Smart cities: performance-based management at the local scale? Analysing the construction of a market of digital devices fur urban spaces in France ; Les Smart Cities : un gouvernement par la performance à l'échelle locale ? Analyse de la construction d'un marché de dispositifs numériques pour l'espace urbain en France

Abstract

Initially developed by tech firms at the end of the 2000s, "smart city" projects are now being carried out by more diversified firms in many cities. There is a large body of literature defining the term "smart city" and attempting to identify what urban model(s) it represents. Recent work has also focused on how digital devices for urban spaces are really implemented, pointing to localized variations. I suggest that the expansion of "smart city" projects is best understood as the construction of a market. I thus focus on its investment by eight major French firms. First, I study the differentiation of their "smart city" sociotechnical devices, along with their main sector of activity: construction, energy, tech, aeronautics and defense. The diversity in these firms' approaches is as much linked to their core business sector as it is to their internal digital transformation policies, as well as to their research and development policies. Next, I examine how these digital devices for urban spaces are thought of by company representatives, who portray them as a form of performance-based management at the local level, thus transforming the place of private firms in urban government. This performance-based management is operationalized in three ways in the firms' "smart cities" offer: the pooling of local authorities' services in a bid to rationalize the way they function; discourses on the production of new services for "citizens" to further greater transparency in public action; and economic and legal "innovations" for urban management. These three dimensions are also the conditions that make it possible to build a "smart city" market in France. The latter is therefore part of the more general economic and political changes that are currently affecting urban governments. ; Initialement développés par des entreprises des NTIC à la fin des années 2000, des projets de "smart city" se retrouvent aujourd'hui portés par des entreprises plus diversifiées dans de nombreuses collectivités. Une importante littérature ...