Design for the Right to the Smart City in More-than-Human Worlds

Environmental concerns have driven an interest in sustainable smart cities, through the monitoring and optimisation of networked infrastructure processes. At the same time, there are concerns about who these interventions and services are for, and who benefits. HCI researchers and designers interested in civic life have started to call for the democratisation of urban space through resistance and political action to challenge state and corporate claims. This paper aims to add to the growing body of critical and civicled smart city literature in HCI by leveraging concepts from the environmental humanities about “more-than-human” worlds, as a way to shift understandings within HCI of smart cities away from the exceptional and human-centered, towards a more inclusive understanding that incorporates and designs for other “others” and other species. We illustrate through a case study that involved co-designing Internet of Things with urban agricultural communities, possibilities for creating more environmentally and socially just smart cities. Author