Francisco Klauser

Smart cities as corporate storytelling

On 4 November 2011, the trademark ‘smarter cities’ was officially registered as belonging to IBM. This was an important milestone in a struggle between IT companies over visibility and legitimacy in the smart city market. Drawing on actor-network theory and critical planning theory, the paper analyzes IBMs smarter city campaign and finds it to be storytelling, aimed at making the company an ‘obligatory passage point’ in the implementation of urban technologies. Our argument unfolds in three parts. We first trace the emergence of the term ‘smart city’ in the public sphere. Secondly, we show that IBMs influential story about smart cities is far from novel but rather mobilizes and revisits two long-standing tropes: systems thinking and utopianism. Finally, we conclude, first by addressing two critical questions raised by this discourse: technocratic reductionism and the introduction of new moral imperatives in urban management; and second, by calling for the crafting of alternative smart city stories.

Security governance and sport mega-events: toward an interdisciplinary research agenda.

In the post-9/11 context, security issues have become increasingly central to the hosting of sport mega-event (SMEs). Security budgets for events like the Olympic Games now run into billions of dollars. This article seeks to advance the emerging field of SME security research in substantive and analytical terms. We identify three sets of issues and problems that are taking shape within this field: first, comparative issues in relationship to the Global North and Global South, notably given the growing number of SMEs set to be staged in the Global South; second, various risks and security strategies that are specific to different SMEs, including perceived terrorist threats, spectator violence, and broader risks associated with poverty, social divisions, and urban crime; and third, the security legacies that follow from SMEs, such as new surveillance technologies, new security-focused social policies, and security-influenced urban redevelopment. We argue that future research into SME security governance should be underpinned by a synthetic theoretical framework. This framework brings together three particular strands: first, a sociological approach that explores the _security field,_ drawing in part on Bourdieu; second, critical urban geographical theory, which contextualizes security strategies in relationship to new architectures of social control and consumption in urban settings; and third, different strands of risk theory, notably in regard to reflexive modernization, governmentality, and cultural sociological questions.

Michel Foucault and the Smart City: Power Dynamics Inherent in Contemporary Governing through Code

Drawing upon Michel Foucaults approach to power and governmentality, this paper explores the internal logics and dynamics of software-mediated techniques used to regulate and manage urban systems. Our key questions are as follows: what power and regulatory dynamics do contemporary smart-city initiatives imply? And how do smart information technologies intervene in the governing of everyday life? Building on the Foucauldian distinction between apparatuses of discipline and apparatuses of security, the paper approaches these questions on three broad levels, namely: how contemporary ‘governing through code’ relates to its referent object (referentiality axis), to normalisation (normativity axis), and to space (spatiality axis). Empirically, the paper investigates two high-profile pilot projects in Switzerland in the field of smart electricity management, aimed at (1) the assessment of customer needs and behaviours with regard to novel smart metering solutions (iSMART), and (2) the elaboration of novel IT solutions in the field of smart electricity grids for optimised load management (Flexlast).

Thinking through Territoriality: Introducing Claude Raffestin to Anglophone Sociospatial Theory

This introductory paper establishes the grounds for a more sustained discussion of Claude Raffestins understanding of human territoriality in its contribution to contemporary geographical debates. The purpose is to highlight the broad, and fundamentally interrelated, philosophical, epistemological, and political ambitions of Raffestins work, before elucidating some of the key conceptual pillars of his relational thinking through territoriality. In this, particular emphasis will be placed on the concept of mediation. The proposed engagement with Raffestins work offers an opportunity not only for revisiting territoriality in its value for contemporary political geography and sociospatial theory, and for rethinking the positioning and contribution of Raffestins oeuvre itself, but also for critically reflecting upon the spaces and power relationships of geographical knowledge production today and in the past.

Introduction: Security and Surveillance at Sport Mega Events

In recent times, sport mega events have grown into major global spectacles that possess huge economic, political and social significance. Cities and nations compete intensively for the right to host mega events such as the Olympic Games, the Superbowl in American football, the Champions League final in European football or the ‘World Cup finals’ of various sports. For the organisers, these events are seen as conferring high levels of national and international prestige on host cities, as well as a variety of other benefits such as urban regeneration, increased tourism and new partnerships with global corporations. For example, the 2006 World Cup finals in Germany were estimated to have attracted 5 million international visitors, combined global television audiences of 26 billion and a national economic boost of US

Sport mega-events and ‘terrorism’: A critical analysis

12.5 billion (Giulianotti and Klauser, 2010). One issue which has become central to the planning and implementation of sport mega events is security, particularly since the 9/11 attacks on the United States. Granted, security concerns in sport do go further back, as most obviously demonstrated by the 1972 Munich Olympic attacks, at which 17 people were killed when Palestinian terrorists held Israeli athletes hostage, and also by the concerted attempts by various authorities to prevent spectator violence at major football tournaments since the mid 1970s onwards. Yet, in the post-9/11 environment, rising expenditures on security demonstrate the intensification of the issue of sport and security. For example, while security spending at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics came to US

The Exemplification of ‘Fan Zones’ Mediating Mechanisms in the Reproduction of Best Practices for Security and Branding at Euro 2008

66 million, the budget for London 2012 stands at a projected US

Disturbances in the sensory experience of the city : CCTV and the development of an unreal urban parallel world.

1.7 billion (The Telegraph, 9 September 2010; Daily Telegraph, 11 December 2007). Such expenditures are realised through the mobilisation of more security personnel, such as the 60 000 additional police officers to be drafted in for London 2012, and the implementation of high-tech security technologies. As security

Surveillance and Privacy, Geography of

The article explores critically the interplay between sport and terrorism, with particular reference to sport mega-events. Our discussion is divided into two main sections. First, we set out the main principles of a critical social theoretical approach, which enables satisfactory analysis of the ‘sport/terrorism’ couplet. We discuss the contribution of three types of critical perspective that are tied to different disciplines, namely sociology, human geography, and political science/international relations. Second, we turn to consider some of the main historical and contemporary incidents and issues with regard to terrorism at sport mega-events. On this basis, we show how and why social scientific analysis needs to move beyond common-sense understandings of the sport/terrorism couplet, to investigate critically the epistemologies and discursive constructions of terror, the logics, processes and relationships underpinning specific counter-terrorism strategies, and the wider socio-spatial implications thereof.

Splintering Spheres of Security: Peter Sloterdijk and the Contemporary Fortress City

The paper starts with an assessment of the internal spatial organisation of the eight host cities of the European Football Championships 2008 into a complex patchwork of tightly enclosed and monitored fan zones (also called ‘public viewing events’). Fan zones, such is the paper’s basic assumption, constitute a previously tested and exemplified solution to the problem of how to deal with security and branding in the event city. The paper examines the mediating mechanisms through which the ‘fan zones exemplar’ was transferred from the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany to Euro 2008 in Austria/Switzerland. Based on rich empirical insights, the exemplar is studied in its various forms and stages: as a written bid requirement for Euro 2008, as a lesson drawn from exchanges and collaboration at earlier mega events and as the object of a wide range of conferences, exercises and external assessments. On this basis, the paper also brings to the fore a number of more fundamental insights into the public–private coalitions of authority and into the patterns of learning and lesson-drawing in contemporary security governance.