Polishing the perfect: The ambitions of smart urbanism

Cities are increasingly seen as agglomeration points for a vast range of contemporary challenges, and many advocate for developing and implementing transformative solutions at the city-level. Here, digitalization is presented as a silver-bullet solution, promising to yield sustainable, equitable and liveable futures through technological optimization and effectivization. In urban policy and planning, such ambitions are commonly articulated under the auspices of smart urbanism. While the transformative potential of smart city initiatives has been dealt with in existing literature, visions of ideal smart urban futures – and the transformative ambitions of these – have insufficiently been addressed. This paper interrogates the purportedly transformative potential of smart cities by developing an analytical framework that contrasts utopia with the end of history, applying this to an in-depth analysis of the smart city initiative in Stockholm. Utopia denotes a radical openness of the future, insisting upon the potential for alternative trajectories embedded within existing spatialities. In contrast, the end of history signifies a radical closure of the future, characterized by stasis and the absence of transformative possibilities. Empirically, the paper draws on interviews with key actors involved in Stockholm's smart city efforts, document analysis and participant observation. The findings suggest that the anticipations motivating smart urbanism rarely entail transformative ruptures with the status quo. Rather than exploring radically different urban futures, the utopias of the smart city in Stockholm aim for reinforcement of existing socio-spatial configurations, leaving us with a future that merely offers more of the same – with a technological twist.