Digital Smartness: Rethinking Communities and Citizenship in the Face of ‘Smart’ Technology

Abstract

This introduction to the Asiascape: Digital Asia special issue on ‘smart communities’ discusses how new technologies have created a paradigm of ‘smartness’ that informs how innovators, entrepreneurs, policy makers, and administrators imagine sociality in urban spaces. This is visible in plans for turning Singapore, Hong Kong, or Taipei into ‘smart cities’, and countries such as India, Japan, and South Korea are similarly rolling out initiatives that promise to revamp urban life across the region. Such ‘solutionist’ attempts to address the complexities of contemporary social life through technology cleverly fuse surveillance techniques, capitalist structures, free labour practices, and neoliberal governance to create urban utopias of safety, convenience, and community. We have asked the contributors to this special issue to explore what people do, through and with digital technologies, as they establish, claim, contest, and alter various social relations in the name of ‘smart community’, and this article introduces and discusses their results.