Smart cities as hacker cities. Organized urbanism and restructuring welfare in crisis-ridden Italy

This article is concerned with the discursive rationality of the smart city, in the context where it became a powerful narrative of urban change in crisis-ridden Italy - right after the first stage of the Euro crisis in 2011-2012. While functioning as a vague signifier that could be used to rebrand anything urban as “smart”, the smart city also portrayed cities as actors of change, as “hackers” that could leverage technological innovation to respond to social and economic crises. Starting from this observation, two arguments are explored in the paper. First, those smart city narratives follow a long tradition of biological urbanism, combining techno-utopian imageries with the more mundane question of addressing economic downturns. Secondly, that the depiction of cities as organic growth machines was, at least discursively, an experiment in rethinking the welfare state for an age of austerity