The smart city fulfils a utopian picture of a future where data-driven, citizen-centred, and just cities thrive. What if this vision of the smart city is combined with the prospect of smart control? What about the sociotechnical imaginaries of authoritarian smart cities?
Currently an Assistant Professor in Public Administration and Digital Transformation at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, Dr. Azadeh Akbari has been awarded a prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Global Fellowship for a 2-year research stay at the University of Ottawa Centre for Law, Technology and Society to investigate how the smart city idea is appropriated and localized, how it is positioned within a political system, and how it is translated into governance initiatives.
Research on smart cities in authoritarian regimes, for example, in Saudi Arabia and China, has rarely been critical and has hardly discussed this urban form as authoritarian or surveillant.
In collaboration with Dr. David Murakami-Wood, the Canada Research Chair in Critical Surveillance Studies, Dr. Akbari will use semiotic and discursive analysis to study the authoritarian sociotechnical imaginaries of desirable urban futures at the symbolic and language level. Additionally, policy process tracing will be conducted through global pathways of influence and multiple streams framework to illustrate how these imaginaries and visions are localized, concretized, and translated to agenda-setting in policy adoption and development.
Part of Horizon Europe, the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions are the European Union’s flagship funding programme for doctoral education and postdoctoral training of researchers. They fund excellent research and innovation and equip researchers at all stages of their careers with new knowledge and skills through mobility across borders and exposure to different sectors and disciplines.
The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Global Fellowships aim to support emerging researchers’ careers and foster excellence in research. They assist in the mobility of researchers between countries, sectors and disciplines to acquire new knowledge, skills and competencies.