Digital governmentality in local governance: policy rationalities in designing smart city

Smart city initiatives have become a central agenda in contemporary local governance. They are widely promoted as technologically driven solutions to complex urban problems. However, recent advances in smart city research increasingly challenge the assumption that digital technologies are neutral, instead highlighting their political consequences for governance, participation, and democracy. Positioning this study within that critical trajectory, this article examines the policy rationalities underlying smart city design in local governments, drawing explicitly on the framework of digital governmentality to analyze how technology reshapes the logic of local self-government. Using a qualitative research design, the study applies thematic content analysis to official smart city policy documents from Jakarta and Bandung, treating these texts as political artifacts that reveal how urban problems are defined, technological solutions are legitimized, and citizen roles are constructed. The analysis identifies six interrelated themes—epistemic authority, digital subjectivity, algorithmic control, participation gaps, data power asymmetry, and the exclusion of plural forms of knowledge—that together demonstrate that smart city policies are dominated by technocratic and data-driven rationalities that privilege measurability, monitoring, and optimization. These rationalities not only structure policy solutions but also reconfigure decision-making processes, modes of participation, and accountability in local governance. This article argues that smart cities should be understood not merely as technological innovations but as political projects that institutionalize digital governmentality at the subnational level, with significant implications for local democracy and citizen agency.