Provincialising smart urbanism further, from the Global East: Articulating the smart city in the context of Hungary’s authoritarian state capitalism

Abstract

This paper aims at advancing recent attempts, within the ever-expanding critical scholarship on ‘smart cities’, to ‘provincialise’ smart urbanism. First, it proposes to do so empirically by extending the scope of the provincialising agenda to the (relationally conceived) ‘Global Easts’ through a conjunctural analysis of Hungary’s smart urbanism. Second, by focusing on how the state-steered character of Hungary’s smart urbanism differs from that of much-discussed Asian examples of neoliberal-developmental urbanism, the paper develops a state-focused relational lens that draws on scholarship on new state capitalism concerned with how relations between state and capital and shifting configurations of political and economic power constitute smart urban development. This lens helps to direct our attention to the market-orienting (or -distorting) actions of the solidifying authoritarian state capitalist Orbán regime in the narrowly conceived field of smart city policymaking, and to how creeping centralisation-through-digitalisation and the expansion of the state-dominated capitalism in the IT sector shape the actualisation of smart urbanism, albeit weakened by the broader political-economic (il)logics of the regime. Given worldwide trends of ever-more assertive state intervention shaping post-smart urbanism driven by artificial intelligence, the paper underlines the broader relevance of a context-sensitive provincialising approach with a state-focused approach devoid of orientalist inclinations.