Autori
Giovanardi, Michele
Gaiba, Andrea

Titolo
Towards interconnected «Politically smart cities»? Rethinking participation from Digital twins to Translocal grassroots digital platforms
Periodico
Rivista di Digital Politics
Anno: 2024 - Fascicolo: 3 - Pagina iniziale: 485 - Pagina finale: 511

The rise of Digital twins (Dt), powered by supercomputers and sophisticated Ai models, presents a transformative opportunity for crowdsourcing innovative policy processes within cities. This paper explores the potential of technology to enhance democratic innovations, fostering more sustainable, interconnected and politically engaged urban environments. Our vision centres on the concept of Politically smart cities (Psc) where Dt and participatory democracy work in synergy to create a transnational, digital infrastructure for evidence-based public discourses and informed decision-making. In Psc, citizens act both as «political sensors», contributing to real-time data to simulate and evaluate policy decisions, but also as political actors, who own and consult the same data to partake in democracy in a more accessible way. The first part of the paper anchors this normative horizon in the broader theoretical work on affective polarisation and presents some of the conditions of possibility for enabling more granular «agonistics» and collective intelligence, where debates on political trade-offs originate at the local level and are presented upstream. The second section outlines the synergistic nature of Dt and Smart cities (Sc), focusing on the conditions necessary for both to be imbued in meaningful and inclusive citizen engagement. Lastly, the concept Translocal grassroots digital platforms (Tgdp) is introduced as a counterpoint to the dominance of Very large online platforms (Vlop) and the risks related to technocratic dominance, data extractivism, and polarization. Interoperable Tgdp are presented as the enablers of trans-local, interconnected participation. The last section theorises that Dt-powered Tgdp can prioritise localised knowledge, needs, and experiences, and foster solidarity and collective action across local contexts, without trumping translocal heterogeneity.



SICI: 2785-0072 (2024)3<485:TI«SCR>2.0.ZU;2-I
Testo completo: https://www.rivisteweb.it/download/article/10.53227/116586
Testo completo alternativo: https://www.rivisteweb.it/doi/10.53227/116586

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