Learning to be a smart citizen

ABSTRACT

The international Smart Cities and the Learning Cities movements are not often linked. However, there are learning questions at stake here. Smart city agendas are often criticised as being technocratic and instrumental, prioritising market-led solutions to urban issues. Such criticism has led to moves to place the citizen at the centre of these discussions. This raises educational challenges: what theories and forms of learning are required for citizens to play a role in the development of digital, urban futures? This paper adopts ethnographic methods to study the assumptions about learning in a Europe-wide smart city project that included a component of citizen-led development. Our argument provides important messages for smart city planners and developers keen to include citizens in smart city development. It suggests that the current ‘banking’ models of learning adopted in relation to citizen participation are not fit for purpose and that a new model is needed. This needs to recognise citizen learning as situated in social and material contexts and embedded in unequal relations of power, knowledge and resources. We make the case for smart city initiatives to offer city inhabitants critical, creative learning opportunities that begin to address the inequalities that constitute the contemporary smart city.

KEYWORDS:

• Smart City
• citizen
• learning
• digital inequalities

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. See http://www.bristolnpn.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/18-01-09-City-Plan-Comms-Pack.pdf, https://www.bristol.gov.uk/youth-council-youth-mayors, http://bristolgreencapital.org/.

2. Statistics from https://www.bristol.gov.uk/documents/20182/928407/Ashley%2C+Easton+and+Lawrence+Hill.pdf/c83444ac-a3d8-4417-b967-b1c19ec3512f accessed 14th Feb, 2018.

3. Key meters are pay as you go meters for domestic energy consumption.

4. Minions ‘live to serve, but find themselves working for a continual series of unsuccessful masters (Animation source, retrieved 2018).

Additional information

Funding

The research was funded by the European Commission Lighthouse project grant number 691735.

Notes on contributors

Helen Manchester

Helen Manchester is a Reader in Digital Inequalities and Urban Futures at the University of Bristol, UK. Helen’s research involves working with others in the city to explore the co-design of creative digital technologies with groups who might generally feel themselves to be excluded from the digital environment. She develops methodologically innovative approaches to research, working across disciplines to collaborate on research projects with artists, technologists, young and older people, civil society organisations and policy makers.

Gillian Cope

Gillian Cope is a Research Associate in the School of Education at the University of Bristol, UK. Gillian is a cultural geographer who is interested in the meanings places have for people and how people engage with places.