Replicating European smart cities?

The replication rationale in European Union mission statements and in practice

Abstract

The paper unpacks the notion of “replication” within the European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities from two perspectives: The first focuses on the rationale of replication as laid out in the mission statement and integral to its vision of a European smart city market and interrogates the term borrowed from laboratory science. The second turns to replication in practice and explores how replication work, rather than providing standardized technological solutions, has harmonized the vocabulary of replication narratives, creating repositories of modularized descriptions of solutions for knowledge exchange and inspiration. The conclusion draws attention to how the focus on describing technical details precludes a more fundamental or even public debate on measures, and how the apparent failure to create a mass market for smart city technologies results in an increased access to “soft policy options,” making the European smart city an increasingly governable entity.