The discoursive representation of Smart Cities in the German Media

The presentation focuses on the representation of smart cities as construed by German media. Due to the lack of a universally shared definition, numerous evocative adjectives have been used to describe the city of the future such as ‘intelligente Stadt’, ’digitale Stadt’, high-tech Stadt’, ‘informationelle Stadt’, Wissensstadt’ and ‘Kreativstadt. Each term corresponds to different conceptual perspectives about the design of the city as a compound of new material substrata with reshaped socio-political relations. An interesting research question concerns people’s perception of such changes. Moving from the assumption that news discourse has a crucial role in shaping public opinions and beliefs, we have collected a corpus of digital versions of print newspaper articles, published in Germany in the last five years and included in the LexisNexis database. The initial qualitative analysis of the corpus has enhanced the semantic and structural patterns occurring in the texts and that contribute to delineate the actors driving the change and the fundamental features characterizing the category of smart cities. A quantitative analysis specifically investigates ad hoc novel collocates. Moreover, we present a graphic representation of the most frequent co-occurrences of words such as ‘city’, ‘infrastructure’, ‘knowledge’, etc. and their collocations with specific adjectives and verbs, which, we posit, are used as identity markers