Artigo:

Smart cities have been the target of intentional conceptual ambiguity. Like other terms, such as sustainability or globalization, smart cities serve for so many purposes, especially in the context of selling the techno-utopia, that both market participants and academics almost expect not to reach consensus. The purpose of the initial bibliographic review of this research was to perform a systematic search of the relevant articles considering publications between 2008 and 2018. The search was conducted with the application of the method of data scraping, from scientific bases and from Google Scholar. We also considered the conceptual assumption that we would expect to obtain mainly results from South epistemologies (BOAVENTURA, 2018), but also especially from a perspective that is supposed to be decoloniality (SANTOS, 2020). Thousands of articles were analyzed, obtaining a final sample of 1,260 papers cited more than 10 times in other publications, and 15 papers that were cited more than 500 times, among which only eight were cited more than a thousand times. These 15, or eight texts, form the conceptual basis on which smart cities foundations have been built. There was also a complementary form of bibliographic review, a narrative, which provided other critical elements and helped in a critical reading considering the material that resulted from the scraping filters. We even realized that the data mining method itself is, after all, similar to colonial methods of extracting wealth, not necessarily consistent with the best ways of producing knowledge of decolonial forms. The analyzed articles also fail to bring a vision that falls short of techno-utopia, of technology as an evolutionary fact of cities, natural, and not a political option that can generate more or less inequalities depending on technical-political decisions (MOROZOV, BRIA, 2019 ), because, after all, any technical decision is also political (FLUSSER, 2002).