Smartness as Wealth

Project: Research

Project participants

  • Beverungen, Armin (Project manager, academic)
  • Halpern, Orit (Project manager, academic)
  • Steinberg, Marc (Project manager, academic)
  • Nag, Anindita (Project manager, academic)
  • Cirolia, Liza Rose (Project manager, academic)
  • Dresden University of Technology
  • University of Cape Town

Description



Smartness promises wealth to cities around the world. Across the planet, we see a growing investment by corporations, philanthropies, start-ups, and governments in computational infrastructures that will manage cities and their inhabitants. This smartness is closely affiliated with venture capital and start-up experiments. It is assumed that smart systems in logistics, real estate, finance, energy and retail will encourage innovation and entrepreneurship, and will resolve problems of top-down economic planning. In this project five particular aspects of this new model of wealth creation and urban management will be examined: optimization, sustainability, inclusion, resilience, and convenience. These are all particular varieties of the promise of wealth associated with smartness: the optimization and subsequent affordability provided by logistics; the sustainability required for living on a planet in crisis; the inclusion in economic life offered by decentralized finance; the energy resilience to climate change, resource limitations, and geopolitics promised by smart grids and financial hedging; and the convenience sold by smart retail. It is smartness which propels these promises a smartness promoted by venture capital. Whether through public smart city initiatives or the plethora of private urban platforms for mobility, sustainability, finance and retail, venture capital is reshaping how wealth is produced and reproduced in the cities of today and tomorrow. This project examines historically and ethnographically the relationship between contemporary smart urbanism and wealth, and the urban economies transformed through smart technologies. Ethnographically the research will occur in five sites in five different countries: Hamburg, Nairobi, Denver and Tokyo. Historically, the research will examine genealogies of smartness and venture capital at these sites and compare smart urban initiatives globally.
StatusActive
Period01.10.2330.09.27

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Researchers

  1. Dirk Stegmann

Publications

  1. From Open Access to Open Science
  2. Quantum Computing and the Analog/Digital Distinction
  3. Using Conjoint Analysis to Elicit Preferences for Occupational Health Services in Small and Microenterprises
  4. Cue predictability changes scaling in eye-movement fluctuations
  5. Effectiveness of the world network of biosphere reserves in maintaining forest ecosystem functions
  6. Exploring the efficacy of metabarcoding and non-target screening for detecting treated wastewater
  7. Adaptive capacity and learning to learn as leverage for social-ecological resilience
  8. From Enterprise Architecture to Business Ecosystem Architecture
  9. Drawing as a Generative Activity and Drawing as a Prognostic Activity
  10. Worauf warten?
  11. Schreiben in der Sekundarstufe II
  12. Computational Swarming
  13. The Measurement of Grip-Strength in Automobiles
  14. Georeferencing System for Maneuvering of Autonomous Truck in Mining Environment
  15. Irish English and Variational Pragmatics
  16. Unchanged food approach-avoidance behaviour of healthy men after oxytocin administration
  17. Bless
  18. Sprachliche Heterogenität im gesellschaftswissenschaftlichen Unterricht
  19. The Lüneburg Sustainable University Project in international comparison
  20. The Effect of Market Power on Electricity Storage Utilization
  21. Sex Differences in Double Poling Performance
  22. Effectiveness of a web-based intervention for injured claimants
  23. Effect of Welding Speed on Friction Stir Welds of PM2000 Alloy
  24. From Phenomenological Self-Givenness to the Notion of Spiritual Freedom
  25. The Future of Provenance: Digital Cataloguing as Reparative Practice
  26. To help or not to help an outgroup member