The oscillating affects of smart city living: ambivalence and desire in Singapore

Source abstract

This article explores the affects that emerge when smart city residents engage with the on-the-ground materialisations of smart urbanism, specifically through the different sites of experimentation in the smart city. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with residents living in smart estates in Singapore, this article studies how these sites, as part of the larger Smart Nation Project, operate. What happens when smart city residents are both officially experimented upon, and unofficially undertaking experiments of their own? This article discusses how this dynamic in the experimentation process produces two kinds of affective circulations. The first circulation of affect, ambivalence, emerges in the oscillating positive and negative affects generated through exciting and frustrating pilot-testing and the installation of new technologies within these estates. The second circulation of affect, desire, becomes paradoxical as it emerges in the simultaneous centrality of green spaces in residents’ enjoyment of their estates, and their calls for increased amenities and transport links that further development brings. These affective circulations demonstrate entanglements beyond the technological that implicate broader socio-political and cultural processes that may both limit and expand participation in the smart city, demonstrating how affect can be the analytical lens used in understanding what “smart” feels like.