e-Authopia · Authoritarian Smart City

Authoritarian Smart City

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? Research on smart cities in authoritarian regimes, for example, in both Saudi Arabia and China, has rarely been critical and has almost never discussed this urban form as authoritarian or surveillant. Even when calls for a comparative global agenda have been issued, authoritarianism has not been a significant component. E-Authopia explores the formation of authoritarian smart cities through the interplay between global smart city trends and domestic policymaking in authoritarian contexts. Through three instrumental case studies of authoritarian smart cities in Turkey, Thailand, and Gabon, I will investigate how the smart city idea is appropriated and localised, how it is positioned within a political system, and how it is translated into governance initiatives. I 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 localised, concretised, and translated to agenda-setting in policy adoption and development. The Project pursues the following objectives: A) to identify major actors and policy trends by 1) assessing the actors’ impact at global, regional, and local levels in the policy transfer process, 2) discovering international policy norms through instrumental case studies in Thailand, Turkey, and Gabon, 3) verifying trends in policy transfer using empirical evidence from these countries. B) to develop an interdisciplinary methodological framework by 1) creating a structured interdisciplinary methodological framework by integrating methods from policy studies and political science, 2) assessing the effectiveness of this framework in examining the interlinkages between global digitally-enabled governance trends and local policy adoption, 3) validating the applicability of the framework through empirical data and case study results. and C) to conceptualise a theoretical approach by 1) formulating a comprehensive theoretical approach to elucidate and compare the structural and discursive elements of authoritarian surveillance, 2) establishing clear criteria for comparing these elements across different contexts, 3) validating the theoretical approach through comparative.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз