Pre the Covid-19 pandemic of 2019-2020, the intended premise of this paper was that it would analyse the relationship between the over determination of Virtual Reality (VR) and neoliberal Smart City rhetoric, outlining the limitations and potential of these spatial ideologies and their supporting epistemic foundations, in particular, critiquing the entrepreneurial solutionism enmeshed with technocratic rationality, namely the abstracted information processing paradigms of both a priori and machine learnt modelling which are present in both the overdetermination of VR technology and the neoliberal Smart City. These paradigms are irreconcilable with equality or social justice, they are entangled with a narrow, normative, a-systemic, uncritically entrepreneurial construct of subjectivity and agency. The Covid-19 pandemic has made the connection between information processing paradigms, technological over determination and Smart City rhetoric increasingly clear, not least, in the failure of the Smart City and its mechanisms (a-systemic modelling, the Internet of Things, pervasive surveillance and a bedrock of entrepreneurial hackathon culture) to provide equality of access to health care and key resources within (and without) the pandemic. In light of these failings, how might we formulate alternative imaginaries for technology and its relationship to wealth and resource distribution, to support a lasting reimagination of cities and of ‘smartness? Taking the example of the Morecambe Bay Poverty Truth Commission, The Design Justice Network, Data for Black Lives and Our Data Bodies, the paper explores both the failings of the Smart City project while highlighting alternative constructions of smartness and smart subjectivity.

Awaiting pubication