Abstract
The ‘smart city’ is an oft-cited techno-urban imaginary promoted by businesses and governments alike. It thinks big, and is chiefly imagined in terms of large-scale information communications systems that hinge on the collection of real-time and so-called ‘big data’. Less talked about are the human-scale implications and user-experience of the smart city. Much of the current academic scholarship on smart cities offers synoptic and technical perspectives, leaving the users of smart systems curiously unaccounted for. While they purport to empower citizens, smart cities initiatives are rarely focused at the citizen-scale, nor do they necessarily attend to the ways initiatives can be user-led or co-designed. Drawing on the outcomes of a university studio, this article rethinks the smart city as a series of urban scales—metropolis, community, individual, and personal—and proposes an analytical model for classifying smart city initiatives in terms of engagement. Informed by the theory of proxemics, the model proposed analyses smart city initiatives in terms of the scope of their features and audience size; the actors accountable for their deployment and maintenance; their spatial reach; and the ability of design solutions to re-shape and adapt to different urban scenarios and precincts. We argue that the significance of this model lies in its potential to facilitate modes of thinking across and between scales in ways that can gauge the levels of involvement in the design of digitally mediated urban environments, and productively re-situate citizens as central to the design of smart city initiatives.
Published Version
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