Criminology and the smart city paradigm: ‘preventative technical imaginary’ or ‘Techlash’ vector?

We live in the age of the smart city. It is is hegemonic in discussions of twenty-first century city planning and governance such that it is now the preeminent urban ideal of our time. But while expenditure on smart cities is expected to approach $1trillion by 2030, the social sciences have been slow to react to this reconfiguration of the urban order. In particular, criminology, a discipline with a longstanding interest in urban space and crime, has virtually ignored the many challenges posed by a world shaped by urban smartness and predicated on environmental-behavioural control. In a bid to address this oversight, this article introduces the smart city paradigm to a criminological audience. It begins with a brief history of urban smartness before introducing an entirely new conceptual term for thinking about security and safety within the smart city: the preventative technical imaginary. The preventative technical imaginary is an amalgam of what science and technology scholars call the ‘sociotechnical imaginary’ (i.e., an envisioned planning or design scenario that allows two historically compartmentalized domains—the techno-scientific and the socio-political—to reconcile their contrasting positions regarding mental and material phenomena) with the mindset and preemptive logic associated with situational crime prevention/reduction. The second half of the paper challenges the putative idea of a ‘no crime’ urban future often associated with the preventative technical imaginary by arguing instead that smart technology and other ‘Internet of Things’ systems actually expose our cities to entirely an array of attack surfaces and vulnerability vectors that have no historical precedent—including new anti-technology “cultures of resistance” that have already started to crystallize.