Latin American smart cities: Between worlding infatuation and crawling provincialising

Clara Irazábal and Paola Jirón
Additional contact information
Clara Irazábal: University of Missouri Kansas City, USA
Paola Jirón: University of Chile, Chile

Urban Studies, 2021, vol. 58, issue 3, 507-534

Abstract: Smart city initiatives in Latin America aim to harness information and communication technologies to make urban service provision and management more efficient, transparent and user-friendly. Latin American cities have been relatively slow to adopt such initiatives, but there is inter- and intra-urban variety in the region. We offer illustrative vignettes of Rio de Janeiro, Santiago and Medellín, which have experimented with different formats for smart city programme design, implementation and management. While top-down and flashier smart city projects in these cities reflect worlding aspirations on the part of urban elites, mixed and bottom-up approaches serve to provincialise and often informalise the initiatives in manners that destabilise elitism and more equitably distribute costs and benefits. One of the biggest challenges these cities share in developing smarter initiatives is inequality, given that most interventions are located in or benefit higher-income areas and actors. As instruments to provincialise the discourses and practices of smart cityness in the region, we propose that cities adopt the ‘6-Es smart cities framework’ (efficiency, economy, ecology, equity, education and engagement) and mobilise public–private– people partnerships within city plans and implementation processes.

Keywords: Latin American cities; Medellín; provincialising; public–private–people partnerships; Rio de Janeiro; Santiago; smart cities; smart cities framework; worlding; æ‹‰ä¸ ç¾Žæ´²åŸŽå¸‚; 麦德林; 本地化; å…¬ç§ ä¼™ä¼´å…³ç³»; é‡Œçº¦çƒ­å†…å ¢; 圣地亚哥; 智慧城市; 智慧城市框架; 世界化 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0042098020945201 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:58:y:2021:i:3:p:507-534

DOI: 10.1177/0042098020945201

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Urban Studies from Urban Studies Journal Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().