Dr Igor Calzada, MBA presents his paper at the Oxford City Debates, International Congress at the University of Oxford, Future of Cities Programme, Oxford (UK), on 18th February 2016.

1. Call for Paper for the Oxford Programme for the Future of Cities conference on “Urban
Governance and its Discontents” to be held on 18-19 February 2016
Panel 2 – Governing the city: where do infrastructure, democracy, and social justice meet?
Infrastructure, Graham and McFarlane have argued, is “not just a ‘thing’, a ‘system’, or an
‘output’, but is a complex social and technological process that enables—or disables—particular
kinds of action in the city.” In this panel we aim at investigating how specific infrastructures,
financing systems, and their imagined temporalities enable or disable popular participation,
democratic activities, as well as social justice. In particular, we are looking for stimulating
pieces which engage with the role of infrastructure in creating corridors as well as raising walls,
allowing and filtering flows, and creating specific forms of mobility and mobilization.
Moreover, we are interested in papers that reflect on the futures, possibilities, and burdens
created by specific financial tools as well as by massive infrastructural investment which may
allow forms of participation today while also leaving economic, social, and ecological debts for
the next generations. We therefore invite
the submission of papers which analyse these themes, either theoretically, ethnographically, or
comparatively. We are particularly interested in opinionated pieces that have the potential of
spurring further conversations, as the resulting panel will work as a springboard for subsequent
urban debate.
‘Comparing Smart City-Regional Governance Strategies in Bristol, Glasgow, Bilbao &
Barcelona’
(Dr Igor Calzada, Future of Cities at the University of Oxford)
‘Smart city’ has already become a ‘fetish’ term to simplify complex urban debates in an uneven
techno-deterministically-driven hyper-connected society. Therefore, a mainstream wave of
urban standarisation concerning the ‘smart city’ (in-the-box) paradigm has been dominating
policy agendas. Yet, this movement has failed to offer alternative efficient policy tools to better
understand and intervene in our daily urban realities while considering the whole range of
stakeholders that determine whether or not a common solution is a ‘smart’ one for the city.
Moreover, it is arguable that the ‘smart city’ is already happening around us, but not in the way
anticipated. Furthermore, the ‘smart city’ discourse has been shifted by academics in order to
make proposals that produce realistic transitions in cities and to avoid a narrowly portrayed
approach to governance and urbanisation processes.
However, according to previous research, the author suggests deconstructing the term ‘smart
city’ to reach a holistic understanding from a critical urban transformation perspective.
Therefore, this paper understands ‘smart cities’ as, in essence, entrepreneurial cities that respond
immediately and efficiently – in imaginative, novel ways – to continuous, complex socio-
technical changes caused externally by global market dynamics, and internally by unequal
stakeholders’ power relations. Indeed, this paper compares strategically and ethnographically
four specific city-region cases located in two European nation-states: Bristol and Glasgow in the
UK, and Bilbao and Barcelona in Spain.
The comparative analysis will enhance two dimensions of the ‘smartness’ for each city-region:
On the one hand, the focus will be on the metropolitan governance dynamics and the
stakeholder democratic interactions. On the other hand, it will tackle a special consideration to
the devolution dynamics between the city-region and each referential nation-state.