Valuing “Othered” Rationalities in the Smart City: Examining Children’s Cycling from a Justice Perspective

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article seeks to contribute to the intersection of children’s mobility (specifically cycling) by assessing the extent to which emerging socio-technical smart city systems accommodate children’s rationalities. In order to do so, it reviews literature on children’s mobility, cycling, and participation in design of smart solutions. Through this process, I highlight distributional injustice where children are marginalized in adult-centric cycling discourses, spaces, and smart initiatives. In making this point the review draws attention to the ways in which children are excluded because their more social and playful rationalities of cycling are not recognized in adult/ policy readings of cycling. Linked to this, I show that children’s rationalities are othered procedurally in the development of smart solutions because children are either absent, treated as data nodes, or asked to solve pre-defined problems of transport optimization. I conclude by foregrounding four elements that could contribute to what smart(er) cycling might look like from a child’s perspective: accommodating a plurality of motives with a particular emphasis on less instrumental and more convivial and playful mobilities; physical and urban infrastructures that emphasize social connection; accounting for the relative absence of technologies in children’s lives; seeking to “make children count” in (smart) decision-making processes.