ABSTRACT
The ubiquity of “smartness” in contemporary discourse suggests an advancement of some kind, albeit predicated on various technologies. Smart cities typically present an optimistic view on what can be achieved by using data to address and improve the operation of various urban management systems. The digital flow and glow inherent to many visualizations of smart cities belies their purpose. From a representational perspective it is evident that their content is deliberately banal and benign, yet as Rose has observed, their power lies in their affective resonances of speed and seamless mobility across spaces where coloured light substitutes for data and everything is in perpetual flux. The representation of the environment here can be a computationally intensive process which, unless modelled through environmental science, often is subject to pure abstraction and symbolism rather than any condition, deformer or the site specificity.
