In Gabrys’s words, in the Smart City “The actions of citizens has less to do with individuas excercising rights and responsabilities and more to do with operationalizing he cybernetic functions of the smart city. Participation involves computational responsiveness and is coextensive with actions of monitoring and managing one’s relation to environments, rather to engaging democratic engagment through dialogue and debate” (196). In this context, which other models of agency or subjectivity could be used to describe other forms of participation of civic engagement? And to which degree this engagement should be operationalized only through the action of sensing and providing data to the system, rather than other forms of action?
In this paradigm “the sensing that takes place in the smart city involves continually monitoring processes in order to mamage them […] Humans may participate in the sensor city through mobile devices and platforms, but the coordination across ‘manual and automated’ urban processes unfolds within programmed environments, which organize the inputs and outputs of humans and machines”. This model opens to the question on how this systems could be designed into a not centralized way? The production of data not necessarily, and not always should be centralized, and this opens a question on ownership of data, but also on how citizens can claims on their own data, their community data, and how this data can be mobilized to push development and change in a local scale, instead of gathered in a centralized manner that pushes to a top-down urban design.
In What’s so smart about the Smart Citizen?, it is argued that “Network technologies afford forms of organisation that make possible citizenled initiatives capable of competing with the traditional planning mechanisms of municipal governments. By focusing on people – not technology – as the primary actors within the system, this approach aspires to foster new forms of participatory planning and governance, where social and cultural factors are emphasised over proprietary high-tech solutions with big price tags.” This argument reflects on other models of Smart urbanism, and opens to the question on why this models are focusing on the sensing and actuating capabilities of new technologies, instead of it dialogic and communication cappabilities? When communication comes out to the surface, it is only to speak about the interconnectected infrastructure where devices and city infrastructure communicate, instead of exploring the new ways of communication and participation between people that this technologies enable.