From Smart Urbanism to the Data-Driven City

From the smart urbanism of the 2010s to platform and AI urbanism(s) of the present-future, the ‘data-driven city’ has been imagined as a functional and controlled whole, impulsed and regulated by autonomous (humans off-the-loop) systems, and fed through powerful data infrastructure. AI urbanism, in particular, manifests the current climax of the long-standing desire to control digital technology in the city yet to come. An excessive focus on technology, however, risks de-contextualising it from the wider economic and political landscapes. While digital platforms have been structuring the fabric of daily urban life colonising almost any field of interest through their ecosystems and mobile apps, AI technologies start making their way into cities with: autonomous vehicles, city brains, Digital Twins and robotics. Advocates suggest these novel technologies have changed the geographies of their deployment – not confined to cities any more, rather on regional or global scales – and of their partnerships with city management – cities no longer having exclusive and central stage, rather participating to consortia with limited or secondary roles. Both these configurations have been framed as the ‘post-smart city’. But, is there a paradigm shift between these versions of urbanism? Has the ‘smart city’ framework – the neoliberal project of linking private investment from technology firms into the management and governance of city living – substantially changed? And, finally, what role is expected for cities to take in this uncertain and evolving scenario? The ‘data-driven city’ ought to be understood in pair with the development of data capitalism and the enormous expansion of its data infrastructure, markets and services. Thus, I invite to re-position this debate as an intensification of neoliberal (‘smart’ or ‘data-driven’) urbanism and its ideological assumptions: technological solutionism and smart mentality, and data extractivism, surveillance and control.