The Rise of the Smart Compound: Privately Governed Urban Intelligence and Its Research Agenda

Abstract

Across a range of fast growing urban markets, private developers are constructing a version of the smart city that operates largely outside the purview of municipal government, often at the explicit invitation of city officials seeking to shift the cost and complexity of digital infrastructure onto private capital. Gated residential and mixed use developments are increasingly marketed not merely on the basis of security and amenity, but on their smartness: integrated home automation, app mediated access control, and centralized energy and resource management, among other features. We refer to this phenomenon as the smart compound. Despite its rapid proliferation, it has received comparatively little sustained scholarly attention: the literatures on smart cities and on gated communities have developed largely independently of one another, even as developers are, in practice, merging the two. This paper introduces the smart compound as an emerging real estate and urban development phenomenon, considers the opportunities and risks it presents, and examines how questions of data governance differ when smart urban infrastructure is built and owned privately rather than publicly. It concludes with a set of research questions intended to orient researchers, planners, and regulators toward a phenomenon whose growth is outpacing the scholarship meant to account for it.