Inclusion, Exclusion, and Participation in Digital Polis: Double-Edged Development of Poor Urban Communities in Alternative Smart City-Making

Abstract

Information and communication technology (ICT) has gained global prominence as an enabling tool for advances in the twenty-first century human settlements. However, the redistribution of ICT is uneven, creating a gap between demographics and regions with different levels of access to ICT. In an uneven context, the urban poor are often excluded from government-led smart city projects because of their inability to use and benefit from ICT. Instead, the urban poor have made volunteer efforts to create an alternative smart city-making model by collaborating with radical social groups outside the institutional smart city framework. Against this backdrop, this study aims to examine the nature of the alternative efforts of the urban poor by narratively exploring how their efforts have affected their power dynamics and social infrastructure across the institutional boundaries of smart cities. The results show that the urban poor can create new forms of social infrastructure through radical intermediary interventions. It is certain that social infrastructure serves to improve communal autonomy, build a self-governing system, and thereby create a model of alternative smart-city-making practices, albeit within limits. However, at the same time, this study also contends that radical intermediary intervention can lead them to isolation from official partnerships with the public as well as the private sector because it remains improvised, provisional, and tactical. Consequently, improved communal autonomy may be undermined or even destroyed, while their self-governing system operates only within the limited network closure with little or no institutional support or protection. In this respect, this study argues that this critical point is central to the development of poor urban communities whose communal sustainability continues to be challenged by those with statutory power in the alternative placemaking of digital polis.