Roadmaps to utopia: Tales of the smart city:

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 ...