Alternatives to smart cities: A call for consideration of grassroots digital urbanism

Abstract

This article contributes to the emerging body of urban digitalisation scholarship concerned with alternative practices at the grassroots level by reviewing and structuring the literature in relation to the production of urban space and governance. By drawing a conceptual framework for grassroots digital urbanism, the paper first brings the ongoing discussions around the smart city and platform urbanism into critical conversation through the lenses of right to city and platform capitalism discourses. Then it reviews the literature on the unfolding alternative ideas and practices mobilised at the grassroots level to discursively and practically contest these techno-capitalist models. The outputs of this literature review are conceptualising a version of grassroots digital urbanism that is at the intersection of grassroots urban movement and digital sovereignty and highlighting the lack of empirical work and critical accounts on the resulting implications of relevant initiatives in reshaping the production of urban space and reconfiguring urban governance.

Keywords

• Urban digitalisation
• Smart city
• Grassroots urbanism
• Urban space
• Governance
• Technological sovereignty