Technocratic Regionalism in Southeast Asia: The Translational Politics of Smart City Knowledge Transfer

This project will explore the translational politics of smart city knowledge transfer, and how these politics implicate urban environments throughout Southeast Asia. We define the smart city as a response to the production of data brought about by the embedding of digital technologies into the socio-material fabric of the city (after Kong and Woods 2018, 2021). We define “translational politics” as the (mis)alignments, tensions and opportunities for exploitation that emerge when different scales of influence – regional, national and local – converge and materialise within a given urban context. In doing so, we will explore the emergence of “technocratic regionalism” as a strategy through which power and inequality are (re)produced at both the macro (or global, regional and national) and micro (or local) scales. Technocratic regionalism refers to the technology-driven forms of regional integration and consolidation that are being implemented throughout the ten member states of ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations). The ASEAN Smart Cities Network (or ASCN) is the political framework through which technocratic regionalism is implemented. It is used to attract private investment, and thus spur urban development through the rollout of smart city plans, policies and projects (collectively, the “knowledge transfer” evoked in the title of this project) within 26 “pilot” Southeast Asian cities. In this sense, it can be seen as a way to scale up the logics of “smartness” from the city level (the current focus of most scholarly analysis) to the national, regional, and even global, levels. The ASCN embeds cities within transnational flows of capital, ideas and expertise, and provides a regional identity (centred on the smart city) that increasingly defines urban development in Southeast Asia. This project aims to understand the effects of embedding by identifying and exploring the urban/local, national and regional politics that are emerging in response to the ASCN.