Planning cities beyond digital colonization? Insights from the periphery

Abstract

Contemporary debates about the smart city are being characterized by divergent views. While smart city proponents enthusiastically see it as a transformative vision for the future of urban areas, the skeptics bring to the fore extremely critical views. The present article critically presents the insights offered by Portuguese planners and public officials on how to craft policies aimed at regulating smart city initiatives in Portugal so that the best land use governance approaches can be identified for this country. Gathered through a mix of semi-structured interviews and an online survey, these insights indicate that planning should play a key role in regulating smart city initiatives, since much can be gained, but also lost, through these initiatives. The insights also show the extent to which smart innovations enjoy today a supposedly universalistic quality: even though Portugal is a peripheral country with very particular social, economic and geographic features, the participants in this research struggled to offer insights that were specifically related to the Portuguese context. This is critically assessed as an alarming sign of the digital colonization that contemporary imaginaries are experiencing. (c) 2022 Elsevier Ltd