According to the EU Commission’s official communication the thematic focus of the ERDF consists of five funding priorities (Fig. 1). Thematic goals “1 and 2 are the main priorities” (EC n.d.c): in the ERDF, the goals of (1) a “more competitive and smarter” (EC n.d.c) Europe and (2) “a greener, low carbon transitioning towards a net zero carbon economy” (EC n.d.c) receive 4–5 times as much funding than the three others goals (EC n.d.d).

Smart urbanism is an “urban strategy that seeks advanced technological solutions to the pressing issues facing policy makers today, among which climate change has taken center stage” (Viitanen and Kingston 2014, p. 803). The ERDF’s thematic priorities – greener, smarter, more competitive – closely resemble this ideology: “[T]he ERDF is primarily oriented to support the development of next generation access networks (NGA), e‑Government and ICT applications” (Gargiulo et al. 2013, p. 12). Official EU communication talks of green and digital as the “Twin Transition” (EC 2022, p. 19). In the previous funding period “75 % of the project budget [were] generally linked to topics of the Twin Transition” (EC 2022, p. 19), assuming a possibility of achieving green ends by smart means, i.e. high-tech solutions to societal problems.

March (2018) finds that smart urbanism leads to problems like technological optimism, private profit orientation and detrimental ecological impacts of the large-scale use of ICT, especially on a global scale. The next three sections zoom in on these critiques: the technological optimism (1), geopolitical ramifications (2) and profits-orientation (3) of smart urbanism.

Criticisms of smart urbanism’s technological optimism can be found throughout the literature (Hartt et al. 2021; March 2018; Viitanen and Kingston 2014). Technological optimism is “the belief that the current problems of the world will continue to intensify […] unless technological innovation intervenes” (Hartt et al. 2021, p. 217). However, smart cities can have unintended negative ecological consequences yet often follow the naïve belief in technological efficiency gains to outpace ecological destructiveness (March 2018). Positive effects of technological solutions could be jeopardized by the “high-technology consumer lifestyles […] central […] in today’s Smart City visions” (Viitanen and Kingston 2014, p. 806), which lead to rebound effects in energy and material throughput. Cities’ problematically large urban metabolisms might thus be enlarged by their ‘smartification’ if socio-technical use practices do not change accordingly.

A main rationale of smart urbanism is “to be efficiently transactional […] making use of advanced, integrated materials, sensors, electronics, and networks which are interfaced with […] databases, tracking, and decision-making algorithms” (Hall et al. 2000, p. 1, as cited in Hartt et al. 2021, p. 214). This illustrates smart urbanism’s aim to annihilate space through time, where spatial distances are bridged by innovations in communication technology. Smart Cities are built on the premise of accelerating information flows in places already designed for fast transportation and low distances. But by “[v]iewing the city as a marketplace” (Hartt et al. 2021, p. 218), smart urbanism follows a “vision of homogeneity and seamlessness […] on the basis of utopian ‘clean and orderly’ pervasive computing” (Viitanen and Kingston 2014, p. 807). Contrasting this western model of cities as detached from biophysical and social reality, cities are more adequately described as “leaky, partial, and heterogeneous” (Viitanen and Kingston 2014, p. 80).

By conceptualizing cities as open systems interacting with their surroundings through flows of matter and energy, global ecological problems of smart urbanism become apparent.

Urban Ecology recognizes that cities are “social-ecological systems (SESs) nested within the global SES” (Nel et al. 2018, p. 251). By conceptualizing cities as open systems interacting with their surroundings through flows of matter and energy, global ecological problems of smart urbanism become apparent. Smart applications like data centers consume large amounts of energy and matter (esp. freshwater and minerals) (Fichter and Hintemann 2014), which links them to extractivism in the global hinterland and its associated ecological, justice and human rights problems. Smart urbanism can thus exacerbate ecologically unequal exchange (Dorninger et al. 2021; Hickel et al. 2022) with the (semi-)periphery. In a conflictual geopolitical context, the securing of resources for smart urbanism is based on a “master narrative of innovation for growth […] fueled by a preoccupation for international competitiveness” (Strand et al. 2018 p. 1850). Smart urbanism can therefore be seen as an “imperial mode of living” (Brand and Wissen 2017, p. 13) where the unintended ecological and social effects of urban spatio-temporal fixes are globally exported. A solidary mode of living (Brand and Wissen 2017, p. 165) like degrowth would be based on convivial technologies (Vetter 2018) that emphasize frugal socio-technical practices and thereby avoid outsourcing ecological problems.

Smart urbanism “can only be effectively delivered through a corporate vision of Smartness, in conjunction with an entrepreneurial form of urban governance” (Hollands 2015, p. 62). Smart ‘solutions’ are often marketing instruments for cities to attract investors and boost their image. Historically and presently “IBM’s work, along with that of other multinationals (e.g., Cisco, Nokia), contributed significantly to the concept’s popularization – along with improving the bottom line of these companies” (Hartt et al. 2021, p. 214). This influence of corporations shows how capital produces space to its advantage and advocates for spatio-temporal fixes as an outlet for over accumulated capital, creating business opportunities “first and foremost associated with ‘green growth’” (Viitanen and Kingston 2014, p. 809). ERDF funding is mostly delivered through public-private partnerships (PPPs), which means potential appropriation of public funds by private companies, e.g. innovative technologies being enclosed by intellectual property rights. Contrary to the win-win discourse, “inequality and poverty do not often feature in Smart City debates, but the technological fixes in smart cities will have distributional consequences under which there are winners and losers” (Viitanen and Kingston 2014, p. 810).

The ERDF is also leveraged “through financial products, such as loans, guarantees and equity” (EC n.d.a) to generate conditions for capital accumulation with speculative investments. Financialization is a bet to reach higher yields than public funds alone could: “Financial instruments [are] maximising private investment with minimum public support” (ibid. n.d.a). From 2014–2021 more than 10 % of ERDF resources were leveraged by financial instruments (Chraska and Kasprzyk 2021). Over 22 billion Euros were channeled through volatile financial markets, which makes the ERDF by far the most financialized EU fund (Chraska and Kasprzyk 2021). The smart urbanist production of space is favorable to real and financial capital accumulation, which in turn makes it more likely that space continues to be produced in a smart urbanist way. Fig. 2 summarizes the theoretical argument and its critical application to the ERDF.

Most degrowth-compatible technologies have some common denominator: “the need for decentralization and a certain autonomy of hierarchical infrastructures, scalability, and […] technologies that are not harmful to the environment” (Vetter 2018, p. 1780). Convivial technology operationalizes these normative propositions into five dimensions (Vetter 2018, pp. 1782–1784):

Conviviality must not be confused with a blueprint for degrowth technology to follow. Rather, it is an abstract, multi-dimensional guiding principle that local projects can appropriate for their own cause, while upholding its central normative propositions of decentralization, autonomy, and environmental harmlessness (Vetter 2018 p. 1780). However, regarding scalability, most convivial technologies currently exist in a niche which keeps them from assuming a more effective role in making society less growth-dependent. The focus for convivial technologies is not so much on innovation of new technologies, but rather about their diffusion and the upscaling of their usage in society. Only a favorable institutional embedding makes convivial technologies practically viable.

A degrowth-compatible ERDF “will require new participatory urban technologies, greater social and economic inclusion, and a substantial shift in power from corporate business and entrepreneurial city leaders to ordinary people and communities that make up cities” (Hollands 2015, p. 63). It should thus favor common and public ownership models over private ownership of technologies, advocating for open-access, sharing, cooperative and community-supported regimes.

Such an arrangement, in direct opposition to PPPs, is referred to as a commons-public partnership. A CPP is established when “a commons association enters into a contract or agreement with the public sector” (Jerchel and Pape 2022, p. 5) and is granted the autonomous execution of an area of social provisioning. This can include the provision of energy, water, housing, or healthcare, but also the management of public spaces, care-groups, education facilities or technologies. In Germany, there are existing legal forms the commoners can adapt for their cause, often in the form of associations (eingetragener Verein) or cooperatives (Genossenschaften), as well as common-interest firms (gemeinnützige GmbH).

The literature defines five abstract characteristics of CPPs (Jerchel and Pape 2022, p. 14, based on Milburn and Russell 2019): (1) they synthesize different forms of knowledge, like technical expertise and lived experience, (2) work through common ownership and eye-level cooperation with the public body, (3) advance shared democratic decision making, (4) have a secure long-term perspective, and (5) lead to the institutionalization of commons that provide goods and services directly. Funding regimes like the ERDF can take the public role of the CPP, providing support (with monetary funding, or by providing public spaces, buildings, materials, energy and skill-sharing platforms) but otherwise leaving autonomous space for commoners. CPPs bring several benefits compared to smart urbanism:

CPPs can become effective enablers for the diffusion of convivial technologies by increasing their relatedness and accessibility dimensions, in turn making scalability more likely. Such democratization could replace the production of space pursued by the current ERDF with a provisioning of public space, money, and power to civil society that can consequently thrive in autonomy to commonize and upscale convivial technologies.