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Short abstract:

This paper discusses ongoing challenges that Singapore's smart city projects face as the country digitalises its government services. The discussion contributes to scholarship on smart city dynamics in Asia, and emphasises the need to address emerging linguistic and generational disparities.

Long abstract:

Smart cities around the world have increasingly embraced the participatory turn and sought more opportunities for citizen co-creation. This paper focuses on one such initiative in Singapore’s smart city, the Smart Nation Builder (the Builder), and the challenges it faces in engaging with the country’s diverse, multilingual population. Designed as an interactive exhibition, the Builder has two functions: first, as a communications site where the public learns of new digital government services; and second, as a space to gather feedback on existing digital public services. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper shows how the Builder’s interactive stations, which only display and collect feedback in English text and/or verbal inputs, end up isolating the very groups in society—non-English speakers and the elderly—that would benefit the most from co-creation initiatives like these that seek to empower citizens in a rapidly digitalising country. Locating this discussion within the country’s linguistic policies and multilingual communities, this paper discusses the work of translation that emerges to address these linguistic and generational challenges. As workers translate comments, feedback and questions that citizens bring, they render these comments legible to the state through the Builder’s interactive stations. Nonetheless, this work, I suggest, remains undervalued amidst the country’s rapid digitalisation. This discussion thus adds to the literature on smart cities in Asia that aim to ‘provincialise’ practices of smart urbanism (Woods et al. 2023; Chang et al. 2021) while seeking to depict the ‘discursive and material realities of actually existing smart city developments’ (Glasmeier & Christopherson 2015, p.9).