A Smart Right to the City—Grounding Corporate Storytelling and Questioning Smart Urbanism

• Main Authors: Anke Strüver, Rivka Saltiel, Nicolas Schlitz, Bernhard Hohmann, Thomas Höflehner, Barbara Grabher
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-08-01
• Series: Sustainability
• Subjects: smart urbanism; entrepreneurial urbanisation; technological fix; waste management; mobility infrastructures; social justice
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/17/9590

Against the backdrop of multiple ongoing crises in European cities related to socio-spatial injustice, inequality and exclusion, we argue for a smart right to the city. There is an urgent need for a thorough account of the entrepreneurial mode of technocapitalist smart urbanism. While much of both affirmative and critical research on Smart City developments equate or even reduce smartness to digital infrastructures, we put actual smartness—in the sense of social justice and sustainability—at centre stage. This paper builds on a fundamental structural critique of (1) the entrepreneurial city (Harvey) and (2) the capitalist city (Lefebvre). Drawing upon Lefebvre’s right to the city as a normative framework, we use Smart City developments in the city of Graz as an illustration of our argument. Considering strategies of waste and mobility management, we reflect on how they operate as spatial and technical fixes—fixing the limits of capitalism’s growth. By serving specific corporate interests, these technocapitalist strategies yet fail to address the underlying structural causes of pressing urban problems and increasing inequalities. With Lefebvre’s ongoing relevant argument for the importance of use value of urban infrastructures as well as his claim that appropriation and participation are essential, we discuss common rights to the city: His framework allows us to envision sustainable and just—actually smart—alternatives: alternatives to technocapitalist entrepreneurial urbanisation. In this respect, a smart right to the city is oriented towards the everyday needs of all inhabitants.