The Hard/Soft Dichotomies in Smart Cities: Comparison
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Hard and soft approaches to smart cities have been a common language in academic and policy literature, lending to the origin of the smart city concept itself, with the original technocratic focus now increasingly reframed as “citizen-centric”.  The binary of the hard and soft is also often presented as a choice of pathways in the development of smart cities.

  • digital governance
  • digital spaces
  • smart city

1. Introduction

The idea of the “smart city” is bringing a number of key and disruptive innovations into the operation of urban life, affecting social dynamics, governance, and markets. Developments in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and the Internet of Things (IoT) make it possible to digitally connect myriads of devices, sensors, actuators, and smartphones and to simultaneously collect Big Data for analyzing, managing, and controlling the ever-increasing number of aspects of urban life. The uninterrupted high-resolution flow of users’ data, real-time responses to it, and the customization of services to tailor people’s individual needs, desires, and trajectories bring the promise of combined efficiency, integration, transparency, inclusiveness, and participation. Consequently, many cities around the world have launched smart city initiatives, often supported by strategic city-level programs. Discursively, these strategies “place people at the center.” Meanwhile, at the core of the emergence of the smart city remain digitalization and ICT. This has produced the dichotomist expression of “hard” and “soft” approaches to the smart city (e.g., [1,2][1][2]), where “hard” refers to ICT-centered applications and physical infrastructures such as buildings, energy grids, natural resources, water and waste management, mobility, and logistics, while “soft” points to innovations, education, culture, social inclusion, and governance. This discursive dichotomy of “hard” and “soft” may also appear in other forms such as “technical” or “social” or as part of an integrated approach [3]. The binary of the hard and soft is also often presented as a choice of pathways in the development of smart cities. It has become rare that a smart city vision does not include a form of a pie diagram plotting a circle in the middle that reads “smart city” and is surrounded by sectors for “smart people”, “smart living”, “smart economy”, “smart government”, “smart environment”, and “smart mobility” and their variations. This is supposed to demonstrate an inthategrated approach, where inevitably, the “soft” approach dominates. The smart citHowever, it is often the case that soft domains are emphasized in a discursive way to justify the rationale for the deployment of smart cities, but that specific areas of real-life smart city application shift the emphasis back to the hard domains such as dataization, its enabling infrastructure, and the deployment of various ICT-based technological solutions. Acknowledging this as a strategy to promulgate technological and instrumentalist agendas in the name of social agendas and citizen empowerment [4], we, nevertheless, argue that this is more than a discursive diversion. What is happening is rather symptomatic has of the ever-deepening interpenetration and hybridization of technical, governance, and sociocultural elements in an increasingly digitalized society, where the dichotomy of technology versus society is increasingly difficult to sustain in practice and, indeed, becomes an epistemological obstruction to addressing the smart city as an analytical category.

2. The Politics of Hard/Soft Dichotomies

Hard and soft approaches to smart cities have been a common language in academic and policy literature, lending to the origin of the smart city concept itself, with the original technocratic focus now increasingly reframed as “citizen-centric” (i.e., [4]). With ICT being central to the smart city, the concept has also drawn from other “hard” sectors such as low-energy buildings, transportation systems, or automation (cf. [5][6][7]). However, the smart city has quickly developed a dialogue with longer-standing principles of sustainable cities [8]. This leads to a broader and varied engagement with smart cities, now involving the notions of multiple stakeholders, participation, citizens, and other soft/social aspects [9]. Letaifa [10], for example, discusses the importance of approaching smart cities as complex innovation ecosystems with integrated socioeconomic, ecological, and political sub-systems while adopting a sustainability approach. Nevertheless, political tensions between the hard and soft pathways to the smart city remain. IMany aut is oftehors are cautious about imbalances when the case that soft domaismart city agenda is dominated by digital technology. They question whether so-called smart solutions are emphasized in a discursive way to juall about a technological push driven by high-tech corporations (e.g., [11][12][13][14]). Thist brify the rationale for the deployment of smart cities, but that specngs forth the entrepreneurial stimulation of smart development by the ICT industries and markets associated with their products and services [15][16]. Difscursic areas of real-life smart city application shift the emphasis back to the hard domainvely at least, citizen engagement and the idea that technology is leveraged to achieve greater social, environmental, and economic—or overall sustainability—needs become the currency of the smart city. Cities such as dataization, its enabling infrastructure, Barcelona have adopted an integrated architecture based on sensors, code, and the deployment of various ICT-based technological solutionsInternet—all in the name of developing networked habitats and distributive management as part of a “multi-scalar city” empowering its citizens [17]. MaAdmiriny authors are cautious about imbalances when g Barcelona’s recent attempt to re-envisage the smart city agenda is dominated by digitalround “technological sovereignty” and the notion that technology should be oriented to serve local residents as technology “commons”, Refs. They[4][18] qarguestion whether so-called smart that elsewhere “citizen-centric” roles are narrowly based on predefined choices over market-led solutions are all about a technological push driven by high-tech corporations (e.g.,(citizens as users or consumers), and not so much in proactive social innovation or political citizenship. They [11,12,13,14]).[18] Thials brings forth the entrepreneurial stimulation of smart development by the ICT industries and markets associated with their products and services [15,16]o argue that this approach is common for EU institutions, and, despite all the “citizen-focused” discourse, smart urbanism remains rooted in instrumental and paternalistic practices. Many authors have similarly questioned the extent of inclusiveness of smart interventions regardless of their capacity to boost sustainability and spur economic growth in cities. Some call the smart city a “hollow signifier” built upon elitist control that only renders further exclusions and injustices, triggering commodification amid a weak economy [19,20][19][20]. This perspective considers smart city solutions as neoliberal “techno-environmental fixes” that involve the depoliticization of city governance and the outsourcing of public services to money-grabbing initiatives by technology funders, utility, and ICT companies [14,17,21][14][17][21].
What emerges here is key to the issue of governance. If the “soft” strategy is chosen, sustaining it in practice may be problematic given the strong impulses for marketization via digitalization more aligned with the “hard” strategy offered by technology proponents. Yet, an important extension from that is the deliberation of whether it is still meaningful to make the dichotomist distinction between the “hard” and “soft” domains or whether it is necessary to accept their co-production (if not blurred meanings). That would require acknowledging both the changing nature (digitalization) of society and the political nature of technology and, consequently, the social responsibility, politics, and ethics of governing technological hardware, software, and other infrastructure. Acknowledging smart cities as a strategy to promulgate technological and instrumentalist agendas in the name of social agendas and citizen empowerment [4], we, nevertheless, argue that this is more than a discursive diversion. What is happening is rather symptomatic of the ever-deepening interpenetration and hybridization of technical, governance, and sociocultural elements in an increasingly digitalized society, where the dichotomy of technology versus society is increasingly difficult to sustain in practice and, indeed, becomes an epistemological obstruction to addressing the smart city as an analytical category. The multifaceted nature of smart cities, therefore, necessitates a different approach that is more in line with systems thinking, where hard and soft domains are co-occurrent and combined in their operation rather than other-replacing. 

References

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