Smart Cities Made Ordinary: Public Sector Digitization and Local Democratic Cultures

Keywords: local democratic culture, participation, platformisation, urban culture, civic resilience
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

Debates about smart cities address relations between technological innovations to their lived circumstances in political cultures. Many critiques have emphasized the divergence of digitization strategies between cities and their effects on members of the public (Halegoua 2020, Foth et al. 2015, Cocchia 2014). Studies of ‘platform urbanism’ (Barns 2020) are critical of wholesale approaches to public sector digitization initiatives, emphasizing the need for civic values embedded in the designs of systems (Heezen et al. 2023).
The logic of platforms for urban innovation processes for ecological, economic and social sustainability transitions (Köhler et al 2019) address “urban politics of platform infrastructures and platform infrastructures of urban politics” (Rodgers 2021: 406). The nature of platform logic beckons questions about participatory processes and the ‘civil sphere’ (Alexander 2006), probing the conditions of civic cultures (Willems 2021; Reese and Rosenfeld 2012). Communication research isolates the fragmentation of the general public sphere into “network of publics” (Bruns 2023) or threats to “social cohesion” (Schneiders et al. 2023). But these efforts isolate a communication problem and abstract from specific local conditions of democracy where different platforms are colliding.
This paper bridges the gap in smart cities research to different local democratic cultures through a case study of urban digitization in a mid-size German state capital. The paper retraces the ‘making of’ a smart city in relation to civic cultures and their historical legacies at the crossroads between federal urban digitization policies and efforts to reinvent democratic participation as central to sustainable urban governance.