La stratégie de la « smart city » au Japon : expérimentations nationales et circulations globales

Abstract

The “smart” cities constitute a new urban imaginary which has recently been spreading through the world, in particular in East Asia, North America, and Europe. Is it for all that a new urban model and, in that case, is it a unique and globalized one? The paper analyzes the “smart” communities, Japanese declination of “smart” cities. Rather than a model, the “smart” communities are part of what pragmatic sociology calls a grammar of the urban. If there is somehow a model, the Japanese case teaches us it might be more in the governance of this new object whom experimentations are various and heterogeneous, in particular in the context of the Japanese developmentalist regime, part of the Japanese capitalism. The exportability of the “smart” communities is therefore not the result of the globalization of models, but results from the complex strategy of private companies, such as Toshiba.

Keywords

• Japan
• « Smart » cities
• « smart » communities
• Toshiba
• model
• developmentalist regime