ABSTRACT
This chapter examines five critiques of smart cities in broad terms, namely the politics of urban digital data and the development of urban indicators, city benchmarking and real-time dashboards and their use in urban governance. Dashboard initiatives purport to provide detailed city intelligence, including real-time overviews of how the city is performing. It focuses on the politics of urban data. As already noted, the generation, processing and analysis of data are critical to smart city initiatives. As with smart city projects themselves, the data they rely on are portrayed as being objective and non-ideological. There are two main visions of smart urbanism, which are underpinned by the roll-out of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) and neoliberal visions of market-led and technocratic solutions to city governance and development, and are promoted as pragmatic, non-ideological and commonsensical in approach.
