From the smart city to urban justice in a digital age

The smart city is the most emblematic contemporary expression of the fusion of urbanism and digital technologies. Critical urban scholars are now increasingly likely to highlight the injustices that are created and exacerbated by emerging smart city initiatives and to diagnose the way that these projects remake urban space and urban policy in unjust ways. Despite this, there has not yet been a comprehensive and systematic analysis of the concept of justice in the smart city literature. To fill this gap and strengthen the smart city critique, we draw on the tripartite approach to justice developed by philosopher Nancy Fraser, which is focused on redistribution, recognition, and representation. We use this framework to outline key themes and identify gaps in existing critiques of the smart city, and to emphasize the importance of transformational approaches to justice that take shifts in governance seriously. In reformulating and expanding the existing critiques of the smart city, we argue for shifting the discussion away from the smart city as such. Rather than searching for an alternative smart city, we argue that critical scholars should focus on broader questions of urban justice in a digital age.