In search of the Smart Citizen: Republican and cybernetic citizenship in the smart city

Dorien Zandbergen and Justus Uitermark
Additional contact information
Dorien Zandbergen: University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
Justus Uitermark: University of Amsterdam, Netherlands

Urban Studies, 2020, vol. 57, issue 8, 1733-1748

Abstract: The smart city has been both celebrated for opening up decision-making processes through responsive digital infrastructures, and criticised for turning citizens into mere nodes of socio-technical networks under corporate or government control. In line with these depictions, smart city politics is often analysed as a struggle between aspirations for bottom-up participatory democracy and authoritarian control. Drawing on ethnographic research on an Amsterdam project which encourages citizens to collect and share air quality data, we problematise this vertical reading of smart city politics. The project mobilises both republican citizenship and cybernetic citizenship, each assuming different logics regarding the ways in which citizens negotiate urban life by means of data and sensing technologies. While republican citizenship emphasises citizens’ sovereignty, cybernetic citizenship emphasises their immersion into informational environments. We demonstrate how, depending on specific situated interests and forms of engagement, both kinds of citizenship feed into appealing visions of urban life for different actors.

Keywords: air quality sensing; citizen participation; citizen sensing; cybernetic politics; digital urbanism; smart city; ç©ºæ°”è´¨é‡ æ„ŸçŸ¥; å…¬æ°‘å ‚ä¸Ž; 公民感知; 控制论政治; 数字城市化; 智慧城市 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0042098019847410 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:57:y:2020:i:8:p:1733-1748

DOI: 10.1177/0042098019847410

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Urban Studies from Urban Studies Journal Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().