Public values and citizen participation are key terms in smart city discourse that are propagated by all its actors, from governments to corporations and civil society. Nevertheless, the design and development of smart cities are hardly ‘public’ as some publics and some forms of participation are never included. This is particularly visible in current protests against a key enabling technology for smart cities, 5G. These contestations tend to be considered ill-informed and irrational, while their methods are seen as conflictual rather than helpful. In this article the author argues that the public value approach to smart cities is rooted in a deliberative perspective of democracy, while the tensions that are produced by 5G and other forms of anti-technological protest are better understood as part of agonistic democracy. Such conflicts about the new smart technologies that are currently hidden from public sight need to be articulated and constructed as contentious issues for electoral politics, in order for the smart city to acquire its democratic legitimacy.

This article deals with the relationship of smart security technologies to broader modes of exercising power and subjugating individuals. It claims that the notion of psychopower is precisely what is missing from post-Foucaultian accounts of the smart city. In the article psychopower is defined as the manipulation of our consciousness in order to channel our desires toward ‘normal’ social behavior, drawing a line between what is ‘acceptable’ and what is ‘unacceptable’. Psychopower raises a series of concerns related to its democratic legitimacy and accountability as behaviorally informed conditioning of the mind runs the risk of constant surveillance, where human agency is diluted in a techno-utopian vision that promises to improve city-wide efficiency, decision-making, and security.

The recently cancelled Quayside smart city project in Toronto by Sidewalk Labs is an example of a top-down, tech-driven, intransparant model of a smart city, where government and citizens got sidetracked in the planning process. This article analyses what went wrong and proposes an alternative approach. Experts in the field – from data scientists to philosophers, sociologists and activists – propose a different kind of smart city. The open smart city is based on principles of open data, public digital infrastructure, and civic participation. It uses technology to strengthen public values, civic participation and human rights, instead of undermining them.

This contribution contains several concrete examples of ‘Corona crime’ thereby showing how the current crisis is creating new opportunities for committing crimes. The authors revert to an analysis framework that was previously used to interpret new forms of crime during the banking crisis. It consists of four scenarios that are briefly described. The future will have to show what effects the corona pandemic has had on fraud and other financial and economic crime.