Introduction

Figure 1: “Newcastle named UK’s smartest city” (screenshot)

2Although just one of the many aspects of contemporary urban development, the smart city provides a very interesting lens through which to observe and analyse cities as a crucible for technological change. The long-running debate on the impact of new technologies on cultural, social and political practice is polarised between an optimistic view which focuses on new technology’s potential to solve human problems and a pessimistic view, wary of technologies’ potential to alter the nature of human relationships (for a summary of debates on the liberating potential of new technologies and the origins of smart urbanism see for example Cugurullo 2018). As cities today are increasingly relying on technological innovation to strengthen their reputation and global relevance as dynamic, adaptive places, the “smart city” stands as the latest urban utopia (eg Hollands 2015; Townsend 2013) and thus provides an opportunity to reappraise the relationship between new technologies and urban development.

3As Viitanen and Kingston have suggested, the smart city is best understood as “an urban strategy that seeks advanced technological solutions to the pressing issues facing policy makers” (2013: 1). Smart urbanism is presented as the response to almost every aspect of contemporary urban living (Marvin, Luque-Ayala and McFarlane 2016). Thus the world’s leading high-tech companies are promising to conduct a new “soft” revolution to address the negative consequences of the first industrial revolution – the traffic congestion, dirt, pollution and insecurity which blight the lives of city dwellers – and to deliver more efficient and environment-friendly infrastructures and services. As McFarlane pointed out, the concept of “smart” is a highly “seductive one” as it comes “charged with positive and aspirational connotations” and “pulls across a range of different discourses – economic growth, optimization, sustainability, efficiency, better service provision, greater and more transparent citizen access, security, and so on” (2015: 90). But there is a need to look behind the label and to stress “the difficulties in substantiating the smart city imaginary” (Buck and While 2015: 1). The growing body of literature on the contradictions inherent in “techno-utopian visions of smart urbanism” (2015: 2) (eg Luque et al. 2014), tends to focus on general and abstract assessments of the benefits and dangers of the smart city, so that there is still a gap in the research as to how smart cities are actually implemented and perceived in specific contexts (Kitchin 2014).

Newcastle as “smart” city: concepts, components and context

6The concept of “smart city” has become ubiquitous yet remains fuzzy; to be of use in this analysis of the case of Newcastle, it needs to be conceptualised, substantiated, and set in context. In general terms, “smart cities” refers to “places that incorporate a range of technologies (especially those that collect and use data) to address economic, social, and environmental challenges” (UK Parliament 2021: 1). A smart city is defined as one that deploys new technologies in order to transform core systems through innovations such as broadband, analytical software, real-time sensing and feedback, and the “Internet of Things” to increase citizen interaction and greater connectivity between services (Buck and While 2015; Dirks and Keeling 2009; Hooper 2010). In short, it collects and uses data to provide “smart” infrastructure connecting the supplies and demands of people, organisations and objects in supposedly new, more efficient ways.

7Indeed the argument is that smart technology will improve the lives of the 45 million people living in the UK’s towns and cities, making urban areas at once more efficient, more sustainable and safer, since smart cities will be able to monitor air quality to reduce pollution, use real time traffic data to ease congestion and tackle crime using analytic software (Los Angeles Police Department has been using social media monitoring tools provided by tech start up Voyager Labs to predict criminal behaviour, Los Angeles Times 3 July 2019). The 2013 European Parliament report “Mapping Smart Cities in the EU” develops the concept of smart city along six dimensions: smart economy; smart mobility; smart environment; smart people; smart living; and smart governance (European Parliament 2013). This reflects the claim, central to official communication on the promise of the smart city, that smart cities will be better able to balance economic growth and social development. The smart city thus seems to stand as the silver bullet to solve all major problems linked to city life.

8The concept of smart city has been promoted heavily by major global players and is being subsidised by national and local governments as well as the EU, which is reflected in a push by cities across the world to acquire the status of “smart” cities, a branding which local authorities see as increasing their ability to attract what urbanist Richard Florida calls the “creative class”, a global urban middle class who share high expectations regarding the provision of public services, the quality of urban infrastructures, as well as environmental concerns (Florida 2003). This means that cities wanting to attract this category of affluent residents have to generate the high value jobs and the kinds of services that may draw them in, for example by ensuring citizens can access services through digital interfaces rather than through offices with long queues (Florida 2008). The smart city, which combines economic competitiveness, quality of life and a dynamic image, therefore stands as a key urban imaginary for the contemporary city (Luque, McFarlane, Marvin 2014).

9Yet although these trends are seen around the world and provide the backdrop against which to conceptualise the smart city, the variegated nature of cities, which have very different histories, sizes, and resources, makes it “difficult to develop a comprehensive framework that conceptualizes different smart city components and the strategic steps for implementation” (Bennett, Pérez-Bustamante and Medrano 2017). Therefore, any attempt to arrive at a workable definition needs to understand how “globalised smart‐city logics and discourses are translated into national and local contexts” (Caprotti and Cowley 2019: 33) and look at the deployment of the smart city in specific cities.

11These initiatives reflect the fact that socio-economic conditions in the North – and its future prospects – have become central to national debates in the UK. The North of England, the old industrial epicentre, has been suffering from a range of social and economic ills, particularly since the 1980s, increased in the 1990s and the 2000s. Studies by the think tank Centre for Cities have shown that these regions have suffered disproportionately from austerity measures in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and from the fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic (centreforcities.org). Therefore, the status of Northern regions and their local economies is intimately associated with efforts to “rebalance” the economy away from the South East and London, while at the same time London has played the leading role in directing debates about the North (Martin, Schafran and Taylor 2018). Northern cities have suffered, since the 1970s, from the decline of heavy industry and have striven to find ways of regenerating themselves, with Manchester’s city centre regeneration earning the UK’s second city the nickname of “London of the North”.

12For a Northern city such as Newcastle upon Tyne, there was a strong incentive to “smarten up”. This north-east city sits within the Tyneside urban conurbation and has, according to the latest available ONS population estimates (Office for National Statistics 2019), a population of just over 300,000 people, which makes it the 8th most populous city in of England (Newcastle City Council April 2021). According to UN figures, the total metro area population of Newcastle upon Tyne in 2021 was 814,000 and has been growing by an average of half a percentage point every year since the beginning of the 2000s. Newcastle has become relatively more deprived between 2015 and 2019 – moving from an overall position of 42, in the second most deprived quartile, into the most deprived quartile (rank 32), i.e. dropping by 10 places (Newcastle City Council 2021). In 2018-19, 23% of children lived in absolute low income families, placing it in the top 20 highest-proportioned local authorities in this category. The most recent data (for 2017-2019) shows that average male life expectancy at birth in Newcastle is 77.9 years, lower than the England average (79.8 years) by 1.9 years (1.5 for women). Official Labour Market Statistics show that the employment rate in Newcastle stands at 69.5% of the working-age population, lower than the national employment rate of 75.7% (nomisweb.co.uk). In this context and in the absence of significant resources, the desire of the local council to regenerate the city through attracting businesses and upscale residents is highly understandable. The expected economic benefits of smart cities range from “job creation, efficiency and productivity savings, export opportunities for UK businesses”, to “making the local area more attractive to live and work in” (UK Parliament 2021: 2).

Who is involved in making Newcastle “smart”?

14When Newcastle was named Smart City of the Year at the Digital Leaders Awards in June 2019, this generated a spate of triumphant announcements by Newcastle City Council and its partners. Yet confronting the prominence of this achievement in promotional documents with the lack of public resonance of the event suggests that there is a wide gap between the official discourse and perception by residents, which is characterised mainly by a lack of awareness, and highlights the existence of conflicting objectives.

17The range of stakeholders involved in the project and funding it is a key dimension as illustrated by Pat Ritchie’s insistence that the smart city drive rested upon “technological partnerships between businesses, universities and public services” (Newcastle City Council 2019). The 2018 public consultation “Your views on the Northumberland Street area in 2018” (letstalknewcastle.co.uk), which ran from 12 March 2018 to 06 April 2018, had an accompanying video explaining the Council’s approach: “We’ve engaged with a wide range of stakeholders from the universities, the cultural institutions, from businesses, from retailers, from the local authority”. Organisations partnering on infrastructural research projects included Northumbrian Water, Northern Powergrid, and the Tyne and Wear Urban Traffic Management Control Centre, while private sector technology partners include Siemens, Philips, Microsoft and Zero Carbon Futures (Caprotti et al. 2016). As well as being backed by national government through the 2012 Newcastle City Deal, the project received further funding for infrastructural projects from the Chancellor in 2015, and had a total budget of £250 million. The flagship building The Core was partly funded by the European Union Regional Development Fund which “aims to strengthen economic, social and territorial cohesion in the European Union by correcting imbalances between its regions” (European Parliament 2013).

18The Core building was opened in November 2014 and reported as almost fully occupied as of March 2016. The initiatives based at the Helix-Science Central today include the Cloud Innovation Centre and a National Innovation Centre for Data. Crucially, the Urban Sciences Building houses Newcastle University’s Urban Observatory, which collects the largest set of publicly available real-time urban data in the UK “to inform decision making and improve outcomes for people in the city” (urbanobservatory.org). This builds upon an existing long-term “Science City” partnership between Newcastle University and the City Council established to “maximise the North East’s scientific potential, raising awareness of the region’s scientific expertise across the world” (newcastlesciencecity.com). The relationship between the local councils and universities is seen as a two-way traffic as universities not only provide “graduates for the knowledge intensive jobs which a smart city creates”, but also use their skills “to provide advice to the city authorities on the impact of different approaches to tackling specific challenges”. Indeed, universities are seen to have become influential actors in the co-production of smart cities (Karvonen, Martin, Evans 2018) and the strength of the links between “town and gown” are seen by the government as a key dimension of the move towards smart cities (UK Government 2013: 17). The smart city agenda is thus being driven by the overlapping interests of academia, government and industry.

19In addition to office spaces, the Helix also includes a residential area and amenities (bars and restaurants). The promotional documentation describes the new area as providing “inspirational city centre living”, populated by “hundreds of innovators, businesses and progressive homeowners living and working side by side”, and living in “hundreds of innovative homes – some so smart you can run them from your phone”. The solar-powered smart homes are also advertised as providing “an exemplary sustainable development, in the middle of the only city centre neighbourhood of its kind in the UK” (newcastlehelix.com⁾, clearly designed to appeal to the “creative class”.

20It is significant that policies and promotional materials relating both to the Science Central-Helix project and the broader economic strategies for the city region mobilise a narrative of continuity with, but also transformation of, the city’s industrial heritage, starting with the symbolic decision to develop the Science Central project on the site of Scottish & Newcastle brewing company, which closed in 2005, and itself built on the site of the former North Elswick Colliery which operated throughout the 19th century. Thus the “smartening up” of the Newcastle’s city centre is part of a wider project of urban regeneration which includes the renovation of historic buildings for new uses.

21The official narrative is that of inclusion of the different groups of residents. On its public consultation hub (letstalknewcastle.co.uk), the Council stresses the fact that they are “making sure that our city is fit for purpose – for residents, businesses and visitors”, because “different users of the city centre have different requirements”, so that there is a need to “create a balance for everyone”. The Council insists that the benefits drawn from the upgrade will not be limited to residents of the new area, and that “the creation of jobs, income and business will help to unlock other parts of the city so the benefits can be shared, with the effects felt further afield than just the immediate city centre”.

22In 2021, Newcastle was ranked 21 in a list of leading cities in the Smart City Index, up two ranks from the previous year, and overtaking London (number 22) and Manchester (number 26). The index ranks 118 cities based on citizens’ perceptions and both economic and technological data and claims to offer “a balanced focus on economic and technological aspects of smart cities on the one hand, and “humane dimensions” of smart cities (quality of life, environment, inclusiveness) on the other (Smart City Observatory 2021). Importantly, it asked residents the question: “What does it mean if your city is ‘smart’?”, so as to assess their perceptions of the impact technology on their lives, looking at issues such as health and safety, mobility, activities, opportunities, and governance. The report showed that citizens’ concerns seem to change as their cities become “smarter”. For example, the cost of housing tends to be a dominant concern in the top-ranking cities whereas residents of lower-ranking ones tend to grant a higher degree of priority to solving issues related to health and safety. Environmental concerns are also comparatively higher in richer cities.

23Yet although the smart city is a big agenda for both the City Council and Newcastle University, there is little awareness of this outside the key partners. Discussions with residents conducted in the autumn of 2021 highlighted conflicting perceptions ranging from complete unawareness, to cautious optimism, and to very strong scepticism, although on balance they leant towards a negative view as the improvements to the city are not seen to be designed for them or are offset by some negative consequences. In fact, few local residents had even heard of Newcastle as a smart city, with a typical response being: “To be honest I didn’t even know it was a ‘smart city’”. This lack of awareness is confirmed by a survey conducted by the Institution of Engineering and Technology which indicated that less than (18%) members of the public have heard of the term “smart city” (Institution of Engineering and Technology 2016), and that those who have tend to see it as a gimmick. One resident had heard of smart bins but considered this was all “corporate bullshit” and mainly an excuse for not collecting rubbish, and saw the technological advances as fixes for lack of money. A local journalist questioned the bidding process and suspects that the Council had to pay to obtain the award and suggests putting in a freedom of information request. A local academic confessed that “The smart city stuff in Newcastle has been a bit off my radar”. Overall therefore, the smart city is strikingly absent from public debate. An internet search of topics related to Newcastle as a smart city brings up mostly websites and documents by consultancies aiming to help businesses, and there are very few mentions of the smart city agenda in the local newspaper, the Evening Chronicle. Talking to a range of people who reside in the city revealed that very few were aware that their city was “smart”, and that those who had heard of the concept were either unable to explain what that meant or were dismissive that this was something significant or positive.

25According to the official and corporate literature therefore, Newcastle has successfully transitioned from a struggling old industrial city to an internationally recognised smart city, which provides an opportunity to change the narrative and the image. But even if the literature claims that smart city initiatives are people-centred and aiming to improve the everyday lives of local residents, the smart city in practice stands first and foremost as a political and economic issue. The absence of discussion of the issue outside political, business and academic circles in the wider public sphere means that “concerns persist that the smart city is little more than a marketing label or a hollow urban imaginary in search of meaning” (Buck and While 2015: 4). The smart city may stand as the new urban panacea yet it continues to be a highly ideological concept.

Newcastle as smart city: for whose benefit?

26This section looks behind the glossy brochures at the “actually existing” situation. Townsend (2014: 12-13) points out that there is concern that smart technologies may have many unintended consequences, while Buck and While (2015) stress the fact that the smart city concept has attracted growing scepticism, as smart city technologies are seen to generate new problems such as the risks linked to increased surveillance, the outsourcing of power and control to private-sector providers whom local authorities are not able to reign in, and the increased marginalisation of excluded citizens with a view that smart cities might actually widen existing societal gaps (Hollands 2008; UK Parliament 2021; Vanolo 2013).

27Indeed, the smart city may for example contribute to worsening the gap between poor and affluent residents. According to the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (UCAS) which operates student applications in the UK, Newcastle is now home to a large temporary student population totalling 42,000 which has transformed the city centre. One resident explained how the central area around football stadium St James’ Park has been “radically altered, from the old brewery being knocked down and now tons of high rise student housing replacing it.” More specifically, Newcastle also has the highest proportion of STEM (Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and computing students in the country (Smart City Business 2022). The growth in the numbers of affluent international students drawn to the city has led to the emergence a new luxury student accommodation market, while affordability at the lower end of the market remains a huge problem. The smart city ranking survey (Smart City Observatory 2021) indicates that affordable housing is now the main concern of residents, as 68.2 % of Newcastle residents rated this as their first priority for the city, well ahead of unemployment, 52.8%, or health, 30.7%. The building boom had generated so-called “town vs gown rows”, leading to a push back against “studentification” of the city centre. As one resident put it, “a large part of new accommodation is for students and key workers, more transient by nature and therefore less likely to integrate into the wider community”. The smartening of Newcastle has also had some negative effects on the quality of life in the new areas, as several residents stressed the deterioration of the city centre where they now saw “a lot more beggars and drug addicts” and “a huge increase in homelessness and poverty across the city”. This led several residents to say that they did not like the city centre for that reason. Clearly, the feeling is that the city centre has not been developed with their own needs and priorities in mind, but to attract a different category of people.

28Overall, the feeling is that the hi-tech clusters such as the Helix are aimed at business and innovation rather than the needs of the average person. The smart city may therefore contribute to increasing geographical inequalities between the city’s “hyper centre” and more peripheral areas. Indeed, one major issue is that of spatial inequality and the emergence of “sensor deserts” (Robinson and Franklin 2020), since not all areas benefit from the new features to the same extent. The same goes for different categories of residents and the existence of the digital divide, which some of the innovations are designed to solve by increasing the council’s ability to respond quickly to the needs of at risk, digitally excluded residents (such as old people at risk of falls). One such project, developed in 2021 by IT firm Trench Networks in association with innovation consultancy Urban Foresight and Newcastle university, aimed to address this problem after user research conducted for the project showed that 46 per cent of service users did not have an internet connection in their home. After it won £15,000 from the national Digital Shift Channel fund in March 2017, the Council developed Chatbots – chat apps, such as Skype, Slack, Messenger and Outlook – using Microsoft’s BOT Framework, to improve “the responsiveness and efficiency of frontline council services” (Urban Foresight 2021). These online services are said to have reduced calls to the Council from about 60 per month to three and saved the equivalent of about £25,000 per year in staff time (Newcastle City Council 25 May 2018). But the smart cities agenda presupposes both the availability of the new technologies in all areas of the city and the readiness of residents to use them. As one resident asked: “who accesses the App to find parking?”.

29This in turn raises the issue of the use of the data collected. Indeed, one of the foundations of the smart city approach is that it gives access to real-time information at the level of individual citizens’ choices and actions. The development of information systems in urban environments has created opportunities to capture information which was not previously accessible. The government’s argument is that “[leading cities] are examining how to generate more powerful insights and value by using potentially more sensitive datasets (including data on vulnerable groups) in order to improve their understanding of citizens’ needs and to provide better services, while respecting data privacy and security” (Department for Business, Innovation and Skills 2013: 37). This can be very useful in enabling the detection of patterns of behaviour, as demonstrated by innovations to tackle the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, for example with the creation of www.howbusyistoon.com, a web-based application developed by Newcastle University’s Urban Observatory in partnership with the National Innovation Centre for Data (NICD), which used real-time data to check how easy it was for residents to maintain social distancing in the city centre.

31Indeed, the data collected through its 50 or so sensors, which residents – or anyone else – can “view, graph and download”, represent “the largest set of publicly available real time urban data in the UK” (Urban Observatory 2021). This conveys the view of city inhabitants as active producers of and contributors to smart cities rather than simply as “users” or “consumers” of smart infrastructures that are being implemented by policy or corporate actors. Yet it is not clear what the data can be used for and who by. One resident stressed the fact that “we haven’t been asked if it is OK to monitor us in the city at all times and for any number of purposes which may or may not be acceptable to people”, and another pointed out that while the data is available to anyone “it would be particularly useful for Central government, Councils, urban developers”, confirming the notion that the smart city remains part of a professional agenda which is reluctant to integrate voices from civil society.

32The competitive dimension of the smart city agenda is also pointed as a major issue, since projects to improve city life are forcing cities to compete for limited funds to compensate for their lack of resources, generating tensions between various actors with competing interests. Following years of funding cuts as a result of austerity measures, many local authorities are forced to do much more with far fewer resources. Impoverished local councils therefore seize these funding opportunities to try and restore their image. Jenny Nelson, Digital Lead at Newcastle City Council, pointed out on receiving the smart city award that the council’s budget has been reduced by £300 million over the past ten years, leaving it with some difficult decisions to make about where best to allocate its more limited funds. Despite a general narrative to increase devolution, and with the government considering that “meeting the needs of urban communities will be a key driver of growth in the decades to come” (Department for Business, Innovation and Skills 2013: 39), the national government’s drive to achieve smarter, more connected cities in the UK is in fact placing the responsibility on individual councils to take the initiative.

34For cash-strapped Councils, these competitive bids constitute a potential boon that cannot be ignored. In this context, cities are encouraged to promote low-carbon transitions “as a means of reinforcing their competitive economic advantages, recasting neoliberal inter-urban competition as an ‘eco-competitive race’” (Hodson and Marvin 2010: 98). But while this can be regarded as a healthy incentive to get local authorities to solve some of the problems of contemporary urban living and be imaginative about ways to make residents’ lives better through a technologically enhanced smart city, it also leads to councils having to work with professional, private players, as well some of the numerous consultancies which have mushroomed to provide their much-needed services. Although some of these, such as Urban Foresight and Dynamo, have developed at local level and have good knowledge of the specific environment in which the projects will be implemented, this nonetheless means that the language and narratives used to pitch the projects in the promotional documents is often alien to residents’ immediate concerns. In addition, the fact that the smart city market is dominated by a handful of global high tech companies leads to a high degree of uniformisation of the projects themselves. Thus Buck and While stress the “potential tensions between the goals of delivering benefits to cities and enhancing the UK’s capability in the lucrative international smart city products and services market” (2015: 4).

35This tension between potentially competing interest leads to one of the major reservations regarding the design of the smart city agenda, which is that “the adoption of technologies within cities has traditionally been driven by a ‘top-down’ approach, with often little involvement from the public at the concept or design stage” (Institution of Engineering and Technology 2016). Since the smart city label is frequently used as a marketing strategy to attract private sector economic development (Shelton, Zook and Wiig 2015), the work of collecting local residents’ views tends to be conducted on the side-lines, in the shape of often opaque public consultations, a process unlikely to produce outcomes that reflect local residents’ ideas of the changes which should be brought to urban infrastructures. The concern is that, despite the claims that the smart city projects are “people-centred”, citizens are not sufficiently involved at the development stage.

36More generally, public consultations do not seem to be raising public awareness, which is a result of the way they are conducted and how their results inform policy. The NCC website states that “following the consultation, all feedback shared will be reviewed ahead of a final decision being made on implementing the plans”, but browsing through its public consultations pages shows that this promise is not always kept, as many consultations show the results as “pending”, sometimes several years after they were closed (in one case the consultation had closed in October 2017 with results still pending in November 2021). Nick Kemp, councillor for Byker, one of Newcastle’s most deprived areas, is reported to have accused the Whey Aye Wheel’s developer of “smoke and mirrors”, lamenting the “fundamental lack of consultation” with locals” (Evening Chronicle 30 October 2020). As the authors of the “Newcastle City Futures 2065” explain, public consultations are not a good enough tool if one really wants to involve local residents: “Traditional public consultation methods are very much on the terms of those initiating the consulting – small timeframes within which society and individuals can express their views on pre-defined policies and proposals” (Tewdwr-Jones, Goddard and Cowie 2015: 47). The report goes as far as to consider that even more innovative participatory approaches tend to increase scepticism because of the feeling that they will not really affect the outcome.

37This generates a feeling among residents that the Council will just not listen to local residents. One resident explained that while “there are lots more things/places that I am enjoying going to”, she was wondering how much support some of the independent businesses were getting from the Council and that “the building of things like the Whey Aye (even against backlash from the public) show that they don’t really listen to what people are wanting for the city, and that profit is still the most important thing to them”. Technology companies are thus seen to be forming opaque partnerships with city-level agencies to profit from projects at the expense of citizens. Another resident, who had heard of smart city but was unsure of what the personal benefits might be, felt that there was a failure to communicate the positive impact – if any – of the smart city on the general population: “Mosley Street may be a smart street, but how does that benefit me?” This resident could not see how the digital sensors would contribute to actually bringing any improvement: “They may be monitoring pollution, but the simple fact is that for most of the day, Mosley Street has two lanes of slow moving traffic in each direction. It doesn’t require a monitor to confirm that pollution is serious”. It should also be noted that Mosley Street is only 222 meters long.

Conclusion

39In the context of increased pressures on urban living and diminishing resources, the smart city stands as a source of hope for the future of cities, holding the promise of addressing meta-problems such as the rising costs of urban life, climate change, as well as the issue of democratic deficits, by empowering residents to co-create their cities through civic technology tools. In promotional documents and government discourse, the smart city is thus extolled as an opportunity to reinvent the relationships between urban infrastructures and residents. Yet residents’ testimonies show that they tend to be pessimistic about the ability of technology to bring about major positive changes to their lives. This pessimism is compounded by the realisation that policies to “level up” the regions of the UK have not delivered on their promise, with figures showing the North East to be the child poverty capital of the UK. This was confirmed in November 2021, when the government announced the scaling back of the Northern Powerhouse Rail project, which local leaders across the region branded a “hammer blow for the North East” (Evening Chronicle 10 November 2021). Indeed, a Rebuilding Britain Index, created by financial group Legal & General, found that less than a quarter of people in the UK agreed that investment was making a noticeable impact where they live, with rates in the North East, North West and Yorkshire and Humber even lower. This is a concern since the report concluded that “the essentially economic focus of these ambitions would appear to be in tension with an ongoing awareness that top-down technology ‘fixes’ are unlikely to have convincingly transformative effects if they are not met with enthusiasm within society more generally” (Legal & General 2021) and are perceived as mere tinkering which cannot compensate the central government’s general disregard for cities such as Newcastle. The ideal vision of a re-engaged citizenry, reconnected to local democracy through technology, is still a distant dream.

40There is a tension between residents’ aspirations and that of the big companies, whilst councils sit in the middle of this battle, at the interface between companies and ordinary people. Townsend talks about a “backlash” against “some of the corporate vision brought about by the development of smart cities” (2014: 9), stressing the potential for distrust resulting from the spread of technology such as CCTVs. As one resident said, “my sense is that there hasn’t been much of a protest against smart cities ideas, probably in part because there’s been very little effort to involve or inform local residents about any of these initiatives.” But even if residents’ engagement and empowerment is lacking from the smart city agenda, citizens are not passive subjects. There is therefore a battle for shaping the technology towards a more progressive, people-centred agenda, as seen in other cities such as Toronto where resistance by residents led to a turnaround. The case of Newcastle points to a situation where groups of citizens have not yet managed to take over, but residents may be able to take control of the new tools or even to subvert them to design their own environment to suit their own priorities, for example by using access to open data, and rethink government on a more open, transparent, democratic, and responsive model (Karvonen, Cook and Haarstad 2020; Townsend 2014:10; Vanolo 2015: 31).

41McFarlane stresses the lack of “clear vision” around what “smart” entails, and “more a sense of bumbling through, a sense that ‘smart matters’ but without any real clarity about why and how” (2015: 90). Indeed, a recurring feature of smart urban initiatives run by city councils is “the level of contingency and uncertainty sometimes found around what smart is and how it might evolve”. Smart cities are therefore best understood as “urban imaginaries”, underpinned by a set of hopes and fears (Vanolo 2015). The case study of Newcastle as a smart city shows how national governments are positioning cities as laboratories for wider public or commercial projects. In this sense, far from the depictions found in the promotional documents, the “smart city” does not provide a model of the future city, but is a “messy” process (Buck and While 2015: 4). Comparative studies of smart cities also stress “the experimental tendencies of the smart city (Cowley and Caprotti 2016; Evans, Karvonen and Raven 2016); one such study concludes that “rather than constituting traditionally ‘planned’ programmes of investment, they are typically driven by ad-hoc partnerships involving city councils, universities, private sector actors and non-governmental organisations, and exemplify the broader contemporary phenomenon of ‘urban experimentation’ as a mode of effecting urban change” (Caprotti et al. 2016: 2-3). As such, the smart city may thus be seen as “a flexible agenda that allows actors across different cities to insert a wide range of different strategies and agendas into it” (Haarstad 2016: 197). This is a key dimension since the criticisms of the smart city narrative overlook “the necessarily experimental and emergent nature of smart city restructuring” (Buck and While 2017: 4). Problems and their solutions are specific to each city, which means that the most imaginative innovations tend to be taking place at a local and small scale. Overall therefore, a nuanced assessment of the benefits and risks associated with the smartening of Newcastle would lead to the conclusion that, despite its current shortcomings, the smart city agenda, which promises to deliver greener, safer cities, the potential of smart city technology to improve urban environments should not be dismissed too quickly, even if it is not reflected in current implementation.