Authoritarian Smart City: A Research Agenda

Abstract

Despite the prevalence of smart city discourse across many disciplines, governance systems, and policy-making bodies, its conceptual foundations are based either on semi-/democratic political constellations or deemed apolitical. This research agenda highlights the embeddedness of any smart city agenda within a more extensive political regime. Furthermore, the research agenda focuses on the authoritarian socio-technical imaginaries and their role in shaping smart city policies, implementation, and governance. The research agenda also highlights the research on authoritarian surveillance and its interconnection with authoritarian smart city conceptualisation. Furthermore, it offers three research areas for authoritarian surveillance: authoritarian practices in democratic contexts, the use of surveillance technologies for maintaining autocratic power, and authoritarian structure and governance of platform corporations. Finally, similar to critical voices in critical data studies and the field of information and communication technology for development, the research agenda aims to demystify the prevalent assumption of the good smart city that fixes all injustices that socio-political endeavours have not achieved. It argues that every technologically enabled tool or platform reflects the political constellations in which it is embedded and affects and produces new socio-technical interlinkages that could never be apolitical.