Mobilizing alternative urbanisms in the semiperipheral smart city agenda

Within critical urban studies, this inquiry examines how mobile policies arriving in a global semiperiphery contribute to developing socially just smart city paradigms. By provincializing smart city research and expanding the North–South dichotomy by analyzing a “South of the West,” the inquiry focuses on Lisbon as a semiperipheral city. It adopts a policy mobility approach and an analytical framework of smart city paradigms, combining thematic document analysis and in-depth interviews to examine the case study. The inquiry engages with local historical transformations and temporally analyzes Lisbon’s smart city agenda representing its development phases and exploring the mobility of ideas and paradigm shifts. Due to historical challenges reflected by the peripheralization of Southern Europe, local arrangements have led to political-economic and social transformations that, as the study argues, are potentialized by policy mobilities and entail smart city paradigm shifts towards social justice. Therefore, hybridizing new and old, emerging and established urban agendas provides alternatives to replicating neoliberal policies.