ABSTRACT

Governments and companies across the globe are promoting smart cities, and their developments usually reflect both globally shared ideas and locally specific agendas and implementations. This paper examines the smart cities of Singapore and Seoul – two key global cities in Asia with legacies of state-led developmentalism. It discusses the two cities’ latest smart city endeavors, trajectories, and policy motivations. In particular, it explores the role of smart city policy in governments’ local and global agendas for development and argues that the two acclaimed cases can be interpreted as globally-oriented neo-developmentalist smart cities. In doing so, this paper also explains that the typically assumed developmentalist feature becomes much more complicated as it intermixes with the global cities’ international outlooks and aspirations as well as the changing demands from citizens in the post-developmental era.

Highlights

• I examine the two ‘actually-existing’ global smart cities in Asia.

• I explore the role of smart city policy in local and global agendas for development.

• Singapore and Seoul reflect globally-oriented neo-developmentalist smart cities.

• Singapore and Seoul are not hardware-driven developmentalist smart cities.