Reshaping the Smart City through Civic Interventions
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Smart cities are rapidly emerging across the globe in ways that change how we know, plan, and govern urban space and city life. But what is smart about the smart city? What is new about it? How precisely is the smart city shaped, managed, and governed? And how do its inhabitants engage with smart city policies and processes? In this presentation, I seek to shed light on these questions using empirical illustrations of smart city policies and practices in Europe and elsewhere. In this process, I will explore the underlying assumptions, promises, and stakes that guide smart city developments, including the originality of integrating sensors and devices into our everyday surroundings. I will also pay specific attention to how citizens intervene in these surroundings, often mundanely and on a small scale, and in manners that intentionally or inadvertently slow down or counteract dominant renditions of ‘smartness.’ These interventions, which take the form of activist and artistic intrusions, citizen science initiatives, and ‘technology assessments’ mediated by social scientists, disturb the smooth technoptimism inscribed in official smart city visions and architectures. Building on these examples, I will argue two interrelated points: 1) official policy and strategic representations of the smart city as a joyous, tranquil space that actively engages citizens and businesses (e.g., EC 2019) fail to capture how smart environments are democratized and potentially reshaped through civic contestation; 2) while sterile and overly optimistic, these dominant representations also open a space for agonistic civic political action, and may even constitute the very conditions of civic intervention and democratic change – a point which is lost on many critical scholars.