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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today I will introduce a research paper by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original paper, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole paper.

Our summary today works with 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.

Smart city efforts are largely indistinguishable from earlier iterations of neoliberal urbanism. Smart city instead of providing a cure for all lagging cities, it rewrites the inequalities by privileging free market, technology-centric and expert-driven forms of urban planning and governance and forcing cities to compete for scarce resources in new ways. These issues are well documented in the literature criticizing smart cities, although the critiques created a counter movement to prove smart city being good and answering those concerns without really changing the idea. Smart city is not all that it is cracked up to be. The very least, even the most benign of smart city efforts are incredibly resource intensive in terms of both financial and human resources, pulling away from less spectacular though still important and pressing urban problems.

Based on these problems, many tried to pivot the smartness discussion from smart cities to smart citizens. Although there are countless articles to concentrate more on the smart citizens, this idea is not mobilized solely in opposition to more conventional smart city images. The authors argues that 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, the actually existing smart citizen plays a much messier and more ambivalent role in practice. The authors introduced dual figures – the general citizen and the absent citizen – to understand the dominant ways how citizens are actually framed, enrolled and utilised for specific institutions and actors guiding smart city planning initiatives. However, the authors highlighted that those two ideological types of citizens are distinguished, they are rarely if at all separate, but instead overlapping and mutually constitutive. The authors also acknowledged the need for grounding the discourse in the particular context in which they are set, for this research this was Atlanta, Georgia.

Being a citizen in a smart city does not necessarily make one a smart citizen – there seems to be a substantive disconnect between these two ideas, while the notion of the smart citizen can remain a mere foil on the conventional understanding of smart cities. Therefore, not all variations on the smart city or smart citizen are made equal, it is doubtful that simply invoking a vision of smart citizens in contrast to one of smart cities represents a sufficient shift in our collective approach. There is a kind of persistent ambiguity around how citizens are thought of in the context of current urban governance. Based on Atlanta’s situation, for the actually existing smart city, the actually existing smart citizen is no single thing, nor does it stand in total opposition to the more conventional, celebratory narratives about smart citizenship.

Atlanta remains one of the country’s most segregated and unequal cities with already actually existing smart city initiatives. There seems to be a long way ahead to become smart for the city, although the city attempts to position itself as smart, in rather economic terms. Atlanta participated in many different national and international initiatives as a smart city.

Throughout workshop series in Atlanta, although the citizen continued to be a central figure of the smart city, it was also always in a mixture of active and passive, entrepreneurial and consumer, and obligatory and business roles. Additionally, the discussions were not clear who these citizens actually were, and how they can utilise or gain from the smart city visions discussed in the workshops. The workshops left the question which citizen in particular unasked and unanswered. Additionally, the city and the citizens were identified and what seemed good for the city, was looked as good for the citizens, though that may not be the case. The easiest example could be data management: although the city could benefit from wider data use and management, the citizens may not have the means and skills to work with data and gain from data collection or availability.

At best the general citizen is vague and poorly defined, lacking the kind of specificity that would demonstrate a meaningful attention to issues of inequality and difference that could or should be at the discussions’ centre. The general citizen can be a vessel for stereotypes that reinstate existing power relations and hierarchies. The top-down approach, to which the general citizen is usually part of, largely perpetuates the status quo, allowing decision-makers to feel more inclusive. The general citizen is powerful precisely because it is used in the absence of the actual citizen who might question assumptions and generalist approaches.

However, for all the discussion of citizens within some circles, the citizen continues to remain marginal to the actually existing smart city. The absence of the citizen becomes even more significant in reality where discussions and decisions are made by experts in their absence. One great example was a roundtable discussion in Atlanta about civic hacking involving everyone but the citizens themselves. The things mentioned in the same roundtable as the core of the smart city were primarily about the efficiency of urban infrastructure, not the people living in the city. The previously mentioned participants were invited as experts or municipal bureaucrats and there were no mundane citizens to participate. Therefore, citizenship in these understandings require the citizen to be active on their own accord, but also not to be a burden on society in such a way that their needs be actively considered.

On the other hand, there are civic movements of citizens and neighbourhoods to regain or at least show their preferences regarding their own environment. While there is on the one hand a clear presence of something approximating actually existing smart citizens – people using and engaging with data in order to make alternative representations of and claims on their neighbourhoods and cities, these citizens and their efforts remain largely ignored and outside of the formal institutions responsible for creating the smart city.

Ultimately, this points to one direction: the actually existing smart citizen may not actually exist at all in practice. Smart citizenship is clearly not matched by the realities of how citizens are discussed and enrolled in the process of making the smart city in Atlanta, at least. Smart citizenship seems to be a form of citizenship that is constantly being imagined by experts and bureaucrats creating the policies, to the exclusion of normal citizenship. Using this smart citizenship, experts – the qua-citizens – are able to create the smart city image from the bottom-up as the stereotypical top-down smart city approach.

However, it is not simple to include citizens into the smart city discourse. Smart citizens do not exist outside of the smart city discourse and potentially nor outside of the neoliberal city’s material constraints. The technocratic approach – if something isn’t working, simply change the technology and or the people – may not be the solution for such social problems. Both the discourse and practice of smart citizenship exists within the same power geometry that produces the smart city more generally: though they may seem in opposition as in their approaches to urban problems, smart city and smart citizenship are both divorced from the actual practices of democratic citizenship and city-making. Although the problems which called smart citizens into existence are real, this approach may not be the answer.

As the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects:

1. The concept of the smart citizen was called to existence by the need for smart cities to become more democratic – which does not seem to solve the social problems.
2. Smart city and smart citizens exist together, established by the same decision-makers.
3. Smart citizen may be used in policy making or city planning, but, unfortunately, that does not mean that the problems are solved, and the decisions are being made even in the absence of the citizens.

Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions:

1. How can the citizen be more involved? What is required from the governance level to meaningfully involve the citizens into the establishment of the future of cities?
2. Why is it bad for city planning for the experts to be involved if they were citizens at the same time?
3. Shouldn’t the citizens be regarded as experts? They are the experts of their own experiences, situations and problems. Of course, they still need to be involved as such, but in this understanding the involvement of the experts can be a much more democratic way of planning the future of a city.
4. What can you be an expert on in your area and how could that be useful for the future of your city?

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