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The concept of smart cities holds environmental promises: that digital technologies will reduce carbon emissions, air pollution and waste, and help address climate change.
Drawing on academic scholarship and two case studies from Manchester and Helsinki, this timely and accessible book examines what happens when these promises are broken, as they prioritise technological innovation rather than environmental care. The book reveals that smart cities’ vision of sustainable digital future obfuscates the environmental harms and social injustices that digitisation inflicts. The framework of “broken promises”, coined by the authors, centres environmental questions in analysing imaginaries and practices of smart cities.
This is a must read for anyone interested in the connections between digital technologies and environment justice.
"In their book, Digital Technologies, Smart Cities and the Environment: In the Ruins of Broken Promises, Adi Kunstman and Liu Xin unsettle the very ground of the digital as exclusively virtual, building connections between environmental justice and social justice in how we understand smart cities and technology. Through the frame of broken promises and a deft examination of failures and ruins, they shift our understanding of smart cities from sustainability or surveillance to accountability, and question ways the digital is constructed through various social, political and economic actors as inevitable. Thoroughly researched and thoughtfully theorised, the book is an urgent and clarion call to reflect on what remains in a time of ecological crisis and techno-solutionist paradigms."
Xiaowei Wang, University of California, Los Angeles and the author of Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside
Adi Kuntsman is Reader in Digital Politics at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Liu Xin is Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Karlstad.
Introduction: How Do We Think About Smart Cities?
1. Smart Cities, Digitisation, and the Environment
2. Helsinki, Kalasatama District
3. Manchester
Conclusion: In the Ruins of Broken Promises