From “Smart in the Box” to “Smart in the City”: Rethinking the Socially Sustainable Smart City in Context

Abstract

This paper focuses on the importance of framing and conceiving smart urban initiatives and schemes in a highly context-sensitive way, and argues that place-based approaches are essential for enhancing the social sustainability of smart cities. It does so by highlighting how such a perspective is often ignored by discourses and visions that favor generalized and socially skewed ways of framing the “city” as well as the citizens who are expected to become “smart” and benefit from high technologies. These, the paper argues, leave out the important nuances and social and spatial interstices that make places unique, and by doing so weaken the ability of smart to be inclusive and afford a rich landscape of technological appropriation making cities more resilient.