The Unmediated Smart Neighborhood?:Digital Disconnection and Local Community on the Waterfront in Copenhagen

This paper examines a critical case (Flyvbjerg, 2006) of a top down-designed “smart” and “green” neighborhood in Copenhagen, Denmark through the lens of digital disconnection. The design of this neighborhood was particularly concerned with mitigating the effects of climate change and energy consumption patterns. The empirical materials are several expert interviews with key organizational actors in the creation or maintenance of the smart neighborhood (n=15) and analyses of publicly available documents (n=50) detailing the process of developing the physical and digital infrastructure underpinning the smart neighborhood. <br/><br/>As I uncover during my analysis, several of the key actors revealed that they and the residents of the neighborhood were only moderately engaged with the digital infrastructures and their role in the “smartness” of the neighborhood. As such, the general pattern was one of non-use of media. Instead, the interviewees emphasized other avenues of “smartness”, including the physical infrastructure of the neighborhood itself, as well as a general imaginary about the people constituting the community of the neighborhood. <br/><br/>I argue that this shift in emphasis away from the digital is congruent with disconnection studies as such, where specific physical environments or unmediated communities are often emphasized as alternatives to the digital (Bagger, 2024; Schwarzenegger and Lohmeier, 2021; Sutton, 2020). This in turn presents an example of an often called-for counternarrative in discussions of “smart city” technologies of resisting or limiting digital technologies (Green, 2019; Mosco, 2019; Powell, 2021). Implications for both critical smart city studies and disconnection studies are discussed. <br/><br/>References:<br/><br/>Bagger, C. (2024). A Decade of Digital Disconnection Research in Review: Where, What, How and Who? In K. Albris, K. Fast, F. Karlsen, A. Kaun, S. Lomborg, &amp; T. Syvertsen (Eds.), The Digital Backlash. Nordicom.<br/>Flyvbjerg, B. (2006). Five misunderstandings about case-study research. Qualitative Inquiry, 12(2), 219–245.<br/>Green, B. (2019). The Smart Enough City: Putting Technology in Its Place to Reclaim Our Urban Future. MIT Press.<br/>Mosco, V. (2019). The smart city in a digital world. Emerald publishing.<br/>Powell, A. B. (2021). Undoing Optimization: Civic Action in Smart Cities. Yale University Press.<br/>Schwarzenegger, C., &amp; Lohmeier, C. (2021). Creating opportunities for temporary disconnection: How tourism professionals provide alternatives to being permanently online. Convergence, 27(6), 1631–1647. https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565211033385<br/>Sutton, T. (2020). Digital re-enchantment: Tribal belonging, new age science and the search for happiness in a digital detoxing community [PhD thesis]. University of Oxford.<br/>