The term “smart city” has circulated across the developed world affecting urban development programmes and government strategies. Such “future cities” are heralded for their efficient networked technologies embedded within the fabric of urban environments that provide new means of social control for the state. These cities are envisioned as a technological fix for the many problems of modern city life, yet emerging technologies are not flawless and have vulnerabilities that can be manipulated by criminal actors. Even so, there is an interesting silence about the issues of security amongst the advocates of smart cities. Furthermore, there remains limited insight into the impact of the smart cities programme from criminologists, particularly in relation to hitherto prioritised threats of organised crime, notably the illicit drugs markets and associated harms. Those who have addressed the impact of emergent technologies have done so through critiques of governmental programmes, drawing largely upon insights from science and technology studies. A key absence in this, as well as the commercial and governmental literature, is the voice of actors involved in the networks that actually constitute threats to urban security, and how they perceive and use emerging technologies for illicit ends. This paper aims to augment but also challenge this treatment of the impact of emergent technologies, by switching the analytical focus towards the principal actor-networks that constitute these threats, with a particular focus on ICT (mobile technologies and internet drug sales). It uses data from a 5-year ethnography to demonstrate how ICT reconfigures and virtually extends illicit drug markets, whilst providing insights into the workings of drug markets of the future.

中文翻译：

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智慧城市中的技术和有组织犯罪：非法毒品贸易的民族志研究

“智慧城市”一词已在发达国家流传，影响了城市发展计划和政府战略。这种“未来城市”因其嵌入城市环境结构中的高效网络技术而备受赞誉，这些技术为国家提供了新的社会控制手段。这些城市被设想为解决现代城市生活中的许多问题的技术解决方案，但新兴技术并非完美无缺，并且存在可以被犯罪分子操纵的漏洞。即便如此，在智慧城市的倡导者中，对于安全问题仍然保持着有趣的沉默。此外，犯罪学家对智慧城市计划的影响的洞察仍然有限，特别是在迄今为止优先考虑的有组织犯罪威胁方面，尤其是非法药物市场和相关危害。那些解决新兴技术影响的人是通过对政府计划的批评来做到这一点的，主要借鉴了科学和技术研究的见解。在这方面以及商业和政府文献中的一个关键缺失是参与网络的参与者的声音，这些参与者实际上对城市安全构成了威胁，以及他们如何看待和使用新兴技术来达到非法目的。本文旨在通过将分析重点转向构成这些威胁的主要参与者网络，特别关注 ICT（移动技术和互联网毒品销售），来增强但也挑战这种对新兴技术影响的处理方式。