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The 4th PlanoCosmo International Conference IOP Publishing
IOP Conf. Series: Earth and Environmental Science 158 (2018)
1234567890 ‘’“” 012046 doi:10.1088/1755-1315/158/1/012046

Crowdsourced Smart Cities versus Corporate Smart Cities

Tooran Alizadeh
University of Sydney

Corresponding author: [email protected]

Abstract. Considering the speedy growth of smart-city promises and practices, there is an urgent
need to take a critical approach and offer an integrated vision for an otherwise fragmented and
sectoral concept. In particular, the literature warns about a critical deficit around the theorization
of the smart city because discussions of relevant smart city theories or frameworks are few and
fall short of offering alternative practical resolutions to the dominant discourse. In developing a
response to such a deficit, this paper takes up the challenge to broaden theoretical insights into
smart cities, by offering a bottom-up understanding of the ‘smart city’ concept with special
attention to the potential of passive crowdsourcing based on the ocean of mostly untapped and
unutilized available data in the public domain. Crowdsourced smart cities are proposed as an
alternative to enable public engagement in smart city debates and decision-making – especially
when dealing with global digital corporations.

1. Introduction
The concept of the smart city has emerged at the intersection of debates on the future of urban places,
new technologies, and infrastructures – as a solution to offer clean, livable, technologically advanced,
economically robust cities [1, 2]. The popularity of the concept is based on a mix of various factors,
including the availability of substantial public financial resources (such as the EU Strategic Energy
Technology Plan) to fund smart city initiatives; the tendency of global corporations (such as Cisco,
Google and IBM) to heavily invest in urban digitization projects [3, 4]; and, finally, a growing range of
complex urban challenges that need advanced technology-enabled solutions [5-7].
Nevertheless, the literature warns about the lack of both theoretical insights and empirical evidence
required to fully understand the opportunities, challenges, and implications of smart cities. Research in
this field is in its infancy [1, 4], fragmented along disciplinary lines [8, 9] and based on limited city case
studies [6, 10].
Given the fast growing global attention given to smart cities and significant practical implications
in the form of smart city initiatives and projects, there is an urgent need to take a critical approach and
offer an integrated vision for this otherwise fragmented and sectoral concept [1, 2]. Here, the danger is
that urban visioning is increasingly reduced to a single technology-centric vision that is simplistic and
does not account for the socio-economic and spatial complexity of cities [3, 11, 12].
The literature specifically puts an emphasis on the critical deficit around theorization of the smart
city [1, 12, 13]. Discussions of relevant smart city theories or frameworks are few; analyses lag behind
actual practice and then fall short of offering alternative practical resolutions to the dominant discourse.
In developing a response to this deficit, this paper takes up the challenge of broadening theoretical
insights into smart cities by offering a bottom-up understanding of the concept. Firstly, it examines how
the smart city is currently defined in the literature and points out different – and sometimes contradictory
– approaches taken towards smart city practice around the world. Secondly, it focuses on the definition
and evolution of crowdsourcing during its relatively short existence. Thirdly, it brings the two earlier
parts together by proposing the ‘crowdsourced smart city’ as an alternative theoretical perspective that
has practical means of enabling people’s voices to be heard in smart city decision-making and
evaluation processes. This alternative theoretical perspective also has the capacity to empower informed

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IOP Conf. Series: Earth and Environmental Science 158 (2018)
1234567890 ‘’“” 012046 doi:10.1088/1755-1315/158/1/012046

smart city policy development for governments of all levels and guide them in their dealings with global
corporations’ increasing interest in the concept of the smart city.

2. Smart cities

2.1. The issue of definition

Despite their ongoing popularity and influence, there is no universal definition for smart cities [3, 14].
Indeed a number of related terms such as ‘intelligent city’, ‘knowledge city’, ‘digital city’, and ‘eco-
city’ are used interchangeably in the literature [15-17]. All of these terms seem to stem from an earlier
fascination with the technological aspect of the smart city concept, promising a new kind of technology-
led urban utopia, which in turn has been criticized for being overly simplistic and ambiguous [10, 18].
Nevertheless, a growing stream in the literature has attempted to address the over-simplification of the
smart city concept by offering holistic, multidisciplinary perspectives around key areas of smart
infrastructure, smart economy, smart mobility, smart governance, smart environment, smart living, and
smart people [2, 19]. This broad approach of defining the smart city has in turn been criticized for being
out of reach and unattainable [20].
Amidst ongoing efforts to reach a comprehensive shared definition for smart cities, there is also a
trend of making people’s voices be heard in smart city design and decision-making processes, calling
for direct participation of local actors and multi-stakeholders in planning and executing social,
technological and urban transformation for smart cities [12, 14]. There are, however, serious questions
about how this alternative approach – of giving a voice to citizens in the smart city discourse – can be
implemented in urban development processes already in place and using technological advances already
at hand. In order to contribute to the ongoing dialogue around such questions, this paper undertakes a
review of the existing, diverse and sometimes contrary smart city practices and approaches to shed light
on how smart technologies can be used to enable citizens’ voices to be heard. This could then promote
an alternative vision on smart cities in which citizens’ voices are taken into account – a vision that is
not compromised and yet attainable.

2.2. Smart city practice

Despite the lack of a shared definition, the smart city practice has been spreading around the world. The
spread is important for a number of reasons, including:
- It is not limited to specific geographies, as smart city projects and initiatives now extend
across the Global North and South [6]. There is, however, a far more limited understanding
of the different ways in which smart cities are being rolled out in cities of the Global South
[1, 21, 22].
- It is not limited to global cities, as medium-sized cities in different parts of the world have
actively engaged with and invested in smart city projects and initiatives [23, 24].
- Smart city practice covers an incredibly diverse ranges of topics, including e-governance
[25, 26], smart transport [27, 28], efficient production of urban services [29], and open data
in cities [30].
- Smart city practice comes in various sizes: examples of large-size city-wide plans include
Singapore’s iN2015 (intelligent nation) project, South Korea’s Songdo, Guangzhou
Knowledge City in China, Masdar City in the UAE, and Barcelona in Spain [9, 31]. Among
the large-scale city-wide initiatives, Barcelona is of special interest due to its apparent desire
to integrate smart city efforts with the city’s urban planning and policy thinking under the
four main topics of smart governance, smart economy, smart living and smart people. More
importantly, Smart City Barcelona is a collaborative movement among its corporations,
universities, government, and the residents of Barcelona [9]. In contrast, some of the out of
scratch smart city projects in Asia have attracted wide criticism as top-down practices with
little room for people’s voices in the process [32, 33].
- Smart city practice is funded by quite different private and/or public sources around the
world. Over the last few years, the European Union (EU), in particular, has devoted constant
efforts to support smart city initiatives – investing millions of euros in research, development
and pioneer projects that try to link smart city initiatives to environmental targets (such as
reduction in greenhouse gas emissions) and economic development (such as innovation and
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employment) [2, 3, 11]. Smart city practices around the world have opened up new horizons
in the problematic relationship between the public and private sectors in the management of
cities [3, 34]. A critical line of scholarship has emerged around the role of global technology
corporations in developing smart cities; and how they have tried to manipulate urban
governments while engaging in providing philanthropic smart city services [7, 10, 35, 36].
Finally, the literature notes that the utmost majority of smart city projects and initiatives around the
world are still in the planning phases or early phases of implementation [15, 23] and no city claims to
be fully-fledged smart [12]. This means further research is required to assess progress of smart city
projects and their implications on the overall success or failure of cities over time.

2.3. A critique of smart cities: corporate smart cities

Despite the lack of a universal definition for the smart city, which has resulted in heterogeneous smart
city practices worldwide, the critiques of the concept seem to be quite focused on what is labeled as
‘corporate smart cities’ [3, 37-39]. From a critical perspective, we are reminded that the term ‘smart
city’ was coined in the US inside two global high-technology corporations, IBM and Cisco. This
indicates a point of view in which a combination of the profit motive for global corporations, on the
one hand, and entrepreneurial governance – as coined by urban geographer Harvey [40] – on the other
hand, drives the leading narrative of the smart city discourse [11, 31]. According to this view, the smart
city has crystallized into an image of a technology-led urban utopia permeated with top-down and
centrally controlled technological infrastructure, with the aim to improve the urban environment in
terms of efficiency, security and sustainability [14, 41].
As noted earlier in this paper, critiques of the corporate smart city [2, 42] vigorously warn against
the new smart cities being constructed from scratch in Asia, the Arab world and even Europe led by
giant corporations (e.g. Cisco, IBM, and Siemens) using examples such as Masdar in the United Arab
Emirates (UAE), Songdo in South Korea, and PlanIT Valley in Portugal. The underlying assumption
with these cities – which is strongly questioned in the literature [33, 43] – is that IT can automatically
make cities more economically prosperous and equal, more efficiently governed, and less
environmentally wasteful – with little room for ordinary people to participate [22, 37]. The corporate
vision of smart cities has promoted a trend towards cities selling themselves, being ‘open for business’,
and increasingly becoming a backdrop to corporate advertising and the privatization of public space [3,
35].
In fact, it might be argued that in the corporate vision of smart cities, citizens are seen as barriers in
the race towards smartness and that they need to be educated as to the benefits IT can bring. This lack
of concern with democratic decision-making, and real citizen involvement and participation has
encouraged a new trend in the literature to search for an alternative version of smart cities and provide
a counter-point to the corporate vision [31]. This alternative vision has emanated from small-scale and
fledgling examples of participatory community-based types of smart initiatives [44, 45].

2.4. Alternative smart cities and their shortcomings

In response to the lack of people’s voices in the corporate vision of the smart city, a new trend both in
academia and practice has started to offer alternative visions. Examples can be identified mostly in the
US and Europe in the last few years: Metalab is a non-profit innovation center based in Vienna offering
a physical space for free exchange of information and collaboration between technology enthusiasts,
hobbyists and hackers. Another initiative that can be linked to the alternative smart city paradigm is the
Medialab-Prado – a collective innovation laboratory in Madrid – interested in the production, research
and dissemination of cultural projects to sustain an active community of engaged citizens [14]. Similar
initiatives have been developed in Amsterdam and Barcelona [2] to encourage bottom-up initiatives.
Amidst the excitement and flashy titles for the alternative visions of the smart city, the characteristics
below give a united front against the corporate vision of the smart city [2, 13, 14, 46]:
- A democratic bottom-up approach: to promote participatory urban technologies, greater
social inclusion and a substantial shift in power from corporations to ordinary people and
their communities.
- Reliance on dynamic public-private partnership: with an emphasis on participatory
governance rather than entrepreneurial governance.

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- A tendency to identifying the urban problem first and only then reaching out for the relevant
technological solutions: with emphasis on the capacities of each city and its distinct cultures,
histories and political economies.
- Associated with the free-software and open-access movement.
- In the preliminary phase: far from being mature and mainly existing in seed form.
In other words, alternative visions of the smart city put strong emphasis on multidisciplinary smart
city investments in human and social capital, traditional (transport) and modern (ICT) communication
infrastructure to fuel sustainable economic development and a high quality of life with a wise
management of natural resources through participatory governance [12, 14, 47]. An essential element
of these alternative visions is the emphasis on citizen engagement beyond the simple delivery of services
[2, 13].
The problem with the alternative smart city visions offered in the literature is the distinct lack of
attention to implementation. Rather, the core mission of giving a voice to the people seems to fall short,
as implemented successful examples are scattered, very small in scale and get lost against the scale and
fast spread of the corporate smart city vision [31, 48]. This core problem in part stems from the difficulty
involved in gathering people’s voices and identifying urban issues that are indeed important to citizens
and not just corporations.

3. Crowdsourcing as a solution?
Given the issues around the practicality of gathering people’s voices in smart city decision-making
processes and practices, this section examines the relatively new concept of crowdsourcing. Here,
crowdsourcing is seen as an alternative technologically-enabled way of making people’s voices be
heard in decision-making. It should be highlighted that the aim is not to offer an all-inclusive account
of the ever-growing concept but rather to provoke further discussion around the concept of the
crowdsourced smart city.
Below we offer an account of how crowdsourcing has evolved in a short period of time. A brief
review of the current landscape of crowdsourcing with a focus on urban problems then follows.
Combing these two will then provide the foundation for the articulation of the crowdsourced smart city
as an alternative vision later in this paper.

3.1. Crowdsourcing: Evolution of a concept

Howe [49] first coined the term crowdsourcing in a Wired Magazine article as “the act of a company
or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and
generally large) network of people in the form of an open call”. Since then there have been many
attempts to define crowdsourcing based on the diversity of its practice and different theoretical models
[50]. In search for a common definition of crowdsourcing, Estellés-Arolas [51] found eight common
characteristics of crowdsourcing: the task at hand; the recompense obtained; the crowdsourcer or
initiator of the crowdsourcing activity; what is obtained by them following the crowdsourcing process;
the type of process; the call to participate; and the medium. Based on these common characteristics he
proposed the following definition [51]:
“Crowdsourcing is a type of participative online activity in which an individual, an institution,
a non-profit organization, or company proposes to a group of individuals of varying knowledge,
heterogeneity, and number, via a flexible open call, the voluntary undertaking of a task.”
This ‘task-oriented’ definition of crowdsourcing has been revised several times. Revisions were
proposed in response to emergent crowdsourcing models based on the prominence of social media and
support by ubiquitous mobile devices [52]. For example, Thapa et al. [53] introduced two types of
crowdsourcing: ‘selective’ and ‘integrative’ (task-oriented), based on different types of citizens
involved. In an integrative crowdsourcing non-professionals are able to participate due to the simplicity
of the tasks. In contrast, in selective crowdsourcing the complexity of the problem reduces the target
group to professionals with special expertise.
However, the most significant evolution of the crowdsourcing concept stems from a shift from a
task-oriented approach to what can be described as the crowdsourcing of opinions [54]. In this second
approach, crowdsourcing is no longer about getting a certain task done with the help of the public.
Instead, crowdsourcing of opinions is used to gauge opinions, ideas or perceptions of the public in
different forms of polling, sentiment analysis, and opinion mining. Sentiment analysis uses language
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processing and machine learning to identify which topics different groups talk and care about the
most. Social media in general, and Twitter in particular, are rich sources of opinions; and have been
used by both private and public sector in the crowdsourcing of opinions. There are numerous examples
of companies using crowdsourcing of opinions – via social media – in their marketing efforts [55, 56].
More importantly, the crowdsourcing of opinions also serves governance and participatory planning
and decision-making processes in different forms [57].
The crowdsourcing of opinions, in turn, is then categorized in two broad categories, namely active
and passive. In terms of the difference between active and passive crowdsourcing, Loukis and
Charalabidis [58] argue that the active crowdsourcing of opinions is more like mainstream private-
sector crowdsourcing, which actively stimulates discussion and content generation by citizens on
specific topics. Meanwhile, passive crowdsourcing is more compatible with the public sector; it
passively collects information, knowledge, opinions and ideas concerning hot topics of the day and
important public policies created by citizens without any initiation, stimulation or moderation from
government postings [57-59]. Social media monitoring (SMM), as systematic, continuous observation
and analysis of the ocean of data already available and mostly untapped, is the main source of passive
crowdsourcing in the public sector [60].
In this paper, we acknowledge the evolution of crowdsourcing as a concept and yet mainly focus on
passive crowdsourcing of opinions as a way to inform and evaluate smart city decision-making
processes and plans. However, this requires a better understanding of the current landscape of
crowdsourcing elaborated in the following section.

3.2. Crowdsourcing: Current Landscape

Several studies [56, 61, 62] have tried to make sense of the rapidly evolving crowdsourcing landscape.
Different categorizations have been offered to articulate the variety of directions crowdsourcing has
been taking in the public, private and non-for profit sectors. Dawson and Bynghal [56], for example,
summarize the current landscape of crowdsourcing in eight crowdsourcing models that cover 22
categories. Table 1 shows a summary of the current landscape of crowdsourcing as articulated by
Dawson and Bynghal [56]. The models include Crowd Service, Crowd Ventures, Media and Content,
Marketplaces, Crowd Platforms, Crowd Processes, Content and Products Markets, Non-profit. Crowd
Service refers to services that are delivered fully or partially by crowds and includes Managed Crowds
and Labor Pools. Crowd Venture refers to ventures predominantly driven by crowds, including idea
selection, development, and commercialization. Media and Content is another model, focusing on the
creation of media, content, data and knowledge shared by crowds. Non-profit models include citizen
engagement for governance purposes, volunteering for disaster management and crowd contribution to
science. Marketplaces match buyers and sellers of services and financing through mechanisms,
including bidding and competitions. The Marketplace model covers crowd-funding, microtasking,
innovation markets, innovation prizes, services marketplaces and competition markets. Platforms are
software and processes to run crowd works and crowd projects for use with internal or external crowds,
including idea management, prediction markets and crowd platforms. Crowd processes are services that
provide value-added processes or aggregation to existing crowds or marketplaces. Content and Product
refers to sale of content or products that are created, developed or selected by crowds.

Table 1. Summary of the current landscape of crowdsourcing as articulated by Dawson and Bynghal
[56]
Crowdsourcing Models Crowdsourcing Categories Examples
Crowd Services Managed crowds Thinkspeed, GeniusRocket
Labor pools BzzAgent, UTest
Crowd Ventures Globumbus, SENSORICA
Media and Content Data Data.com, Rootwireless
Content Wikipedia, DemandMedia
Knowledge sharing Quora, ChaCha
Marketplaces Equity crowd-funding SeedUps, CrowdCube
Crowd-funding IndieGoGo, Fundedbyme
Microtasking Mechanical Turk, CloudFactory

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Crowdsourcing Models Crowdsourcing Categories Examples

Innovation markets IdeaConnection, Innocentive
Innovation prizes Cisco i-Prize, DARPA
Services marketplaces Freelancer.com, Guru
Competition markets Zooppa, TopCoder
Crowd Platforms Idea management IdeaScale, BrightIdea
Prediction markets CrowdWorx, ConsensusPoint
Crowd platforms Crowdicity, CrowdEngineering
Crowd Processes CrowdFlower, Smartsheet
Content and Product Content markets Threadless, Shapeways
Markets Crowd design Ponoko, Quirky
Non-profit Contribution Kiva, Crowdrise, Causes
Science GalaxyZoo, Phylo
Citizen engagement CrisisCommons, Ushahidi

While elaborating the diversity of the ever-growing crowdsourcing models in the current landscape
is beyond the scope of this paper, below we offer a few examples of the different types of crowdsourcing
used to tackle urban problems.

3.2.1. Crowdsourcing in emergency/disaster management. There have been several cases around the
world where crowdsourcing has been used as an additional, complementing tool in emergency/disaster
management [63-65]. Emergency responses in several cases – including but not limited to the recent
earthquakes in Nepal and Haiti, and floods in Myanmar and India – have shown that different crowds
with different skills and expertise can get involved differently in crisis management. Disaster-affected
people can bring local and directly observed information and detect precise location (crowd as sensors);
diasporas can offer their implicit socio-cultural knowledge in detecting needs within the affected area
(crowd as a reporter); and, digital GIS volunteers contribute to processing and managing crisis data
(crowd as a micro-tasker) [66, 67].

3.2.2. Active crowdsourcing of opinions in strategic planning. There is a growing number of planning
departments at different levels (e.g. local and state) that use crowdsourcing to seek public opinions,
ideas and feedback on their – mostly strategic – draft planning documents; to promote public
participation in policy making and decision-making processes [68, 69]. In most cases, specially
designed digital platforms are used to facilitate active crowdsourcing of ideas, which are often
expensive to design and maintain and more importantly have to compete with the well-established social
media platforms (i.e. Facebook and more aggressively Twitter). For instance, the City of Vancouver
used an online platform to seek feedback as part of the participatory process involved in the
development of its first urban digital strategy document [17, 70].

3.2.3. Active crowdsourcing of data in local planning/development. The most widespread form of
crowdsourcing used in response to urban challenges is when data are crowdsourced from citizens to
have a better understanding of the community conditions to facilitate better evidence-based decision-
making [71]. For example, Street Bump is a crowdsourcing platform, produced by the Mayor’s Office
in Boston, which collects real-time road condition data from residents while they drive to improve their
neighbourhood streets by fixing problems or planning long-term investments [72].

3.2.4. Passive crowdsourcing of opinions by government. There is a relatively new approach that calls
for governments to exploit the extensive political content continuously created in numerous social-
media platforms by citizens – without government stimulation – to better understand public needs,
issues, opinions and arguments concerning a particular domain of government activity or public policy.
[57]. This novel approach towards e-participation based on passive crowdsourcing of data is rarely used
by urban governments [73, 74].

4. Crowdsourcing and smart cities

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In principle, crowdsourcing has great potential in participatory planning; promotes many elements of
smart cities including open government; and can be used as expansion of e-governance to we-
governance by facilitating citizen-to-government support, citizen reporting, and citizen-government co-
production of cities [75-77].
Nevertheless, the problem is the scale of uptake of crowdsourcing in urban governments. Previous
studies have pointed out that the slow uptake of technologically-enabled solutions in e-governance at
the urban level, in part, is related to the lag in technical skills at the local government [25, 78, 79]. It is
argued that staff and organization structure of urban governance lack technical readiness and some of
the well-established technical advances are missing at the local level [80]. In the last few years,
however, we have witnessed an influx of technologically advanced smart city projects and plans around
the world and cities of all sizes have shown interest to jump on the smart city wagon [6, 81]. Such a
trend suggests that urban governments are catching up on technological issues somehow – or at least
join forces with those (companies) who have the technical skills required [11, 31].
Moreover, financial restrictions and resourcing issues at the local government level have been
pointed out as another set of reasons slowing down the rate of technologically-enabled solutions in e-
government and we-government [75]. However, passive crowdsourcing requires less preparation and
financial resources in comparison to many other smart solutions around that require sophisticated
advanced equipment [58, 82]. So the problem must be somewhere else.
In this paper, we argue that the slow uptake of passive crowdsourcing capabilities to promote
citizen’s voices in urban decision-making is mainly a conceptual problem at the core of how the smart
city is defined. Therefore we argue that the slow uptake of passive crowdsourcing capabilities, at least
in part, is because it is seen as a side issue and not integrated with the popular smart city concept.
In the next section, we identify and respond to two reasons that have limited the role crowdsourcing
has played in the smart city discourse so far.

4.1. Inclusionary concerns

Over the last few decades, a stream in the literature has consistently raised concerns about the
inclusionary limitations of any online platforms, with reference to the digital divide [83, 84]. More
specifically, it has been argued that there are limitations to how citizens can systematically, reliably and
consistently get involved with crowdsourcing [85, 86]. One of the important challenges of
crowdsourcing is finding, motivating and retaining participants. It has been noted that to prevent bias
in results, participation in crowdsourcing should be inclusive and take in people from all walks of life
and sectors of society affected by a problem [73, 87-89].
Having said this, we argue that inclusionary concerns over the use of crowdsourcing in urban
decision-making seem to be mitigated. This, by no means, is to suggest that the digital divide between
urban vs. rural at any national level, or Global North vs. Global South at the international level does not
exist [90-92]. However, participatory technologies at the local level have been growing in popularity
with an increasing number of cities and planning agencies using technology to engage the public in
planning processes [93, 94]. This is partly due to the enormous popularity of the social-media platforms,
which are no longer limited to a limited elite and educated sector of society [73, 95]. The popularity of
social media basically paves the way for passive crowdsourcing by the public sector [68] as the voices
captured are quite diverse [55, 87].

4.2. Corporate agenda

Socio-technological advances in the last decade or so have mitigated some of the inclusionary concerns
around the role that crowdsourcing could play in the smart city discourse. We, however, argue that
corporate agendas [31, 38] at the center of the dominant smart city discourse is the main barrier against
crowdsourced cities. In other words, the dominant corporate smart city discourse mainly holds its power
by claiming that the digital corporations have the solutions and the skills required in a complex urban
world [35, 96]. In contrast, in this paper, we join the stream in the literature arguing that smart cities
should build on democratic decision-making [20] and contribute to transparency [93, 97] through public
participation. Participatory processes enabled by crowdsourcing help urban governments to identify and
respond to wicked problems [43, 98], democratize decision-making, and increase social capital [99].
This focus on the citizen-centricity of the crowdsourced smart city [41, 100] emphasizes the potential
of online participatory technologies to allow citizens to actively engage in shaping their city.
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Empowered citizens, in turn, then empower local governments in their negotiations with digital
corporations that have clear vested interests in running the show in the smart city discourse. As a first
step in dealing with the dominant corporate smart city vision, passive crowdsourcing has the potential
to evaluate some of the smart city projects already in place to assess their success based on public
opinion. In other words, the crowdsourced smart city can shift the power from corporations to citizens,
help local governments to avoid undervaluing their skills and expertise, make more strategic
investments informed by public opinions, and ensure that smart city projects and initiatives have
equitable outcomes for all citizens.

5. Conclusion: crowdsourced smart city vs. corporate smart city

This paper started by acknowledging an urgent need to take a critical approach to the concept of the
smart city [1, 3]. In particular, it pointed out the deficit around theorization of the concept [12, 13]. In
developing a response to such a deficit, we took up the challenge of broadening theoretical insights into
smart cities by redefining the concept of the smart city with special attention to data that are available
in the public domain.
In so doing, we examined both 1) the current dominant – yet mostly exclusive and technocratic –
and also 2) the alternative – yet mostly limited and not comprehensive – definitions of the smart city.
This paper then discussed the evolution of the crowdsourcing concept and its practices since it was
introduced and built upon its latest definition to tap into the streams of underutilized urban data, as
citizens are using online channels to engage on topics that they feel passionate about.
In conclusion, we propose the crowdsourced smart city as an alternative to the corporate smart city.
The crowdsourced smart city provides the response so desperately sought in the literature to shift from
the corporate smart city paradigm to a bottom-up, socio-technological inclusive approach that produces
non-planned forms of citizen empowerment in urban governance [61]. Passive crowdsourcing has the
capability to harnesses the ocean of untapped data already available in social-media platforms to
generate collective intelligence [101] and improve planning, evaluation and functioning of smart cities.
At this stage, we call for urban governments around the world – interested and invested in smart cities
– to verify any smart projects and initiatives already in place; to use passive crowdsourcing to evaluate
the impact of their earlier and ongoing smart city efforts; and to modify any future smart city projects
and plans based on public needs, opinions, and priorities.

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