Problematizing and politicizing smart city-regions: is devolution smart?

This paper problematizes meanings, governance implications, and metro-political shortcomings given the evolution of some smart city transitional cases in Europe. As such, current smart city projects in Europe are depicting rather complex urbanity regarding the techno-politics of data, pervasive multi-stakeholder regional configurations, and unlike one-size-fits-all extensions/replications from the metropolitan to the city-regional scale. Ongoing reforms of administrative borders and competences of local governments are increasingly leading to a trend that this paper summarizes as ‘smart devolution’. This paper will thus suggest a conceptual framework encompassing six dimensions to politicize smartness in cities and regions by blending governance with technological and territorial issues that sooner or later will require context-based and ad-hoc smart city-regional strategies stemming from technological sovereignty, data ownership, and city-regional self-government policies. Ultimately, this paper will present some evidence-based findings from ethnographic and strategic fieldwork research conducted from September 2015 to June 2016 in Glasgow, Bristol, Barcelona, and Bilbao