Conclusion: In the Ruins of Broken Promises

Summary

Introduction

This book began with questions about smart cities, digitisation, and the promise of digital technologies to support the environment and ensure a brighter future for all, despite the harms these technologies might inflict. Inspired by Berlant's (2010, 2011) notion of cruel optimism – an attachment to a fantasy, dream, or promise that is not only unattainable, but can be explicitly damaging or toxic – we traced optimistic narratives and visions of smart cities, and of digitisation, in academic literature and in two cities, Helsinki and Manchester. In Chapter One, we looked at the ideas of, and investments in the story of smart urbanism as a story of progress, and of digital technologies as game- changing tools of environmental sustainability. To challenge these ideas, we briefly explored the untold and invisible stories of environmental harms and social injustices in the processes of resource extraction or manufacturing, which are necessary for smart cities to operate.

We then turned to our two case studies. In Chapter Two, Liu Xin explored the Smart Kalasatama district of Helsinki, drawing on a range of materials including autoethnographic accounts, reports, and audio- visual materials from Kalasatama webpages. The chapter focused on the environmental aspects of smart city, asking what kind of human- digital- environment relations are at work in the imagination, narratives, and practices of making Kalasatama ‘smart’. The chapter made visible the relations – and tensions – between the multiple temporalities of Kalasatama: the promise of one more hour a day, the temporality of long- term sustainable development, the short duration of project economy, and the multiple temporal expressions of the digital itself. The chapter traced the social and environmental temporalities that take place outside the demarcated boundaries of smart cities, attending to the schism between the promise of speed and real- timeness of digitisation and the less visible, and often destructive processes such as digital ruination, the sedimented and slowly unfolding environmental changes, and the long- term impact of energy transition.

In Chapter Three, Adi explored policy narratives, research documents, and media discussions of several smart city initiatives in Manchester which have recently ended, as well as interviews about the latest developments around smart city initiatives. The chapter traced the promises made about technology, innovation, and the environment, and focused on the disconnect between the digital and the environmental concerns.