ABSTRACT
Images of many kinds are central to the activities associated with smart cities, and are therefore key to how stakeholders, policy-makers, developers, operators and residents understand the idea of the smart city. This chapter considers some of the multiple ways in which the idea of the smart city is made to appear real, in images. The first section reviews existing work on data visualisations and urban ‘dashboards’ which convert the city into flows of data to be collated and combined in new relationships for urban managers. Here, the ‘real’ is understood as and through abstract visualisations of numeric data. Following this, the chapter draws on original empirical data to examine the use of 3D visualisation technologies such as interactive maps and virtual reality in smart city projects in Milton Keynes, UK. These visual techniques achieve a sense of the real through embodied interaction with a viewer/user, creating a viscerally experienced sense of reality. Through these technologies, the chapter argues, an embodied representation of the smart city is constituted as a vision of the ‘real smart city’. However, both these abstract and visceral visions of smart neglect another form of smart reality which is representational: neither of these forms of imaging adequately represent the diversity of smart cities in terms of their population’s gender, class, ethnicity, (dis)ability and age.
