A Smart Right to the City—Grounding Corporate Storytelling and Questioning Smart Urbanism

Against the backdrop of multiple ongoing crises in European cities related to socio-spatial injustice, inequality and exclusion, we argue for a smart right to the city. There is an urgent need for a thorough account of the entrepreneurial mode of technocapitalist smart urbanism. While much of both affirmative and critical research on Smart City developments equate or even reduce smartness to digital infrastructures, we put actual smartness—in the sense of social justice and sustainability—at centre stage. This paper builds on a fundamental structural critique of (1) the entrepreneurial city (Harvey) and (2) the capitalist city (Lefebvre). Drawing upon Lefebvre’s right to the city as a normative framework, we use Smart City developments in the city of Graz as an illustration of our argument. Considering strategies of waste and mobility management, we reflect on how they operate as spatial and technical fixes—fixing the limits of capitalism’s growth. By serving specific corporate interests, these technocapitalist strategies yet fail to address the underlying structural causes of pressing urban problems and increasing inequalities. With Lefebvre’s ongoing relevant argument for the importance of use value of urban infrastructures as well as his claim that appropriation and participation are essential, we discuss common rights to the city: His framework allows us to envision sustainable and just—actually smart—alternatives: alternatives to technocapitalist entrepreneurial urbanisation. In this respect, a smart right to the city is oriented towards the everyday needs of all inhabitants.

Municipal Statecraft For The Smart City: Retooling The Smart Entrepreneurial City?

Urban scholarship has begun to trouble the neat alignment of smart city governance with urban entrepreneurialism. Starting from the proposition that states remain central in smart city governance and that unfolding the smart city involves crafting new performances of the state, this paper revisits evolving theorisations of urban governance through the lens of urban entrepreneurialism to examine how municipal state roles and practices are being refashioned and reoriented. Utilising empirical research on smart city governance across Australia's two largest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, we identify and tease out the active roles and the constitutive and experimental practices of entrepreneurial municipal statecraft involved in smart city governance. We frame these as ‘extrospective’ or ‘beyond-the-state’ in which new forms of partnerships are forged, and ‘introspective’ in which the dispositions, capabilities and competences of the municipal state itself are reformed. The paper enriches entrepreneurial accounts of smart cities and the situated and contextually-articulated agenda pursued in the name of governing ‘the smart city’. It highlights plural municipal state agenda and the reworking of practices and performances of the municipal state that these entail. It remains imperative, the paper concludes, to attend critically to the ways that smart co-constitutes the state in unpredictable ways.

Urban policy: estate regeneration

This chapter examines the shifting rationales and funding for estate regeneration in Britain with a focus on London. It provides an overview of urban renewal in both its old slum clearance form and new estate regeneration/demolition form. The chapter identifies an early estate regeneration period (1980s-90s) that included substantial public funding. However, from the late 1990s onwards, the private sector was increasingly expected to finance regeneration, while New Labour also emphasised creating mixed-tenure communities. The New Deal for Communities’ programme is discussed within this context. Rationales for comprehensive redevelopment are examined, including the roles played by neighbourhood effects and ‘sink estate’ place myth. The concept of entrepreneurial borough is introduced in relation to London and the entrepreneurial city (Harvey). The penultimate section identifies a key shift between earlier regeneration schemes (e.g. Comprehensive Estates Initiative in Hackney), and contemporary schemes (e.g. Heygate) which are the book’s primary focus. Whereas the former produced mixed-tenure neighbourhoods including limited private housing, 21st century regeneration schemes are estate densification projects which have resulted in distinct mixed-tenure neighbourhoods weighted towards market housing for sale rather than social renting – estate regeneration masquerading as state-led gentrification. The final section examines the financial and health costs of estate demolition.

Die sozial-unternehmerische Stadt: Gesellschaftliche Ungleichheit, Reproduktionskrise und Stadtpolitik in Hamburg

Entrepreneurial and social urban policies contradictorily depend from each other: growth policies aiming to increase investment and population numbers produce a crisis of reproduction (i.e. housing or care); and social policies aiming to resolve this crisis allegedly require entrepreneurial policies as fuel for tax resources financing social goals. We investigate this interrelationship along the recent housing and childcare policies in the city of Hamburg, Germany. We show that as long as growth and competition are primary objectives of urban governments, a compensatory social policy is needed to legitimate the entrepreneurial axiom – and therefore has a specific character: social policy in the social-entrepreneurial city is actually addressing inequalities, but it eventually is aimed at all classes, secures capital accumulation and is gendered. This paper contributes to understanding urban crises of reproduction by exposing that current social policies aiming to solve this crisis merely consolidate the crisis-prone growth policies.

Entrepreneurial city in Russian economy: quantitative and qualitative parameters of identification

This paper is devoted to research the “entrepreneurial city” in Russian economy. Firstly the authors analyze the development of the concept in foreign studies and compare the results with Russian authors researches. This concept is not so widespread both in scientific sphere and in municipal level in Russia. Then the authors propose two groups of parameters that give the opportunity to identify entrepreneurial city using Russian statistics. From the one hand there are quantitative parameters that include the degree of economic diversity and services; presence of human capital; the degree of the urban environment and living conditions. Each of criteria was evaluated on the several statistic indicators. From the other hand there are qualitative parameters that help to explain differences between similar cities. For example, the authors consider two close Ural cities, Chelyabinsk and Yekaterinburg, and analyze its differences according quantitative and qualitative criteria of entrepreneurial city.

The environmentalization of urban entrepreneurialism: From technopolis to start-up city

This paper investigates two trends in contemporary forms of urban entrepreneurialism: (a) an increasing focus on cultivating entrepreneurship, and (b) the promotion of entrepreneurial ecosystems that leverage culture and sustainability to attract and support entrepreneurs. We argue that these trends signify a shift from the entrepreneurial city to new strategies that shape cities for entrepreneurs. Underpinning this development is a broad normalization and valorization of entrepreneurship as the dominant pathway for urban economic growth. Additionally, we show how sustainability and greening are enrolled in these economic development strategies, promising to bolster the environmental image of the city. We highlight these two changes by focusing on the intellectual foundations of the technopolis concept in Austin, Texas, and the development of a cleantech entrepreneurial ecosystem that has increasingly been leveraged in Austin’s entrepreneurial growth efforts. We offer insights into how the growing trend of “making cities for entrepreneurs” is reshaping urban entrepreneurial governance, potentially exacerbating inequalities in urban development.