ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we examine the governmentality and the logics of urban control enacted through smart city technologies. Several commentators have noted that the implementation of algorithmic forms of urban governance that utilise big data greatly intensifies the extent and frequency of monitoring populations and systems and shifts the governmental logic from surveillance and discipline to capture and control. We explore this contention by examining two smart city technologies: urban control rooms and city dashboards and their use in urban governance. In particular, we draw on empirical analysis of the governmental logics of the Dublin Traffic Management and Incident Centre (TMIC) and its use of SCATS (Sydney Coordinated Adaptive Traffic System) to control the flow of traffic in the city, and the Dublin Dashboard, a public, analytical dashboard that displays a wide variety of urban data. We argue that there is no one governmentality being enacted by smart city technologies, rather they have mutable logics which are abstract, mobile, dynamic, entangled and contingent, being translated and operationalised in diverse, context-dependent ways. As such, just as disciplinary power never fully supplanted sovereign power, control supplements rather than replaces discipline.
