Placebo urban interventions: Observing Smart City narratives in Santiago de Chile

The implementation of the Smart City (SC) model in Santiago, Chile has not heralded any significant interventions in terms of scale, urban impact, amount invested, technological innovation or architectural design. Instead, material interventions have been small and have had little more than a superficial impact upon the perceptions of citizens. The significance of observing ‘Smart’ interventions in Santiago involves analysing their implementation under a provincialising lens in order to observe the way local experience transforms monist ways of thinking about SCs. Based on ethnographic observation of an SC intervention (in Paseo Bandera, Santiago de Chile), four principles of intervention were identified: democratisation of the city, spatial appropriation by citizens, social and technological innovation and local and territorialised interventions. These principles help to identify the intervention as an urban placebo, which the article argues works through the fictions of effective interventions and urban image improvement that seek to participate in worlding practices whilst, in reality, very little is being improved or effectively addressed in the city. Paseo Bandera SC intervention presents a narrative of modern, sustainable and technologically advanced urban planning in the form of specific material interventions, when in fact it involves very little modernity, sustainability or technology, and is little more than a continuation and evolution of the neoliberal urban model that exists in Chile. 智慧城市模式在智利圣地亚哥的实施，在规模、城市影响、投资额、技术创新或建筑设计方面并未带来任何重大干预。相反，物质干预一直很小，对市民的感知只产生了表面的影响。在圣地亚哥观察“智慧”干预措施的意义在于，从一个地方性的视角分析它们的实施情况，以观察当地经验如何改变看待智慧城市的一元论思维方式。基于对智利圣地亚哥的帕索班德拉 (Paseo Bandera) 的一个智慧城市干预的人种学观察，我们确定了四项干预原则：城市民主化、市民对空间的占有、社会和技术创新以及当地和属地干预。这些原则有助于明确干预作为城市安慰剂的功能。本文认为，这种做法通过虚构有效干预和城市形象改善（从而寻求参与世界实践）发挥作用，但在现实中，改善乏善可陈、城市问题也没有得到有效解决。帕索班德拉的智慧城市干预呈现了一个现代、可持续和技术先进的城市规划的叙事，其以具体的物质干预为表现形式，但在事实上几乎不涉及现代性、可持续性或高科技，只不过是智利现有的新自由主义城市模式的延续和演变。