《Scaling smartness, (de)provincialising the city? The ASEAN Smart Cities Network and the translational politics of technocratic regionalism》

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作者
Lily Kong;Orlando Woods
来源
CITIES,Vol.117,Issue1,Article 103326
语言
英文
关键字
Smart cities;Scaling smartness;Technocratic regionalism;ASCN;Southeast Asia
作者单位
School of Social Sciences, Singapore Management University, 90 Stamford Road, Singapore 178903, Singapore;School of Social Sciences, Singapore Management University, 90 Stamford Road, Singapore 178903, Singapore
摘要
This paper explores the case study of the ASEAN Smart Cities Network (ASCN) to uncover the motivations and potential challenges associated with technocratic regionalism, by which we mean technology-driven forms of regional integration and consolidation. In the case of the ASCN, technocratic regionalism is used to spur urban development through the rollout of smart city plans, policies and projects across Southeast Asia. As such, it is a regional strategy designed to scale smartness, and thus deprovincialise the city by embedding it within transnational flows of capital, ideas and expertise. At the same time, however, already existing urban issues have the potential to re-provincialise the city. The vagaries of local contexts, structures of governance and urban cultures complicate processes of scalar ascendency and thus foreground the paradox of (de)provincialisation. We identify three challenges – divergent infrastructural developments, vertical and horizontal (non-)integration, and the need to reconcile (in)formal spaces of the “smart” city – that underpin the translational politics of technocratic regionalism, and which are likely to compromise the efficacy and success of the ASCN.