ABSTRACT
Critical literature on smart cities has been taken to task for being ahistorical and for failing to engage with “actually existing” smart city policies and technologies. The report concludes by identifying a mismatch between supply and demand in the market for city services and technologies. Cities are held to be too numerous, too modestly sized, and too individualistic to act as consistent and stable consumers. Systems theory is a catch-all term for a variety of complex, ongoing and often conflicting domains of engineering and scientific knowledge production. While its origins can be traced to late nineteenth century physics, systems theory really established itself in the post-war US research funding climate. The concept of governance is used slightly differently by different academic disciplines and policy areas: urban studies favour urban governance; international relations, global governance; the World Bank, good governance; and finance and management, corporate governance.
