Dialectics of informality in the smart city: Between antagonism and interdependence

Critical academic engagements of smart cities are increasingly traversing boundaries of global North and South in the theorization of urban smartness. More recent tendencies present important entry points for critically discussing smart cities, partly by pointing to the exclusion of urban informality in much smart-city research. To overcome this omission, suggestions of provincializing the study of smart cities and arguments for a Southern research agenda on just smart cities have emerged. While such work emphasizes the importance of merging the study of smart cities with ordinary lives, we will build on the extant literature on the role of informality in the makings and workings of the southern city to similarly argue that informal urban settlements also subsidize the emergent smart cities in the global South. This helps us exceed the binary approach that visualizes the city as divided between sectors of privilege and inequity, but what remains unexplored is the texture of the relationship between smart urbanism and informality. In this commentary, we theorize what the smart city looks like when viewed from spaces of informality, proposing a dialectical relationship of interdependency and antagonism between smart cities and informal settlements.