ABSTRACT
The smart city is a postcolonial phenomenon that has emerged in contemporary times; its emergence also has the potential to mark a distinct break from earlier ways of knowing about disability – as objects of charity, medicalised bodies and also as disabled subjects influenced by the disability rights movement. As both a conceptual frame of reference and a vision that is being realised, the smart city is increasingly embraced, with many different iterations across Asian nation-states such as Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam, China and Thailand. Within the smart city, technology and disability come into productive conversation, as visions of a technologically enabled future also conjure particular ideas of disability. This occurs amidst a backdrop of scholarship that has highlighted how technology is a double-edged sword; while it is seen as a means towards the enablement and inclusion of disabled people, technology has also been critiqued for its underpinning logics and problems. Focused on the case of the Smart Nation of Singapore, this chapter interrogates how discourses of inclusion, disability and technology come together and their implications for policy, scholarship, research and the inclusion of disabled people.
