Enrolling nature in the smart city: Discourses and imaginaries of Parisian smart city

Seeking for optimised resources exploitation, efficient flows management, sustainable environmental impacts, smart city programs are enrolling and repurposing in their networked technological infrastructure a vast array of objects, not least natural ones: trees become connected to reduce “heat islands”; algae are pushed into street furniture to absorb pollutants; mushrooms, strawberries, aromatic plants and vegetables are grown - up over roofs, down in former underground parking lots, vertically grafting on wall - to satisfy local food demands; sheeps and muttons are transformed into lawn mower. All these examples came from a rather specific implementation of the smart city. They take place in Paris, as pilots, experiments, tests and demos, attempting to blend together the biological and the socio-technical layer of the city, along with the historically rooted aesthetic of the city with a future projected imaginations. To observe and describe them, we extended an ongoing research concerned with the issues raised by urban nature in Paris: the NATURPRADI project. We mapped the discursive and pictorial elements of the Parisian urban nature debate by tracing digital-native contents produced on Twitter from July 2016 till July 2017. This digital method approach led to a series of visualisations showing how objects, places, practices and technologies are mobilised, re-appropriated by the smart city. By exploring the visualisations, we intend to provide a empirical base to discuss the frictions provoked by the articulations of nature, technology and the city in business models, policy toolboxes and citizens engagement initiatives.