Introduction

Manchester is among several UK cities which have been developing and adopting various smart city initiatives since 2010s, building on the legacy of digital strategies published in 2008 and 2012 (Cowley and Capriotti 2019). Named as one of the lead UK smart cities, Manchester's innovation plans and policies have been documented and analysed as smart city ‘case studies’ across several disciplines, from urban planning and development to geography, citizenship, ethnography, and art (Caird 2018; Cowley, Joss, and Dayot 2018; Fraser and Willmott 2020). In academic publications, Manchester is often presented as part of the larger processes of urban digitisation, urban governance, and ‘techno- publics’ (Cowley, Joss, and Dayot 2018), that take pace the UK, in Europe, and globally. It is also noted that, for Manchester, becoming a smart city is part of a longer trajectory of industrial modernity, transforming from early industrial, to post- industrial, to hyper technological (Fraser and Willmott 2020). Policy narratives and media essays often depict Manchester as a ‘city of pioneering innovation’, of which the smart city is only the latest stage (Collier 2019; Slatcher 2016). See, for example, the infographic presenting the Manchester context of smart city developments in one of the reports compiled by the Manchester City Council's long- term expert on smart cities, Adrian Slatcher (Figure 3.1, from Slatcher 2016). The infographics link industrialisation and transport development to nuclear science, computing, and the discovery of graphene, all of which took place in Manchester. In a similar vein, a media report, written by a Manchester University research fellow, links smart city developments to the city's history as ‘the birthplace of the (first) Industrial Revolution, where the steam engine first roared to life, where the atom was split, where “Baby”, the first stored program computer was built, all of which changed the modern world forever’ (Collier 2019: n.p.).

In these and many similar narratives, the digitisation and smartification of today are tied to these centuries- long, and seemingly uninterrupted, lines of scientific progress. Major disruptions such as wars, decolonisation, or political upheavals, as well as more routine unsettling of economic reforms and crises, changes in governance, migration, citizen protest, and periods of harshening austerity, are entirely absent in this genealogy. Instead, there is a sense of continuity of innovation and discovery, a continuous link from the industrial revolution of the 18th and 19th century to the digital revolution of today.