The ‘Actually Existing’ Smart City, or the Ever-Evading Smart City? Promises for Better Cities, Technological Determinism and the Marketization of Urban Assets

Smart city projects often aim to favour a seamless urban experience, where automation and smart predictions enhance citizens’ urban quality of life and democratic participation. For example, a French start-up boasts “Predictive functionalities and artificial intelligence, to guide the management of public policies” (Manty website). Many studies examine discourses about smart cities, but what exactly do smart city projects entail: how are they put into place, with what firms and technologies, and how does this affect citizens’ experience? Following calls to study the “actually existing” smart city, rather than what it should or should not be, my research focuses on private firms developing smart city projects in France, to understand what exactly they are selling to public authorities. It draws on interviews with local authorities and firms, ethnographic observation of events promoting smart cities and statistical data collected on firms and their products. I contend that the development of smart city projects reveals transformations in urban markets and the changing place private firms have in urban governance. Because their promises about modelling and optimising the city never seem to become achievable, they push for public investment in yet more captors and new data analysis to attain their “engineer’s dream” of a seamless city (interviewee in start-up). The paper will first present the firms’ discourses, products and practices for the “optimisation” of urban governance, with new captors and data analysis, as well as the end of “silos” in local government, often by means of a pervasive digital platform. It will then examine the technical, economic and political reasons why the promise of modelling the city is never met, and how nonetheless, these smart city projects transform urban government, broadening large firms’ grip on markets for urban services, and in the definition of what urban citizenship should, or should not, be.