Speakers
Description
Smart city roadmaps in Scandinavia are actively building upon the keywords of “citizen participation”. Despite the term’s overarching claim to reinvigorate democracy, the introduction of digital technology has, in some contexts, destabilized the definitions of both “citizenship” and “participation” and caused these keywords to be interpreted and implemented vaguely and sometimes disingenuously. Contending that there is room for plurality in the definition of “citizen participation”, this paper proposes a terminology capable of distinguishing different interpretations with the hope of preventing the umbrella term of “citizen participation” from conflating incommensurable approaches during future debates.
Methodologically, this study builds upon empirical material collected during a roundtable discussion on “citizen participation” in the 2021 annual seminar of the University of Stavanger’s Research Network for Smart Sustainable Cities. Diverse experiences and perspectives of participation advocated by different stakeholders are assessed along the axes of “temporality of participation”, “magnitudes of citizen agency” and “tech-ladenness”. The aim of the article is to make tacit conceptualizations of expert vs. non-expert citizenship in the Smart city explicit and to identify the opportunities and challenges attributed to different current modes of participation.
| I am willing and able to travel to Norway unless Covid-19 restrictions prevent me from traveling to Stavanger. | YES |
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| GDPR complianced | Yes |
