Based on ethnographic observations, this article seeks to empirically illustrate how one of the main functions of the Smart City Expo in Barcelona in 2024 is to perform smartcity-as-ideology and its technological-solutionist stance that considerably narrows our understanding of urban problems and the solutions for it. The article introduces the Expo and describes our arrival and visit to the Expo. It provides empirical detail of the performativity of technological solutionism and its optimism, including the role of alliances, based on ethnographic observations. The main features of the technological-solutionist ideology underpinning the smart city are summarised and we conclude how this performativity is in line with Althusser's understanding of ideology.

So called ‘smart’ built environments operate in a peculiar temporal nexus: they are simultaneously just around the corner, already here, and yesterday’s news. This is usually put down to hype and hyperbole, but it may well be argued that smart built environments do indeed exist across temporal dimensions – only not in the way we imagine them to.

Instead of speaking of a digital turn in housing, we would be better served by employing the plural: digital turns. In fact, once we begin to unravel the history of how the idea of what we today call smart technology has been implemented in multi-household rental dwellings since the early 1980s, a pattern emerges.

The article charts how landlords and others have placed smart devices that monitor, encourage or discipline tenants to behave in certain ways. This is a parallel story to the dream of a leisure-centred technology-enabled house of the future. This parallel story is darker and centres on the transformation of the dwelling through its digitalisation.

Cities across the world are increasingly labelling themselves as smart in one way or another. At the same time, this smartness appears amorphous or invisible in its built urban environment. Critical researchers writing on the smart city regularly express confusion or exasperation about precisely the difficulty to locate the smart in the city. Visibility of the smart city is not a given. This article argues that visibility in the case of the smart city is instead strategically produced, and that the strategy opted for tells us something about the kind of urban imaginary put forward. The article introduces a provisional and non-exhaustive taxonomy of strategies of visibility based on analyses of three different cases of smart city projects (in Brazil, Sweden and Canada) and identifies the ways in which the smart city is made visible (or not)—symbolic presence of smart, modelling smart and ubiquitous invisible smart—and discusses what kind of city is envisioned based on each strategy.

Alltsedan Kockums huvudkontor sträckte sig över varvets kranar har skyskraporna i Malmö genererat intensiva debatter om vad staden är och, inte minst, vad den borde vara. Skyskrapsprojekt har om och om igen varit del av hur stadens identitet vuxit fram: Sydsvenskanhuset, Kronprinsen, Triangeln och senare Turning Torso och Malmö Live är några exempel.

I Malmhattanism undersöker arkitekturforskaren Fredrik Torisson varför, hur och av vem skyskrapor har byggts i Malmö under sjuttio år. Han beskriver den skiftande roll som höghusen har spelat i stadens utveckling, kartlägger de specifika byggprojekten och för en diskussion kring hur Malmös skyskrapor kan förstås i ett internationellt sammanhang. Vilka är aktörerna bakom byggnaderna och hur har processerna förlöpt? Vilka förhoppningar var byggnaderna tänkta att infria?

I ett större perspektiv belyser Torisson projekten i såväl historiska som nutida perspektiv. Genom att följa Malmös höghusbyggen över en längre period klarlägger han skiftningar i synen på staden och dess relation till arkitektur och skyskrapan som symbol.