publicness and in turn enable a moreconvincing sense of public ownership and enthusiasm

For more fully public smart city assemblages to emerge in future the civic and politicalmay need to be more obviously accommodated within the service-user and entrepreneurialThis need not relate to heavy-handed attempts to co-opt the civic which risk neutralising itsinnovative potential but the civic should at least not be siloed into more ephemeral strands ofactivity A lack of civic engagement with large infrastructural projects for example seemsunlikely to be successfully mitigated by a series of parallel participatory events which passunnoticed by most residents Similarly entrepreneurial activities are to be welcomed whichare more obviously oriented towards finding solutions to problems defined by citizensalongside those oriented at the creation of wealth through hi-tech innovations The possibi-lities for smart city technology to enable or engender more formal political participationfurthermore appear to have remained largely unexplored in practical terms

If only because the lsquoactually existingrsquo smart city is still at an experimental stage ofdevelopment we note that it has effected only marginal reconfigurations of the materialspaces of the city to date Nevertheless looking forward we urge researchers and practi-tioners to pay attention to the distinctive spatialities of the lsquosmart publicrsquo particularly in theinterfaces between public and private space and between virtual space and the traditionalmaterial public realm There is considerable scope in this regard to reverse the tendencyidentified by Kinsley (2013) to assign the digital to a parallel disembodied lsquohyperspacersquorather our understandings might more fruitfully be grounded in the relationships betweenhumans and technology in local contexts For policy-makers and practitioners activelyseeking a more widespread and involved sense of public debate around and engagementwith the implications of smart technology it may be rewarding to focus on the visibility ofnew innovations This may involve moving towards a more active consideration of themultiple roles of public space and more imaginatively using smart technologies to moveaway from more traditional fora as spaces of public engagement

Overall we resist from concluding that contemporary UK smart initiatives alreadyconstitute a qualitatively novel recasting of the public In relying on dominant political

20 R Cowley et al

structures and economic actors they have come to promote incremental change at best bothin terms of publicness and the material space of the city But assessing the long-termimpacts of smart innovations on urban space will be an ongoing project indeed the conceptlsquosmartrsquo itself may in future lose currency as a label or be reworked as a signifier In themeantime insofar as the smart city is indicative of broader contemporary attempts to shapeurban change in a time of austerity its lsquoexperimentalrsquo nature may appear rather moreproblematically reflective of a bypassing of the traditional democratic process And if wetoo may be allowed to propose a dystopian scenario it is one where in spite of the bestintentions of policy-makers the dominant norms of emerging smart city practices becomesedimented into novel twenty-first century institutional processes whose pragmatic world-view does not extend beyond that of a society of entrepreneurs and service users

AcknowledgementsThis study was undertaken at the University of Westminster with financial support from ESRC grantESL0159781 Youri Dayot was Visiting Fellow from the University of Grenoble

Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors

FundingThis study was undertaken at the University of Westminster as part of the ESRC-funded projectlsquoSmart Eco-cities for a Green Economy a Comparative Study of Europe and Chinarsquo (grant ESL0159781)

Notes1 The two terms (lsquosmart cityrsquo lsquofuture cityrsquo) are complementary and often used interchangeably

especially in the UK national policy context (see eg BSI 2014 3 also Joss Cook andDayot forthcoming) It is beyond the scope of this paper to delve into the conceptualinterrelationship of these recent policy terms in more detail

2 A fuller list of the key documents and links to relevant web pages consulted has been madepublicly available on the lead authorrsquos ResearchGate web pages httpswwwresearchgatenetprofileRobert_Cowley

3 More detailed descriptions of many of the individual activities and bodies analysed in thepresent research may be found in the lsquogrey literaturersquo (see eg Caprotti et al 2016 Woodset al 2016)

4 With the exception of some concerns in Glasgow about the use of facial recognition softwarein the cityrsquos CCTV system linked to the Operation Centre (Sunday Herald 2014 Aitchinson2015)

ReferencesAitchinson J 2015 ldquoShould We Be Worried about Glasgowrsquos New Hi-Tech Surveillance Systemrdquo

STV News February 23 httpglasgowstvtvarticles310713-glasgows-new-surveillance-installed-by-israeli-firm-nice-systems

Allmendinger P and G Haughton 2012 ldquoPost-Political Spatial Planning in England A Crisis ofConsensusrdquo Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37 (1) 89ndash103 doi101111j1475-5661201100468x

Arqiva 2015 ldquoAre Cities Really Getting Smarterrdquo httpswwwarqivacomnewspress-releasesare-our-cities-really-getting-smarter

Urban Research amp Practice 21

6 Conclusions towards a new lsquosmart urban publicnessrsquo

In studying and comparing a series of relatively well-developed smart city programmes aslsquotechno-public assemblagesrsquo we have responded to a series of policy claims made about therelationships between smart urban technologies and the public Our analysis reveals that thepublicness envisaged and enacted in the UK smart city is far from one-dimensional Citizensare not merely absent as the earlier critiques of the smart city would have it nor do smart cityactivities necessarily invoke a particular stunted notion of publicness in all cases Rather thegreat variety of types of publicness in evidence leads us to conclude that the rhetorical claimsabout the smart city being citizen-centric are not straightforwardly empty ones Rather thanagreeing with the speculative critiques of the smart city as a devious attempt to exclude thepublic we would urge commentators to begin from the assumption that its institutionalprotagonists do have a vested interest in questions of democracy

That said it also seems fair to conclude that the smart does not yet evince a convincinglyrounded sense of the lsquopublic cityrsquo The opportunistic nature of smart city development inother words gives rise to unique local forms but simultaneously holds these hostage tobroader societal and economic agendas the forms of their assemblage have remained shapedby immediate policy contexts and broader smart city policy discourse Thinking in terms ofits experimental shifting and peripheral assemblage in practice nevertheless opens upagentive space for actors involved to influence smart development in ways which moreconvincingly invoke a more rounded sense of publicness and in turn enable a moreconvincing sense of public ownership and enthusiasm

For more fully public smart city assemblages to emerge in future the civic and politicalmay need to be more obviously accommodated within the service-user and entrepreneurialThis need not relate to heavy-handed attempts to co-opt the civic which risk neutralising itsinnovative potential but the civic should at least not be siloed into more ephemeral strands ofactivity A lack of civic engagement with large infrastructural projects for example seemsunlikely to be successfully mitigated by a series of parallel participatory events which passunnoticed by most residents Similarly entrepreneurial activities are to be welcomed whichare more obviously oriented towards finding solutions to problems defined by citizensalongside those oriented at the creation of wealth through hi-tech innovations The possibi-lities for smart city technology to enable or engender more formal political participationfurthermore appear to have remained largely unexplored in practical terms

If only because the lsquoactually existingrsquo smart city is still at an experimental stage ofdevelopment we note that it has effected only marginal reconfigurations of the materialspaces of the city to date Nevertheless looking forward we urge researchers and practi-tioners to pay attention to the distinctive spatialities of the lsquosmart publicrsquo particularly in theinterfaces between public and private space and between virtual space and the traditionalmaterial public realm There is considerable scope in this regard to reverse the tendencyidentified by Kinsley (2013) to assign the digital to a parallel disembodied lsquohyperspacersquorather our understandings might more fruitfully be grounded in the relationships betweenhumans and technology in local contexts For policy-makers and practitioners activelyseeking a more widespread and involved sense of public debate around and engagementwith the implications of smart technology it may be rewarding to focus on the visibility ofnew innovations This may involve moving towards a more active consideration of themultiple roles of public space and more imaginatively using smart technologies to moveaway from more traditional fora as spaces of public engagement

Overall we resist from concluding that contemporary UK smart initiatives alreadyconstitute a qualitatively novel recasting of the public In relying on dominant political

20 R Cowley et al

structures and economic actors they have come to promote incremental change at best bothin terms of publicness and the material space of the city But assessing the long-termimpacts of smart innovations on urban space will be an ongoing project indeed the conceptlsquosmartrsquo itself may in future lose currency as a label or be reworked as a signifier In themeantime insofar as the smart city is indicative of broader contemporary attempts to shapeurban change in a time of austerity its lsquoexperimentalrsquo nature may appear rather moreproblematically reflective of a bypassing of the traditional democratic process And if wetoo may be allowed to propose a dystopian scenario it is one where in spite of the bestintentions of policy-makers the dominant norms of emerging smart city practices becomesedimented into novel twenty-first century institutional processes whose pragmatic world-view does not extend beyond that of a society of entrepreneurs and service users

AcknowledgementsThis study was undertaken at the University of Westminster with financial support from ESRC grantESL0159781 Youri Dayot was Visiting Fellow from the University of Grenoble

Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors

FundingThis study was undertaken at the University of Westminster as part of the ESRC-funded projectlsquoSmart Eco-cities for a Green Economy a Comparative Study of Europe and Chinarsquo (grant ESL0159781)

Notes1 The two terms (lsquosmart cityrsquo lsquofuture cityrsquo) are complementary and often used interchangeably

especially in the UK national policy context (see eg BSI 2014 3 also Joss Cook andDayot forthcoming) It is beyond the scope of this paper to delve into the conceptualinterrelationship of these recent policy terms in more detail

2 A fuller list of the key documents and links to relevant web pages consulted has been madepublicly available on the lead authorrsquos ResearchGate web pages httpswwwresearchgatenetprofileRobert_Cowley

3 More detailed descriptions of many of the individual activities and bodies analysed in thepresent research may be found in the lsquogrey literaturersquo (see eg Caprotti et al 2016 Woodset al 2016)

4 With the exception of some concerns in Glasgow about the use of facial recognition softwarein the cityrsquos CCTV system linked to the Operation Centre (Sunday Herald 2014 Aitchinson2015)

ReferencesAitchinson J 2015 ldquoShould We Be Worried about Glasgowrsquos New Hi-Tech Surveillance Systemrdquo

STV News February 23 httpglasgowstvtvarticles310713-glasgows-new-surveillance-installed-by-israeli-firm-nice-systems

Allmendinger P and G Haughton 2012 ldquoPost-Political Spatial Planning in England A Crisis ofConsensusrdquo Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37 (1) 89ndash103 doi101111j1475-5661201100468x

Arqiva 2015 ldquoAre Cities Really Getting Smarterrdquo httpswwwarqivacomnewspress-releasesare-our-cities-really-getting-smarter

Urban Research amp Practice 21

structures and economic actors they have come to promote incremental change at best bothin terms of publicness and the material space of the city But assessing the long-termimpacts of smart innovations on urban space will be an ongoing project indeed the conceptlsquosmartrsquo itself may in future lose currency as a label or be reworked as a signifier In themeantime insofar as the smart city is indicative of broader contemporary attempts to shapeurban change in a time of austerity its lsquoexperimentalrsquo nature may appear rather moreproblematically reflective of a bypassing of the traditional democratic process And if wetoo may be allowed to propose a dystopian scenario it is one where in spite of the bestintentions of policy-makers the dominant norms of emerging smart city practices becomesedimented into novel twenty-first century institutional processes whose pragmatic world-view does not extend beyond that of a society of entrepreneurs and service users

AcknowledgementsThis study was undertaken at the University of Westminster with financial support from ESRC grantESL0159781 Youri Dayot was Visiting Fellow from the University of Grenoble

Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors

FundingThis study was undertaken at the University of Westminster as part of the ESRC-funded projectlsquoSmart Eco-cities for a Green Economy a Comparative Study of Europe and Chinarsquo (grant ESL0159781)

Notes1 The two terms (lsquosmart cityrsquo lsquofuture cityrsquo) are complementary and often used interchangeably

especially in the UK national policy context (see eg BSI 2014 3 also Joss Cook andDayot forthcoming) It is beyond the scope of this paper to delve into the conceptualinterrelationship of these recent policy terms in more detail

2 A fuller list of the key documents and links to relevant web pages consulted has been madepublicly available on the lead authorrsquos ResearchGate web pages httpswwwresearchgatenetprofileRobert_Cowley

3 More detailed descriptions of many of the individual activities and bodies analysed in thepresent research may be found in the lsquogrey literaturersquo (see eg Caprotti et al 2016 Woodset al 2016)

4 With the exception of some concerns in Glasgow about the use of facial recognition softwarein the cityrsquos CCTV system linked to the Operation Centre (Sunday Herald 2014 Aitchinson2015)

ReferencesAitchinson J 2015 ldquoShould We Be Worried about Glasgowrsquos New Hi-Tech Surveillance Systemrdquo

STV News February 23 httpglasgowstvtvarticles310713-glasgows-new-surveillance-installed-by-israeli-firm-nice-systems

Allmendinger P and G Haughton 2012 ldquoPost-Political Spatial Planning in England A Crisis ofConsensusrdquo Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37 (1) 89ndash103 doi101111j1475-5661201100468x

Arqiva 2015 ldquoAre Cities Really Getting Smarterrdquo httpswwwarqivacomnewspress-releasesare-our-cities-really-getting-smarter

Urban Research amp Practice 21

Barnett C 2014 ldquoTheorising Emergent Public Spheres Negotiating Democracy Development andDissentrdquo Acta Academica 46 (1) 1ndash22 httpscholarufsacza8080xmluibitstreamhandle116602953academ_v46_n1_a3pdf

Barns S 2016 ldquoMine Your Data Open Data Digital Strategies and Entrepreneurial Governance byCoderdquo Urban Geography 37(4) 554ndash571 doi1010800272363820161139876

Bender T 2010 ldquoReassembling the City Networks and Urban Imaginariesrdquo In Urban AssemblagesHow Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studies edited by I Fariacuteas and T Bender 303ndash323Abingdon Routledge

Bristol City Council 2011 ldquoSmart City Bristol Final Reportrdquo httpwwwslidesharenetBristolccbristol-smart-city-report-7579696

Bristol City Council 2012 Connect Bristol Feasibility Study httpsconnectinnovateukorgdocuments31307266091879Feasibility+Study+-+Bristol+City+Councilpdf4269233f-cd8b-47da-9f0b-58a27294a684

Bristol is Open 2016a ldquoOpen Programmable CityrdquoAccessed June 25 2016 httpwwwbristolisopencom

Bristol is Open 2016b ldquoPlatformrdquo Accessed May 3 2016 httpwwwbristolisopencomplatformBristol is Open 2016c ldquoWireless Milerdquo Accessed May 1 2016 httpwwwbristolisopencomwp-

contentuploads201511BIO-Application-Wireless-5GpdfBSI (British Standards Institution) 2014 Smart Cities ndash Vocabulary BSI Standards Publication

PAS180 London British Standards InstitutionBSI (British Standards Institution) 2015 Smart Cities Overview ndash Guide BSI Standards

Publication PD8100 London British Standards InstitutionBuchanan I 2015 ldquoAssemblage Theory and Its Discontentsrdquo Deleuze Studies 9 (3) 382ndash392

doi103366dls20150193CAICT and PDSF (China Academy of Information and Communications Technology amp EU-China

Policy Dialogues Support Facility II) 2014 Comparative Study of Smart Cities in Europe andChina 2014 Current Chinese Economic Report Series Berlin Springer

Calzada I and C Cobo 2015 ldquoUnplugging Deconstructing the Smart Cityrdquo Journal of UrbanTechnology 22 (1) 23ndash43 doi101080106307322014971535

Caprotti F 2015 Eco-Cities and the Transition to Low Carbon Economies Basingstoke PalgraveMacmillan

Caprotti F R Cowley A Flynn S Joss and L Yu 2016 Smart-Eco Cities in the UK Trendsand City Profiles 2016 Exeter University of Exeter httpwwwsmart-eco-citiesorgwp-contentuploads201608Smart-Eco-Cities-in-the-UK-2016pdf

Caragliu A C Del Bo and P Nijkamp 2011 ldquoSmart Cities in Europerdquo Journal of UrbanTechnology 18 (2) 65ndash82 doi101080106307322011601117

Corridor Manchester 2015 ldquoCorridor Manchester ndash A Decade of Opportunity Strategic Vision to2025rdquo httpwwwcorridormanchestercom

Crivello S 2015 ldquoUrban Policy Mobilities The Case of Turin as a Smart Cityrdquo EuropeanPlanning Studies 23 (5) 909ndash921 doi101080096543132014891568

Datta A 2015 ldquoNew Urban Utopias of Postcolonial India lsquoEntrepreneurial Urbanizationrsquo inDholera Smart City Gujaratrdquo Dialogues in Human Geography 5 (1) 3ndash22 doi1011772043820614565748

Davies S 2014 ldquoGlasgow Aims to Be the First lsquoSmart Cityrsquo Experimental Programmes IncludeUsing Big Data Forecast Crimerdquo Financial Times June 3 httpwwwftcomcmss0d119ac06-e57e-11e3-a7f5-00144feabdc0htmlaxzz49YVLCVov

Dean J 2005 ldquoCommunicative capitalism Circulation and the foreclosure of politicsrdquo CulturalPolitics 1 (1) 51ndash74 doi102752174321905778054845

De Jong M S Joss D Schraven C Zhan and M Weijnen 2015 ldquoSustainablendashSmartndashResilientndashLow CarbonndashEcondashKnowledge Cities Making Sense of a Multitude of Concepts PromotingSustainable Urbanizationrdquo Journal of Cleaner Production 109 25ndash38 doi101016jjclepro201502004

Dewey J 1989 The Public and Its Problems An Essay in Political Enquiry Athens OH SwallowPress (Ohio University Press)

Evans J A Karvonen and R Raven eds 2016 The Experimental City Abingdon RoutledgeFariacuteas I 2011 ldquoThe Politics of Urban Assemblagesrdquo City 15 (3ndash4) 365ndash374 doi101080

136048132011595110

22 R Cowley et al

Fariacuteas I and T Bender eds 2010 Urban Assemblages How Actor-Network Theory ChangesUrban Studies London Routledge

Fraser N 1990 ldquoRethinking the Public Sphere A Contribution to the Critique of ActuallyExisting Democracyrdquo Social Text 2526 56ndash80 doi102307466240

Freeman R and J Maybin 2011 ldquoDocuments Practices and Policyrdquo Evidence amp Policy A Journalof Research Debate and Practice 7 (2) 155ndash170 doi101332174426411X579207

Future City Glasgow 2016a ldquoFuture City GlasgowrdquoAccessed June 25 2016 httpfuturecityglasgowgovuk

Future City Glasgow 2016b ldquoOpen Datardquo Accessed June 25 2016 httpfuturecityglasgowgovukdata

GLA (Greater London Authority) 2016 Smart London Plan Accessed June 25 2016 httpwwwlondongovuksitesdefaultfilessmart_london_planpdf

Glasgow City Council 2012 ldquoGlasgow City Management Systemrdquo Report prepared forTechnology Strategy Board httpsconnectinnovateukorgdocuments31307263794125Feasibility+Study+-+Glasgow+City+Councilpdf

Greenfield A 2013 Against the Smart City New York Do ProjectsHarvey D 2000 Spaces of Hope Berkeley University of California PressHollands R G 2015 ldquoCritical Interventions into the Corporate Smart Cityrdquo Cambridge Journal of

Regions Economy and Society 8 (1) 61ndash77 doi101093cjresrsu011Hommels A 2005 ldquoStudying Obduracy in the City Toward a Productive Fusion between

Technology Studies and Urban Studiesrdquo Science Technology amp Human Values 30 (3) 323ndash351 doi1011770162243904271759

Hommels A 2010 ldquoChanging Obdurate Urban Objects The Attempts to Reconstruct the HighwaythroughMaastrichtrdquo InUrban Assemblages How Actor-Network Theory Changes Urban Studiesedited by I Fariacuteas and T Bender 139ndash159 London Routledge

Hou J ed 2010 Insurgent Public Space Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of ContemporaryCities New York Routledge

IET 2016 ldquoSmart Cities Time to Involve the People an Insight Report from the Institution ofEngineering and Technologyrdquo httpwwwtheietorgsectorsthought-leadershipfuture-citiesfilessmart-cities-brochurecfm

Isin E F and E S Ruppert 2015 Being Digital Citizens London Rowman amp LittlefieldJoss S 2015 Sustainable Cities Governing for Urban Innovation London Palgrave MacmillanJoss S M Cook and Y Dayot Forthcoming ldquoSmart Cities Toward A New Citizenship Regime A

Discourse Analysis of the British Smart City Standardrdquo Journal of Urban Technology Acceptedfor publication

Kinsley S 2013 ldquoThe Matter of ldquoVirtualrdquo Geographiesrdquo Progress in Human Geography Advanceonline publication doi1011770309132513506270

Kitchin R 2014 The Data Revolution Big Data Open Data Data Infrastructures and TheirConsequences London SAGE

Kitchin R 2015 ldquoMaking Sense of Smart Cities Addressing Present Shortcomingsrdquo CambridgeJournal of Regions Economy and Society 8 (1) 131ndash136 doi101093cjresrsu027

Krivyacute M 2016 ldquoTowards a Critique of Cybernetic Urbanism The Smart City and the Society ofControlrdquo Planning Theory Advance online publication doi1011771473095216645631

KWMC (Knowle West Media Centre) 2016 ldquoThe Bristol Approach to Citizen Sensingrdquo AccessedMay 3 2016 httpkwmcorgukwp-contentuploads201512Bristol-Approach-Citizen-Sensing-A4pdf

MadLab 2016a ldquoAbout Usrdquo Accessed May 23 2016 httpsmadlaborgukabout-usMadLab 2016b ldquoOur Missionrdquo Accessed May 23 2016 httpsmadlaborgukour-missionMahony N 2013 ldquoTheWork of Public EngagementrdquoComunicazioni Sociali 3 349ndash358 httpwww

vitaepensieroitscheda-articolo_digitalnick-mahonythe-work-of-public-engagement-001200_2013_0003_0347-166639html

Manchester City Council 2012 ldquoManchester Future City Feasibility Report Back to Manchester CityCouncilrdquo httpsconnectinnovateukorgdocuments31307263794125Feasibility+Study+-+Manchester+City+Councilpdff1a7d5eb-6651-471a-b9f8-7f9e0f3ec4fa

Manchester City Council 2013 ldquoSmart CitiesrdquoReport for Resolution Presented to Economy ScrutinyCommittee Item 6 December 11 wwwmanchestergovukdownloadmeetingsid161266_smart_cities

Urban Research amp Practice 23

Manchester City Council 2016 ldquoAbout the Programmerdquo Accessed June 25 2016 httpwwwmanchestergovukinfo500315smarter_city7013manchester_smarter_city_programme

Marres N 2005 ldquoNo Issue No Public Democratic Deficits after the Displacement of PoliticsrdquoPhD diss University of Amsterdam

Mayor of London 2013 ldquoSmart London Planrdquo httpwwwlondongovuksitesdefaultfilessmart_london_planpdf

McFarlane C 2011a ldquoAssemblage and Critical Urbanismrdquo City Analysis of Urban TrendsCulture Theory Policy Action 15 (2) 204ndash224 doi101080136048132011568715

McFarlane C 2011b ldquoThe City as Assemblage Dwelling and Urban Spacerdquo Environment andPlanning D Society and Space 29 (4) 649ndash671 doi101068d4710

Milton Keynes Council 2012 ldquoFuture-Ready MKrdquo httpsconnectinnovateukorgdocuments31307263794125Feasibility+Study+-+Milton+Keynes+Councilpdf3ec3cf6d-3445-43e4-a11d-5db9b67f0616

NESTA 2015 CITIE City Initiatives for Technology Innovation and Entrepreneurship Report no20 London NESTA httpcitieorgassetsuploads201504CITIE_Report_2015pdf

Newman J and J Clarke 2009 Publics Politics and Power Remaking the Public in PublicServices London Sage

Parkinson J 2012 Democracy and Public Space The Physical Sites of Democratic PerformanceOxford Oxford University Press

Peck J and N Theodore 2001 ldquoExporting WorkfareImporting Welfare-To-Work Exploring thePolitics of Third Way Policy Transferrdquo Political Geography 20 (4) 427ndash460 doi101016S0962-6298(00)00069-X

Peck J and N Theodore 2010 ldquoMobilizing Policy Models Methods and Mutationsrdquo Geoforum41 (2) 169ndash174 doi101016jgeoforum201001002

Peterborough City Council 2012 ldquoFuture Cities Demonstrator Feasibility Study PeterboroughDNArdquo httpsconnectinnovateukorgdocuments31307263794125Feasibility+Study+-+Peterborough+City+Councilpdf65e92af1-445f-454d-87b6-fce0a8c2cfb8

Peterborough City Council 2014 ldquoPeterborough Delivering a Truly Smart Cityrdquo httpwwwbrainwaveinnovationscoukuploadcmspagepeterborough-dna10-09-14_11-58-35_peterborough_dna_onlinepdf

Powell A 2014 ldquolsquoDataficationrsquo Transparency and Good Governance of the Data Cityrdquo In DigitalEnlightenment Yearbook edited by M-H Kieron OrsquoHara C Nguyen and P Haynes 215ndash224 Amsterdam IOS Press BV

Prince R 2010 ldquoPolicy Transfer as Policy Assemblage Making Policy for the Creative Industriesin New Zealandrdquo Environment and Planning A 42 (1) 169ndash186 doi101068a4224

Robinson J 2011 ldquoCities in a World of Cities The Comparative Gesturerdquo International Journalof Urban and Regional Research 35 (1) 1ndash23 doi101111j1468-2427201000982x

Ruijsink S and A Smith 2016 ldquoTransformative Social Innovation European Network of LivingLabs Summary Reportrdquo TRANSIT EU SSH201332-1 Grant Agreement No 613169 httpwwwtransitsocialinnovationeucontentoriginalBook20coversLocal20PDFs19420ENoLL-living20lab-Ehvn_Mstr-SUMMARYpdf

Saunders T and P Baeck 2015 Rethinking Smart Cities from the Ground Up httpswwwnestaorguksitesdefaultfilesrethinking_smart_cities_from_the_ground_up_2015pdf

Shearmur R 2016 ldquoDebating Urban Technology Technophiles Luddites and Citizensrdquo UrbanGeography 37 (6) 807ndash809 doi1010800272363820161207914

Shelton T M Zook and A Wiig 2015 ldquoThe lsquoActually Existing Smart Cityrsquordquo CambridgeJournal of Regions Economy and Society 8 (1) 13ndash25 doi101093cjresrsu026

Smart Cities Challenge 2016 ldquoWhat Is a Smart Cityrdquo Accessed July 20 2016 httpwwwsmartcitieschallengein

Smart Nation 2016 ldquoSmart Nationrdquo Accessed July 20 2016 wwwsmartnationsgSoumlderstroumlm O T Paasche and F Klauser 2014 ldquoSmart Cities as Corporate Storytellingrdquo City

Analysis of Urban Trends Culture Theory Policy Action 18 (3) 307ndash320 doi101080136048132014906716

Sunday Herald 2014 ldquoCityrsquos Israeli Security Dealrdquo August 17 httpwwwheraldscotlandcombusinessopinion13175288City_s_Israeli_security_deal

Swyngedouw E 2007 ldquoThe Post-Political Cityrdquo In Urban Politics Now Reimagining Democracyin the Neoliberal City edited by Bavo 58ndash76 Rotterdam NAi Publishers

24 R Cowley et al

Swyngedouw E 2011 ldquoWhose Environment The End of Nature Climate Change and the Processof Post-Politicizationrdquo Ambiente amp Sociedade 14 (2) 69ndash87 doi101590S1414-753X2011000200006

Talk London 2016 ldquoWelcome to Talk Londonrdquo Accessed May 10 2016 httptalklondonlondongovuk

Taylor Buck N and A While 2015 ldquoCompetitive Urbanism and the Limits to Smart CityInnovation The UK Future Cities Initiativerdquo Urban Studies Advance online publicationdoi1011770042098015597162

UK Government 2015 ldquoManchester Wins pound10m Prize to Become World Leader in lsquoSmart CityrsquoTechnologyrdquo Press Release December 3 httpswwwgovukgovernmentnewsmanchester-wins-10m-prize-to-become-world-leader-in-smart-city-technology

Ureta S 2014 ldquoThe Shelter that Wasnrsquot There On the Politics of Co-Ordinating Multiple UrbanAssemblages in Santiago Chilerdquo Urban Studies 51 (2) 231ndash246 doi1011770042098013489747

Vanolo A 2016 ldquoIs There Anybody Out There the Place and Role of Citizens in TomorrowrsquosSmart Citiesrdquo Futures 82 (Sep) 26ndash36 doi101016jfutures201605010

Warner M 2002 Publics and Counterpublics Brooklyn NY Zone BooksWatershed 2016 ldquoWhat Is a Playable Cityrdquo Accessed September 26 2016 httpwwwwatershed

coukplayablecityvisionWhite J M 2016 ldquoAnticipatory Logics of the Smart Cityrsquos Global Imaginaryrdquo Urban Geography

37 (4) 572ndash589 doi1010800272363820161139879Wiig A 2015 ldquoIBMrsquos Smart City as Techno-Utopian Policy Mobilityrdquo City 19 (2ndash3) 258ndash273

doi1010801360481320151016275Woods E D Alexander R R Labastida and R Watson 2016 ldquoUK Smart Cities Index

Assessment of Strategy and Execution for 10 Cities White Paperrdquo Navigant Researchhttpswwwnavigantresearchcomresearchuk-smart-cities-index

Young I M 1989 ldquoPolity and Group Difference A Critique of the Ideal of UniversalCitizenshiprdquo Ethics 99 (2) 250ndash274 doi101086293065

Urban Research amp Practice 25