Notions of the smart city are pervasive in urban development discourses. Various frameworks for the development of smart cities, often conceptualised as roadmaps, make a number of implicit claims about how smart city projects proceed but the legitimacy of those claims is unclear. This paper begins to address this gap in knowledge. We explore the development of a smart transport application, MotionMap, in the context of a £16M smart city programme taking place in Milton Keynes, UK. We examine how the idealised smart city narrative was locally inflected, and discuss the differences between the narrative and the processes and outcomes observed in Milton Keynes. The research shows that the vision of data-driven efficiency outlined in the roadmaps is not universally compelling, and that different approaches to the sensing and optimisation of urban flows have potential for empowering or disempowering different actors. Roadmaps tend to emphasise the importance of delivering quick practical results. However, the benefits observed in Milton Keynes did not come from quick technical fixes but from a smart city narrative that reinforced existing city branding, mobilising a growing network of actors towards the development of a smart region. Further research is needed to investigate this and other smart city developments, the significance of different smart city narratives, and how power relationships are reinforced and constructed through them.

In this paper, we extend current debates around urban Artificial Intelligence (hereafter “urban AI”) by outlining new modes of framing or conceptualizing urban AI, understanding its trajectory, and...

Although smart cities are now the subject of a growing literature, there is a paucity of research which considers how smart city projects develop on the ground. This paper begins to address this concern by exploring the development of a transport application, MotionMap, within the MK:Smart smart city programme. MotionMap aims to provide city-wide real-time transport information services. It is being developed through an ongoing dialogue sparked by the interaction of lead users and prototypes of a smart transport app. We draw on insights from Strategic Niche Management and social practice theories to explore how ‘smart’ might be integrated within and potentially transform the plurality of mobility practices that exist in cities.

In this paper, a curatorial perspective is developed to draw attention to the notion that smart cities are assembled within a field of relations and thus inevitably connected to constellations of actors, histories, materialities and ideas. In this way, a curatorial perspective informed by diverse disciplines such as art history, critical theory and institutional critique, can be used to reveal the struggles through which fragmented, entangled and shifting constellations of technologies, places and policy ideas are purposely cultivated to prefigure new ways of living in smart cities. Drawing on an in-depth longitudinal case study of Milton Keynes (MK), an English new town founded in 1967, this paper examines how concepts of a smart city were used to draw together, catalyze and possibly (re)configure pre-existing policies, narratives and materialities, i.e. to curate smart city developments. Urban curation, understood as the selection, organization and care for a constellation of elements and their relation to place, is revealed to be profoundly political. Actors with local remits curate urban constellations to render them receptive to smart city agendas while pursuing their contextually defined goals and often resisting those imposed from elsewhere.