PROJECT THEMATIC
Smart cities as a proposed solution to efficient urban governance has gained traction since 2000 because of the deep involvement of global IT companies, the support of funding programmes from EU, DfID and USAid and the interest of national governments and urban municipalities.
As a consequence, retrofitted smart city ‘packages’ or fully-fledged smart ‘city in a box’ are increasingly making their way into national agendas in the global south. Through a comparative study of smart cities in India and South Africa, 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. The outcomes of the project will thus move beyond a critical stance to provide prosaic visions of smart urbanism that are alternative, empowering and knowledge intensive.
This project begins with the broad hypothesis that the global circulation of smart cities (new cities from scratch and retrofitted) are translated in different global south contexts through local visions, technologies and built manifestations. This will form the basis of developing an empirical and theoretical research agenda around ‘smart urbanism’ that captures the local historical, political and alternative forms of data-driven urbanism from the grassroots.








This November,
we invite you to our online conference
25-26
NOVEMBER
2021
URBAN DATA POLITICS
IN TIMES OF CRISIS
This conference aims to engage with data politics and crises in all its urban expressions – big data, deep data, small data, no data, data scarcity and dataveillance alongside its political and social implications in a context where our 'data bodies' are increasingly the markers of our identities and experiences.
A select panel of speakers will provide a mix of virtual and in-person presentations – all streamed to an online platform.
We invite those interested in attending the conference
– either virtually or in-person in Neuchâtel – to register their interest using the link to our conference website below.
Publications
Meet the team leaders
Location
University of Neuchâtel
Institute of Geography (IGG)
Espace Tilo-Frey 1,
CH-2000 Neuchâtel
Contact us
+ 41 32 718 1812
provesmartcities@gmail.com
