‘Built from the internet up’: assessing citizen participation in smart city planning through the case study of Quayside, Toronto

Abstract

Citizen participation in smart cities has come under ever more scrutiny in recent years. Whilst smart city projects across the world have proclaimed themselves as citizen-centric, scholars have found that these claims are still framed within a neoliberal, post-political conception of citizenship, whereby citizens are afforded little agency. In evaluating such projects and in aid of developing a better understanding of the citizen’s role in smart cities, scholars have developed various heuristics. This paper aims to further both empirical and theoretical developments in the field to evaluate citizen participation in Quayside, Toronto’s first smart city neighbourhood, using Cardullo and Kitchin’s Scaffold of Smart Citizen Participation. A document analysis of seventeen citizen engagement summary reports and advertisements, corresponding to eight citizen engagement initiatives, has revealed that the quality of citizen participation varied substantially according to individual initiatives in Quayside. It was also discovered that Cardullo and Kitchin’s scaffold was ineffective at capturing the complexity of citizen engagement in smart city planning. In light of this, a new heuristic which assesses the post-political spaces of citizen engagement has been developed. This heuristic can provide a productive foundation for further research in the field.