The Right to the Smart City: Who Benefits from Digital Cities?

The right to the smart city is the question of who benefits from digital cities and who decides about them, and the book The Right to the Smart City (2019), edited by Paolo Cardullo, Cesare Di Feliciantonio and Rob Kitchin at Maynooth University, posed it by carrying Henri Lefebvre's right to the city into the age of sensors, platforms and data. Its thesis is that smart city initiatives, generally driven by technology companies and neoliberal governments, promise efficiency and participation but tend to reproduce existing power structures, treat citizens as users or data sources and perpetuate inequalities, and that claiming the right to the smart city means demanding that urban technology be governed democratically and serve everyone.

The scaffold of participation: smart citizenship without power

The starting point is the critique of smart citizenship. Cardullo and Kitchin built, from Sherry Arnstein's ladder of participation, a scaffold of smart citizen participation running from non-participation, the citizen as subject of control and consumer of services, to citizen control, and found, analysing Dublin and corporate discourse, that most initiatives sit on the lower rungs: consultations, complaint apps, hackathons and open data that offer token participation while decisions on infrastructure, contracts and data are taken between firms and administrations. Smart citizenship, they conclude, is often citizenship without power.

Financialisation, surveillance and digital commons: the book's fronts

The volume's chapters follow that tension across several fronts. The financialisation and corporate governance of the digital city, in which platforms and service contracts turn urban infrastructure into a source of private rent. Surveillance and algorithmic classification, which reproduce biases and affect poor neighbourhoods most. The digital commons, with experiences of collectively managed data, community networks and platform cooperatives. And the smart city from below, with movements that use technology to claim housing, mobility and public space instead of receiving them as services.

Barcelona and technological sovereignty: the right in practice

Barcelona is its positive reference. Between 2015 and 2019 the city, with Francesca Bria as chief technology officer, reframed its smart city plan around technological and data sovereignty: the Decidim participation platform built on free software, clauses in public contracts returning data to the city, the European DECODE project giving citizens control over their data and priority to housing, energy and mobility problems over technological showcases. The editors present it as proof that the right to the smart city can translate into policy, and also note its limits of scale and continuity.

Toronto, criticism and who decides what sensors are for

The book converses with the critiques of Ben Green, Adam Greenfield and Shannon Mattern, and with the failure of Sidewalk Labs in Toronto in 2020, which confirmed that the question of who owns a city's data decides a project's fate. Critics note that the proposal of a citizen-led smart city may be as hard to scale as the initiatives it criticises, and that Lefebvre's right to the city, centred on space, loses precision when applied to data flows; the editors reply that the digital city produces space as much as the physical one and that the struggle to decide over it is the same.

The lesson of The Right to the Smart City is that urban technology is not neutral and that its governance is the field where part of the right to the city is now decided. A smart city that treats its residents as users and its data as private assets reproduces the unequal city with greater precision; one that treats them as citizens with power over infrastructure, data and priorities can turn technology into an instrument of justice. The difference lies not in the sensors but in who decides what they are for.