City Research Online

Abstract

The futuristic visions, infrastructures, and developments of smart cities continue to gather pace, with municipal authorities and businesses in the UK investing increasing amounts of resources into their manifestation. At the same time local communities continue to be hard hit by austerity, with more local services being affected by government cuts, with the North-East of England being particularly affected. In this paper we report on a case study that aimed to explore how the top-down, technocentric, and corporate visions of smart cities stand in contrast to the reality of grassroots communities who are dealing with the consequences of austerity. Our case study focuses on a community of urban food growers. We describe our speculative and participatory approach that we devised for co-designing “smart” urban food-growing futures from the bottom-up with local residents in a deprived neighbourhood of Newcastle upon Tyne, and reflect on how they elicited realities and future visions that stand as a counterpoint to the corporate visions of future cities.

Publication Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (UNSPECIFIED)
Additional Information:	© Heitlinger, S., Clarke, R., Clear, A. K., Chopra, S., Dilaver, O. | ACM 2019. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in C&T '19 Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Communities & Technologies - Transforming Communities , http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3328320.3328399.
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HT Communities. Classes. Races J Political Science > JS Local government Municipal government S Agriculture > SB Plant culture
Departments:	School of Science & Technology > Computer Science

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