Smart City Gnosys
Smart city article details
| Title | Encountering Not-So-Smart Technologies In Urban Spaces: Qr Codes, Screens And The Idiocy Of Smart Living |
|---|---|
| ID_Doc | 23087 |
| Authors | Liu C. |
| Year | 2025 |
| Published | Urban Geography |
| DOI | http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2025.2455055 |
| Abstract | This article investigates people’s lived experiences of encountering the idiocy of digital technologies in their ordinary lives in smart cities. It regards the concept of “idiocy” as both the limited smartness in the digital society and a moment when actual users of technologies are fooled. Drawing upon mixed-method studies in Guangzhou, this article delineates a QR-coded and screen-mediated public lifestyle that simultaneously bridges the smartmentality and smart citizens and creates idiocy. Although people in Guangzhou are smart enough to participate in smart city projects and actively respond to digital technologies and their problems, they are inevitably subject to constant monitoring and discipline from the top-down operations of smart cities, and it is hard to reject the “smart” lifestyle. Digital technologies in smart cities, as well as their breakdowns, often fool people by interrupting their public events, datafying and categorizing them, reducing efficiency, alienating the “bookend generations”, and excluding some smart people who choose to bypass the algorithmic logic designed for the digital/smart urbanism. Ultimately, this research suggests that future works pay more attention to the tensions between digital technologies and smart people in order to search for an alternative and more hopeful urbanism in the digital era. © 2025 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. |
| Author Keywords | digital materialities; Idiocy; smart city; smartmentality; urban technologies |
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