Photo Essay Located in Guadalajara, Mexico’s third largest metropolitan area, La Perla District aims to be “a city within a city”— a sustainable community where residents thrive, prosperity exudes in the air, and creativity sparks (Distrito La Perla, 2020). The masterplan was designed by SOM architects for the real estate developer Grupo Ouest. The vision…… Continue reading La Perla District: “A city within a city”
Category: English
The “What” and “Why” of Smart Cities
By Natalia Sandoval Quezada. From time to time, new models of urban development arise offering a variety of actions to improve the experience of life in the city, trying to respond to local interests. Some of them fail to secure support from either the academic or political sphere, while others become relevant, precise, and even…… Continue reading The “What” and “Why” of Smart Cities
How do we take postcolonial critique seriously from a location in the global North?
Last week I attended a meeting of Urban Agency III: Towards a Sustainable Integration of Disciplines in Urban Studies, a scientific research network that I am part of (alongside Guy Baeten, Carina Listerborn, Defne Kadioglu, Lorena Melgaço and Chiara Valli) through the Institute for Urban Research, IUR, at Malmö University. Urban Agency III seeks to…… Continue reading How do we take postcolonial critique seriously from a location in the global North?
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…… Continue reading Future research avenues for smart city research with a focus in the global South?
Smart city research in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic
This blog has been mostly dormant since its creation in 2020. Like Favilla and Pita (2020) reflected on their own journeys as researchers, beginning a qualitative research project that relied on interviews and field visits halfway across the world, in pandemic times, was not easy. While a body of work on remote methods, mobile probes,…… Continue reading Smart city research in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic
CfPs: Beyond Smart Cities
I’m happy to share I’m part of the organizing committee putting together the conference Beyond Smart Cities Today: Power, Justice and Resistance. The event is hosted by the Institute for Urban Research, Malmö University and will take place on June 16-17, 2022. The organizing team is thrilled to confirm the participation of the following speakers:…… Continue reading CfPs: Beyond Smart Cities
Welcome!
The project Smart Cities in the Global South: Contributing to Cosmopolitan Urban Studies has been running now for a couple of months at Malmö University so this blog and website are way overdue. Welcome! It has been a challenge to launch a research project in the middle of a global pandemic given the stress and…… Continue reading Welcome!
Smart cities in the global south 