Understanding the Contextual Development of Smart City Initiatives: A Pragmatist Methodology

Since the mid-2000s, the “Smart City” has emerged as a popular discourse describing technological solutions to challenges of urban governance. The Smart City has been praised but also criticized as a discourse for its narrow epistemology. Limitations have led to reductionist benchmarking that lends itself to comparison, yet limits practitioners’ ability to translate findings into ontologically diverse action. In the related fields of information systems and management studies, a pragmatist research paradigm has been used to address this challenge. This article explores that pragmatist paradigm, describing how it can expand the current limits of the current Smart City discourse to include local politics, technologies, and the relational genealogies that characterize sociotechnical systems. The pragmatist methodology I explore here uses excerpts from practitioner oral histories—organized visually using actor-network theory—to define and explain the emergence of two Smart City initiatives. This approach is capable of a more situated and contingent practitioner explanation of the complexity of urban projects. Ultimately, the article concludes with reflections on the use of pragmatism for Smart City cases to provide a counter perspective to the dominant discourse