Smart Cities: Towards a New Citizenship Regime? A Discourse Analysis of the British Smart City Standard

Growing practice interest in smart cities has led to calls for a less technology-oriented and more citizen-centric approach. In response, this articles investigates the citizenship mode promulgated by the smart city standard of the British Standards Institution. The analysis uses the concept of citizenship regime and a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods to discern key discursive frames defining the smart city and the particular citizenship dimensions brought into play. The results confirm an explicit citizenship rationale guiding the smart city (standard), although this displays some substantive shortcomings and contradictions. The article concludes with recommendations for both further theory and practice development

The Smart City as Global Discourse: Storylines and Critical Junctures across 27 Cities

Despite its growing ubiquitous presence, the smart city continues to struggle for definitional clarity and practical import. In response, this study interrogates the smart city as global discourse network by examining a collection of key texts associated with cities worldwide. Using a list of 5,553 cities, a systematic webometric exercise was conducted to measure hit counts produced by searching for ‘smart city’. Consequently, 27 cities with the highest validated hit counts were selected. Next, 346 online texts were collected from among the top 20 hits across each of the selected cities, and comprehensively analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively using AntConc software. The findings confirm the presence of a strong globalising narrative which emphasises world cities as ‘best practice’ models. Moreover, they reveal the smart city’s association – beyond the quest for incremental, technical improvements of current urban systems and processes – with a pronounced transformative governance agenda. The article identifies five critical junctures (interlocking discourses) at the heart of the evolving smart city discourse regime; these shed light on the ongoing boundary work in which the smart city is engaged and which contain significant unresolved tensions. The paper concludes with a discussion of resulting implications for research, policy and practice

The Smart City as Global Discourse: Storylines and Critical Junctures across 27 Cities

Despite its growing ubiquitous presence, the smart city continues to struggle for definitional clarity and practical import. In response, this study interrogates the smart city as global discourse network by examining a collection of key texts associated with cities worldwide. Using a list of 5,553 cities, a systematic webometric exercise was conducted to measure hit counts produced by searching for “smart city.” Consequently, 27 cities with the highest validated hit counts were selected. Next, 346 online texts were collected from among the top 20 hits across each of the selected cities, and analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively using AntConc software. The findings confirm, first, the presence of a strong globalizing narrative which emphasizes world cities as “best practice” models. Second, they reveal the smart city’s association—beyond the quest for incremental, technical improvements of current urban systems and processes—with a pronounced transformative governance agenda. The article identifies five critical junctures at the heart of the evolving smart city discourse regime; these shed light on the ongoing boundary work in which the smart city is engaged and which contain significant unresolved tensions. The paper concludes with a discussion of resulting implications for research, policy, and practice.Integral Design and Managemen