Paper short abstract:

The aim of this paper is to account for alternative processes of city making through hacktivism and testbedding, observing how they actually engage with smart cities transformation processes and create specific regimes of change and innovation.

Paper long abstract:

The aim of this paper is to account for alternative processes of city making through hacktivism and testbedding, observing how they actually engage with smart cities transformation processes and create specific regimes of change and innovation. In which extent these alternatives are viable for the cities? Which (and whose) are the benefits? How the idea of urban change is produced and performed? What kind of digital atmosphere/governmentality is produced?

Hacktivism and testbedding are considered here as two forms of collaboration between public and private actors to envision and test the deployment of IoT based services in the city.

They are considered as alternative because they collide and interact with their own rationalities, because they stem from different ideas of users, markets and value for the city and finally because they perform different possible urban worlds. In so doing, they present relevant features for STS analysis: first, they act upon a web of relations that creates a common platform/infrastructure, the move across and enact mutable urban scales, they assemble heterogeneous actors (such as public organizations, civic communities, start-up companies, multinational corporations, city innovation frameworks and protocols, etc.), they build on specific ideas of change, they contribute to create an digital innovation affect that pervade smart urbanism practices across the city. Such affect seems to orient the discourse and the innovation in very unpredictable ways, acting both as a source of ideas and practices that can be enrolled enacted by companies and/or public sector to become actual project.