The term ‘Smarter Cities’ stands for the range of current efforts, aiming at the creation of the ‘future city’ as an interconnected, computerized and automated system of connections, processes and flows. At their core, smarter cities initiatives thus imply a world of perfect ordering and regulation-at-a-distance that relies, fundamentally, on the coding of social life into software. Yet such processes of ordering and software sorting are never neutral, whether the collection, classification and analysis of data aim at greater efficiency, speed, convenience or security.
The project aims to highlight a number of critical issues - and to assess their potential implications for individuals and social groups - arising from the organizational settings and situated coalitions of authority underpinning current efforts towards smarter cities. It does so through the empirical investigation of two initiatives devoted to the elaboration of novel best practices and technologies for smarter cities: Future Cities Laboratory, a research platform in Singapore developed by the ETH Zurich and two partner universities (1) and Ittigen, one of the most coveted test municipalities in Switzerland for the development of new smart city solutions (2).