Futuring Smart Cities and Smart Petroleum Futures: The Melding Digital Smartness of Extraction and Urbanization

Little research to date has drawn out the connections between digitalizing extractive industries and digital urbanism. In this paper, we argue that these are complementary, mutually reinforcing processes: digital urbanism enables the digitalization of extraction, and digitalization centralizes extractive labor in urban centers. "Smart" digitalization as a political-economic strategy works on both the extractive and urban levels, as seen in smart cities as well as extraction’s intensifying use of automation, sensors, digital twins, artificial intelligence, and robotics. More precisely, we argue that these processes mutually articulate through future world-building. The Calgary smart city promises a future economic diversification from the oil & gas industry toward high technology, and the digitalizing oil & gas industry promises a low-carbon future.

In this talk, we draw on a 3-year ongoing case study of the digitalizing oil & gas industry in the city of Calgary and the province of Alberta, Canada, to situate the dual smartness strategy within the same process of future world-building. In tension with smartness's promises, what seems to be happening empirically is that digitalization in Calgary is deepening extraction’s centrality to Alberta’s economy. Moreover, whereas literature on futuring has focused on crisis as a primary instigator of futuring, our research shows more banal, more hopeful futures in digitalizing energy and cities. Our evidence suggests that while the production and unrolling of futures is quotidian in practice, potential revolutionary futures create the conditions for everyday futuring.