The insurgent smart city: How a social movement created an alternative imaginary of the smart city

Abstract

Urban scholars have critiqued smart cities for their association with neoliberal governance, narrow focus on quantifiable aspects of urban systems, and failure to incorporate citizens’ needs or aspirations. The “smart city” remains a contested concept and as such is subject to reappropriation. Here, I analyze the case of an urban social movement, the 2019–2020 Hong Kong Anti-ELAB protests, as an alternative, “insurgent smart city.” Following from an earlier network analysis of Telegram channels used during the protests, I show how the communications system underpinning much of the protest action simultaneously enabled coordination while also remaining open to grassroots decision-making and innovations of new protest formats as the movement responded to countertactics of the state and police. Telegram channels linked neighborhood-based organizing to the citywide movement. These actions not only emulated but also inverted top-down visions of a total urban information system underpinning many smart city projects. Framing the Hong Kong Anti-ELAB protests as an insurgent smart city offers an alternative sociotechnical imaginary of what smart cities could be, and raises possibilities for an “insurgent digital citizenship” as an alternative to both state and platform-mediated forms of digital citizenship.