1.
Smart Cities:
A Skeptic’s View
Stephen Graham,
Newcastle University

2.
The Seduction
of “Enacted
Environments”
(Dana Cuff)...
• High modernist dreams of
perfect, real-time, remote
control, anticipation, clarity
• Ubiquitous computing/Internet
of Things/social media
• ‘Big Data’ and ‘Data Fusion’
• Geodata
• Optimisation
• Anticipation
• Robotisation
• Blurs into discourses
surrounding “sustainable cities’,
‘resilient cities’, ‘creative cities’
etc etc.
Figure 1: the cyberne0c city
Rela%onship between smart ci%es and IT (Hitachi
2013:14) Hitachi, 2013: 14)

3.
Those Damned Silos!
Panoptic Dreams?
Configuring urban crises as
requiring, of necessity, ‘smart
city’ OS cures
“Today’s cities are based on separate domains with no
real ability to be managed as an entire entity. City
managers have no single place to get real-time status or
historical reports of city events. Older systems are
domain-specific and are not concerned with the
consequences on other domains. Daily operations of
cities generate vast amounts of data from many different
sources but cities often lack the ability to visualize and
extract meaningful information” IBM 2012.

4.
“If you believe the marke0ng hype, though, we’re on
the cusp of an urban future in which embedded
sensors, ubiquitous cameras and beacons, networked
smartphones, and the opera0ng systems that link them
all together, will produce unprecedented efficiency,
connec0vity, and social harmony. We’re transforming
the idealized topology of the open web and Internet of
Things into urban form” Shannon MaPern

5.
Deterministic.
Self-Evident
and Messianic
Discourses...
‘Smart city’ concepts “tend.. to be discussed casually,
as if it were self-evident that all one need do to finally
“solve” the city is to weave sensors into the urban fabric
by the million, trawl the relevant social networks for
geotagged utterances, and apply just the right analytic
algorithms to the ever-mounting tally of terabytes
captured this way” Adam Greenfield

6.
Surveillant-Simula0on:
Data Feeds and Visualiza0on
Socie0es of Control

7.
Four Areas of Critique:
(1) We’ve Been Here Before (Many Times!)
“As technical solu0ons to social problems, informa0on and communica0ons
technologies encapsulate the promise of order over disarray … as a path to an
emancipatory poli0cs of modernity” Hannah Knox

8.
Michael Benedikt (1991):
‘Cyberspace’ would work by:
"decontaminating the natural and urban landscapes,
redeeming them, saving them from the chain-dragging
bulldozers of the paper industry, from the diesel smoke of
courier and post-office trucks, from jet fuel flames and
clogged airports, from billboards, trashy and pretentious
architecture, hour-long freeway communities, ticket lines,
choked subways... from all the inefficiencies, pollution
(chemical and informational), and corruptions attendant to
moving information attached to things across, over and
under the vast and bumpy surface of the earth rather than
letting it fly free in the soft hail of electrons that is
cyberspace."

9.
• Hitachi, MicrosoY, IBM, Cisco, Siemens etc. Ava Kofman (2014) “the
assump0on that the collec0on of residents’ data is a useful and
immensely profitable enterprise”
• “’City OS’ spin-offs promise that we can know the city in its en0rety:
scaled down to the size of a microchip, dematerialized into data clouds,
predictable and itera0ve
• As top-down city design becomes a market commodity, we will soon be
forced to choose between the urban opera0ng systems we want to
inhabit”.
(2) Corporate Push into Urban Opera0ng Systems (UOSs)

10.
And yet “the systems currently being sold to
municipali0es, and the public, under the rubric of
“smart ci0es” have nothing to do with ci0es at all.
They are, by and large, repurposings of exis0ng, off-
the-shelf technology, force fit into contexts in
which they may or may not make any sense and
may or may not prove useful, dressed with the
most superficial mantle of metropolitan glamour”
Adam Greenfield

11.
(3) Glitzy and
Troubling
Exemplars:
Elite, Privatised
Capsules
“In marketing materials and press releases for smart city
initiatives, we hear about idyllic dashboards,
switchboards, and control rooms, artifices that enable
government decision makers to interface with data
streams being produced by the city and simultaneously
obscure the process from those people who inhabit it”
Lily Bui (2014) Sensor Journalism Lab

12.
Foster’s Masdar City, Abu Dhabi; Songdo, South Korea; Eko Atlantic, Lagos
“Songdo is as much a protocol as it is a city: other territories can ‘download’ its
plans. Its technology was bought by other cities before it had even been built in
Songdo itself. Its master plan is being exported to Ecuador; meanwhile, China has
purchased kits from similar companies to make its cities more closely resemble
Singapore. Nations dissolve into transnational, portable, cities in a box. With
simulation emerging as the dominant paradigm, material and lived histories are
rendered obsolete” Ava Kofman (2014)

13.
Moreover, key ICT entrepreneurs are pivotal members of the so-called
alt-right movement, and are pushing elite island city utopias run in
authoritarian ways as future urban panaceas

14.
“Americas way of thinking about
conflicts is changing,
accommoda0ng reluctantly a
complicated world of distributed,
highly variable threats both in
civilian and baPlefield
environments where the front lines
are no longer brightly lit.”
Mark P. Mills, ICX Technologies, Inc.
(4) Blurring With the ‘New Military Urbanism”

15.
“Airport surveillance, internet
filters, passport tracking devices,
legal deten0on without criminal
charges, security internment
camps, secret trials, “free speech
zones”, DNA profiles, border
walls and fences, erosion of the
line between internal security
and external military ac0on –
these security ac0vi0es resonate
together, engendering a na0onal
security machine that pushes
numerous issues outside the
range of legi0mate dissent and
mobilizes the populace to
support new security and
surveillance prac0ces against
underspecified enemies.”
William Connolly
.

16.
Jordan Crandall:
Biometrics, tracking, ‘armed vision’ and the
‘coloniza:on of the now’
Jordan Crandall: a militarisa0on through ‘Armed
Vision’: “Tracking is an an0cipatory form of seeing”
”Iden0fying targets becomes the role of sta0s0cal
algorithms which siY the mass and flux of registered
and sensed data searching for [Mark
Seltzer’s]”‘sta0s0cal persons’”
“A gradual coloniza0on of the now, a now always
slightly ahead of itself”
“While civilian images are embedded in processes of
iden0fica0on based on reflec0on, militarised
perspec0ves collapse iden0fica0on processes into
“Id-ing” - a one-way channel of iden0fica0on in which
a conduit, a database, and a body are aligned and
calibrated” (Crandall 1999)

17.
Premediation,
Norms and
Anticipatory
Surveillance

18.
The homeland security and emergency management market was
valued at USD 526.10 Billion in 2017 and is projected to reach
USD 742.06 Billion by 2023, at a rate of 5.90% during the
forecast period (marketsandmarkets.com).

19.
‘Fusion’ and the ‘Surveillance-Security-Military-
Industrial Complex’

20.
Links to a Wider Authoritarian Shift: “What we are handing
the administrators of a smart city is a suite of all the tools
they would need to isolate, quash or even prevent
whatever conduct they defined as undesirable”
Adam Greenfield (2013)
.

21.
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Accesses
20 Amen Proirems
Worldwide
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• 3rd PARTY/LIAISON
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• REGIONAL
9D SCS
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50.000 World-wide Implants
LARGE CABLE
20 MaJor Accesses
• FORNSAT
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TOP SECHET//COMINTI/REL TO USA, ALPS, CAN, GBR, NZL
TOP SECRET/ICON/INT/MEL TiO USA, ALPS, CAN, GEM, NZL
I- TO Pin'
Driver 1: Worldwide SIGINT/Defense Cryptologic
Platform

22.
NSA “Dagger
Complex”
Griesheim,
Germany,
2014

23.
Oakland ‘Domain Awareness Center’ as C4ISR (Command,
Control, Communica0ons, Computers, Intelligence,
Surveillance and Reconnaissance)
“Oakland is one of
the most diverse
ci0es in the country.
It’s also home to a
violent, oYen
unaccountable police
department”
Yasha Levine

24.
Conclusion:
Danger that urbanism is being depoli0cised, it’s poli0cs
obfuscated, through a totalising and fe0shis0c obsession with
computable data!
“Were he alive today, [Lewis] Mumford would reject the
creeping no0on that the city is simply the internet writ large. He
would remind us that the processes of city-making are more
complicated than wri0ng parameters for rapid spa0al
op0miza0on. He would inject history and happenstance. The city
is not a computer. This seems an obvious truth, but it is being
challenged now (again) by technologists (and poli0cal actors)
who speak as if they could reduce urban planning to
algorithms.” Shannon MaPern

25.
Conven0onal smart city paradigms tend to:
• Be realist: Uncri0cally assume objec0vity of data
• Be presented as self-evident
• Be generic: assume applicability to all ci0es, everywhere
• Privilege quan0ta0ve over qualita0ve and space over place in truth
claims
• Assert that ICTs per se are solu0ons to urban problems, not part of the
problems themselves
• Depoli0cise or postpoli0cise: Neglect wider social, environmental and
poli0cal crises
• Neglect ques0ons of jus0ce, ci0zenship and the right to the city
• Deny knowledges that are uncomputable
• Be top-down and not grassroots-led
• Inscribe ethical, social, cultural and poli0cal judgements and
inequali0es into the secret agencies of code; and
• Overlap worryingly with wider processes of urban securi0sa0on whilst
camouflaging such processes

26.
Thank you!
Steve.graham@ncl.ac.uk

27.
Place not space: Must match scepticism with
critical and democratic insurgent practices
• Data democratisation;
hacktivism; open code;
challenging depoliticizing
discourses of techno-rationality
• Expose creeping power of
surveillance-security-military-
industrial complexes
• Undermine anti democratic
control logics of top-down
‘smart city’ paradigms and
securitisation/criminalisation of
ICT-based activism