Abstract

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 its implementation under a provincializing lens (Leitner & Sheppard, 2016) in order to observe the way local experience transforms monist ways of thinking about smart cities. Based on ethnographic observation of an SC intervention (Paseo Bandera in 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 paper argues works through the fictions of effective interventions and urban image improvement that seek to participate in worlding (Roy & Ong, 2011) practices while, in reality, very little is being improved or effectively addressed in the city. It presents a narrative of modern, sustainable, and technologically advanced urban planning in the form of specific material interventions, when in reality 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.