Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at how the notion of the 'smart city' has the potential to alter how governments do policy-making on the basis of the complexity and data management that governments will need control if it is aiming at optimisation.

Paper long abstract:

We under stand 'smart cities' as connected cities. The project sets out to examine how Information and Communications Technology (ICT) is transforming the spatial dimensions of the politics of the state. By space, we have traditionally understood this to mean the geographical limits of state power, as seen in the Westphalian concept of national sovereignty or in the Weberian notions of the bureaucratic state. Both national sovereignty and the bureaucratic state suggests the limits of power or, more precisely, bounded spatial politics. This bounded spatial politics is seen by border, boundaries, sometimes markets or logistics. Yet, technology, or more precisely techno-science (the technological and social context of science), has traditionally been used both to reinforce boundaries and to violate them, such as roads, rail, flight, credit, and many other developments. Yet, the converge of technologies and science that has allowed many developments that are changing the pattern of social relations, such as the internet, social media, computer learning and data collection and analysis.