As smart cities integrate AI-driven governance and ecological sensing, questions of digital citizenship extend beyond human actors. This workshop explores collectively how these emerging developments challenge existing notions of rights, participation and accountability. Through speculative cinematic prototyping, participants will critically engage with real-world cases to imagine alternative trajectories for equitable future cities.

Questions we explored included: Who (or what) gets to be a “citizen” in a smart city? What happens when AI systems designed for human-centric cities start responding to nonhuman rhythms and behaviors? How is digital participation shaped by AI-driven systems? What forms of agency and exclusion emerge when governance is increasingly automated? What forms of resistance, subversion, or adaptation might emerge?

The workshop is conducted as part of the Digital Inequality in Smart Cities (DISC) by Dr. Johanna Ylipulli. DISC is an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary project funded by Research Council of Finland, spanning over 5 years from 2020 to 2025. It is executed in collaboration with significant academic and non-academic partners with the aim of building more nuanced conceptions of digital inequality and citizenship in smart cities. In addition to creating new knowledge, the project frames central design challenges and proposes solutions for them on conceptual and practical level.

Methodological findings – The workshop departed from the finding that digital citizenship requires the capacity to imagine alternatives: to think beyond inherited models of participation, governance, and agency in increasingly datafied environments. It explored methods to facilitate this imaginative capacity through a step-by-step structure. This process combined anthropological observation with speculative narration, encouraging learning-by-doing, experimentation under constraints, and situated forms of imagining rooted in familiar places and relationships. Participants noted an increased sense of agency, finding that immersive, affective storytelling made the resulting ideas feel communicable across cultures and contexts.

Thematic findings – Across the films, more-than-human agency and mediated relationships surfaced as recurring themes. Participants examined how digital systems, infrastructures, and ecological networks shape relations of care, attention, and interdependence, blurring the boundary between technological mediation and daily life.The imaginaries reflected the tensions of the current multi-crisis: climate breakdown, polarisation, ecological instability, and shifting forms of communication. None were purely utopian; each embraced friction and complexity as integral to imagining alternatives. Artificial intelligence appeared most frequently, often as a mediating entity between humans, environments, and other beings.

Credits