Whose right to the (smart) city?

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This international network brings together different global perspectives to critically respond to the current smart city agenda. It is timely and innovative in approach and networks together a key set of academics working in different global contexts. It addresses a gap in current knowledge exchange and seeks to redress the balance of focus from the existing highly urbanised, first-world contexts to concentrate on more marginalised urban communities and people-centred urban change in relation to ICTs. The network activities delivered through a series of workshops will address the topic of the impact of digital marginalisation in the 'Smart City' context and its effect on urban space. It will explore models and tools for urban change within marginalised communities, by investigating and analysing positive and negative initiatives developed through the smart city approach. Within this context of what can be considered sustainable urban development in marginalised communities it aims to question how ICTs contribute to this process. The network will investigate a series of Smart city projects in a series of global contexts to study and understand how marginalised communities can appropriate and benefit from impacts of ICTs within the city.The network works with the framework of Henri Lefebvre's seminal work The Right to the City to consider the role of everyday and people centred agency in urban change. Taking the right to the city, the network questions 'Whose right to the "Smart" City". The current Smart City agenda, championed and promoted by ICT companies such as IBM and global city leaders is problematic, since it adopts a technologically deterministic approach that homogenises urban problems across different economic, political, social and cultural contexts. It tends to focus on ICT solutions to be applied top-down, and therefore, fails to address particular issues related to different types of marginalised communities. The network seeks to counter this approach by exchanging and mapping examples of knowledge of ICTs and marginalised urban contexts to understand how such communities might benefit from ICT driven change and how this might support a 'right to the city'. The network workshops will adopt a case study method and will have an open and discursive ethos. Each workshop will comprise contributions from selected invited guest speakers to represent local areas of expertise and knowledge, activities with early stage and doctoral researchers as well as a field visit with selected local community stakeholders. Early stage researchers will be invited to participate in an open forum session and to contribute to forming the outcomes of the workshop meetings. The concluding symposium event will take place in Plymouth; comprised of a series of focused sessions with presentation of the investigators of all partner universities and of other related work. Guest speakers will also be invited from a range of disciplinary and sectorial backgrounds. This will close with an open forum session to determine crosscutting similarities and differences between the different forms of marginalisation discussed along the partnership, possible guidelines for further research and case studies. Knowledge exchange and the outcomes of the workshops will be documented and shared through a website mapping platform. This will act as a live and open platform to disseminate the work of the network as well as providing a tangible outcome as a mapping of knowledge. This will make the work of the network available to the wider community, and will be supported by an ongoing use of social media (e.g. Twitter) to share work in progress.The network will produce an edited book with contributions from all network partners, as well as a co-authored journal paper. The network website will also be developed from the outset of the project and act as a mode of dissemination of the academic outcomes to a broader audience.