The complexities of smartification: Exploring horizontal tensions in smart city governance

Abstract

Smart cities build on visions for using technology to optimise various infrastructural functions andãmake city management more efficient, sustainable, and reliable. However, scholarship on smart cities has drawn attention to how data-centric planning simplifies the complexity of the urban environment and how a dichotomous approach to smart cities as either top-down or bottom-up may be overly reductive. This paper attempts to remedy this divide by highlighting the horizontal tensions in smart city planning, where tensions around implementing smart technologies appear as multiple actors and discourses converge in creating complex governance structures. We offer a case study of how scalar, temporal and social tensions around implementing smart city technologies are negotiated, based on interviews with employees in a Swedish municipality and several municipal corporations. We elaborate on three themes around time, the role of the municipality and infrastructure to gain a deeper understanding of the governance of and attitudes towards smartification. The interviewees described the complexities of implementing smart technology in reality, spanning various scales and intermingling public and private interests. These issues matter for how the municipality and the municipal corporations work with implementing smart technologies, making it anything but a straightforward process.