Smart cities as corporate storytelling

On 4 November 2011, the trademark 'smarter cities' was officially registered as belonging to IBM. This was an important milestone in a struggle between IT companies over visibility and legitimacy in the smart city market. Drawing on actor-network theory and critical planning theory, the paper analyzes IBM's smarter city campaign and finds it to be storytelling, aimed at making the company an 'obligatory passage point' in the implementation of urban technologies. Our argument unfolds in three parts. We first trace the emergence of the term 'smart city' in the public sphere. Secondly, we show that IBM's influential story about smart cities is far from novel but rather mobilizes and revisits two long-standing…