Smart City Gnosys
Smart city article details
| Title | Negotiating Digital Urban Futures: The Limits And Possibilities Of Future-Making In Singapore |
|---|---|
| ID_Doc | 38939 |
| Authors | Yeo S.J.I. |
| Year | 2024 |
| Published | Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 49, 2 |
| DOI | http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/tran.12632 |
| Abstract | This paper brings into dialogue recent critical scholarship on smart cities and geographies of the future by examining how city dwellers encounter normative visions of the future supplied by government actors under smart urbanisation. I focus specifically on the prosaic but significant ways in which people (re)interpret and (re)produce urban futures in and through their everyday affective and material engagements with digital technologies. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews, I discuss the extent to which state-promulgated imaginings of digital urban futures projected by electronic payment infrastructures are negotiated by urban inhabitants in Singapore, at both the levels of the individual and the collective. Although there is a tendency in Urban Studies to read the smart city as depoliticising, the findings in this paper suggest that urban dwellers' lived encounters with digital urban futures are characterised and bound up with politics. Furthermore, this paper casts attention on forms of negotiation that emerge not from grassroots movements and/or democratic activism that have so far attracted social and cultural geographers working on the future, but everyday lived practice around the digital. Such a fine-grained, practice-based approach productively foregrounds emancipatory potential for reworking and reimagining normative digital urban futures. Equally importantly, it takes seriously the diverse and uneven future-making capacities of urban inhabitants in the digitally mediated city, contributing to ongoing projects that seek to develop a globally oriented alternative smart urban agenda for cities and urban spaces in the 21st century. The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). © 2023 The Author. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers). |
| Author Keywords | electronic payments; everyday; future-making; negotiation; Singapore; smart urbanism |
Similar Articles
| Id | Similarity | Authors | Title | Published |
|---|---|---|---|---|
7283  | 0.893 | Vadiati N. | Alternatives To Smart Cities: A Call For Consideration Of Grassroots Digital Urbanism | Digital Geography and Society, 3 (2022) |
| 60023 | 0.891 | Sepehr P.; Felt U. | Urban Imaginaries As Tacit Governing Devices: The Case Of Smart City Vienna | Science Technology and Human Values, 50, 2 (2025) |
| 58840 | 0.89 | Guma P.K. | Transforming The Smart City Ideal From The Margins: Everyday Regimes Of Labour And Governance | Territory, Politics, Governance (2025) |
| 25067 | 0.889 | Lynch C.R.; Sweeney M.E. | Evolving Spatialities Of Digital Life: Troubling The Smart City/Home Divide | Digital Geography and Society, 6 (2024) |
| 60 | 0.889 | Mouton, M; Burns, R | (Digital) Neo-Colonialism In The Smart City | REGIONAL STUDIES, 55, 12 (2021) |
| 30263 | 0.887 | Cairns R.; Onyango J.; Stirling A.; Johnstone P. | Imagining Urban Transformation In Kenya | Environmental Science and Policy, 135 (2022) |
| 39621 | 0.887 | Sobey A. | Obliged Smart Freedom: The Singaporean Experience Of Advanced Neoliberal-Developmental Governance | Urban Studies, 60, 16 (2023) |
| 47154 | 0.887 | Odendaal N. | Ruptures And Departures: An Emancipatory Perspective On Planning And Technology | Critical Planning Futures: New Directions in Planning Theory (2025) |
| 33183 | 0.886 | Burns R.; Welker P. | Interstitiality In The Smart City: More Than Top-Down And Bottom-Up Smartness | Urban Studies, 60, 2 (2023) |
| 50356 | 0.886 | Guma, PK; Monstadt, J | Smart City Making? The Spread Of Ict-Driven Plans And Infrastructures In Nairobi | URBAN GEOGRAPHY, 42, 3 (2021) |