Karinne MADRON-NEUMANN, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Constance CARR, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
Digital technologies are hailed as essential tools to tackle environmental challenges. The smart city objective to improve the environmental performance of cities can however often be questioned (Evans et al., 2019). This paper analyses the Amsterdam Smart City (ASC) initiative in relation to the data center industry in the Netherlands as part of the DIGI-GOV project (Carr, 2021). The objective is to understand the correlation between Amsterdam being a pioneer in the smart city movement (Mora & Bolici, 2017) and the current efforts of the Metropolitan Region Amsterdam (MRA) to set up policies to regulate the resource consumption of the data centre industry. The ASC was set up in 2009 and the main objectives of the project are ‘sustainable economic growth, efficient use of natural resources and a high quality of life’ (Amsterdam Smart City, 2021). However, digitalization has been accompanied by a proliferation of data centers in the MRA which put pressure on the energy infrastructure to the point that the city decided to suddenly halt all new data center constructions in July 2019. The paper discusses the resource consumption of data and the challenges for smart city governance that data centers represent. The research consisted of a discourse analysis of policy documents as well as interviews with stakeholders involved in the ASC and the data center industry in the Netherlands. Initial observations indicate that the speculative nature of urban smart innovations resulted in the case of Amsterdam in unforeseen consequences leading to what can be described as a ‘policy crisis’. The study is situated within the literature on experimental governance and speculative urban planning which contend that the uncertainties associated with urban experiments are not sufficiently acknowledged (Evans & Karvonen, 2013; Evans et al., 2019).
Mots clés : Amsterdam Smart City|Data centers|DiGi-GOV|Experimental Governance|DIgital infrastructures
A103224KM