ABSTRACT
Smart cities, like creative cities, sustainable cities or liveable cities are part of contemporary language games around urban management and development. These games involve experts, marketing specialists, consultants, corporations, city officials, etc. and frame how cities are understood, conceptualized and planned. Although we might consider this discursive activity with some scepticism, it often makes a difference. We therefore take discourse seriously in this chapter and focus on two important aspects of contemporary ‘smart city talk’: we first look at how the term smart city has been popularized in the discourse of municipalities, media and especially private firms and then, at more length, how it has been given a specific content in IBM’s global and massive smarter cities campaign: the most developed attempt by a private company to define a smart model of urban management. In doing this, we analyze key episodes in the struggle over the definition of what smart cities are about, claiming that this struggle is an important element in the competition between private companies over authorship, authority and profit in the smart city business.
