Short abstract:

Exploring citizen’s agency in platform urbanism, we critique tokenism in smart city imaginaries. We advocate participatory methods to engage citizens and challenge power imbalances in data-driven urban AI systems, based on Feenberg’s critical constructivism.

Long abstract:

There is a long history of industry and states attempting to frame and set expectations about future cities and the possible disruptive impact of smart systems and digitalisation. The recent narrative of ‘platform urbanism’ is based on the so-called ‘pivot to platforms’ (Barns, 2019), given the advance of platformisation, algorithms and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the context of cities. In our paper we critically discuss and examine ‘the right to the smart city’ in the context of urban platformisation, i.e. how to go beyond tokenism by empowering citizens and how this can transform current market led imaginaries to smart cities into more equitable and sustainable cities (Mansell, 2012; Cardullo et al., 2019). For this we build on Feenberg’s critical theory of technology and the notion of ‘technical citizenship’ (2017), stressing the agency of citizens and how they can contribute to the construction and usage of data-driven AI platforms in a municipal context.

We illustrate this approach by comparing our experiences in two different countries applying two innovative participatory methods for offering citizens a voice: ‘walkshops’ and ‘citizens think-ins’. These relatively low technology methods have proved effective to make citizens and other municipal stakeholders more aware and better understand smart infrastructures in their cities, and offer a potential route to influence more effectively academic, corporate and city decision makers. We demonstrate how critical constructivism can practically contribute to understanding and confronting transformations and power asymmetries, emerging around data-driven AI systems in cities.