Abstract
This chapter explores how a Smart City agenda has influenced attitudes towards the future in contemporary mobility planning in Hamburg. By comparing three recent frameworks of transportation planning, we detect an interesting shift that occurred when Hamburg’s administration embarked on the project of becoming a leading Smart City. At that point in time, an attitude of planning, characterized by the styles of foresight and prediction, by practices of calculating and by the logic of precaution was replaced, or at least complemented and challenged, by an attitude of experimenting towards real-time management, which is characterized by a style of premediation, practices of performing and a logic of preparedness (in terms of Anderson 2010). We discuss multiple implications of such a shift on governance arrangements and prospects for citizen participation and decision making.
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Notes
- 1.
The authors acknowledge that there is a crucial difference between a perspective on (means and flows of) transportation and on (needs and experiences of) mobility, especially from a planning and urban development perspective. The documents and actors that the contribution refers to usually speak of means/infrastructures/policies/planning of “transportation” (in German: “Verkehr”) and that is reflected in this chapter. Nevertheless, the authors adopt a broader perspective on mobility (cf. UN-Habitat 2013) wherever possible.
- 2.
At this occasion, a previous attempt to position Hamburg as Germany’s primary “Smart City” (cf. MoU CISCO—Hamburg 2014) was twisted towards a “proactively digitized” city, allegedly because “Smart City” was expected to provoke negative associations in a German population and because of scepticism among local government officials themselves.
- 3.
This and the following two paragraphs have partly been derived from some earlier, comparative work by P. Späth and colleagues (Raven et al. 2017).
- 4.
In the three German city-states, the cabinet is called “Senate”, and we report here that the strategy was adopted by the Senate.
- 5.
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Späth, P., Knieling, J. (2019). Smart City Experimentation in Urban Mobility—Exploring the Politics of Futuring in Hamburg. In: Lösch, A., Grunwald, A., Meister, M., Schulz-Schaeffer, I. (eds) Socio-Technical Futures Shaping the Present. Technikzukünfte, Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft / Futures of Technology, Science and Society. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-27155-8_8
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