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The Variegated Economics and the Potential Politics of the Smart City

Abstract The smart city discourse has gained increasing popularity within contemporary cities across the globe, mobilizing powerful economic actors and hegemonic public–private coalitions. This article argues that, in spite of the common wisdom within critical urban scholarship looking at the smart city as a policy framework aligned with the interests of powerful private and public actors such as multinational corporations and the state, the smart city model of local economic regeneration and governance goes beyond this, nurturing a process of capitalist variegation, which comprises multinational high-tech firms but is not limited to them. Thanks to its adaptability, the smart city narrative can be applied to a variety of strategies of economic revitalization, as showed by the case of Turin in Italy analysed here: a constellation of initiatives including start-up innovative firms, infrastructure projects and the social economy. The article argues that this variegated economics of the smart city offers still unexplored opportunities for a ‘potential politics’ of smart urbanism, aimed at appropriating the gains of technology for a future of urban social justice.