Smart Urban Publicness

One of the objectives of Smart City concept is to incorporate the public into the city’s decision making. “People-centric” governance are the core framework that many smart cities incorporate in their masterplan. However, in many cases, Smart City only reflects the opportunistic nature to promote economic activity without even considering the inhabitants needs. Cowley et al. (2018), through the study of six UK cities explained a more nuanced way to see how “public” smart cities are from their strategic planning and day-to-day operation.

There are four modalities of smart city “publicness”. First is Service-user Publicness relating to the day-to-day of public service that the inhabitants use such as water, transport, electricity, etc. This is the most common and least complicated way smart city connect to their people. It is the most passive public assemblage of smart city and may only serve a normative goal to improve efficiency of urban service. Then, there is Entrepreneurial Publicness, that expects the public to be involved in creating services and economic values in the smart city. Hackathon, Open-data lab, or Innovation Week are some programs that reflects this modal of publicness. Although the residents may take up a more active role in creating smart city service, this assemblage of publicness says little about the democratic dimension of publicness. 

Political Publicness or the inhabitant’s ability to contribute to decision making and involvement; and Civic Publicness or the freedom of speech that residents have in the public sphere; are the publicness modalities that shows how democratic the smart cities are. However, these are the least common publicness that Cowley et al. (2018) observed. By looking at the four dimensions of publicness, smart cities can evaluate how “citizen-centric” their smart city visions are and move forward with improvements in the area that they still lack. 

Reference:

Cowley, R., Joss, S., & Dayot, Y. (2018). The smart city and its publics: insights from across six UK cities. Urban Research & Practice, 11(1), 53-77.

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