Capitalizing on the “Public Turn”: New Possibilities for Citizens and Civil Servants in Smart City-Making

Abstract

There is a sharp contrast between the public value discourse that typifies smart city-making on the one hand and its democratic deficit on the other. In this article we explore this contrast in more detail and assess that the paradigm and practices of networked government, which dominates smart city making, positions citizens as "audiences" of smart city makers and civil servants as "shepherds" of their public values. In these positions, both citizens and civil servants participate in a wide array of smart city experiments and engagements. However, an active, autonomous agenda setting role by citizens or democratically legitimated advocacy of civil servants is rare and does not easily fit within the paradigm of networked government. We draw on the work of Dewey and Marres to envision such different roles and make them concrete by highlighting experiences of Dutch citizens and civil servants with urban data and technology. These show, first, that the desires and goals of citizens may differ markedly from those of the smart city, and-second-that civil servants struggle with legitimate ways to advocate for socially and economically balanced smart city solutions. We conclude, in the final section, that the smart city can only be developed further through representative democratic means of engagement, among which local elections that express the collective desires of citizens and frame the mandate of civil servants.

The Ethical Smart City Framework & Toolkit: An Inclusive Application of Human-Centered Design and Public Engagement in Smart City Development

“…This framework lacked public engagement as it included gathering research but failed to further involve communities in the development process. Contemporary smart city discourse argues for a focus on the citizen [10] yet in reality still employs top-down 'citizen engagement' practices that fail to achieve true inclusion and engagement [11,12]. That said, smart cities in developed countries are slowly shifting their focus from technical indicators and instead learning to evaluate social impact [13]; taking into account their community's needs [14].…”

The Promise of the City. Adventures in learning cities and higher education. By David Wilmoth, Laneway Press, 2021, 350 pp., $39.95 (hardback), ISBN: 978‐0‐ 6450070‐3‐9 (hardback); 978‐0‐6450070‐4‐6 (ebook)

“…With diseases caused by pollution having been responsible for an estimated nine million premature deaths in 2015 alone, urban pollution in particular is now being taken more seriously than before, and not just in poorer countries (Landrigan, 2018; McManus, 2021). Additionally—in the guise of so‐called “smart cities”—“learning” increasingly is manifesting as the AI mass surveillance society examined so forensically in Cugurullo’s (2021) Frankenstein Urbanism (see also Engelbert et al, 2022).…”