Interstitiality in the smart city: More than top-down and bottom-up smartness

Abstract

The critical research agenda on smart cities has tended to assume a largely top-down orientation in which powerful actors like the state and corporations enact programmes to embed Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) in the urban landscape. Because of the way research has framed this relation of power, the dominant response has been to seek social justice by either contesting these top-down exercises of (digital) power or by reconceptualising the smart city ‘from below’. In this paper, we join a growing chorus of voices recognising the importance of interstitial actors that influence the ways in which the smart city manifests. We draw on a five-year ongoing study in Calgary, Alberta, to examine two actor groups that are, properly, neither top-down nor bottom-up, but play an important role in envisioning, implementing and contesting how ‘smartness’ is framed. The first set of actors, situated between the top and bottom of the smart city hierarchy, are most prominently community associations, non-profit organisations and ad-hoc task groups. The second group is comprised of groups with different digital practices, whose spectre of marginalisation influences how digital systems are articulated and pursued. These actors strategically move between different interstices in order to enact particular kinds of political influence, and often influence smart cities by virtue of their absence, profoundly impacting urban political geographies of smartness.