Ola Söderström

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.

Paper Cities: Visual Thinking in Urban Planning:

We find instead that direct observation, far from being a mere ragpicker, is an explo ration by the form-seeking and form-imposing mind, which needs to understand but cannot unless it casts what it sees into manageable models.1

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).

Studying cosmopolitan landscapes

In Beijing, a few months ago, I was intrigued by the meaning of a (by now) banal street scene. Cycling on the sidewalk close to the 4th Ring Road in the northeastern part of the city, I bumped into a street-sign for a furniture and design shop just nearby: Cosmopolite, Boutique Living in China (Figure 1). A few blocks away and a few minutes later I could not miss a huge and comfortable housing complex – Lido Courts – presenting itself as ‘the oasis of Cosmopolitan Living’. This complex proposes, I discovered later by visiting its website, 364 fully serviced apartments, a shopping mall, a park with a playground for children and a series of sports facilities. The whole promises:

On alternative smart cities

Smart urbanism seems to be everywhere you turn. But in practice the agenda is an uncertain one, usually only partially developed, and often more about corporate-led urban development than about urban social justice. Rather than leave smart urbanism to the corporate and political elites, there are opportunities now for critical urban scholarship to not only critique how it is currently constituted, but to give shape to a globally oriented alternative smart urban agenda. An ambition like this means taking the ‘urban’ in ‘smart urban’ much more seriously. It means foregrounding the knowledges, political priorities and needs of those either actively excluded or included in damaging ways in mainstream smart urban discourses. We outline steps towards an alternative smart urbanism. We seek to move beyond the specific to the general and do so by drawing on radically different initiatives across the Global North and South. These initiatives provide tantalizing openings to a more socially just use of digital technology, where urban priorities and justice drive the use—or lack of use—of technology.

Redefining the field: auto-ethnographic notes

The geographers’ field has in the past two decades been redefined both through a series of theoretical innovations and the encounter of a series of new situations in the field. The latter can still be today the bounded place of traditional ethnography but also a more complex multi-sited, virtual space of investigation peopled by non-human and human entities, and approached through polysensorial, mobile or emotional forms of analysis. How do new theorizations in geography and the immersion in new field situations redefine the field and thus the categories and practice of fieldwork? This is the question addressed by the authors of the two pieces put in dialogue in this section. The first text, by Augustin Berque, apparently deals with a traditional situation: a researcher approaching a society quite different from the one in which he has been socialized. Yet, his encounter with Japanese ways of thinking the societynature relation led him to an epistemological conversion. Lin Weiqiang’s and Brenda Yeoh’s text regards transnational (im)mobilities of Singaporean migrants and thus phenomena that radically challenge canonical ways of defining the field and doing fieldwork in geography. They discuss the personal and methodological implications stemming from actually experiencing transnationality in the field. In this brief introduction, I will first situate these two contributions in the discussion about the ‘ontologies’ of the field and the practice of fieldwork in geography and, second, comment on how each of these short and incisive contributions redefine the field within geographical research.

From mosaic to network: social and cultural geography in Switzerland

It is already a tradition: most country reports in this journal start with questions and doubts concerning the relevance of thinking about the production of geographical knowledge in national terms. I cannot avoid feeding this tradition as Switzerland is a particularly uncertain and fragmented nation. It is often maintained that it certainly is a State but much more dubious whether it really is a nation, because it has no single language, but four national ones, no single religion and more than twenty different educational systems. In other words, Switzerland lacks some of the crucial elements of the nation-building toolbox. It is moreover territorially very fragmented: it continues to have a huge number of communes (2,900) and the Swiss remain extremely keen on maintaining local identity and cantonal autonomy. Geography as an academic discipline and the daily work of geographers are embedded within this political culture and territorial system. Universities are mainly funded by the cantons and receive only part (around 25 per ent) of their financial support from the State. There is therefore very little national steering of education and research. The appointment of professors and researchers in geography departments, for instance, is, unlike France, made with no connection to national institutions. Unlike Italy, the national association of geographers is not a strong and important forum of decision making and unlike the UK or the USA this association does not organize an important annual conference and cometogether of the discipline. The consequence of these national specificities has for long been a situation with rather autonomous, non-specialized departments working like small cantonal baronies, governed by a feudal logic and maintaining connections mostly with foreign colleagues and departments. There has been a series of negative outcomes to such a situation (which are rather obvious and need not be commented upon here), but also some positive ones. Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 8, No. 4, August 2007

Expo.02: Exhibiting Swiss identity

ducted – as far as they can be – with great prudence. This peculiarity produces strange and interesting phenomena. In this short paper I want to deal with one of these: the survival of national exhibitions. Switzerland is the only European country where there has been a persistent tradition of national exhibitions in the twentieth century. This tradition continues into the present century with an exhibition in four cities of the region of Neuchâtel (Bienne, Morat, Yverdon and Neuchâtel) planned for 2002. My very modest goal is here to sketch briefly the historical context of this exhibition, and consider some of the questions raised by my experience of working with artists, architects and academics on an exhibition on space and identity. I will argue that the cultural projects underpinning these national exhibitions in the past and the forthcoming exhibition have radically changed. This change is at the root of the unease and controversies that the present project has generated, and signifies a shift in the public and governmental politics of Swiss identity.

Emplacing recovery: how persons diagnosed with psychosis handle stress in cities

Abstract The background of this study is recent work on the correlation between urban living and psychosis. It is part of a larger interdisciplinary research project using an experience-based approach to the city-psychosis nexus. The aim of this paper is to investigate how, soon after a first episode of psychosis, patients manage urban factors of stress. Methodologically, it is based on video-elicitation interviews of urban walks and ethnographic observations in a community care centre in the city of Lausanne, Switzerland. It shows that patients use three tactics: creating sensory bubbles; programming mobility; and creating places of comfort. On the basis of these findings, the paper discusses how the approach and results of our study can inform strategies of recovery that are both user-driven and take into consideration the importance of places and situations in the city in the phase following a first episode.

Lendemains d'échecs: Conduite de projets et aménagement d'espaces publics à Genève

In the year 1998, two important urban planning projects were rejected by the inhabitants of the city of Geneva. The first one concerned “Place des Nations”, the second one “Place Neuve”, which both are considered strategic locations within the city. As these two rejections of local authority policy followed shortly after each other, they created considerable traumatic experience at the local level. Nevertheless, the series of events which lead to these rejections has never been examined in depth. Consequently, the learning process of the public remained limited. To better understand the reasons for the two rejections, this article proposes to reopen these files and concentrates its analysis on the course of the projects. It shows that the definition of “public interest” in both cases was incomplete and therefore it concludes with a short inventory of procedures aimed to formulate a coherent definition of “public interest”.