The citizen in the smart city. How the smart city could transform citizenship

Abstract

Smart city-policy makers and technology vendors are increasingly stating they want to bring about citizen-centered smart cities. Yet, it often remains unclear what exactly that means, and how citizens are envisaged as actors in smart cities. This article wants to contribute to this discussion by exploring the relation between smart cities and citizenship. It aims to do this by introducing a heuristic scheme that brings out the implied notions of citizenship in three distinct sets of smart city visions and practices: The Control Room envisages the city as a collection of infrastructures and services; The Creative City views the city from the perspective of (economic) geography and ponders on local and regional systems of innovation; The Smart Citizens discourse addresses the city as a political and civic community. These smart city discourses are mapped against two visions on citizenship and governance taken from political philosophy. A `republican' perspective with strong presence in social-democratic countries is contrasted with a libertarian one, most prominent in Silicon Valley approaches to smart city technologies. This provides a scheme to reflect on potential benefits and downsides if a specific smart city discourse would develop. Instances of smart cities may promote notions of citizenship that are based on consumer choice and individual responsibility, alternatively they could also reinforce collective responsibilities towards the common good of society.

(Smart) Citizens from Data Providers to Decision-Makers? The Case Study of Barcelona

“…Many attempts were made to conceptualize smart citizens. While a variety of researchers focused on contextually bound definitions, there seems to be a lack of agreement regarding the significance of smart citizens in practice [40,62,[74][75][76][77]112,113]. Expanding on prior works, some authors fiercely countered the technodeterministic and/or neoliberal smart city rhetoric from policymakers and technology vendors by pointing out the absence of benefits from citizen-centered smart cities [114,115], whereas others more recently took a constructive approach to consider and elaborate upon the alternatives offered by experimentalism [29,64,65,116].…”

“…Over the last few years, the idea of smart citizens profoundly influenced smart-city literature [40,[75][76][77][78][79][80]113]. In summary, scholars such as Cardullo and Kitchin [40] interestingly argue that the concept of the smart citizen is often synonymous with "choice" in the market, with the following predominant roles: a "consumer" or "user"-who selects the services acquired from the marketplace of providers; "resident"-who can afford the exclusivity offered by a "smart district"; and "data provider"-who creates data through the use of smart-city technologies that companies can incorporate into products and extract value from.…”

The City as a License. Implications of Blockchain and Distributed Ledgers for Urban Governance

“…In the context of urban governance, smart city-technologies can be understood as an example of such platformization (Kitchin, 2014;Cowley et al, 2017;De Waal and Dignum, 2017). Although definitions of smart cities differ widely (De Waal and Dignum, 2017), a trait that the many definitions hold in common is that all kinds of urban services can be optimized through the applications of various types of data that are assembled and processed in the city in real-time.…”

“…At the same time, others can offer their services as taxi-drivers. An often-used metaphor is that of the control room (De Waal and Dignum, 2017), in which all kinds of urban processes can be monitored and managed in real-time, both from a top down perspective, as well as from the perspective of the user. His or her mobile phone becomes a personalized control-room from which a citizen can manage their own urban operations.…”

The role of participatory design activities in supporting sense-making in the smart city

“…In smart cities, different sectors of society (companies, government, citizens, knowledge institutions) allocate meaning to how urban life changes because of technology, and what these changes entail for our ways of being and acting. Technology influences societal values (Forlano & Mathew, 2014;Royakkers et al, 2018), the lives of citizens (Vanolo, 2016) and often leads to tensions resulting from value diversity or conflicting agendas (Kitchin, 2014;Van Zoonen, 2016;De Waal and Dignum, 2017;Valdez et al, 2018).…”