Is there anybody out there? The place and role of citizens in tomorrow’s smart cities

Imagining tomorrow’s life implies, to a large degree, imagining the kind of cities we will inhabit in the future. In this framework, the smart city is actually a popular vision in discourses on urban development. This paper explores alternative ways in which citizens are positioned within different imaginaries of the smart city. The premise is that most mainstream discourses implicitly assume that smart city projects will empower and improve the lives of citizens. However, their role is often ambiguous. While some visions of the smart city are characterised by the absence of citizen’s voices, others are populated by active citizens operating as urban sensors. Furthermore there are fearful visions of a future in which citizens will be subjugated by technologies that will hamper their freedom. This paper analyses the role of citizens in four alternative smart city imaginaries. The thesis proposed is that all four imaginaries are characterised by citizens playing a subaltern role, and hence the smart city is a relatively poor concept if intended as a model of the urban life of the future.