Smart urban regeneration in Rotterdam: A cultural political economy perspective

Critical smart city scholarship has challenged claims that smart urbanism is truly transformative and argued that the “smart city” is but the latest manifestation of competitiveness-oriented neoliberal urban governance. This article expands on this literature by arguing that beyond examining the role of discursive framing and logics, we need to examine the multiscalar technologies of government that help to retain and actualize a certain (technocratic, business-oriented) understanding of the smart city. To this end, the article proposes a cultural political economy (CPE) framework that can account for how policy concepts as the smart city articulate with strategically selective political-economic structures and discourses and become inscribed through technologies of government at multiple scales. The usefulness of the CPE lens is demonstrated by the example of the Heart of the South district in the Dutch city of Rotterdam, where smart city projects have been realized within a program co-financed by the European Union. The analysis confirms existing studies’ insights on the role of multiscalar urban policymaking discourses but underlines the to-date unexposed significance of the vast apparatus of technologies geared to entrepreneurialism in smart city building and argues that efforts of repoliticizing the smart city should (also) aim at denaturalizing these technologies.