Kyle Haddad-Fonda

This project explores "smart city" (or a "digital city" or a "tech city") projects, comparing between China, Egypt and Morocco and tracing connections in the construction and design sector of these three countries, particularly Chinese businesses and government plans in these countries. I trace connections between China's promotion of its own mid-size cities as models for technology-integrated development and the development of similar projects in the Arab world, focusing on the case of the Tangier Tech City (planned to be built by the China Communications Construction Company with Chinese funding) and the string of smaller so-called smart cities springing up around Egypt, especially New Alamein (being built by China State Construction Engineering Corporation).There was a flurry of interest in 2016 and 2017 in mid-size Chinese cities that were presenting themselves as "smart cities," including Yinchuan, Wuxi, Zhuhai, and Hangzhou. Yinchuan is the most interesting of these cities because it is also the permanent host of the China-Arab States Expo and because, prior to the crackdown on expressions of religiosity in 2018, its leaders were aggressively highlighting their city's religious and cultural linkages to the Arab world. Since 2018, Yinchuan has partially retained its status as a common destination for Arab visitors (and the agreement to create the Tangier Tech City was signed there). In the past few years, however, the Chinese government seems to have highlighted Wuxi most assertively as a model smart city for foreign countries to copy. The meaning of "smart city" is not easy to pin down. In different contexts, it can suggest that a city has internet connectivity built into the infrastructure, that it collects data about its residents and uses that data to improve urban life, that it uses sustainable energy, or that its citizens rely on cashless technologies. We should also not neglect an additional—though usually unspoken—feature, which is that it has comprehensive surveillance technologies built into the fabric of the city. This study illuminates how mid-size Chinese cities that the Chinese government was promoting as "smart city" models starting in the mid-2010s influenced the conception of new Chinese-built smart cities adjacent to mid-size Egyptian and Moroccan cities in the 2020s. First, this study draws fromsources and documented visits by Moroccan and Egyptian development officials to mid-size Chinese smart cities, in the hope of figuring out exactly which example cities are being taken most seriously. Second, this study explores how Arab and Chinese officials have worked together with the IEEE (formerly the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) to designate certain cities as official "smart cities," and how they have presented these official designations to their own citizens. And, finally, this work investigates how Egyptian and Moroccan intellectuals, journalists, and politicians have talked about certain mid-size Chinese cities in their own writings, speeches, and scholarly reports.