1

NOTE: author draft of forthcoming article excludes figures/pagination. Please email the
author, Andrew Boulton (Andrew.boulton@uky.edu) regarding citation.

Cyberinfrastructures and Smart World Cities: Physical, Human, and Soft

Infrastructures

Andrew Boulton1, Stanley D Brunn, Lomme Devriendt

Mapping points and flows

Each Sunday in central Kashgar more than four thousand vendors bring their goods to the
International Trade Market of Central and Western Asia. Here, buyers and sellers from
the city and its desert hinterlands barter over everything from silk and handicrafts to
livestock and vegetables, much as they have since (at least) the days of the Han Dynasty
(206-220 BC) when explorers such as Zhang Qian remarked with surprise upon the
vibrancy of the urban marketplace in this arid outpost. Much of the architectural character
of Old Town Kashgar is no more: wrecked, a small, hyperreal, tourist-friendly taste of
the Old excepted, in the first decade of the 21st Century in the name of safety,
modernization and anti-extremism by a government seeking to bring stability and
control to the alleys and warrens of this cold, threatening western city (Sheridan 2008;
Macartney 2009). An oasis city of 350,000 in the far west of Chinas Xinjiang region,
Kashgar arguably sustains itself as a viable city today on the basis of the same locational
advantages that made it a key trading location, staging post, and population center on the

ancient Silk Road: water supply, relatively fertile land, and superior accessibility by land
and, today, by air (see Kreutzmann 2003 on livelihood strategies in the region).
In classic textbook maps of the ancient Silk Road, Kashgar appears as a dot (or
node) within a more-or-less coherent system of arrows and dots tracing out seasonal,
cyclical, and longer run flows of migrants and goods across a vast, intercontinental
network of trading routes. But we wonder: another two thousand years from now, what
might an equivalent iconographic mapping of todays intercity relationships in Eurasia, or
elsewhere, look like? A map showing flows of capital? Flows of people? Flows of goods?
Flows of telecommunications data? FlowsFlowsFlows.
Recently, the very flow metaphor (Castells 1996) adopted unreflexively in
much world cities work (see Beaverstock et al. 2000; Taylor et al. 2002; Devriendt et al.
2008) has itself come under scrutiny (Smith and Doel 2010). The question becomes not
what flows? bits, bytes, planes, money, ideas and so forth but what flows? (cf.
Boulton et al. 2010). Is a flow ontology even an appropriate framework (or plausible
metaphor; a discontinuous flow?) to apprehend the relationships existing between places
in an Information Age supposedly divested of a necessary or even predominant basis in
geographical contiguity? (Castells 2000; Smith and Doel 2010).
In one (perhaps glib) reading, Smith and Doels poststructuralist critique of the
ontological assumptions of the flow metaphor, of the world cities category2 itself,
and ultimately of the limiting politics thereof, marks the sub-disciplinary coming of age
of a world city network geography rooted to date in an avowedly critical realist tradition
(Ibid.). But, more than that, the critique offers a challenge to and an opportunity for

(would-be) world cities scholars. Rather than dismiss, or attempt to co-opt, these timely
anti-foundationalist critiques of the world cities literature, there is an exciting opportunity
for cyberinfrastructure research in particular, and world cities research more generally, to
move beyond a potentially nihilistic deconstructive moment to become vital, multivocal
and critical subdisciplines that address timely and important questions across disciplines
and theoretical orientations. Against this backdrop, our purpose in the remainder of this
chapter is thus to take stock of the key debates, theoretical and research trajectories in
world cities cyberinfrastructure research, and to identify promising future research
directions on this diversifying terrain of smart cities. First we introduce an expanded
notion of smartness that takes into account what we characterize as the physical,
human, and soft moments of cyberinfrastructure. Thereafter, we utilize these three
dimensions in order to characterize the open questions and dynamism of current (and
potential future) world cities research. These three dimensions of cyberinfrastructure are
not intended to be exhaustive or exclusive categories, but merely potential empirical or
analytical cuts through the messy and infinitely multiple multiples that are the world
city (Ibid.)

Conceptualizing smartness
When a rich endowment of classic site and situational advantages is no longer
sufficient or even necessary for a citys prosperity and economic dynamism, scholars and
policymakers alike are driven to search for new data, new strategies and new narratives to
describe, explain, and in the case of policymakers, to affect, the relative competitiveness

of, and differentiation between, cities. What many of these new logics of, or strategies
for, competitiveness fostering educational export industries (Robertson 2003);
encouraging high-tech clusters; creating a climate suitable for an emerging Creative
Class (Florida 2002) rely on implicitly, or more often explicitly, is a notion of
smartness predicated on, or underpinned by, knowledge, technology and particularly
ICTs.
We argue that a more expansive notion of smart cities than those operational
definitions common in the economics literature is necessary in order to appreciate the
range of research trajectories and conceptual frameworks at the cutting edge of smart
world cities research. Where smartness is frequently operationalized as a product of the
education level of a population which is then correlated with employment or GDP
growth (Shapiro 2003; Glaeser and Berry 2006) we would draw attention to the
ambivalent nature of smartness itself not only as an attribute of places (a smart city)
or individuals, but simultaneously as a messier, multi-scalar, and overlapping set of
concerns related to cyberinfrastructure in its physical, human, and soft moments.
Physical infrastructure refers to cities locations with respect to the global
network of physical infrastructures such as airlines, hotel and conference facilities, and
the high-tech fiber optic technologies on which telecommunications depend (Zook and
Brunn 2006; Derudder et al. 2007; Malecki 2002).
Human infrastructure, by contrast, refers to the more traditional human capital
concerns of agglomeration, clustering and economies of scale (Saxenian 1996; Gorman
2002).

Soft infrastructure refers to the domains (literally and figuratively) of cyberspace:

the informational cloud of Web domains (Zook 2001), cyberscapes and user-generated
and georeferenced spatial data (Graham and Zook 2010), which, despite their apparent
placelessness, touch the ground with real, material effects (Crutcher and Zook 2009;
Graham 2005).
This is not to deny the importance of classic notions of smartness to particular
kinds of economic analysis, or the value of simple education-level measures of human
capital. Indeed, regardless of the merits of the often scathing critiques of Richard
Floridas liberal, middle class-centric Creative Class meme (Marcuse 2003; Peck 2005),
the prevalence of university degrees within a citys population one of Floridas
creativity measures appears to be directly correlated with incomes of the population in
general, including of the least wealthy (Moretti 2004). As an aside, though, the payoff for
mayoral devotees cities resulting from their cultish adoption of Floridas prescriptions
that is, pandering to the lifestyle preferences of yuppies (Marcuse 2003, 41) is
evasive at best (Peck 2005, 768). The key point to reiterate, here, is that any normative
claim about the nature of or potential futures for world cities/networks is necessarily
partial, situated and contextual. Framed differently and more modestly, perhaps, as
contextualized descriptive analyses rather than universal prescriptions simplistic,
quantitative analyses such as Floridas (2000) need not subscribe to or draw on any
particular, problematic (critical realist, positivist, or whatever) epistemology. As
conceptual interventions, and empirical cuts though the inherent messiness of the city
they may signal interesting trends (however transitory or superficial), productive

tensions, or points of intervention towards innumerable and not necessarily neoliberal,

as is the critique of Florida (Peck 2005) futures. Thus, to bastardize the words of French
philosopher Alain Badiou, the situation (something like reality) is infinitely more
complex than the state, as claimed, as secured, in its re-presentation and in its
recounting (Badiou 2005, 85, cited in Smith and Doel 2010). But the complexity of the
situation, we suggest, need not paralyze us from saying something however contingent,
partial, tentative about it.
City planners, private corporations, and governments grapple perpetually with the
competitiveness problem: how to abstract the growth ingredient from an infinitely
complex, multiple and interconnected totality. Perhaps the allure of self-styled gurus and
their high-energy, simple (if expensive!) solutions are understandable. Todays world
cities are centers of knowledge, innovation and technology, but they are also infinitely
complex assemblages of people and things, dynamic and indeterminate both in and of
themselves and in their relationships to other places (Smith and Doel 2010). Recognizing
these complex and intrinsic networks of relationships between cities, scholars of world
cities, globalization and the knowledge economy have, increasingly, turned their attention
to the ways in which cities are positioned differentially in relation to global information
flows, and specifically in relation to ICT networks. Note, that we say cities are
positioned differentially rather than arranged hierarchically, as this is an important
distinction (see also Taylor 2008). Whereas hierarchy implies relationships of control
literally, of domination by the top tier of subsequent, submissive tiers the speciously
similar concept of rank refers not to relations of power between, but to differential

attributes of and within, cities. Thus ranking cities in terms of, for example, headquarters
of global producer firms, Web page references (or hyperlinks), conference proceedings,
and news stories (Williams and Brunn 2004; Devriendt et al. 2009) does not imply a
hierarchical ordering of cities in the sense of command and control. Rather, such rankings
if recognized as transient, partial snapshots (Boulton et al. 2010) constitute but one
potential point of comparison between cities and their relative experiences of and
relationships to the eventfulness of the global economy.

Physical, human and soft dimensions of cyberinfrastructure

Smart cities then may be used as a shorthand to refer to those cities with high densities
of cyber or digital infrastructure and high levels of utilization of ICTs.
Operationalizing density, and drawing out the implications of relative densities to
social/economic life, entails a broad and collective (but diverse) effort towards data
gathering/production and theory development. The genealogy of much current research
on smart cities and creative cities in geography can be traced to major research agenda of
the 1960s and 1970s that focused on the concentrations and diffusion of innovations (see
Abler et al.1971). The pioneering research of Torsten Hgerstrand (1952, 1967), though
not focused on cities, sought to explicate the spatial processes underlying innovations in
rural areas and small towns of Sweden. His diffusion work was supplemented by that of
rural sociologist, Everett Rogers (1962), who identified specific stages in the diffusion of
innovations. In Rogers account, it was the innovators who were the leaders, working on
the cutting edge, willing to experiment, and taking the necessary risks. At the heart of

these diffusion/communication studies were always questions about where a practice or

idea originated, what were the distinguishing characteristics of these origin places, and
what kinds of spatial processes were operating to produce the resulting patterns of
diffusion and concentration. Along with the work of other key 1960s and 70s
geographers, including Peter Gould (1969) and Larry Brown (1968, 1981), this spatial
science tradition of mapping innovation offers a strong foreshadowing of the work on
creative cities and smart cities conducted three decades later in terms of its focus on the
attributes of smart places: human capital, creativity and agglomeration economies
(Florida 2000; 2002; Gorman 2002; see also Krueger and Buckingham 2009 introducing
a Geographical Review special issue on creative cities).
In a similar vein, Allan Preds (1966) pioneering work on the social and
commercial landscapes of patent awards mirrors in its place-based ontology recent work
on the human attributes of successful and/or creative and/or competitive cities. All
patents are awarded to a specific individual or firm, at a specific address. Thus, one could
map the locations of those places that received particular kinds of patents (biotech,
automotive, and so forth). By studying the locational patterns of patents over a longer
period of time (a decade) or a slice of time (such as one year), one might infer not only
the location but some of the characteristics of those creative or innovative places in
particular fields. Data on patents awarded in the fields of ICT, fashion design, music, and
myriad other creative industries (for example, Watson 2009) offer a rich potential
source by which to test, and/or add conceptual and empirical depth to, broad brush
creativity indices (see Chapman 2010).

A crucial task, then, for world cities research is to think about how we might
understand the ways in which the contemporary city produces, is produced by, and is
experienced in relation to cyberinfrastructures: both in terms of aggregate human
capital variables such as patents, but also in terms of day-to-day experiences of place in
relation to ICT infrastructures. Promising research directions in this respect are diverse,
and call for innovative conceptual frameworks as well as new and creative use of data.
Here we explore one broad topic: cyberscapes.

Cyberscapes and the soft dimensions of cyberinfrastructures

As conceptualized by Zook and Graham (2007) cyberscape refers to the experiential
blurring between cyberspace and material place. That is, places cities are experienced
as and constituted within virtual and material spaces simultaneously (Graham 2010).
Particularly suggestive is the observed unevenness of cyberspaces (Ibid.): that is, the
varying density of digital spatial data tied to particular locations. The relatively new
phenomenon of user-generated spatial data the so-called crowd-sourced cloud of
cyberspace contributed via platforms such as Google Maps (see Crampton 2009 for an
excellent overview of these neogeographies; see also Graham 2010 and Boulton 2010)
raises important questions about the ways in which cyberspace (re)produces extant
relations of domination, inequity and racialization (Crutcher and Zook 2009). Critical
geographies of world cities in this cyberscape vein suggest that cyberinfrastructures
can scarcely be understood without reference to (at least) the soft (cyberspace/cloud) and
the human (discrimination, digital divides and so forth), or their intersections with

10

myriad other dimensions of the social. A related question also arises: if we are prepared
to identify smart cities, are we prepared, also, to delineate dumb cities? A broadened
conceptualization of smartness suggests a more nuanced reading of smart and
dumb than a simple binary, or even numerically ranked, classification. Understandably,
world cities research has focused on the great cities (and what makes them so), but
there is, arguably, a case for placing other cities regional cities, national centers, small
cities within the same analytical space, to focus on the have nots as well as the
haves of neoliberal globalization.
Hyperbolic claims that distanceand with it, place, the city, and geographyis,
or soon will be, dead (for example, OBrien, 1992) belie an important paradox in
cyberspace research: even as ICTs become accessible everywhere, demand for
transportation between places, and for prime, proximate real estate within core urban
locations, continues to grow (Denstadli and Gripsrund, 2010). The vision of so-called
post-industrial theorists of a world without distance, where everyplace is everyplace
(Abler, 1974), remains unmet in many ways. The ubiquitous cloud of communication
is, in fact, underpinned and enabled by a vast, physical (placed) ICT infrastructure of
cables, data centers, and exchanges. Rather than rendering place irrelevant, cities
economic performance and their prominence within the global urban network becomes,
increasingly, a product of their relative attractiveness vis--vis other places, and in
relation to ICT networks. As the highly uneven geographies of Web factories and hightech enclaves suggest, communication has not and cannot be substituted for the social,
cultural and economic advantages of agglomeration (Gorman 2002), Silicon Valley being

11

the paradigmatic case Saxenian 1996). Within our conceptual framework of treating the
physical (place, material infrastructure), the human, and the soft (qua cyberspace) as
related intrinsically, one can begin to imagine a plural world cities research agenda
concerned both with networks of world cities, and with world cities as networks or even
plasmas (cf. Smith and Doel 2010) of multiplicity, diversity and indeterminacy.

Conclusions: infrastructure, interconnection and plurality

(One tooth of) the cutting edge of cyberinfrastructure research is characterized by a twopronged approach to smart cities: cyberplace approaches, focusing on the material,
placed infrastructure underpinning digital flows, and cyberspace approaches which
focus on the less bounded/grounded cloud of digital information circulating in, about
and between places (Devriendt et al. 2008)3. These in turn correspond most closely with,
respectively, the physical and soft dimensions of cyberinfrastructure outlined in this
chapter. As a diverse array of work on world cities has noted the interconnections
between cities, however they are measured, are arguably more global, more immediate,
and deeper than ever before. One has only to look at the pace with which the shockwaves
of the global financial crisis (2008) and Greek debt crisis (2010) reverberated
monetarily and imaginatively across the globe. For scholars, lending empirical specificity
to these alluringly simple and apparently self-evident claims of deepening and quickening
interconnection is a different matter entirely.
The ambivalent relationship between the supposed placelessness of cyberspace,
and the continued importance of place (qua the city) signals a core concern for world

12

cities research going forward. The lexicon surrounding cyberspace, the Internet and
new technologies is replete with spatial metaphors and analogies (Adams 1997): online
community, web site, information gateway, portal site, chat room. At one level, the
reading of this spatial language is straightforward. Spatial/territorial analogy
superimposes upon the otherwise intangible (and unintelligible) sphere of bits and bytes a
determinate and visible/visualizable representational surface. Cyberspace, so imagined,
becomes knowable; written in geographical language (Kellerman, 2002, 31) it becomes
definable, mappable and understandable in terms of standard spatial rubrics of distance
and proximity, connection and flow. But an alternative reading of this spatial language
suggests a problematization of the supposed separation between underlying reality
(intangible/unintelligible) and overlaid representation (tangible/visible) (see Cicognani,
1998). This reading recognizes that the virtual world of cyberspace is already
fundamentally imbricated with the real, material life of the contemporary city (Crutcher
and Zook, 2009).
An expanded conceptualization of cyberinfrastructures as comprising overlapping
physical, human, and soft dimensions suggests an exciting and (theoretically) broad
research agenda targeted towards understanding the complex variations between and
within contemporary cities.

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1

Thanks to Matt Zook for his ideas and discussions on these topics; responsibility for

errors and omissions lies with the listed authors.

2

In what follows, the term world cities is used advisedly. In common with our

sympathetic reading of the poststructural critique of the world cities literature (Smith and
Doel 2010) we reject any necessary a priori category of world city. Rather, in line with
our call for an expanded notion of world cities, a reflexive use of network and flow
metaphors, and our recognition of the multiplicity of world cities and world city
networks, we retain the notion of world cities insofar as it provides a useful heuristic
for talking about rankings and qualities of, and relationships between, places (however
fleeting, however partial).
3

The discussion of cyberplace and cyberspace approaches builds on our earlier GaWC

working paper (Devriendt et al. 2009) and the article by Devriendt et al. (2008)