Smart City Experimentation in Urban Mobility: Exploring the Politics of Futuring in Hamburg

This chapter explores how a Smart City agenda has influenced attitudes towards the future in contemporary mobility planning in Hamburg. By comparing three recent frameworks of transportation planning, we detect an interesting shift that occurred when Hamburg’s administration embarked on the project of becoming a leading Smart City. At that point in time, an attitude of planning, characterized by the styles of foresight and prediction, by practices of calculating and by the logic of precaution was replaced, or at least complemented and challenged, by an attitude of experimenting towards real-time management, which is characterized by a style of premediation, practices of performing and a logic of preparedness (in terms of Anderson 2010). We discuss multiple implications of such a shift on governance arrangements and prospects for citizen participation and decision making.