Samenvatting

While smart city initiatives claim to be ‘citizen-focused’ or ‘citizen-centric’, there are several troubling aspects of how citizenship and social relations are produced within them. First, they prioritize technological solutions to social and urban problems from the perspective of businesses and states, rather than serving local communities. With a focus on digital technology, they also exclude a wide range of marginalized publics from the possibility to participate in the smart city and only rarely address issues of social differences in cities. The smart city thus creates new or exacerbates existing challenges to the possibility of all city dwellers to fully enjoy urban life with all of its services and advantages, as well as taking direct part in the management of cities – in other words, it creates challenges for ‘the right to the city’. In this article, the author thus explores the notion of the right to the city in order to inform and recast the smart city in emancipatory and empowering ways, one that would work for the benefit of all citizens and not just selected populations.