University of Westminster Simon Joss September 2016 1 Reflections Issue 15 ‘SMART CITY’: A REGRESSIVE AGENDA? 1 Professor Simon Joss University of Westminster josss@westminster.ac.uk Abstract The history of the smart city may be a brief one, but it has already left an indelible mark on contemporary discourses on urban development and associated innovation practices. Only a couple of decades ago, the term ‘smart city’ was hardly used by scholars, let alone by policy makers and practitioners. Yet, within the last decade or so, the term has enjoyed a meteoric rise to the extent that in the academic literature it has now come close to replacing the concept of ‘sustainable city’ that has dominated urban planning and policy for so long; meanwhile, policy‐makers appear to have embraced this new concept wholeheartedly based on its (as yet untested) promise to reinvigorate urban economic growth while improving liveability and environmental performance. The risk of such popular embrace is that the smart city becomes a catch‐phrase bereft of much precise conceptual meaning and, thus, susceptible to diverse interpretations and superficial practice. However, a different critical reading of this emergent phenomenon suggests that the popularity of the ‘smart city’ is in no small part due to the successful amalgamation of two powerful conceptual discourses – namely, the prospect of harnessing digital urban innovations for the purpose of urban economic growth and governance reform. In order to investigate this more fully, this paper seeks to analyse the conceptual roots of the ‘smart city’. This acknowledges that, while the focus on applying digital technological systems to urban infrastructure and governance processes arguably lends this concept unique novelty, the ‘smart city’ nevertheless builds on pre‐existing concepts. And in at least two important ways, it is argued that the ‘smart city’ represents a somewhat regressive agenda: for one thing, it suggests a return to a more modernist, rational planning tradition centred upon digital technology as standardising process for decision‐making; and for another, it indicates a relative retreat from the commitment to urban sustainability, given the dominant focus on economic growth through digital technological innovation. 1 A version of this paper was presented at the Society for the History of Technology Annual Meeting 2016, Singapore, 22‐26 June 2016. Published with author’s permission.