Illiberal smart urbanism? Lessons from the politics of state-led smart securitisation in Miskolc, Hungary

Abstract

This article makes the case for the ‘illiberal smart city’ in response to a growing body of literature on the post-politicisation of smart urbanism. Drawing on the centralised rollout of an intelligent CCTV network in Miskolc, Hungary, under a regime that calls itself ‘illiberal’, the article proposes an alternative perspective on the politics of smart urbanism in continuation of dialogues on the ‘actually existing smart city’. To this end, two key claims will be put forward. First, in contrast to mainstream post-political understandings of smart urbanism, Miskolc’s smart surveillance project is wrapped up in an explicitly right-wing populist, and in certain respects racialised social ordering campaign. Second, not only is the CCTV network a key manifestation of a populist agenda, but it also reproduces the illiberal smart city through engineering a new consensus around securitisation without responding to the root causes of crime and segregation. Rather than engaging in depth with the digital technologies themselves, the article instead focuses on the underpinning politics of smart surveillance in Miskolc to show how, in the project’s implementation, post-political ideas are replaced by the overt campaigning machinery of the illiberal state.