Researching authoritarian smart cities from below

Authoritarian smart cities are often studied from afar, through policy papers, media discourse, or elite perspectives. While important, such approaches tend to reproduce state-centric narratives, offering little insight into how residents actually experience these cities. In this commentary, I argue that to truly understand authoritarian smart cities, we must go beyond ‘repoliticising’ them and start ‘rehumanising’ them. Rehumanising demands more than critique from a distance; it requires grounded, adaptive, and ethically attuned fieldwork that engages directly with how people navigate and make sense of smart city technologies in their daily lives. Yet gaining such access in authoritarian contexts is far from straightforward. For that reason, and drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan in 2022, in this commentary, I offer three practical strategies for studying authoritarian smart cities from below: (1) strategic questionnaire; (2) relational ethics; and (3) tactical flexibility.