While the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are generally discussed in light of “governance through goals,” this article deals with the SDGs as an international norm and treats them as soft law—a set of the norm consisting of goals, targets, and indicators. In particular, this article focuses on SDG 11, which is concerned with sustainable cities and communities. However, when SDG 11 came out in 2015, there was already an existing norm for sustainable urban development—a norm of smart cities. Currently, smart cities attract attention as a potential solution for global issues, such as climate change, energy consumption, and population growth.
The aim of this article is to assess norm pathways for sustainable urban development by exploring the relationship between SDG 11 and the norm of smart cities (although this is not to deny that there are other urban-related SDGs, such as SDG 3 (health), SDG 4 (education), SDG 6 (water), SDG 7 (energy), and SDG 9 (innovation) among others).
Drawing upon the literature of smart cities, this article first looks at how the norm of smart cities has been developed. In the initial smart city debate, being “smart” typically referred to the utilization of information communication technologies (ICT); however, such an ICT-led vision was criticized because it failed to take into account the multiple dimensions of smart cities, including quality of life, environment, and citizen participation among others. This article investigates how a more “integrated” and “sustainable” approach for smart cities has been promoted, especially after the adoption of the SDGs.
This article argues that SDG11 transformed the smart city norm to an “international” norm, while the smart city norm was originally developed as a norm for global ICT corporations and local governments. Moreover, such transformation was accelerated by digitalization. Current smart city projects entail collecting, processing, and analyzing big data using artificial intelligence. Consequently, due to the recent debate on the governance of data, the smart city norm is now concerned with emerging issues, such as information security, privacy, and transparency within smart city projects. Such an interface between data governance and smart cities has pushed the smart city norm increasingly toward international concerns against the backdrop of the incompatible national positions of governing data. The article concludes by highlighting an institutional complexity for smart cities, as the number of international regimes and bodies addressing smart cities has increased in the era of the SDGs and data governance.
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