The complex life of a Smart City initiative

This master’s thesis is an empirical investigation of a Smart City initiative within healthcare in a Norwegian municipality. What is presented is a rich description of how local actors have engaged themselves in the planning, development, implementation and use of the Smart City initiative. The research approach is inspired by praxiography, a qualitative methodology, where we have followed the initiative across different contexts and practices within the municipality. Since urban life is becoming increasingly entangled in advanced technology, it is essential to explore modes of inquiry that challenge perspectives that treat the social and material as to separate worlds. This thesis has therefore used theories and concepts from research on sociomateriality as a sensitising device (e.g., Law, 2004; Mol, 2002). This perspective is used to illustrate the sociomaterial complexity of the Smart City initiative, by demonstrating how it changed, slipped and multiplied when it was interpreted, negotiated and being done across different local contexts. The thesis presents a story about how local actors within the municipality have applied the idea of Smart City to their urban strategies by embracing domain-agnostic approaches to public management. The actors involved in development enacted smartness as technologies’ capacity for being generic, which led them to utilise so-called generic technology based on its potential to function across, and create synergies between, the different domains within the city. By using a sociomaterial lens, this thesis has raised some questions about domain- agnostic systems. We have argued for how enacting technology as generic can contribute to rigidity in the development and evolution of the Smart City initiative. This was seen in terms of how the design space was limited to explore during development, how the resulting technology was difficult for the users to ‘fit’ in their everyday work situation, and how it was difficult for the developers to implement changes to accommodate emergent local needs. Based on our insights, the thesis presents some suggestions for Smart City practitioners wanting to create Smart City technology