Rob Kitchin

Paolo Cardullo

Cesare Di Feliciantonio

Globally, Smart Cities initiatives are pursued which reproduce the interests of capital and neoliberal government, rather than wider public good. This book explores smart urbanism and 'the right to the city', examining citizenship, social justice, commoning, civic participation, and co-creation to imagine a different kind of Smart City.

The Right to the Smart City

This book critically examines ‘smart city’ discourse in terms of governance initiatives, citizen participation, and policies which place emphasis on the ‘citizen’ as an active recipient and co-producer of technological solutions to urban problems. The current hype around ‘smart cities’ and digital technologies has sparked debates in the fields of citizenship, urban studies, and planning surrounding the rights and ethics of participation. It has also sparked debates around the forms of governance these technologies actively foster. This book presents new sociotechnological systems of governance that monitor citizen power, trust-building strategies, and social capital. It calls for new data economics and digital rights for a city founded on normative ideals rather than neoliberal ones. It adopts a prescriptive approach, arguing that a ‘reloaded’ smart city should foster citizenship as a new set of civil and social rights and the ‘citizen’ as a subject vested with active and meaningful forms of participation and political power. Ultimately, the book questions the utility of the ‘smart city’ project for radical municipalism, proposing a technological enough but more democratic city – an ‘intelligent city’, in fact. Offering useful contributions to ‘smart city’ initiatives for the protection of emerging digital citizenship rights and socially accrued benefits, this book will draw the interest of researchers, policymakers, and professionals in the fields of urban studies, urban planning, urban geography, computing and technology studies, urban politics, and urban economics.

Paolo Cardullo

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