ICT practices in smart sustainable cities : In the intersection of technological solutions and practices of everyday life

ICT, information and communications technology,has radically transformed our world and is now an inextricable partof what it means to live a normal life as a citizen, at least in highincomecountries. This has led to a situation where ICT has becomeso taken for granted that it has lost its visibility. While thisdevelopment to a large extent has been driven by businessopportunities, there is now also an increasing recognition of ICT as apossible solution to sustainability problems. There are however twomajor pitfalls of using ICT as a tool for sustainability that need to beaddressed for its potentials to be realized. The first pitfall isenvironmental impacts of ICT, as well as the risk of lock-in effectsand an increasing vulnerability. The second pitfall concerns theunderstanding of ICT as a neutral solution, rather than recognizingthat ICT, as all technology, carries implicit values. Taken together,these two pitfalls imply a need for replacing the atomized and technobiasedunderstandings of ICT with an approach that recognize thelarger socio-material, political and economic structure in which ICTis (thought to be) part. With the aim of contributing to such a shift,this paper proposes a practice-oriented perspective in order toexplore the potential of ICT to contribute to sustainability, using thesmart sustainable city discourse as our example. We define theconcept ICT practices and discuss it from an interdisciplinaryperspective and in relation to the sustainable smart city. We arguethat by using ICT practices as a conceptual starting-point foranalysis, both the technological and the socio-cultural components ofthe smart sustainable city discourse can become elicited, enabling amore explicit analysis of what assumptions this discourse rests on.QC 20150915