Abstract (eng)
Smart cities (seemingly) represent new paradigm of urban development, which is often discussed as a whole new dimension of the integration of ICT in the urban environment. Smart cities therefore are often understood as mainly technological endeavours, aiming at optimising urban processes with digital means. However, the notion of the smart city is highly contingent and a wide variety of ideas, values and imaginaries are subsumed under this term. There is no such thing as the one smart city (Albino, Berardi, & Dangelico, 2015; Angelidou, 2014). The actual smart city is a translation of this more general vision on urban planning into local contexts. As a result every local translation of a smart city emphasises different aspects, adds new meanings to the term or tries to subvert the original meaning completely. These translations of the smart city concept often take place in municipal governments and the offices of official urban planners. Their plans and ideas regarding the development of the smart city are integral parts of defining social life and social order within the imagined smart city. At the same time these imaginaries construct what one could call a smart citizen. Urban planning in general, and the smart city in particular, are constructing a certain image of its future residents, assuming characteristics and formulating demands.
Starting from that observation, this thesis explores the smart city initiative of Vienna and how it constructs this smart citizen in relation to the formulated goals and visions of the future Smart City Wien. The search for Vienna’s smart citizen engages thereby in the discursive construction of the imagined residents and her/his characteristics per se, but also explores the imagined and partly already realised instruments of governance to actively create a smart population. To do so, the analysis relies on the theoretical concepts of co-production (Jasanoff, 2004) and socio-technical imaginaries (Jasanoff & Kim, 2009; Jasanoff, 2015). Empirically, the smart citizen was re-assembled in this study by bringing together official documents and strategies regarding the Smart City Wien, interviews with stakeholders and observations from participation events taking place in Vienna and from newly built city quarters as a materialisation of the smart city imaginary.
The result of this thesis suggests that the smart citizen is constructed as an individualistic, competent and responsible member of the smart city community. Through processes of responsibilisation, the Smart City Wien is heavily based on voluntary changes in practices and a smart city consciousness of its residents. The major recourse for this changed practices and values is a prevalent and commonly shared form of knowledge, from which each individual can derive, what it means to be a smart citizen. To stabilise the discursive construction of the smart citizen within Vienna’s population, the city administration utilises different instruments to actively shape and (re-)produce this knowledge and to establish a specific vision of the smart city – the Smart City Wien imaginary.