Right to the Smart City: Evaluating Smart Urban Policies through Lefebvrian Lens

Abstract

This paper aims to understand and empirically measure the wellbeing of urban citizens and their ability to exercise their ‘right to the city’ in the context of smart city development and algorithmic urban governance. It develops and empirically tests the right to the smart city idea grounded in basic research and existing theories. The starting point is the concept of the right to the city as a basket of rights defining the citizenship status of urban residents in the digital era. Our study is based on representative survey data from Singapore and Warsaw, which represent different stages of technological urban development. In the context of growing criticism of smart city idea, we propose using the composite indicators of ‘right to the city index’ and ‘AI acceptance index’ as tools for monitoring a smart urban development from the human-centric perspective.