SMART CITIES IN JAPAN AND THE EU: IN SEARCH OF STRUCTURAL FOCAL POINTS IN RESPECTIVE POLICY DEVELOPMENT.

• Author: Sanada, Kie

1. Introduction

   In the wake of the twenty-first century, the idea of the smart city has become a central agenda in urban (re)development worldwide. The global trend of its conception and implementation continues to grow. The size of the global market related to smart cities is estimated to increase from around 1 trillion USD in 2020 to 2.5 trillion USD in 2025 (PwC 2019 in OECD 2020) and to 50 trillion USD by 2050 (Future Cities Catapult 2017 in Alizadeh 2021). In particular, with the pressing need to address the issues of climate change and societal challenges, the European Union (EU) and Japan share a strong interest in the concept of smart cities with strong socio-economic and geographical cohesion. Japanese interest is formulated in its effort to realize the new societal model--Society 5.0 (2016)--while the EU's interest is shaped by the European Green Deal (2019) and REPower (2022). The shared interest between the EU and Japan is anchored in the Paris Agreement (2015) and concretized in a number of bilateral agreements. The EU-Japan Strategic Partnership Agreement (SPA) 2018 highlighted the need for bilateral cooperation to advance the transition to a circular economy and climate neutrality. The following EU-Japan Green Alliance 2021 promised to strengthen collaboration on research and development (R&D) in the prioritized area of smart cities to enhance decarbonization and secure sustainable and clean energy supply locally. The energy sector is appointed as the key target for investment (Zappa 2022). In 2022, the EU and Japan further agreed to collaborate on R&D of digital technologies through signing digital partnership.

   Given such rapid-paced and large-scale dynamism, it is an urgent task for social sciences to reflect on its social implications by asking how this dynamism took shape, what the emerging focal points are, and how it would affect our lives. However, contributions from the field of social sciences on this topic remain outnumbered. In fact, the majority of existing studies, particularly in the field of engineering, have treated social innovation and technological advancement as if they equate in promoting and legitimizing smart city investment (Kim, Sabri, and Kent 2020, Luque-Ayala and Marvin 2019). In this formulation, a set of societal issues at hand in a given locality are presented as if they are detached from their geographical and historical context and reinterpreted as globally shared targets of technical troubleshooting. Societal futures from this perspective are aspirational, experimental, and uncertain (de Waal and Dignum 2017, White 2016), and they are infiltrating and dominant. A critical body of social research has warned of the risks of such constructs and called for serious social scientific attention from a perspective of viewing smart cities as a matter of governance (Alizadeh 2021, de Waal and Dignum 2017, Hollands 2008, Kim et al. 2020, Kitchin 2015, Visvizi and Lytras 2019, White 2016). This paper aims to contribute to this research trend from a perspective of examining smart cities as a matter of political governance.

   The following part of this article is structured as follows. Firstly, I will introduce the heterogeneity that the conception of the smart city witnesses. The following section will give a brief summary of the current state of social research. After clarifying the research questions and theoretical background of this article, I will proceed to trace the policy development of smart city initiatives in Japan and the EU, respectively. This will lead to highlighting structural focal points in smart city cooperation between the EU and Japan as the conclusion of this article.

2. Heterogeneous formulations of smart city initiatives

   In the promotion and legitimization of investment, international and governmental organizations, as well as private vendors, have described smart cities under their unique conceptions. This has resulted in a variety of existing descriptions of smart cities among promoters. For instance, the European Commission (n.d.a) conceptualizes a smart city as a place where traditional networks and services are made more efficient with the use of digital solutions for the benefit of its inhabitants and businesses. Among its member states, giving a few examples, the German Federal Ministry of the Interior and Community (2022) defines the term smart cities as referring to the development and use of digital technologies in almost all areas of local life "...to serve the objectives of sustainable and integrated urban development in the public interest". The Government Office of Sweden (2016) defines smart cities as using "information and communication technologies to improve the quality, performance, and interactivity of municipal services, reduce costs and resource consumption, and improve contact between citizens and authorities". The Estonian government (2019) defines smart cities as the "meeting point between...digital transformation, environmental issues, [and] economic performance" to "make urban agglomerations more inclusive, efficient, and attentive toward environmental issues". On the other hand, Japanese smart cities are "sustainable cities and regions, which solve challenges faced by cities and regions", which "continue to create new value" by providing services tailored to individual citizens using new technologies and various types of data from the public and private sectors, and by upgrading management in various fields (CAO 2021).

   In addition, much has been written on smart cities by academics as well as researchers employed in commercial, governmental, and international organizations. This existing literature witnesses the heterogeneous and multi-dimensional descriptions of smart cities. The heterogeneity arises from the combination of various factors, such as anchored technologies and infrastructures, visions and objectives, promoting actors and financial sources, governing style, and so on (de Falco et al. 2018, Sakuma et al. 2021). Moreover, each publication represents the idea of smart cities in accordance with the purposes of the study, disciplinary orientations, and perspectives taken by the authors (Kitchin 2015, Mora et al. 2019). Therefore, the scientific definitions of smart cities are, as it stands, diverse and heterogeneous. Against this backdrop, there is a growing consensus among social scientists that there is no one-size-fits-all definition (Albino et al. 2015, Bibri and Krogstie 2017, Kitchin 2015). Instead, every smart city operates differently in practice as it is a glocal phenomenon (Dameri et al. 2019). The normative idea of the smart city gets localized in accordance with a given politico-historical context in dealing with locally specific issues within different institutional settings at hand. Furthermore, such local conditions are subject to change through time and space. Thus, the definition of a smart city will necessarily remain elusive. Against this background, a number of unique empirical case studies have been published. Notably, case studies from the countries of the so-called global south have challenged the field of study, which has long been dominated by case studies from Europe and other high-income countries (Alizadeh 2021, Datta 2015, Shin 2016).

3. Human centric shift in smart city research

   The scientific discussions regarding smart cities have mainly revolved around digital infrastructures and social innovations via data-driven solutions. The majority of existing research on smart cities was published in the field of natural sciences, particularly in the fields of engineering and Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) (Kim et al. 2020, Sakuma et al. 2021, Visvizi and Lytras 2019). An expectation that technological and infrastructural updates will eventually result in augmenting economic performance and social innovation in a given city is often embedded in these studies (Kim et al. 2020, Luque-Ayala and Marvin 2019). Certainly, these views, held in the natural sciences, are an important driving force for the development of smart city initiatives worldwide. However, the societal future they depict is, in fact, normative, aspirational, entrepreneurial, Utopian, and ultimately uncertain (Datta 2018, de Waal and Dignum 2017, Jasanoff and Kim 2015, Shin 2016, White 2016).

   From the early stages, social sciences have critically examined the social impact of smart cities from a perspective of its governance, both theoretically and empirically. In this vein, critical social studies from the early 2010s rejected the first generation of smart city initiatives, namely smart city 1.0, which is characterized by technocratic, profit-driven, top-down, and supply-based governance. These studies called for a paradigm shift to the so-called smart city 2.0, characterized by participatory and user-driven governance, aiming to co-create solutions for locally specific societal issues in a bottom-up manner (Caragliu et al. 2011, Chourabi et al. 2012, Hollands 2008, Kitchin 2015). The call seemed to have triggered a discursive shift among smart city promoters from the public sector and private vendors "to reflect more human-centric objectives" (Sakuma et al. 2021: 1778) and "to embrace narratives of citizen engagement and inclusivity" (Trencher 2019: 118). However, this shift may only be at the discursive level (de Waal and Dignum 2017). This doubt is supported by the latest studies that continue to raise alarms about the neoliberal business interests rooted in the management of smart cities (Sadowski and Bendor 2018, Visvizi and Lytras 2019, Voorwinden 2021). Besides, its technocratic political governance continues to prevail in Japan (Granier and Kudo 2016, Zappa 2020) and in European countries (Bibri and Krogstie 2017, Engelbert et al. 2019, Grossi and Pianezzi 2017). According to Shin (2016) and Datta (2015), this occurs because existing political structures and institutionalized neoliberal and...