The citizen and the smart city: a global comparison of institutional logics

Critical urbanists’ placement of smart city initiatives in Western<br/>Europe or North America mostly on “low” rungs of participatory<br/>ladders or scaffolds does not mean that smart urban<br/>development connotes democracy-eroding neoliberalization<br/>everywhere. This article offers a more globally variegated and<br/>dynamic understanding of the relationship between citizens and<br/>smart cities. We apply an institutional logics frame to the citizen-<br/>smart city nexus in seven cities spanning three world regions, in<br/>each case considering the interplay of citizen-centric logics with<br/>techno-innovation-oriented and bureaucratic/managerial logics.<br/>Appreciation of contextually specific institutional orders helps to<br/>explain why similar initiatives and intentions yield different<br/>outcomes across time and space, but the interplay of competing<br/>logics also enables a reworking of prevailing orders and<br/>possibilities for change. Bringing multiple cases and associated<br/>dynamics into comparative conversation reveals similarities and<br/>differences that would not have been expected from a priori<br/>classifications based on geographical region or mode of<br/>governance, affording cross-case conceptualization of civil servant<br/>“proxy citizenship” and “palimpsests” of social scripts. The article<br/>provides empirical, methodological and conceptual resources not<br/>only for understanding how prevailing institutional logics<br/>variously enable or foreclose citizen action in smart city<br/>development, but also for building contextually-attuned<br/>propositional agendas for change.