Psychogeography and the Smart City

I begin this chapter with a very brief outline of what is meant by the smart city. My aim here is to treat the smart city as a starting point, something that is integral to the assumptions and imperatives upon which our ideas of the modern city are based. To do this means subjecting urban regeneration, as it is defined and justified by ideas of the smart city, to a different type of critique. In his work on visual culture, Jenks (1995: 144) argues that that ‘dominant views and appropriations of space have become taken for granted and have, in turn, enabled routine human organisation and governmentality’. He also talks about a lack of ‘critical theoreticity’ in the social sciences together with a need to explore ‘alternative geographies’ (Jenks 1995: 144). With this in mind, I want to ask whether or not psychogeography can be used to provide a timely critical intervention in relation to the smart city. There is a strongly political edge to this project, which involves being able to somehow reimagine what a city might look like in the face of powerful neo-liberal forces that have come to condition every facet of our existence. Here, I will show how philosophical currents dating back to surrealism and the situationist movement have been used to critique both the urban space and its inequalities