Design for the Right to the Smart City in More-than-Human Worlds
This work contributes to critical HCI literature by advocating for democratization and inclusivity in smart city design, though it is incremental in building on existing civic and environmental concepts.
The paper addresses the human-centered bias in smart city design by proposing a more inclusive approach that incorporates non-human species, using a case study of IoT co-design with urban agricultural communities to illustrate possibilities for environmentally and socially just smart cities.
Environmental concerns have driven an interest in sustainable smart cities, through the monitoring and optimisation of networked infrastructure processes. At the same time, there are concerns about who these interventions and services are for, and who benefits. HCI researchers and designers interested in civic life have started to call for the democratisation of urban space through resistance and political action to challenge state and corporate claims. This paper aims to add to the growing body of critical and civic led smart city literature in HCI by leveraging concepts from the environmental humanities about more than human worlds, as a way to shift understandings within HCI of smart cities away from the exceptional and human centered, towards a more inclusive understanding that incorporates and designs for other others and other species. We illustrate through a case study that involved codesigning Internet of Things with urban agricultural communities, possibilities for creating more environmentally and socially just smart cities.