Cities. London: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020. 224 pp. US$140.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-78897-287-1.
Few recent ideas have equally captivated the imaginations of politicians, corporate strategists, and citizen activists as much as the Smart City. The ubiquitous and pervasive application of information and communication technology (ICT) like big data, Internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), or robots is widely identified as a means to make cities smarter and more sustainable at a time when 55 percent of the global population resides in urban areas, produces 60 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions and consumes 78 percent of the world’s energy.
Critics of the Smart City decry it as an evocative slogan that high-tech companies, entrepreneurial politicians, and international consultants employ in order to advance their agendas. To gain a clearer understanding of this ambiguous concept, it is necessary to cut through the hyperbole and examine how existing smart city policies are actually assembled in specific places, how they are filled with meaning, and how they are implemented.
Smart Cities in Asia—Governing Development in the Era of Hyper-Connectivity, edited by Yu-Min Joo and Teck-Boon Tan, is a timely addition to the ongoing debate about the local manifestation of this globally circulating policy idea. The editors point out that so far smart city debates have crystallized mainly around Western examples, in cities which face very different urbanization issues and are marked by contrasting governance traditions and socio-cultural contexts. Apart from some canonical examples of smart cities in Asia like Songdo in Korea and Singapore’s Smart Nation, the authors argue, the Asian region with its rapidly expanding megacities has been critically understudied. The volume presents ten empirical case studies that help to develop a clearer understanding of why and how national and local governments are pushing the use of ICT to optimize urban processes and city governance.
Part 1 presents the cases of Singapore, Hong Kong, Taipei, South Korea, and Japan. The Four Asian Tigers and Japan share a history of strong developmental states that have robustly guided economic development and embraced cutting-edge technology with the aim of “catching up” with the advanced economies of the West. Smart city initiatives are advanced in many of these contexts as a national development goal.
Chapter 2 exemplifies this with Singapore’s famous Smart Nation initiative of 2014. It is the latest national development strategy, which is built on a foundation of four decades of technological innovations and digitalization master plans, promoting an informatization of the island state long before the term smart city had come into fashion. Since its independence in 1965, economic competitiveness has been regarded as key to the survival of this resource-poor country. Singapore also initiated the ASEAN Smart City Network in order to increase its standing as a regional and global leader in the field and has partnered with governments across Asia for the actual construction of intelligent cities.
Similarly, chapter 4 shows how Taipei has formed its own international smart city network, called Go Smart. Through this city diplomacy initiative, Taipei is not only seeking to establish itself as a hub for global smart city development, but also to promote direct “people-to-people relations” (68) with local governments around the world, in a bid to help overcome the country’s diplomatic isolation. Moreover, owing to Taiwan’s authoritarian past, a highly active civil society has pushed for citizens’ access to decision-making processes, which has led to a strong emphasis on participatory governance in smart-city policies.
Chapter 5 discusses the experience of South Korea and highlights the importance of proper conceptualization and framing of smart city policies. The country was one of the global leaders in the domain and pioneered advanced computing technologies for efficient city operations as early as 2003. Expectations were high, and the Korean public anticipated nothing less than “totally transformed city operations and citizen life” (79). However, the resulting “ubiquitous city” was a largely technology-centric, vertical approach, conceived as a series of discrete smart solutions and not as an innovation-oriented horizontal process, stressing “continuous innovations, using technology as a tool, not an end” (79). The ensuing disappointment led to a “smart city winter”: a decade-long development slump during which only a few intelligent city projects were rolled out.
Part 2 of the book contains the cases of the “two Asian giants,” India and China, the two most populous countries in the world, where a substantial number of smart city policies and concrete projects are being implemented by the national governments. Most famous here is India’s Smart City Mission of 2015, with the stated goal of building 100 smart cities country-wide within five years. Lastly, part 3 discusses second-tier smart cities in the two ASEAN countries Indonesia and Thailand, as well as Songdo in Korea.
The book is strongest when chapter authors develop their own conceptual ideas and approach their subject critically. By highlighting the political and socio-cultural contexts, the authors of the chapters that work best help us to understand why and how smart city policies are assembled in specific localities.
The volume is at its weakest when chapter contributors merely list policies and instruments one after another and don’t challenge the techno-centric smart city narrative claiming that technology will automatically fix all urban problems. Moreover, a concluding chapter is much missed, in which the editors would contrast the different studies around common themes like the relationship between national and local governments and tech companies, the role of citizens in the making of their smart cities, and policy mobilities between different Asian countries and elsewhere, to name but a few.
Finally, when the editors suggest that smart city developments in Asia are “in stark contrast to the more sceptical perceptions and privacy concerns found in the West” (2), it would have been rewarding to see what exactly they understand as critical differences and what as common ground. In this context the famous scenes of anti-surveillance protesters in Hong Kong come to mind, when the protesters tore down smart lamp posts in 2019 out of concern that the China-friendly government could use these for face recognition.
Clearly, how data is being used and by whom is something that should concern all citizens around the world.
Christian Dimmer
Waseda University, Tokyo