For a Cooperative “Smart” City Yet to Come: Place-Based Knowledge, Commons, and Prospects for Inclusive Municipal Processes From Seattle, Washington

Abstract

This article explores possibilities for cooperative, equitable, and participatory forms of smart urbanism. We begin by outlining orientations that emphasize the heterogeneity of economic and urban life and center the capacities and priorities of constituencies that currently are often not well served by urban planning and information-gathering processes. We then further iterate these sensibilities in relation to two examples from community organizing in Seattle, Washington, sketching out a broad sense of how community’s and resident’s place-based knowledge, experiences, and forms of expertise might be understood as resources that could be integral to processes of urban planning, organization, and potential structural transformation. Finally, we connect these possibilities to ongoing debates and experiments with “commons” and “commoning”—both conceptually and in actually existing urban experiments—to show how serious engagements with place-based knowledge and capacities understood as commons might be made central within “smart” processes that are radically democratic, inclusive, open-ended, and potentially transformative in ways that are distinctive from more top-down models that often merely manage and reproduce status quo urbanisms. Ultimately, the article suggests possibilities for alternative “smart” urbanist orientations, sensibilities, and techno-political applications to emerge in and through open-ended participatory processes grounded in community and place-based resources and priorities.