Smart urbanism in Barcelona: a knowledge politics perspective

Bruce Sterling’s quote vividly captures some of the knowledge politics involved in smart urbanism. Or at least, the concerns critics raise against the Smart-City vision: the way urban processes are reduced to codified, inter-operable (and tradeable) information; whose processing through calculation and inference produces ostensibly authoritative knowledge about complex cities; and whose proprietary characteristics cedes power to ‘smart-city’ service providers (Greenfield 2013). At the same time, however, technological advances in sensors, data handling, internet platforms, ubiquitous computation and evermore imaginative visualisation permits wider access to information about cities and opens up the possibility for unprecedented citizen involvement in urban processes.Barcelona was an appropriate place for Bruce Sterling to make his remarks. He did so on a conference platform that later that day saw then-Mayor Xavier Trias commit Barcelona to becoming a smart, self-sufficient city within 40 years (see later). Under Mayor Trias, the city government was working hard to promote Barcelona as a world-leading smart city, and with considerable success (Continente et al. 2016). A wide variety of smart-city installations had been