Varieties of States, Varieties of Smart Cities

Keywords: smart cities, states, comparison, relational, conjunctures
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

While “the state” figures in much of the smart city literature, it typically takes the form of an instrumental force, promoting a surveillance society and the interests of capital. While such practices are not uncommon and indeed raise deep concerns, the state understood as a nexus of social relations (Jessop 2015), in combination with a conjunctural understanding of social relations and political-economic power (Peck 2017; Leitner and Sheppard 2020), implies not only the existence of a variety of state forms, but a variety of smart city agendas and objectives. Drawing from a three-year comparative research project examining smart city initiatives in seven cities—Calgary, Toronto, Singapore, Taipei, Seoul, Stockholm, and Barcelona—we consider the implications of different state forms, and the social relations they embody, to develop a relational understanding of the diversity of smart city programs we encountered. Among our seven cases we find four basic state forms—the developmental state, the highly decentralized neoliberal state, the highly centralized welfare state, and the highly decentralized neoliberal state coupled to a strong institution of extra-territorial regional governance (the EU). Further complicating these basic state forms is a diversity of scalar and territorial arrangements (Jonas and Moisio 2018). We argue that the diversity of smart city agendas, actors, and rationalities observed among our seven comparative cases can, in part, be understood in light of the variety of state forms and their role in structuring diverse conjunctures of social and political-economic processes.