Study title

Interviews were undertaken with relevant players and stakeholders in their field.The project’s central research question was ‘how is smart assembling and engaging different forms of social difference in Milton Keynes?’. It investigated this across five ‘slices’ in our case study city of Milton Keynes (MK). The five slices became the five work packages: smart citizens, smart businesses, smart governance, smart data and smart visuals. MK was chosen for two reasons. First, it is one of the UK’s leading smart cities with a number of significant public and privately funded smart city interventions underway or recently completed at the time of the project. Second, in a field where most research was based on urban areas in some ways exceptional, this project looked at an ordinary city. Its aim was to be attentive to the way smart city interventions come about in an average sized urban area, resembling the kinds of towns and cities and most people live in.The past decade has seen the widespread emergence of what are now often called 'smart cities'. Smart cities are generally understood to use the data produced by digital technologies to enhance their sustainability (by encouraging more efficient use of resources), economic growth (through innovating new products and markets) and openness (by enabling greater citizen participation in city governance). 'Smart cities' are a global phenomenon at the heart of how many cities are planning for future growth, and the UK is no exception. Over half of UK cities are implementing smart projects, and the government's Information Economy Strategy aims to make the UK a global hub of smart city delivery by capturing 10 per cent of the global smart city market by 2020. The government directly funds several large smart city projects, sponsors three innovation Catapults with direct links to smart initiatives, and the British Standards Institute is developing a framework for implementing smart city technologies. 'Smart', then, is...