More-than-human smart urban governance: A research agenda

Abstract

Environmental change is giving rise to more-than-human thinking/practice about cities. At the same time, ‘smart’ thinking/practice about cities driven by technocratic approaches, have been critiqued for reinforcing human exceptionalism. That is, nonhuman nature in cities is increasingly perceived and governed via digital technologies that rarely account for limits to human perception. Here, we offer an alternative and address how digital technologies and politics can potentially be reconfigured to care for the more-than-human world within cities. In this paper, we critically review technocratic approaches to smart urban governance and explore the more-than-human turn across the triad of cities, digital technologies and data, and politics. We outline the contours of a new more-than-human approach to smart urban governance.

Keywords

• More-than-human
• Multispecies
• Smart urban governance
• Smart cities