AAG 2015: Technology and the cities of tomorrow: Exploring the smart city imagery (and beyond)

Outline :  The relation between technology and the urban is constantly evolving over time, producing different urban forms, ways of life, and alternative ways of thinking about possible futures for cities. The diffused idea that technologies will play a huge role in urban life in the near future gives origin to a number of utopian and dystopian idea about the city, including for example the idea that technologies will solve our current environmental problems without meaningfully changing our way of life, or to the idea that security technologies will limit our freedoms by constantly checking our behaviours. Many of these ideas are mobilized in the current debate about the so-called 'smart city’, that is basically an ambiguous concept referring to the possibility of building new cities, or restructuring existing ones, so to encompass ICTs, environmental sustainability, quality of life, social cohesion, and economic growth. The session wishes to explore alternative understandings and alternative imaginaries of the relation between technology and the city. Contributions may include (but are not limited to): cultural analysis of utopian and dystopian technological imaginaries; the global circulation of smart city imaginaries; the politics of new urban technologies; politico-economic perspectives on the regimes of accumulation triggered by new technologies; the role of major multinational enterprises in shaping technological imaginaries; theoretical and methodological perspectives on the exploration of the relation between technologies and the urban.