IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/cityxx/v23y2019i2p245-255.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

On the difficulty of agreeing upon a universal logic for city standards

Author

Listed:
  • James Merricks White

Abstract

In a paper published within the Debates section of City last year, Schindler and Marvin laid out an agenda for the study of city standards, which they argued impose a universal logic of control. While they described three published standards and situated city standards within the context of smart cities, their failure to consider the institutional setting of the International Organization of Standardization (ISO) led them to overemphasise the coherence and unity with which city standards are actually developed. In this response piece, I correct this omission by excavating the origins of TC 268, the technical committee dedicated to city standards. This reveals not a universal logic of control, but a body of expertise in contentious and contingent emergence. While ultimately, I agree with Schindler and Marvin that city standards are deserving of greater attention from critical urban scholars, I argue for a more situated response to their politics that leaves open the possibility of them having positive effects on urban equity and social change.

Suggested Citation

  • James Merricks White, 2019. "On the difficulty of agreeing upon a universal logic for city standards," City, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 23(2), pages 245-255, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:cityxx:v:23:y:2019:i:2:p:245-255
    DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2019.1615765
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13604813.2019.1615765
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/13604813.2019.1615765?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Robyn Dowling & Pauline McGuirk & Sophia Maalsen & Jathan Sadowski, 2021. "How smart cities are made: A priori, ad hoc and post hoc drivers of smart city implementation in Sydney, Australia," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 58(16), pages 3299-3315, December.
    2. Michele Acuto & Daniel Pejic & Jessie Briggs, 2021. "Taking City Rankings Seriously: Engaging with Benchmarking Practices in Global Urbanism," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 45(2), pages 363-377, March.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:cityxx:v:23:y:2019:i:2:p:245-255. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/CCIT20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.