A new wave of smart-city projects is underway that proposes to deploy sensorbased ubiquitous computing across urban infrastructures and mobile devices to achieve greater sustainability. But in what ways do these smart and sustainable cities give rise to distinct material—political arrangements and practices that potentially delimit urban ‘citizenship’ to a series of actions focused on monitoring and managing data? And what are the implications of computationally organized distributions of environmental governance that are programmed for distinct functionalities and are managed by corporate and state actors that engage with cities as datasets to be manipulated? In this paper I discuss the ways in which smart-city proposals might be understood through processes of environmentality or the distribution of governance within and through environments and environmental technologies. I do this by working through an early and formative smart-city design proposal, the Connected Sustainable Cities (CSC) project, developed by MIT and Cisco within the Connected Urban Development initiative between 2007 and 2008. Revisiting and reworking Foucault's notion of environmentality in the context of the CSC smart-city design proposal, I advance an approach to environmentality that deals not with the production of environmental subjects, but rather with the specific spatial—material distribution and relationality of power through environments, technologies, and ways of life. By updating and advancing environmentality through a discussion of computational urbanisms, I consider how practices and operations of citizenship emerge that are a critical part of the imaginings of smart and sustainable cities. This reversioning of environmentality through the smart city recasts who or what counts as a ‘citizen’ and attends to the ways in which citizenship is articulated environmentally through the distribution and feedback of monitoring and urban data practices, rather than through governable subjects or populations.
EllisonNBurrowsRParkerS (Eds) 2007, “Urban informatics: Software, cities and the new cartographies of knowing capitalism”Information, Communication and Society10785–960
FoucaultM, 1977, “Intellectuals and power: A conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze”, in Language, Counter-memory, Practice translated by BouchardDSimonS (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY) pp 205–217
23.
FoucaultM, 1980, “The confession of the flesh”, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977 translated by GordonCMarshallLMephamJSoperK (Vintage Books, New York) pp 194–228
24.
FoucaultM, 1997The Politics of Truth translated by HochrothLPorterC (Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, CA)
25.
FoucaultM, 2003Society Must Be Defended translated by MaceyD (Penguin, London)
26.
FoucaultM, 2004La Naissance de la Biopolitique Cours au Collège de France 1978–1979 (Éditions du Seuil/Gallimard, Paris)
27.
FoucaultM, 2007Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978 translated by BurchellG (Palgrave Macmillan, New York)
28.
FoucaultM, 2008The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979 translated by BurchellG (Palgrave Macmillan, New York)
29.
FullerMHaqueU, 2008, “Urban versioning system”Situated Technologies Pamphlets2 (The Architectural League of New York)
GabrysJ, 2007, “Automatic sensation: Environmental sensors in the digital city”The Senses and Society2189–200
32.
GabrysJ, 2010, “Telepathically urban”, in Circulation and the City: Essays on Urban Culture Eds BoutrosAStrawW (McGill-Queens University Press, Montréal) pp 48–63
33.
GabrysJ, 2011Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics (University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI)
RevelJ, 2009, “Identity, nature, life: Three biopolitical deconstructions”Theory, Culture and Society2645–54
55.
RobinsonJ, 2011, “The spaces of circulating knowledge: City strategies and global urban governmentality”, in Mobile Urbanism Cities and Policymaking in the Global Age Eds McCannEWardK (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN)
ThriftNFrenchS, 2002, “The automatic production of space”Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series27309–335
58.
TownsendAMaguireRLiebholdMCrawfordM, 2010, “A planet of civic laboratories: The future of cities, information, and inclusion”, Institute for the Future and the Rockefeller Foundation, Palo Alto, CA
59.
WeiserM, 1991, “The computer for the 21st century”Scientific American26594–104
60.
WienerN, 1965Cybernetics: Or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA)
