Centralized top down implementation of smart governance in the growing urbanization process, is now popular more than ever to help better decision making based on citizen engagement. While there are many indeterminacies about appropriateness of digital infrastructures, they are now the inseparable part of the city. Ubiquitous computing including transportation mobile apps, civic data gathering approaches and playful urban apps, has changed the behavior of citizens. The excitement of automation might conceal the true potential of using aforementioned platforms.
First set of question in this research is concerned with target group. The promise of tech companies on more efficiency, rarely addresses the marginalized citizens. How equity of accessibility to these platforms have been considered? What are the scenarios for marginalized people who are not connected to the digital urban network? Are they truly counted as citizen? Asking who is citizen, leads to the notion of citizenship itself. The other set of questions is concerned with implicit definitions of new citizenship and city and what they offer to each other. How ways of life and not merely lives are governed through these particular environmental distributions due to their modalities? What is measurable in a city and what is not measurable? What future cities offer or limit in terms of livability, joy and having new experiences? What is the potential of moving from desktop computing to urban computing for becoming a communicative city and forming new relations with other human beings?
This investigation looks at examples of former automated governance systems and experiments with current successful mobile computing networks to understand how they are able to manipulate urban life; in addition, analyzes participatory urban projects to extract their effective elements. These studies joined with literature review of the subject, form a solid critical point of view. The goal of the project is to engage technologists, designers, decision makers and public, effectively with this point of view through a speculative set of urban scenarios, digital platform and devices.