Critical interventions into the corporate smart city

Abstract

Driven by the profit motive of global high-technology companies, in collusion with the trend towards city governance being wedded to a competitive form of ‘urban entrepreneurialism’, has left little room for ordinary people to participate in the smart city. The article seeks to make a two-fold critical intervention into the dominance of this corporate smart city model. It does this by first looking at how we currently understand the smart city and critiques the growing trend towards corporate and entrepreneurial governance versions. A second form of intervention concerns considering smartness from different perspectives emanating from small-scale and fledgling examples of participatory and citizen-based types of smart initiatives.