Paper short abstract:

In this paper we discuss emerging technologies associated with smart cities through the prism of three concepts which are articulated in the narratives of the policy makers, researchers and project leaders who support and mobilise smart city agendas: co-creation, validation and infrastructuring.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper we discuss emerging technologies associated with smart cities through the prism of three concepts which are articulated in the narratives of the policy makers, researchers and project leaders who support and mobilise smart city agendas: co-creation, validation and infrastructuring.

In doing so we draw on fieldwork undertaken in Denmark, Spain and Australia, focusing on the processes that sought to support and boost the development and deployment of smart city technologies, between government, business and citizens. We outline how we used a methodology of being with and in the processes in which emerging technologies are implicated and involved. Through this approach, we investigated how the 'native' categories of co-creation, validation and infrastructuring provide a particular narrative and set of resources for 'innovation' that does not determine what emerging technologies would become, but that articulate a potentiality that feeds back into and drives the very processes through which emerging technologies are materialised.

As we show, it is this very circularity of a process that is intended to drive innovation and social change forward that underpins the apparent failure of the smart city concept to ever become the utopian reality that its proponents invest their hopes and resources.