This symposium will explore the possibilities and imaginaries generated through the intersection of two urban agendas.

The ‘Smart City’ is concerned with the application of digital infrastructure, sensors and data capture devices, and large scale computing power to previously distinct ‘social’ and governmental dimensions of urban life. Visions of the smart city have largely been built around the centralized, data-driven management of urban spaces and the flows that characterize them: of people, goods, services, and resources. Given the enterprise-driven character of these visions, the focus has been upon transport, utility management, security, and customized commerce. It has been increasingly felt amongst academics and policy-makers that we should not leave the vision for interactive infrastructures solely in the hands of IBM, Siemens, and their various marketers, sub-contractors, and engineers. Nor should we restrict the impact of these technologies on urban culture to data-driven marketing and new consumption platforms.

The ‘Creative City’ attempts to mobilise culture and creativity for city branding, urban regeneration and cultural industries growth, which also point to new forms of urban planning and governance. It has been closely associated with the “creative class” and the creative-entrepreneurial city in ways that have frequently become divisive and exclusionary, focusing on arts flagships, photogenic CBDs, and real estate profits. So too, cultural production has been reformatted under the rubric of the ‘creative industries’ in ways that foreground their contribution to economic growth. Increasingly calls have been for social justice, citizenship and the rights to the city, with a return of community and activist-focused arts activities, as well as new forms of ‘post-capitalist’ production communities.

In an attempt to broaden and re-imagine the data-driven and creative city, this symposium will explore the intersections between these urban agendas with a view to re-imagining their possibilities. It seeks to open out new possibilities for the city contained in both interactive infrastructures and new forms of cultural practice. Cultural workers of all kinds have an important role to play in crafting alternative visions for the implementation of “smart” technologies and the practices they support. These technologies are also opening new physical and social spaces of collaborative production, new kinds of economies which cities constantly seek to capture in the form of ‘creative entrepreneurship’ and similar tropes of a business language.

Is there another kind of urban culture and economy being made possible beyond the tightly controlled formats of the Smart City/ Creative City? What might that look like?

SPEAKERS

Keynote

Seb Olma, Avans University of Applied Sciences: Let’s Smarten Up: Acid Communism & the Serendipitous City

Smart City/ Creative City

Mark Andrejevic, Monash University: Decentralizing “Smarts”: Drone Cities vs. Creative Spaces

Justin O'Connor, Monash University: The Disappearance of the Creative City

Policy Panel

Ianto Ware, City of Sydney

Michelle Tabet, Director Leftbankco.

Marcus Westbury, Collingwood Arts Precinct (TBC)

Smart Cities: Logistics and Governance

Brett Neilson, Western Sydney University: What is an Operation?

Ned Rossiter, Western Sydney University: Automated Labor and the Logistical State

Nic Carah, University of Queensland, Branding, Digital Media and Urban Atmospherics

Media, Culture and the City

Scott McQuire, University of Melbourne: The Communicative City

Xin Gu, Monash University: Creative Clusters and Media Cities

A New Urban Imaginary?

Wendy Steele, RMIT: Smart Cities and the Urban Imaginary

Sarah Barns, Western Sydney University: Platform Architecture as Urban Design: Challenges for Smart Cities and Connected places