Power Relationships in the Co-production of Smart City Initiatives

Participatory smart cities promote urban development and transformation by involving citizens and communities in participation and co-production exercises. However, to take advantage of the citizens’ contribution to the success of smart city initiatives, interaction-defined and participation-based governance infrastructures should be implemented that return power to the people. An exploratory study shows that how the smart city collaborative/participatory governance questions the traditional power relationships between city governments and citizens is a still underexplored topic. The paper aims to help bridge this theoretical gap by discussing citizens’ co-production in smart city initiatives from the point of view of the power relationships. The main point of the paper is that to leverage the citizens’ smartness to develop a smart city, the power relationships between the city government and the citizens should be rebalanced, which entails a shift from a power-over domination-based logic to a power-with interactive and collaboration-based logic.