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Smart and sustainable? Five tensions in the visions and practices of the smart-sustainable city in Europe and North America

AAM

Chris J. Martina, James Evansb, Andrew Karvonenc

a Department of Geography, Durham University, Durham, DH1 3LE, UKb School of Environment, Education and Development, The University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UKc Division of Urban and Regional Studies, Department of Urban Planning and Environment, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Kungl Tekniska Högskolan, SE-100 44, Stockholm, Sweden

Please reference as:

Martin, C., Evans, J. and Karvonen, A. (2018) Smart and sustainable? Five tensions in the visions and practices of the smart-sustainable city. Technological Forecasting and Social Change. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2018.01.005

AbstractSmart cities are increasingly advocated by governments and the private sector as the primary means to deliver urban sustainability. Particularly in Europe and North America, the smart city is envisioned as a place where digital technologies are deployed to ‘solve’ urban sustainability problems. Such visions have been broadly critiqued in the urban studies literature for reflecting techno-utopian, neoliberal approaches to urban development that exert corporate control over cities, but there has been little empirical verification of these critiques. More recently, a disparate and interdisciplinary body of literature has emerged documenting the impacts of smart city initiatives in practice. This paper provides a state-of-the-art, empirically informed analysis of smart-sustainability, which considers established critiques of smart city policy and visions alongside the increasing body of evidence concerning the actual experiences of smart city initiatives. Through a systematic review of the smart city literature pertaining to Europe and North America, we identify and test five tensions between the smart city and the goals of sustainable urban development. These tensions involve: (1) reinforcing neoliberal economic growth; (2) focusing on more affluent populations; (3) disempowering and marginalising citizens; (4) neglecting environmental protection; and, (5) failing to challenge prevailing consumerist cultures. On the basis of these findings we propose how digital technologists, urban developers, municipalities and citizens might address these tensions. A key finding is that the potential to empower and include citizens represents the key to unlocking forms of smart-sustainable urban development that emphasise environmental protection and social equity, rather than merely reinforcing neoliberal forms of urban development.

Keywords: smart cities, sustainable urban development, sustainable development, smart sustainability, visions, practices

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1. Introduction

There are growing expectations that the emergence of smart cities will drive sustainable development (Hollands, 2008; Viitanen and Kingston, 2014). The neoliberal, techno-centric vision advanced in industry-policy discourses in Europe and North America is primarily entrepreneurial and digital. This vision typically includes ultra-efficient and digitally optimised urban infrastructure, and a population of highly educated, affluent worker-consumers; a combination that is expected to fuel global economic competitiveness and growth. The smart city is a place where previously intractable social and environmental problems, such as social exclusion and climate change, are solved through the deployment of digital technologies. Based on such visions and expectations, the smart city concept has rapidly risen to prominence within the industry-policy discourses of urban development and is “on its way to becom[ing the] leading driver of urban sustainability and regeneration initiatives” (de Jong et al. 2014: 12). Stoked by speculative estimates that the global smart city market will be worth $1.56 trillion by 2020 (Frost & Sullivan, 2014), municipalities and private companies are allocating considerable resources to implement smart city initiatives in the hope of promoting urban growth, citizen participation and decarbonisation.

Urban studies scholars have developed a collective critique of the neoliberal vision of the smart city and questioned whether digitisation can actually deliver sustainability, especially from the perspective of environmental protection and social equity (Hollands, 2008a, 2014; Gabrys, 2014; Viitanen and Kingston, 2014; Glasmeier and Christopherson, 2015; Shelton et al, 2015). This critique derives from high-level analysis of the industry-policy discourses within Europe and North America, and questions whether the environment can be protected by making economic growth the primary goal of the smart urban development (March, 2016; Viitanen and Kingston, 2014). Meanwhile, it is unclear if these critiques are applicable to actual smart city initiatives (Kitchin, 2014; Shelton et al., 2015). A broader and less critical literature has emerged to analyse actual smart city initiatives on the ground (Bakici et al., 2013; Garau, 2014; Grimaldi and Fernandez, 2015; Komninos and Tsarchopoulos, 2013; Maier, 2016; Nam and Pardo, 2014; Paroutis et al., 2013). The primary focus is again on initiatives being implemented in Europe and North America (with notable exceptions of studies focused on Brazil (Gaffney and Robertson, 2016), South Korea (Kim et al., 2016; Yigitcanlar and Lee, 2014) and Australia (Bulkeley et al., 2016)).

This paper tests the extent to which the critique of the neoliberal smart city vision is applicable to smart city initiatives being implemented in specific cities, regions and countries. In other words, it asks whether the current empirical evidence base supports or rejects the critiques of smart city visions. We do this by identifying five key smart city critiques from the literature, and then testing them against the empirical evidence base. The literatures we draw upon primarily focus on Europe and North America where the majority of research has been conducted. We begin by describing the rise of the neoliberal smart city vision and how sustainability, particularly environmental protection and social equity, have been addressed in this vision. We then identify five key tensions between the neoliberal vision of the smart city and the goals of sustainable urban development1, which we refer to in this paper as smart-sustainability tensions. Based on a systematic review of 32 empirical case studies focused on smart city initiatives, we test how the five smart-sustainability tensions are

1 In this paper we consider sustainable development, as first advanced by the Brundtland Report, to be the simultaneous pursuit of economic development, environmental protection and social equity (Holden et al., 2014).

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playing out in practice. We conclude by considering how digital technologists, urban developers, municipalities and citizens might address these tensions by emphasising environmental protection and social equity, and indicate key topics for future comparison with other regional contexts.

2. Background

The neoliberal smart city vision is a product of the convergence of three visions of the future city: the digital city, the entrepreneurial city and the sustainable city. In combination, these visions suggest that digital innovation can integrate urban infrastructure systems and drive gains in operational efficiency that will be beneficial to economic development, environmental protection, and social equity. In the following section, we trace the convergence of these visions to outline the particular form of smart-sustainable development that is advanced within neoliberal smart city visions. This then provides the basis for identifying five key smart-sustainability tensions.

2.1. The rise of the smart city vision

The smart city emerged as the successor to visions of first the information city (Hepworth, 1990), and then the digital city (Couclelis, 2004). The information city, prominent in the urban development discourses of the 1990s, was critiqued for adopting a narrow focus on how digital technologies – including the internet and virtual public spaces – could transform the city (Allwinkle and Cruickshank, 2011; Hollands, 2008). The digital-centric vision of the smart city that subsequently emerged was intended as a paradigm shift in digital urban development, a move away from a techno-centric perspective toward a socio-technical perspective of the city (Lee et al., 2014). This shift in framing emphasised the ability of digital technologies to solve economic and social problems, such as low levels of citizen participation in local democratic processes (Schuurman et al., 2012) and social exclusion (Tranos and Gertner, 2012).

From the late 1990s onwards, this digital-centric vision converged with visions of the entrepreneurial city (Mahizhnan, 1999), resulting in a vision of the smart city in which digital technologies would boost competitiveness and create new engines of economic growth. This vision layers the digital-centric vision of the smart city over the neoliberal orthodoxy that cities are engaged in a global competition with winners and losers (Kitson et al., 2004) and must compete to attract residents, workers and businesses.

More recently, this vision of the smart (digital-entrepreneurial) city has been connected to visions of the sustainable city. For example, Caragliu and colleagues (2011) highlight that smart city visions offer a mode of governance in which social equity and environmental protection can be achieved in parallel with digitally catalysed economic growth. The smart city with its digitally mediated, efficient and integrated infrastructure is positioned as a facilitator of sustainable development by aligning the aims of environmental protection, social equity and economic development. This framing is prominently featured in the European Commission’s smart city policy (Haarstad, 2016a; Marciano, 2013; Russo et al., 2016) as well as in the marketing materials of global technology companies such as IBM (Viitanen and Kingston, 2014). However, reviews of the literature suggest that the concept of the smart city as a whole does not emphasise concerns of sustainability (de Jong et al., 2015).

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This latest incarnation of the smart city vision can be understood as advancing an amended sustainable development paradigm, in which the logic of economic development is replaced with the compound entrepreneurial and digital logic of smart urban development (see Figure 1). In effect, this smart city vision reinforces the emphasis of sustainable development on neoliberal economics and capitalist growth under the guise of digital innovation.

Figure 1: smart-sustainable development as advanced by the neoliberal smart city vision.

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2.2. Five smart-sustainability tensions

The techno-centric and neoliberal vision of the smart city has been widely critiqued by scholars of urban studies on the basis that it positions economic growth as the primary, or even sole, imperative of urban development (Glasmeier and Christopherson, 2015; Hollands, 2014, 2008; March, 2016; Söderström et al., 2014; Wiig, 2016). Growth is envisioned through digital innovation, which creates both new markets as urban infrastructure is digitised (e.g., smart energy and mobility systems) and new consumer cultures are created (e.g. consumption of smart home technologies). Each of these dynamics creates tensions which undermine the hopes, expectations and claims that the smart city can and will deliver urban sustainability. Below we identify five of these smart-sustainability tensions that appear most prominently in the literature critiquing the smart city vision, before examining the empirical evidence base for each.

Tension 1: Economic growth is unsustainable

Critics have argued that economic growth as the primary objective of the smart city vision is incompatible with promoting social equity and protecting the environment (Glasmeier and Christopherson, 2015; Hollands, 2008; March, 2016; Viitanen and Kingston, 2014). From the perspective of social equity, the distribution of financial gains from economic growth is left to the market, which tends to increase economic inequality rather than promote social equity (Piketty, 2014). In the case of the envisioned smart city, critics expect this tendency to result in the benefits of growth primarily being accrued by technology corporations, investors in the digital economy and highly skilled workers (of which more below) (Hollands, 2014; Söderström et al., 2014).

From the perspective of environmental protection, critics argue that economic growth relies on, and creates, increased demand for material resources, accelerating environmental degradation. Viitanen and Kingston (2014) argue that smart city advocates vastly overestimate the potential of digital innovations and technologies to decouple consumption and associated demand for material resources from economic growth (Hornborg, 2009; Kostakis et al., 2016). Rather they contend that economic growth will continue to rely on ever increasing consumption of material resources, regardless of the purported ‘green’ benefits of the pervasive deployment of digital technologies across the smart city. In the absence of detailed studies, smartness is not expected to reduce flows of resources (energy, water, materials) through, and emissions (CO2 and other waste) from, cities to levels which respect planetary limits (Rockström et al., 2009; Steffen et al., 2015).

Tension 2: The benefits of digital innovation will be unevenly distributed

Critics of the smart city vision argue that the benefits of digital innovation will be unevenly distributed across urban populations, with benefits primarily accruing to the affluent residents (Glasmeier and Christopherson, 2015; Hollands, 2014; Mcneill, 2016; Wiig, 2016). Hollands (2014) argues that the smart city forms part of a broader neo-liberal vision of an urban utopia where affluent residents live perfect worker-consumer lifestyles. Residents lacking the economic resources needed to live these perfect worker-consumer lifestyles within the smart city are marginalised. At best, the distribution of economic resources to lower income residents arises from a form of trickle-

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down economics. Smartness has the potential to create two-speed cities that favour highly skilled worker-consumers whilst overlooking the basic needs of a growing precariat (Hollands, 2008). Sustainability concerns over the uneven distribution of the benefits of digital innovation arise from the direct, and obvious, incompatibility between the objectives of promoting social equity and the emergence of two-speed smart cities. These concerns arise in part from recognition that resource intensive consumer lifestyles of wealthy citizens are incompatible with environmental protection.

Tension 3: Digital innovations disempower and marginalise citizens

Critics have raised concerns that the digital innovations driving the creation of smart cities will disempower and marginalise citizens rather promote social equity. Within the smart city discourse participation is often framed in terms of citizens forming digital connections with smart urban infrastructure (Caragliu and Del Bo, 2012). Citizens will be empowered to make better (i.e. more efficient) decisions based upon the data created by smart infrastructure, and to participate in urban governance through digital democracy platforms (Viitanen and Kingston, 2014). In the case of the former, critics counter that participating in these ways ensures citizens either voluntarily or unwittingly become sensors and data sources. Hence, rather than being empowered to participate in the smart city, citizens are instrumentalised as another efficient component of the digital infrastructure (Gabrys, 2014). The expansion of democratic modes of urban governance through smart engagement has also been questioned. Digital innovation could marginalise citizens further from practices of urban governance as global technology companies take responsibility for services previously provided by local government (Viitanen and Kingston, 2014; Wiig, 2016).

Tension 4: Digitising urban infrastructure alone does little to protect the environment

Embedding digital technologies across grey urban infrastructure is central to the smart city vision (de Jong et al., 2015; Gabrys, 2014; Glasmeier and Christopherson, 2015; Hollands, 2008; Joss et al., 2013; March, 2016; Söderström et al., 2014; Taylor Buck and While, 2017; Vanolo, 2016; Viitanen and Kingston, 2014). These technologies are expected to enable the integration and optimisation of grey infrastructure, in turn leading to major gains in operational efficiency. However, claims that such efficiency gains will protect the environment have been critiqued as a form of greenwashing (Viitanen and Kingston, 2014; Yigitcanlar and Lee, 2014). A superficial concern with the environment is used to justify digitising urban infrastructure by companies seeking to develop new markets for their products, and municipalities focusing on realising efficiency savings (Gabrys, 2014; Hollands, 2014; Viitanen and Kingston, 2014; Wiig, 2016). Meanwhile, the smart city vision pays scant attention to the ecosystems that are supposedly protected, either within or beyond the city. The question of how smart cities will reduce the demands they place on the extra-urban ecosystems that supply resources to the city and absorb its waste is not addressed. Urban ecosystems including green space and infrastructure, which improve the quality of life of citizens and reduce environmental impacts of the urban metabolism (Karvonen, 2011; Pincetl and Gearin, 2005), tend to be neglected in visions of the smart city.

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Tension 5: Cultures of consumerism are unsustainable

The fifth and final critique apparent in the literature involves the relationship between smart city visions and practices and cultures of consumerism. This contradiction stems from the focus on the perfect worker-consumer lifestyle within the smart city vision (Hollands, 2014). Critics argue that consumerist cultures embedded within the smart city vision are incompatible with environmental protection, as these cultures drive ever increasing levels of material consumption and associated environmental damage (Hollands, 2014; March, 2016; Viitanen and Kingston, 2014). The potential environment benefits of smart technologies, which are expected to reduce the environmental impacts of consumerism, are likely to be limited (Viitanen and Kingston, 2014). For example, the ability of smart energy meters to reduce consumption appears to be limited for at least three reasons. First, current smart meter designs are based on the assumption that consumers will reflect upon and change their energy-using practices (including washing, cooking and using the internet) when presented with energy use data for their household. This assumes a ‘rational choice’ model of material consumption that connects information provision with residential behaviour (Karvonen, 2013; McMeekin and Southerton, 2012). Research suggests that this assumption is flawed and “feedback attentive to the particular energy-using practices of householders is likely to have most influence on demand” (Pullinger et al., 2014: 1144). Second, consumer engagement with smart meters and any associated energy savings diminish over time, as the smart meter losses its ‘novelty value’ while existing energy-consuming practices continue relatively unchanged (Hargreaves et al., 2013). Third, and perhaps most problematically, there is the challenge of addressing the rebound effect (Herring et al., 2008; Sorrell et al., 2009), whereby efficiency savings from smart meters are simply diverted by consumers to other resource-intensive products or services.

3. Testing the tensions: methodology

We conducted a systematic review of empirical studies of smart cities to determine how these five smart-sustainability tensions are playing out on the ground. An initial search of English language publications indexed by the Scopus database returned 104 empirical studies of smart urban development. Specifically, the titles, abstracts, and keywords of indexed publications were searched for references to the smart city and one or more search terms that indicated empirical evidence (interview, case study, empirical, ethnography, or observation). Publications in the disciplines of computer science, biochemistry, chemistry and physics were excluded from the results, as were conference papers2. Based on a review of the abstracts of the 104 publication identified, 33 were retained as relevant based on the following criteria.

The conceptualisation of smart: we retained those publications where digital technologies were a central focus, rather than other forms of smartness such as human intelligence and education.

2 The search query used was as follows. TITLE-ABS-KEY("smart city" AND ("interview" OR "case study" OR "empirical" OR "ethnography" OR "observation")) AND ( EXCLUDE(SUBJAREA,"COMP " ) ) AND ( EXCLUDE(DOCTYPE,"cp " ) OR EXCLUDE(DOCTYPE,"cr " ) ) AND ( EXCLUDE(SUBJAREA,"BIOC " ) OR EXCLUDE(SUBJAREA,"CHEM " ) OR EXCLUDE(SUBJAREA,"PHYS " ) )

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The presence of empirical data: we retained those publications with qualitative and/or quantitative data on how the smart city (or smartness) was implemented in a specific district, city, region or country.

Four further papers were identified as meeting these criteria through on-going monitoring of papers indexed by Scopus which referred to smart cities and were published between September 2015 and December 2016. This resulted in the identification of a total of 37 relevant publications for a more detailed review (see Supplementary Material A for a list of these publications).

The 37 publications were reviewed carefully, with relevant details and evidence recorded in an analytical grid (see Table 1 for an illustration of the structure of the grid). For each paper, the presence of evidence supporting or challenging the five tensions was noted, and brief reflections on the empirical content of the publication and key quotations were also recorded (see Table 1 for an illustrative example). During this process five publications were removed from consideration as they focused on smart city initiatives taking place beyond Europe and North America. Given the empirical literature remains at a relatively early stage of development, it was not possible to identify regional variations in the forms of smart city initiatives developing across Europe and North America or in other regions (Africa, Asia, South America or Australasia). Both remain avenues for future research.

It is important to note that a variety of analytical frameworks and theoretical perspectives were employed in the literature reviewed. Hence, we did not expect to find the tensions directly explored in detail in all of the publications. Rather, we sought to identify characteristics of smart city initiatives related to the five tensions, specifically: (1) characteristics which demonstrate the tensions of smart-sustainability playing out in practice (see Table 2); and, (2) characteristics which demonstrate the tensions of smart-sustainability being addressed in practice (see Table 3).The selection of these characteristics was informed by our reading of the urban studies literatures which: critique the smart city vision; and, underpin the five tensions of smart-sustainability presented in this paper (as discussed in Section 2.2 above). Table 2 and Table 3 also list the publications reviewed which provide supporting evidence that the tensions play out in practice, and that the tensions are being addressed in practice.

Reviewing the analytical grid provided a basis for systematically understanding how the tensions are, or are not, playing out in practice. By reviewing the grid, particularly the ‘comments’ column, we were also able to identify empirical examples which supported the discussion of the five smart-sustainability tensions. Throughout the process of writing the results and discussion sections below, we revisited the analytical grid and selected publications, particularly those which we draw upon in more depth and detail.

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Table 1: illustration of the structure of the analytical grid employed in the literature review. ‘…’ indicate a contraction of the structure of the grid for presentational purposes where columns relating to tensions 2, 3, 4 and 5 would be present. The contents of the analytical grid relating to Bakici et al.(2013) have been edited for readability upon inclusion in this paper.

Publication reviewed

Empirical focus

Tension 1. Economic growth is unsustainable … Comments Key QuotationsEvidence of tension playing out in practice

Evidence of efforts to address the tension

…

(Bakici et al., 2013)

A smart city initiative in Barcelona

Yes None observed … Green infrastructure mentioned but strong focus on digital, grey and social infrastructure.

Authors note the lack of skilled labour in the city, but don’t mention how this is addressed locally.

Appears to be some limited efforts within the initiative to promote equity, but dominate focus on the growth particularly in the ICT industries (see quote to the right).

Authors cite as a benefit of the initiative newly "urbanised green areas" (Bakici et al., 2013: 145)

"It has created more than 4,000 units of new housing with 25% at minimum rental, 55,000 jobs with over 1,500 new companies and new institutions, mainly in information and communication technologies and media industries. It has ten universities and 12 R&D centres" (Bakici et al., 2013: 145)

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Table 2: identifying evidence of smart city initiatives where the smart-sustainability tensions play out in practice

Tensions of smart-sustainability

Characteristics of initiatives where of smart-sustainability tensions play out in practice

Number of publications providing supporting evidence

Publications providing supporting evidence

1. Economic growth is unsustainable

Positioning economic growth as a key aim of the initiative.

14 (Bakici et al., 2013; Ben Letaifa, 2015; Crivello, 2014; Garau, 2014; Haarstad, 2016b; Hielkema and Hongisto, 2013; Komninos and Tsarchopoulos, 2013; March and Ribera-Fumaz, 2014; McLean et al., 2015; Mcneill, 2016; Paskaleva et al., 2015; Pollio, 2016; Wiig, 2016, 2015)

2. The benefits of digital innovation will be unevenly distributed

Focusing on developing innovations likely to primarily benefit highly skilled, affluent and capitalist classes.

9 (Bakici et al., 2013; Ben Letaifa, 2015; de Wijs et al., 2016; March and Ribera-Fumaz, 2014; McLean et al., 2015; Mcneill, 2016; Pollio, 2016; Wiig, 2016, 2015)

3. Digital innovations will disempower and marginalisation

Enrolling citizens as efficient components of digital systems and/or primarily framing citizens as users of digital systems.

10 (Bakici et al., 2013; Crivello, 2014; de Wijs et al., 2016; Kraus et al., 2015; March and Ribera-Fumaz, 2014; McLean et al., 2015; Mcneill, 2016; Nam and Pardo, 2014; Wiig, 2016, 2015)

4. Digitising urban infrastructure alone does little to protect the environment

Focus on digitising urban infrastructure, with little or no attention paid to ecosystems or environmental impacts.

14 (Bakici et al., 2013; Ben Letaifa, 2015; Crivello, 2014; de Wijs et al., 2016; Grimaldi and Fernandez, 2015; Haarstad, 2016b; Kitchin et al., 2015; Komninos and Tsarchopoulos, 2013; March and Ribera-Fumaz, 2014; McLean et al., 2015; Perng and Kitchin, 2016; Pollio, 2016; van der Graaf and Veeckman, 2014; Wiig, 2015)

5. Cultures of consumerism are unsustainable

Promoting consumerism or failing to challenge consumerism within the initiative.

6 (de Wijs et al., 2016; Grimaldi and Fernandez, 2015; Haarstad, 2016b; Komninos and Tsarchopoulos, 2013; McLean et al., 2015; Mcneill, 2016)

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Table 3: identifying evidence of smart city initiatives where the smart-sustainability tensions are addressed in practice

Tension of smart-sustainability

Characteristics of initiatives which address the smart-sustainability tensions in practice

Number of publications providing supporting evidence

Publications providing supporting evidence

1. Economic growth is unsustainable

Exploring how smart cities could support the non-growth based economic models (a-growth, degrowth or steady-state economies).

0

2. The benefits of digital innovation will be unevenly distributed

Focusing on developing innovations likely to primarily benefit lower skilled, lower income and precarious classes.

4 (Grimaldi and Fernandez, 2015; Komninos and Tsarchopoulos, 2013; Wiig, 2016, 2015)

3. Digital innovations will disempowerment and marginalisation

Engaging citizens as co-producers of the smart city and promoting citizen participation in urban governance.

14 (Arribas-Bel et al., 2015; Bakici et al., 2013; de Wijs et al., 2016; Garau, 2014; Grimaldi and Fernandez, 2015; Haarstad, 2016b; Hielkema and Hongisto, 2013; Lee et al., 2014; March and Ribera-Fumaz, 2014; Mcneill, 2016; Paskaleva et al., 2015; Perng and Kitchin, 2016; van der Graaf and Veeckman, 2014; Zubizarreta et al., 2016)

4. Digitising urban infrastructure alone does little to protect the environment

Employing digital technologies to support urban ecosystems, and seeking to radically reduce the demands placed on extra-urban ecosystems.

0

5. Cultures of consumerism are unsustainable

Challenging cultures of consumerism and seeking to bring about radical reductions in consumer demand.

0

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4. Results

The following paragraphs summarise the findings of the systematic review of empirical case studies and outline how smart city initiatives are reinforcing and/or addressing the five smart-sustainability tensions in practice.

Economic growth (Tension 1)

The empirical studies provided recurring evidence of a strong focus on economic growth within smart city initiatives in Europe and North America (14 out of 32 studies). Researchers studying the development of smart city initiatives in the Netherlands (de Wijs et al., 2016), Germany (Kraus et al., 2015), Turin (Crivello, 2014) and San Francisco (Lee et al., 2014) observed a tendency to promote economic growth at the expense of environmental protection and social equity. The primary appeal of smart cities is the promise to create a new digital engine for economic growth. For example, Haarstad (2016a) reported on the smart cities activities in Stavanger, Norway where the municipal government identified an opportunity to transition away from the carbon-intensive oil industry to become a leader in the smart city and smart home markets. Meanwhile, the digital economy appears to offers new opportunities for growth in cities struggling with the legacy of deindustrialisation such as Philadelphia (Wiig, 2016, 2015) and Turin (Crivello, 2014; Pollio, 2016). However, economic growth was not featured in all articles as might have been expected. In some cases a focus on economic growth was implied, where the author(s) of the study positioned growth as a key goal of the smart city in an introductory section, but do not support this with the empirical material presented (e.g. Nam and Pardo, 2014; Zubizarreta et al., 2016).

There was limited evidence of efforts to address conflicts between the pursuit of economic growth and environmental protection and social equity. Given that the pursuit of economy growth is a core tenet of the neoliberal economic paradigm, unsurprisingly this tension remained largely unacknowledged in the smart city initiatives reviewed (March, 2016). A discursive fix for this tension is offered by smart city advocates in some cities including Thessaloniki (Komninos and Tsarchopoulos, 2013) and Barcelona (Bakici et al., 2013). This fix advances the argument that a growing smart-digital economy is inherently green as digital technologies are driving dematerialisation of the economy. Meanwhile, none of the studies identified successful initiatives directly focused on reducing the material resources flows through the city or redistributing the wealth created by the growth of the digital economy. Rather, there was limited evidence that growth can increase inequality, as in the case of San Francisco where the influx and growth of digital corporations including Airbnb, Uber and Dropbox has created high skilled, high wage employment opportunities which in turn has resulted in large increases in housing prices, driving low-income residents out of the city (Mcneill, 2016).

Distribution of economic benefits (Tension 2)

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There was limited evidence of smart city initiatives being implemented to ensure the equitable distribution of the benefits of digital innovation (4 of 32 studies). Meanwhile, some evidence suggested considerable potential for these benefits to be realised by the affluent and capitalist classes (9 of 32 studies). Two strands of research were identified within the literature reviewed: (1) a strand adopting a critical perspective on the digital innovation taking place under the guise of smart city development which addresses issues of social equity; and, (2) a strand adopting a more supportive perspective and largely overlooking distributional issues and the associated politics of digital innovation. Within the later, several studies identified that a successful smart city is one in which innovation creates high skilled jobs in the digital economy (Bakici et al., 2013; Ben Letaifa, 2015; Kraus et al., 2015). While the imaginary of the perfect worker-consumer did not appear to be employed in these studies, concerns of social equity, including who has access to these jobs, were largely absent. More critically orientated empirical studies highlighted problematic aspects of this dynamic.

The case studies focusing on Philadelphia (Wiig, 2016) and Stavanger (Haarstad, 2016b) demonstrated that the formation of public-private partnerships between municipal governments and digital technology corporations were the primary criteria for evaluating the success of smart city initiatives. Wiig's (2016: 535) research focused on efforts to implement a smart employment solution in Philadelphia, where the city administration and IBM developed a “social media-style workforce education application (app) to train up to 500,000 low-literacy residents for jobs in the information and knowledge economy”. This initiative was unsuccessful in achieving this stated goal, as the training provided was limited, few digital economy job vacancies existed within the city and a projected influx of new digital industries failed to materialise. Regardless, success was proclaimed on the basis that IBM and the municipality had worked successfully in partnership, suggesting that benefits of this particular digital innovation accrued to those involved in the partnership, rather than low-literacy residents. Digital innovations orientated toward delivering environment benefits also appeared to have the potential to exacerbate issues of inequality. A study by McLean and colleagues (2015) highlighted that the development of a smart grid in Austin (USA) created opportunities for those with capital to invest in installing renewable energy generation assets in their homes. These assets could then be connected to a smart grid, enabling the home owner to become a ‘prosumer’ by selling the energy produced. Meanwhile those without capital to invest or without secure tenure were excluded from participating in the emerging smart grid energy market.

Empowerment and marginalisation (Tension 3)

The literature provides mixed evidence on the question of whether smart city initiatives driven by digital innovation are empowering or disempowering citizens. The enrolment of citizens as efficient components of the smart city was not specifically addressed in the literature. However, there was substantial evidence of citizens being framed and engaged as users of technological systems (de Wijs et al., 2016; March and Ribera-Fumaz, 2014; McLean et al., 2015). The lack of citizen engagement in the design and implementation of smart city initiatives was highlighted in cases studies focused on Turin (Crivello, 2014) and Barcelona (March, 2016). Likewise, it is important to understand how citizen participation is being undertaken. In particular, digital innovations have been designed based on the assumption that structural problems can be resolved through changes in the behaviour of

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individual citizens. For example, McLean and colleagues (2015) highlighted that the development of a smart grid in Austin (USA) placed the onus on residential energy users to respond to informational campaigns to change their behaviour, and in doing so address the challenges of decarbonising the energy system. Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, a simplistic digital fix (the aforementioned ‘app’ providing training in digital skills to unemployed citizens) was developed as a solution to complex intertwined socio-economic issues including “widespread post-industrial economic decline, inner city marginalization, and a lack of economic opportunities for hundreds of thousands of city residents” (Wiig, 2016: 548). The question of whether the engagement of digital corporations and other private sector organisations in smart city initiatives crowded out possibilities for citizen participation in urban governance was not explored. However, March and Ribera-Fumaz (2014) observed that branding the privatisation of collective urban infrastructure as part of a smart city initiative in Barcelona depoliticised this action and reduced the potential for citizen contestation.

In contrast to the general trends illustrated by the above examples, the desire of municipalities to use digital technologies to empower citizens and increase citizen inclusion in urban governance was commonplace in the literature (14 of 32 studies). Empirical case studies of smart city initiatives, particularly in Europe, highlighted the ambition to develop digital platforms to enable citizen participation. Of particular prominence were open data platforms (de Wijs et al., 2016; Haarstad, 2016b; Hielkema and Hongisto, 2013; Lee et al., 2014; van der Graaf and Veeckman, 2014; Zubizarreta et al., 2016) and crowdsourcing platforms (Bakici et al., 2013; Garau, 2014; van der Graaf and Veeckman, 2014). However, the efficacy of these platforms remained largely unexplored, and most authors tended to consider them to be unequivocal public goods. In contrast, research outside the smart city literatures suggests that such platforms had mixed impacts on citizen inclusion. For example, open data platforms can be shaped by the interests of corporations to the extent that which they are of little value or interest to members of civil society (Bates, 2013).

Non-digital innovations for citizen participation were also featured in the smart city initiatives, with the notion of the living lab3 appearing most frequently within the literature reviewed (Bakici et al., 2013; Paskaleva et al., 2015; van der Graaf and Veeckman, 2014). These living labs are context dependent, being situated in specific places with specific constellations of actors and faced with distinctive challenges related to their historical trajectory (Evans et al., 2016). While living labs do address issues of broader urban transformation, this approach is very different to the kinds of disruptive urban change that smart city boosters claim can be realised through the replication of context-independent digital innovations.

Digitisation of infrastructure and environmental protection (Tension 4)

Over half of the empirical studies reported that smart city initiatives and developments had a strong focus on the digitisation of grey urban infrastructure to realise efficiency gains (14 of 32 studies), but there was no direct evidence of these initiatives directly engaging with the environmental imperative to reduce absolute levels of resource consumption. Examples of a commitment to digitising infrastructure in cities in both Europe and the USA included the development of smart energy grids (Ben Letaifa, 2015; Haarstad, 2016b; McLean et al., 2015), smart mobility systems (de Wijs et al., 3 A designated place in which experimental activity can be facilitated through public subsidies, project funding and a permissive institutional environment (Voytenko et al., 2015).

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2016), and in one case, smart water infrastructure (Lee et al., 2014). Relatively few of the empirical studies addressed the question of why municipal governments and digital technology corporations engaged in initiatives to digitise grey infrastructure. However, in Barcelona and Turin, the smart city vision was implemented to realise cost savings in the context of on-going programmes of austerity instigated by municipal governments (March and Ribera-Fumaz, 2014; Pollio, 2016).

There was little evidence of efforts to move beyond a focus on grey infrastructure and engage directly with ecosystems in an effort to protect the environment. Bakici and colleagues (2013) report that environmental sensing played a role in smart city development in Barcelona, and also present the urbanisation of green spaces as a successful outcome of the same processes of development. Non-digital forms of grey infrastructure development with potential environmental benefits were addressed in some smart city initiatives, including the development of district heat networks in Barcelona (March and Ribera-Fumaz, 2014) and the installation of renewable energy generation technologies in Austin (USA) (McLean et al., 2015).

Cultures of consumerism (Tension 5)

Within the literature reviewed, the relationship between smart city initiatives, consumerism and consumption were rarely addressed directly or only in passing (6 of 32 studies). Much of the literature made implicit arguments that the increased consumption of digital technologies would deliver environmental benefits. Also, there was some evidence of smart city initiatives encompassing digital innovations that reinforced a consumerist culture, including for example smarter (i.e. more convenient) digital payments within shops (Grimaldi and Fernandez, 2015). Garau's (2014) study of smart initiatives in Sardinia focussed on the deployment of digital technologies to enhance the ability of tourists to engage with cultural artefacts and the natural environment, to support the growth of sustainable forms of tourism. However, the wider environmental impacts of such tourism, including carbon emissions associated with travelling to Sardinia, were not addressed. Efforts to reduce the impacts of consumerism were confined to energy systems, where a number of empirical studies identified smart meters as a means to promote more efficient consumer behaviour (Lee et al., 2014; McLean et al., 2015; Wiig, 2015; Zubizarreta et al., 2016).

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5. Discussion: resolving the tensions?

The analysis of 32 academic articles suggests that the tensions evident in smart city visions are present in the practice of smart city development. Of particular note was the critique that the creation of smart cities will disempower and marginalise citizens (Tension 3). The review identified a range of initiatives, particularly data platforms and living labs, which are intended to empower citizens in processes of urban governance. From this starting point we turn to consider how smart city stakeholders might start to resolve the five tensions.

A first recommendation would be for smart cities to begin working with alternative notions of what it means for the economy to grow, as it is unlikely that all growth in the digital economy is green. A key practical challenge for smart cities is to work out which sectors of the urban digital economy need to grow and which need to shrink in order to protect the environment and promote social equity. As Janicke (2012: 13) suggests, green growth might be best understood as “both, rapid growth of green sectors and “de-growth” of others”. More radically, March (2016) argues that sustainable development could be better facilitated by shifting the smart city development imperative from economic growth to degrowth. This shift would herald the emergence of post-capitalist, digital mediated urban economies, where open source digital fabrication plays a central role in the economy of the city and the lives of its residents.

A second recommendation involves promoting social equity within the smart city by moving beyond current initiatives, where municipalities and technology companies provide tools (e.g. data platforms) and prescribe spaces (e.g. living labs) to enable citizens to participate in the processes of urban governance. This entails greater recognition of the important roles that shared public services and spaces play in social inclusion, and the potential for government intervention to redistribute the benefits of digital innovation (McLaren and Agyeman, 2015) through policy instruments such as a universal basic income. Grassroots innovations emerging from civil society (Seyfang and Smith, 2007) should be nurtured and afforded greater prominence in smart city visions and initiatives. Such innovations include maker spaces and Fablabs (Fabrication Labs) (Smith et al., 2015a, 2015b) which provide citizens with access to digital and material production. One form of grassroots digital innovation that recently attracted considerable interest among policy makers, activists and social entrepreneurs is the platform cooperative (Martin et al., 2017). This offers an alternative ownership model for the digital platforms, such as Uber and Airbnb, which increasingly shape and influence the development of smart cities. In a platform cooperative users and service providers, rather than venture capitalists, own and democratically govern the platform (Gorenflo, 2015; McLaren and Agyeman, 2015). Advocates hope that a renewal of the worker cooperative model for a digital era would offer workers employed in precarious forms of employment in digital economy greater control over working conditions and greater opportunity to share the benefits of digital innovation.

Ensuring that smart cities contribute to regional, national and international efforts to protect the environment entails moving beyond a focus on driving efficiency savings through the digitisation of urban infrastructure and digital mediated consumerism. An alternative vision for smart city infrastructure would emphasise the potential for digital technologies to enable community owned and operated systems, such as community energy and broadband systems. The digitisation of infrastructure, in particular the development of sensor networks, might be orientated to gathering data to reveal the collective impact of the city on ecosystems within and beyond its boundaries. A

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further central objective for digitising infrastructure would be to facilitate the development of a circular economy, where data would be captured to enable the identification of potentially productive uses of waste streams in real time.

A third recommendation is to consider the role of digital technologies in enabling the development, maintenance and use of green infrastructure. Although the integration of digital and green infrastructure remains limited, it is being encouraged by the European Commission (2015) Horizon2020 innovation funding programme, and initial research in the area is encouraging. For example, the Landshare platform - which enables food growers to make use of previously inaccessible green spaces – also supports physical and mental wellbeing and enables the formation of new social relationships (Harvey et al., 2014; McArthur, 2014).

Finally, alternatives to consumerism, such as the notion of collaborative consumption (Botsman and Rogers, 2010), could also form part of smart city visions and initiatives. Notwithstanding its later corporate co-option under the guise of the sharing economy (Martin, 2016), collaborative consumption is a radical alternative to a culture of consumerism. Exploiting the potential of digital platforms to reduce consumption by driving a shift from a culture of ownership to one of sharing access to resources remains a considerable opportunity.

Resolving the tensions inherent within the discourse and practices of smart-sustainable cities involves a series of implications for public and private sector actors and citizens. Many of the possibilities outlined above involve harnessing the potential of digital technology to deliver more community-owned and collaboratively managed forms of infrastructure. Within this potential future, corporate interests would need to shift from having a vested interest in facilitating business as usual to seeing the benefits of transformative urban change. There are signs that a shift is taking place, driven as much by the failings of first wave (digital) and second wave (digital-entrepreneurial) smart city efforts to gain the traction that was promised. The review identified that almost half of the studies identified co-production as a way to move beyond the tensions of smart-sustainability, and corporate partners and municipalities have never been more sensitised to the need to be driven by community needs and wants.

This line of discussion inevitably opens up two further questions: first how well-equipped are citizens and communities to engage with these opportunities to be empowered, and second, how can smart city projects and programmes be designed to address broader environmental and social concerns. Concerning citizen empowerment, some authors report a lack of interest and capacity among communities and citizens in many places, who are suspicious of any smart solutions that are seen to be forced on them (Lovell, 2016). That said, smart phones have rapidly penetrated global urban populations. As urban populations become increasingly digitally literate, it is possible that a critical mass of digital innovations and motivated citizens will prompt a broader transformation of urban infrastructure. If this occurs, a series of co-benefits can be expected. For example, owning and producing electricity would presumably drive different consumer behaviours. An important avenue for current research involves understanding where this is currently happening and how it might be scaled up. Second, and related to this, it is important to design smart city projects and programmes in ways that address broader environmental and social concerns. This can be done by involving a greater range of stakeholders in the design of projects, and through extending monitoring and assessment to include broader measures of social and environmental performance. New initiatives

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such as the European CITYkeys project offer a broader suite of smart city KPIs, although do not go as far as presenting an ecosystems approach (CITYKeys, 2017). Addressing this tension requires the smart city community to adopt an urban metabolism approach to tracing flows of energy and materials in order to understand the environmental sustainability of smart initiatives.

6. Conclusion

Smart cities are increasingly advocated by public and private sector stakeholders as the primary means to deliver urban sustainability. The idea of smart-sustainability is underpinned by the assumption that digital innovation can drive gains in operational efficiency and integration of urban infrastructure systems that will simultaneously benefit economic development, environmental protection, and social equity. These dynamics underpin the rise of the idea of the smart-sustainable city but the ability to realise these benefits in practice is supported by surprisingly little evidence and is actually undermined by a number of smart-sustainability tensions. While the smart city vision has been critiqued for reflecting techno-utopian, neoliberal approaches to urban development there is a lack of understanding of how sustainability is being articulated in actual smart city initiatives.

In this article, we identified five key tensions between smart city visions and the goals of sustainable urban development. We then conducted a systematic review of 32 empirical studies of smart city initiatives in the peer reviewed literature to reveal how these tensions are playing out in smart city initiatives across Europe and North America. The analysis revealed that smart city initiatives in practice reinforce the focus on delivering unsustainable forms of economic growth and consumerist cultures, while neglecting social equity and environmental protection. The evidence from case studies of smart cities initiatives demonstrates that where it does touch upon sustainable urban development, it tends to default to longstanding ideas of green growth. This idea developed over the previous three decades and has been subject to similar critiques to those identified and discussed above in relation to smart city visions and initiatives (Agyeman et al., 2003; Campbell, 1996; Gibbs and Krueger, 2007; Guy and Moore, 2004). There is little evidence of smart city initiatives that advance alternative or novel notions of urban and economic development, social and political inclusion or consumption. In this sense, smart loses its appeal as an innovative and emancipatory agenda and instead, is closely aligned with existing modes of urban development that rely on neoliberal, consumerist modes of economic growth.

That said, the critique identified in the literature that the creation of smart cities will disempower and marginalise citizens was questioned. The review presented a range of initiatives, particularly data platforms and living labs, which are intended to empower citizen to engage with the processes of urban governance. A key finding of this review is that the potential to empower citizens represents the key to unlocking more emancipatory and sustainable modes of smart urban development. Such a trajectory would reframe the smart-sustainable city vision as a radical alternative to existing modes of urban production and involve more revolutionary modes of urban design, management and operations. To this end, an imaginative leap on the part of digital technologists, urban developers, municipalities and citizens is needed to envision and develop these alternative forms of smart city that engage with a broader notion of sustainability that transcends the promotion of efficiency and growth, the control of individual and household behaviour, and the mediation of consumer culture.

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