Civic participation in a world of smart city initiatives: a comparative appraisal of diverse forms and trajectories

Abstract

There is a well-established strand of scholarly research on the nexus of civic participation and digital technology, mostly arising from examination of smart city initiatives in North America and Western Europe. This has documented outcomes ranging from cases where citizen-led political initiatives advance frontiers of democratic participation, to cases where citizens’ role in smart governance amounts to little more than serving as living “data points”, eroding extant urban democratic practices and culture (Lake, 2017). There are many other outcomes between those extremes – most individual city case studies show evidence of multiple forms and possible trajectories – even in documentation of “mature” democratic contexts. How are such political-cum-technological developments playing out across wider worlds of smart city experimentation? Some of the foundational and most influential smart cities scholarship has shown that smart city initiatives vary geographically because cities have diverse historical and cultural legacies, governance and political structures. At the same time, historical legacies do not simply determine present outcomes or future possibilities. In this paper, we identify a range of forms and degrees of citizen participation from urban political contexts within and beyond the EuroAmerican heartlands of urban studies knowledge production. Drawing upon findings from a global comparative smart cities project encompassing research teams from seven cities (Barcelona, Calgary, Seoul, Singapore, Stockholm, Taipei and Toronto) across three continents, we distill four main forms of smart city civic participation: citizens as data points; the “transactional citizen” (Johnson et al, 2020); public sector “proxy citizens”; and participatory digital decision making.