This article focuses on the smart city as a political place. It analyses how both the technologies and the ideas smart cities are built on, oust trust and the rule of law as two important conditions for the city as a thriving political community. In particular, three challenges to the city as a political place are identified: desubjectivation, invisibility, and a neo-liberal value shift. In order to address these challenges, we introduce the term 'negotiation' as a new guiding principle to the use of smart technologies in cities. Through negotiation, we underline some necessary steps to resubjectify citizens and to put the acceptance of vulnerability and transparency at the centre of our thinking and evaluation of the smart city. This article concludes that the current focus on participation and citizen-centric smart city projects is not sufficient to build and contribute to a genuine political community and that a re-evaluation of active citizenship in the smart city context is therefore needed. ARTICLE HISTORY

The 'smart city' movement asks new questions about the role of private actors in urban governance. Smart technology providers, because of their unique position, influence policymaking through their products and services. Yet, the effect of this role on public values remains unaddressed. This article considers how the use of public-private partnerships (PPPs) in smart city development challenges public values, particularly accountability and transparency. It shows how both PPPs and smart cities frame for-profit firms as central actors in creating efficient and innovative public services and infrastructure. The risks privatisation poses for public values have to be reassessed, in light of the issue of vendor lock-in and the value-embedding capacity of technology. Furthermore, this article suggests that to mitigate such risks, data protection legislation is insufficient: the wider notion of publicisation, namely the extension of public norms to private actors acting for public purposes, needs to be re-examined in the context of the smart city. Therefore, this article contributes to the literature with a novel discussion of the possibilities and limits of using smart city PPPs as tools to safeguard public values.

This article studies how local governments interface with the adoption of smart city initiatives, and the challenges this poses from a public law perspective. Although every smart city develops within an administrative territory regulated by a local government, this dimension often remains overlooked in legal and smart city literature. Municipal governments can act as regulators through their existing competences in spatial planning, environmental protection, local by-laws, financial subsidies, and partnerships. However, through an analysis of the Amsterdam Smart City program, this article shows that the smart city challenges this traditional role as regulator. Specifically, it observes four elements: (1) fragmentation, (2) networked governance, (3) multilevel governance, and (4) experimentation. These elements illustrate four challenges for the role and position of municipalities in the smart city: (1) collaborating across municipal departments, (2) steering smart city programs through public-private networks, (3) navigating the limits of local government’s powers on smart city issues, and (4) experimenting with new forms of public procurement. These challenges push municipal governments to find new ways to fulfil their role as public authorities, such as the creation of new municipal departments, the development of soft law instruments, and the use of innovative procurement. Legal research needs to examine these shifts in a context where citizens’ rights are put under pressure. smart city, municipal government, local government, public-private partnerships, networks, governance, privatization, digitization

Voorwinden, A. (2023). Smart cities: private means, public ends? Challenges in regulation and governance of smart city projects. [Thesis fully internal (DIV),

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