IBM and the visual formation of smart cities

This chapter has explored what I have termed the visual formation of smart cities, in which several modes of visual perception have been built into, and marketed into, smart city software packages. It has identified some linkages between technopolitical practices of the urbanising state, particularly in the Victorian period of urban municipalism, and the smart cities strategies pursued by IBM and other corporations. From IBM’s perspective, of course, it is merely enabling public managers to operate effectively in a hostile fiscal environment. But here the value-free, dehumanised technical systems approach also operates to justify a minimum, or socio-spatially targeted, service delivery