Page 22 - Kaleidoscope Academic Conference Proceedings 2021

market, rather than being active, engaged participants, in which smart city initiatives are
conceived in terms of rights, citizenship, the public good, and the urban commons. This has
resulted in pushback by civil society organizations against technocratic, top-down deployments
of smart city technologies.

The third key issue is institutional factors. City administrations are large, complex
organizations consisting of many departments, with entrenched structures, ways of working,
and legacy systems that create a high degree of embedded path dependency. They are also full
of internal politics, fiefdoms, and competing interests. As such, they are not easy to re-orientate
with respect to shifting how units and staff think about and undertake their work, especially
when they directly challenge the paradigmatic training and ideals of professionals schooled to
think and act in certain ways (e.g. planners, engineers, architects, educators, social workers,
community development workers). A smart city approach promises to create a more nimble,
flexible, leaner data-driven, efficient, horizontal organization, cutting across departmental
silos, reducing labor and reconfiguring how work is performed. They thus promise to disrupt
the status quo and radically change working conditions. Consequently, smart city initiatives
and policy often run into internal inertia and resistance by managers and workers who are
reluctant to embrace change. In addition, most cities have multiscale systems of administration
and governance, yet smart city technologies are designed to work at scale across whole city-
regions. In other words, there might be dozens of public agencies responsible for different
geographic areas and services who might be operating quite independently of each other and
aligning their interests, operations, procurement, and technical systems is difficult. For
example, Dublin has four local governments, London has 33, and Boston 101.

The fourth issue is a sense that a great deal of smart city technology is not yet mature and is
unsuitable for mainstreaming. Technologies are still being developed and tested. This is borne
out in the large number of pilot projects and what has been termed "experimental" or "test-bed"
urbanism or "living labs". Practically all EU-funded smart city projects have this status, being
initiatives to scope out, create and implement proof-of-concepts, and share knowledge about
efforts, rather than being market-ready and proven to work in practice. City administrations are
reluctant to invest in technology that has a limited track record, where the product and price
will be significantly improved in a few years.

The final part of the paper turns its attention to standards and standardization as factors that
potentially limit adoption, but also create potential solutions. Dozens of competing smart city
standards have now been produced, relating to specific technologies and smart cities more
broadly. They are having varying degrees of impact in terms of influencing the creation of
smart cities. Following the work of Jim White, some consideration is given to the politics of
standards in terms of propagating systems, steering outcomes towards desirable goals, and
assuring city leaders and decision makers to narrow the adoption gap. Questions reflect on what
it is that standards do and who are the beneficiaries of standards? Do standards reinforce
technocratic, instrumental, and top-down means of managing and governing cities and enable
the more efficient monetization of citizens, or do they provide a means of countering more
pernicious effects and democratizing of smart city technologies? Throughout the presentation,
the argument will be illustrated with examples drawn from two large-scale smart city projects
that included the development and assessment of smart city technologies: the Programmable
City project (2013–2018, funded by the European Research Council) and Building City
Dashboards project (2016–2020, funded by Science Foundation Ireland).

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