Childhood in the Smart City. Digital Transformation of Urban Space and its Implications for Young People's Environments.

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In the transition to a resource-efficient and liveable city of the future, the smart city concept has gained almost universal significance in recent years. The use of intelligent technologies is associated with the hope and promise of making urban processes more efficient and sustainable, and enabling new forms of participation in urban society. One striking feature of this development is that local smart city initiatives specifically address and engage young to very young city dwellers. This research project builds on this observation and investigates digital transformations of the urban environment, and their effects on childhoods lived in those settings. The central thesis of the project is that while the concept of the smart city facilitates new ideals of urban childhoods, the use of smart incentives and control systems does also foster exclusion and risks of regulation for children. As a result of major urbanization processes of recent decades, the city as a living space for children has often been questioned. Now, intelligent urban redevelopment shall help to make cities more child-friendly while simultaneously providing new access possibilities to public space. In their alleged capacity as future “nation builders” and “smart citizens”, young people are among the prime targets of smart development strategies striving to raise awareness of society’s responsibility concerning the implementation of using optimized resources and services in their everyday lives and secondly to use space accordingly. In human geography’s discourse concerning smart cities, the relationship between childhood and smart urban environments has not yet been systematically investigated. The project aims to make a significant contribution to closing this gap, and to expand smart city research to include a childhood-geographic perspective. Empirically, the research project is based on two parts:(1) A program analysis of smart city vision and planning documents will analyse the role of children in the design of sustainable cities, and how a future urban childhood is modelled and globally disseminated in the programs’ representations. (2) A local case study (“Smarter Together” Vienna Simmering) will examine smart urban development strategies and measures with regard to participation potentials for children on the one hand, and exclusion risks and standardization effects on the other. Both participatory creative research methods with children and expert interviews will be applied.The aim of the project is to reconstruct the influence of smart development strategies on the urban appropriation of space by children and the conception of urban childhood. With this focus, the project will make an important contribution to the question of how smart technologies change our understanding and experience of space, and how they affect urban social interaction.