Tenth International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

Increasingly, governance within smart cities engage in approaches that reach beyond the institutional, adapting methods accomplished through networks of more-than-human assemblages that include the socio-technical and material. This paper explores how governance takes the shape of “experimentation” within ‘smart city’ laboratories. It contextualizes the realities of governance experiments accomplished on-the-ground through studying the relationship between the human and 2 types of non-human actors – the material and the immaterial – responding to calls for empirically-grounded understandings of what visions of the ‘smart city’ mean in everyday life. Focusing on the case study of the Singaporean Smart Nation, and in particular, the installation of solar panels and the experience of seasonal haze, this paper explores how conceiving of “living labs” as a particular assemblage of the human and non-human might allow us to reconceptualize notions of power and agency during periods of transformation, such as energy transitions, and emergencies, such as the cross-boundary haze crisis. This study hopes to expand current understandings of environmental governance by showing how assemblages can generate insights into how the non-material is significant to statecraft.