034R_Actually existing smart citizens – Expertise and (non)participation in the making of the smart city (research summary)

Summary of the article titled Actually existing smart citizens – Expertise and (non)participation in the making of the smart city from 2019 by Taylor Shelton and Thomas Lodato published in the City – analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action journal.  Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see how smart citizens are or aren’t involved in establishing the smart city. This article argues that while the citizen participation is crucial to truly democratic systems, the emerging discourse around the promise of smart citizenship fails to capture the realities of how citizens are actually discussed and enrolled in the making of smart city or smart citizen policies. The article is available through this link. Abstract: In response to the mounting criticism of emerging ‘smart cities’ strategies around the world, a number of individuals and institutions have attempted to pivot from discussions of smart cities towards a focus on ‘smart citizens’. While the smart citizen is most often seen as a kind of foil for those more stereotypically top-down, neoliberal and repressive visions of the smart city that have been widely critiqued within the literature, this paper argues for an attention to the ‘actually existing smart citizen’, who plays a much messier and more ambivalent role in practice. This paper proposes the dual figures of ‘the general citizen’ and ‘the absent citizen’ as a heuristic for thinking about how the lines of inclusion and exclusion are drawn for citizens, both discursively and materially, in the actual making of the smart city. These figures are meant to highlight how the universal and unspecified figure of ‘the citizen’ is discursively deployed to justify smart city policies, while at the same time, actual citizens remain largely excluded from such decision and policy-making processes. Using a case study of Atlanta, Georgia and its ongoing smart cities initiatives, we argue that while the participation of citizens is crucial to any truly democratic mode of urban governance, the emerging discourse around the promise of smart citizenship fails to capture the realities of how citizens are actually discussed and enrolled in the making of these policies. The transcript is available through this link. What wast the most interesting part for you? What questions did arise for you? Let me know on twitter @WTF4Cities! I hope this was an interesting episode for you and thanks for tuning in. Music by Lesfm from Pixabay