How EU-funded Smart City experiments influence modes of planning for mobility: observations from Hamburg

Abstract

Hamburg participates in the EU-funded research and development project mySMARTlife (mSL) with experiments involving smart city technologies, among others in the field of transportation infrastructure. These experiments are shaped by a public-private consortium in accordance with a call of the EU research and innovation program “Horizon 2020”. They focus on close to the market technologies. The experiments aim at citizen participation. Yet, what technologies are experimented with has been decided and contractually fixed by the consortium beforehand. We explore tensions in this kind of setup, and how entrenched approaches to planning of transportation infrastructure are challenged by new subjectivities, expectations, standards and procedures. From our perspective, it is highly questionable whether a purely expert driven process can produce outcomes that sufficiently reflects local residents’ ideas of sustainable and appropriate changes to urban infrastructures. For this reason, candidate ‘solutions’ for future mobility demands should be exposed to societal deliberation at an earlier stage in their development. Our exploration of (possible) interplays between such an experimental approach to the shaping of infrastructures and the pre-existing integrated approach to planning has been a modest first step, and more empirical research would be needed to draw solid conclusions. It seems worthwhile to analyse more deeply the in- and exclusiveness of the actor constellations in such processes, the role of coincidences or strategies behind the selection of partners, and a possible gate-keeper function of the process initiator.