2025/11/11 by David Murakami Wood · 1 voice
Engineering · Social Sciences · #Digital Economy and Work Transformation #Smart Cities and Technologies #Sustainable Urban and Rural Development
paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/9781009383851.003
openalex created_date 2025/11/11 · openalex publication_date 2025/11/11 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/14
Murakami Wood makes both an empirical and a theoretical contribution by analysing the discourses contained in smart city marketing materials to create a detailed description of the kind of human that smart city developers and promoters envision as smart city residents. The resulting portrait of the “platform human” – a being whose entrepreneurial and libertarian needs are seamlessly enabled by technology built into the lived environment – is informed by a technologically-enabled notion of class, a particular and specific political identity of smart citizens as property-owning, entrepreneurial, and libertarian, and a generic environmental ‘goodness’ associated with smart platforms. The combination of these three elements resonates strongly with transhumanist speciation where humans are imagined as data-driven, surveillant, and robotic.