provincialising

A three year international research collaboration between University of Neuchâtel and University College London on Indian and South African smart cities. Through a comparative study of smart cities in these two countries, this project will research globally circulating urban development narratives around ICT and data-driven urbanism, its ‘mutations’ in different urban contexts and ‘urban hacking’ at the scale of everyday life...

smart cities

The pandemic smart city

Ola Söderström, 28.4.2020

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Note:

An expanded version of this post with other texts from our team on the situation in South Africa, Singapore and India will form a forthcoming special issue in a journal that we are presently preparing.

Our project team is scattered across different countries (South Africa, Singapore, India, UK and Switzerland). The pandemic and the different forms of lockdown we are witnessing arrived where we work and live like a wave at different moments in time. Lockdown happened first in Singapore and Switzerland because of their proximity respectively to China and Italy. The UK, due to the erratic crisis management by its government, came last.
 

But now we, all nine of us, have been working from home for weeks, observing day by day how the response to the pandemic is closely intertwined with different layers of the smart city. Institutions, organisations and people we are working with have in recent weeks stopped, reshaped or reoriented their activities. The technologies, infrastructures, data and initiatives in which they are involved have been re-engineered in the context of the pandemic and its governance. A pandemic smart city has emerged under our eyes...

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