Amsterdam Smart City: with citizens or for citizens? A critical discourse analytical view on how citizens figure in Amsterdam Smart City's discursive construction

Abstract

The rapid growth of cities and the advent of ubiquitous computing engendered an interesting phenomenon: smart cities. This thesis analysed the Amsterdam Smart City project, since it is considered to be a leading program within global smart city initiatives. With their online platform and citizen-centred approach, ASC appears to be an initiative that could overcome much of the smart city criticism. This criticism is characterised by the importance of citizens being involved and engaged. Many smart city initiatives are willing to involve citizens, but struggle in the actual implementation of this involvement or even what is meant by citizen engagement. These cities struggle to combine technology platforms with citizens. This research seeks to expose how citizens are included within the ASC project by analysing how citizens are discursively constructed by ASC. The central research question is: How do citizens figure into ASC’s discursive construction? The analysis involved a CDA and semi-structured interviews. The results of this research indicate that ASC’s discursive construction is characterised by the ideology that cities face various challenges concerning urbanisation, the environment and technology. According to this ideology, ASC can solve these challenges through an online platform. This ideology is formulated as a performative persuasion. The way in which citizens figure in ASC’s discursive construction can be seen as a form of participation, since the online platform enables citizens to interfere in the running initiatives of ASC. Citizens, however, are not empowered enough, since citizens are viewed more as end-users of the projects rather than co- creators. The platform is about an ecosystem that is built to bring smart city initiatives together, instead of a citizen centred initiative. Another key finding of the analysis is that the different stakeholders have different reasons for joining the platform and that every company has their own approach to citizen engagement. The variety of backgrounds and rationales of the stakeholders affected ASC’s discursive construction and the way in which citizens are discursively framed on the platform. A driving force for the prominent ideology could be the different backgrounds and goals of ASC’s different stakeholders. Indeed, for a number of the stakeholders, joining ASC could result in maintain economic profit. The chosen methodology helped the researcher to gain a better understanding of what other discourses helped structure the used language of ASC and furthermore, it exposed the embedded ideologies. The methodological approach did not, however, expose the experience of citizens that use the platform. Therefore, the overall smart city debate would benefit from more case studies where examples for maintaining citizen engagement or enabling citizens to participate in co-creation are presented. The smart city debate must shift from a critical perspective to a solution-oriented perspective.