Research Project Smart Cities and Urban Citizenship

This project is about smart city projects and their impact on urban citizenship. Specifically, it focuses on the new forms of (contestation over) citizenship that emerge as a consequence of smart city initiatives. Implementing visions of future urban place-making are inherently contested processes because everyday practices of urban residents and their identity-making are invested in the spatial and material surfaces of the city. However, smart city initiatives are often conceived as apolitical due the highly technological and technocratic processes that guides them and their vision of urban development and social improvement. The project approaches smart cities and citizenship contestations through three related analytical and methodological lenses: Citizenship, smart city visions, and the governance of visions. Case studies take place in three highly unequal cities. Johannesburg, Mumbai and Nairobi are subjected to disjunctive comparison.