Seminar (TURBA Lab): "The utopian logics of smart Stockholm"

Program

Abstract

In this presentation, I will try to give a broad overview over my doctoral research and preliminary findings. My thesis explores how smart urbanism is perceived as improving urban futures by exploring the utopian logics embedded within such urban development initiatives, using the smart city initiative in Stockholm, Sweden, as a case. Smart cities continue to proliferate globally, and understanding the ideals driving such urban developments is key if we are to critically engage with the potentials that smart urbanism seek to realize. Perhaps surprisingly, scholarship on utopianism is seldomly applied to further understandings of smart city initiatives. Where such connections are made, they mainly serve the purpose of describing or prescribing. When describing, scholars label and critique “smart utopias.” Others use utopia prescriptively, searching for and/or constructing alternative pathways for smart urbanism. While these uses of utopianism have clearly contributed to furthering understandings and critiques of the smart city and its promises, my thesis argues for an alternative way of bringing utopia into dialogue with the smart city, namely as an analytical tool. Drawing on theories upholding the importance of utopia as a social critique, particularly Ernst Bloch and Henri Lefebvre, the thesis seeks to unravel the utopian logics of smart city projects. The method mirrors that of the theoretical foundation, and, more specifically, ‘utopia as method,’ as developed by sociologist Ruth Levitas, is employed. This method gives importance to the analytical function of exploring policymaking based on the configuring of utopian thought within them. The thesis demonstrates that smart urbanism in Stockholm is characterized by utopian logics of visibility, predictability, and controllability. Further, the thesis suggests that through approaching urban improvement through the lens of smart technologies, public administrations are shifting the mandate of the public sector itself, towards the management of data and technologies, encouraging privatization in a more foundational way that scholarship on smart cities have hitherto acknowledged.

Marikken Wullf-Wathne

PhD student at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and NIBR of the Oslo Metropolitan University and Visting Researcher at TURBA Lab.

Her research explores digitization in urban development, and in particular the “utopian logics” associated with the development of smart cities.