Future research avenues for smart city research with a focus in the global South?

Research on smart urbanism with a global South focus has blossomed in the last few years in Anglophone academia, building and reacting to the critical interventions in the subdiscipline (e.g., Hollands, 2008; Kitchin, 2014; Söderström et al., 2014) but also proposing new avenues for research. There is work that has explored smart or data-driven urbanism in Brazil (Luque-Ayala and Neves Maia, 2019), Chile (Jirón et al., 2021), India (Datta, 2015), Kenya (Guma, 2019), the Philippines (Mouton, 2020), and South Africa (Odendaal, 2006). The critique has highlighted how “smart” initiatives in the global South tend to ignore poverty and inequality (Guma, 2019; Luque-Ayala and Neves Maia, 2019), giving rise to what Watson (2014) refers to as “fantasy cities.” Other authors have warned of the risk of homogenizing models that replicate a specific type of Eurocentric modernity (Jirón et al., 2021; Melgaço and Milagres, 2023). Along similar lines, there has been arguments smart urbanism might accentuate colonial legacies and reproduce neo-imperial relations (Datta and Odendaal, 2019; Jirón et al., 2022; Kwet, 2019). Last, but not least, scholars have also pointed out the importance of acknowledging everyday urban practices that contest and mold the smart city—sometimes in unexpected directions (Guma and Monstadt, 2020; Odendaal, 2021; Yeo, 2023).

However, there are still several gaps in our understanding of smart urbanism in the context of the global South. We have seen that “smart” research has followed the general trend in Urban Studies that seeks to postcolonize and decolonize the field through, for example, a less EuroAmerican centered approach and the development of comparative tactics (Fonseca Alfaro et al., 2022).  The work of Miller et al. (2021), has, for example, proposed a “more-than-Global-North smart city research agenda” that not only seeks to compare across different geographies, but also questions the nature of Eurocentric knowledge production. I think we will continue to see a move from the study of single case studies to an attempt to understand smart cities through more comparative research, particularly global South-global South and global South-global North analyses. As smart city initiatives continue to grow in most corners of the global South, there will also be a need to concentrate our attention in “secondary cities” (Ranchod, 2020). Another avenue of research avenue is a move towards integrating other aspects of data-driven urbanism such as digital platforms (Cirolia et al., 2023; Leszczynski, 2020; Sadowski, 2021) and robotic and automation technologies (Luusua et al., 2022; Macrorie et al., 2021).

Critical urban scholarship has plenty of work to catch up with smart urbanism, particularly in the global South.

References

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