Abstract

The discourse on smart cities has been dominated by a functionalist vision of leveraging data technology to solve urban problems, and critiques of its technocratic intentions. Regardless of this discourse, smart city experiments have been conducted in several cities, and on the other hand, data technologies are rapidly permeating things in our daily lives and becoming a fundamental part of urban life. Based on the recognition of the inseparability of ‘digital technologies’ in future cities, this article argues that we need to go beyond critiquing smart cities as imaginaries drawn from ideological discourses to recognize them as urban practices in the digital world and analyze their concrete mode. To this end, I first point out the blind spots in the critical discourse on smart cities and the limitations of normative approaches. Next, the mechanisms, by which urbanity itself is simultaneously reconfigured alongside the data technologies for smart cities that integrates technology society and space is examined from the view point of subjectivity and social interaction with relevant discussions and examples. It then explores the dilemma of publicness in the “deeply digitalized” urban like smart cities, and argues that a new concept of publicness is needed. Lastly, I emphasizes the importance of the design of things and spaces as a modality of the technology-urban nexus and propose that the analysis of the design can become one of the critical methodologies for addressing the smart city phenomenon.