Smart cities as corporate storytelling

TLDR

IBM registered the trademark “smarter cities” in 2011, marking a pivotal moment in the competition among IT firms for visibility and legitimacy in the smart‑city market. The paper uses actor‑network and critical planning theory to analyze IBM’s smarter‑city campaign, arguing that it is a corporate storytelling strategy that positions IBM as an obligatory passage point in urban technology implementation. The authors trace the emergence of the term “smart city” in the public sphere and apply actor‑network and critical planning theory to analyze IBM’s campaign. The study finds that IBM’s smart‑city narrative is not novel but reuses long‑standing tropes of systems thinking and utopianism, and calls for alternative stories to address technocratic reductionism and new moral imperatives.

Abstract

On 4 November 2011, the trademark ‘smarter cities’ was officially registered as belonging to IBM. This was an important milestone in a struggle between IT companies over visibility and legitimacy in the smart city market. Drawing on actor-network theory and critical planning theory, the paper analyzes IBM's smarter city campaign and finds it to be storytelling, aimed at making the company an ‘obligatory passage point’ in the implementation of urban technologies. Our argument unfolds in three parts. We first trace the emergence of the term ‘smart city’ in the public sphere. Secondly, we show that IBM's influential story about smart cities is far from novel but rather mobilizes and revisits two long-standing tropes: systems thinking and utopianism. Finally, we conclude, first by addressing two critical questions raised by this discourse: technocratic reductionism and the introduction of new moral imperatives in urban management; and second, by calling for the crafting of alternative smart city stories.