Creating sustainable smart cities: technologies for citizens' engagement and collaborative experimentation
The article explores technologies of creating sustainable smart cities. Smart cities characterize the sociotechnical transformation of urban space through the formation of the integrated information urban environment. The key advantages of smart city systems are connected with cost reduction and automation of management processes. However, in order to transition to sustainable smart cities, new technologies are needed to interact with the diversity of the social environment and identify different ways for citizens to adapt digital systems. To interact with the diversity of the environment, the paper proposes a scheme of technologies for citizens' engagement and technologies for collaborative experimentation. Technologies for citizen engagement include online discussions, voting and other proactive forms of citizens' participation in urban politics. The main goal is deliberation as a process of discussion and collective agenda formation. As the main technologies of citizens' engagement, the platforms and discussions in social networks and media are considered. Trends of disintermediation, rejection of universalist systems in favour of decentralized networks, formation of communities as collective agents are highlighted. Technologies for collaborative experimentation include the practice of testing and determining the functionality of new technologies in accordance with the practices of citizens. The main goal is to develop a technology design that considers the interests and practices of citizens. Among the technologies for collaborative experimentation, living laboratories and scaling of technologies from the local level are analyzed. The possibilities of stimulating social cooperation and identifying implicit knowledge are noted. The article examines the most successful cases of these technologies implementation. The use of technologies for citizens' engagement and collaborative experimentation allow to consider sustainable smart cities in new paradigms of complex systems and resilience.