| Summary: | <p>This work explores multiple, competing sociotechnical imaginaries of smart cities in Oxford. I worked with two main groups in the field, Smart Oxford and Cyclox, the former the official smart city initiative of The City of Oxford, and the latter, a grassroots political pressure group for cycling in and around the city. Each group presented very distinct visions of the future, each imagining and mobilising data and science and technology in extremely different ways. Over the course of my fieldwork and post fieldwork analysis, drawing on the distinct and dynamic social and material conditions across the city, I observed multileveled and contested dimensions of smartness and found that smartness is messy, subjective, and never neutral. There are no core values or tenets that necessarily apply to smart practices or ideals across the board. This being the case, the different sociotechnical imaginaries at work in the city each work to mould different ideas of what it means to be ‘smart’, and what ‘smarter’ futures ought and ought not to look like. Further, each different imagining comes with distinct visions, assumptions, values, and perspectives of what data is, how it can and should be mobilised, and what futures are attainable and desirable.</p>
<p>This work adds to findings that follow the most recent call in smart city literature to move beyond the critique of unrealised ideals, and to study what is actually happening on the ground, exploring how smartness plays out in practice, and what it means for ordinary citizens’ everyday lives and practices to live in ‘smart cities’. It also highlights the challenges around smart city realisation and manifestation, offering a case that explores a less than fully successful attempt at smart city world building by an official smart city initiative with an officially endorsed narrative.</p>
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