Are you interested in how smart city can be more than just top-down or bottom-up?
Our summary today works with the article titled Interstitiality in the smart city: more than top-down and bottom-up smartness from 2023 by Ryan Burns and Preston Welker, published in the Urban Studies journal.
Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see how smart city can be more. This article investigates the interstitial actors that influence the ways in which the smart city manifests, through the case of Calgary, Alberta.
As the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects:

Smart city concepts have traditionally focused on the top and the bottom of the landscape, however, they have been influenced by the middle, the interstitial actors.
These interstitial actors are neither passive recipients nor mere conduits for smart city policies, rather, they actively shape smart city programmes even if they are physically absent from the arenas of formal planning.
This understanding opens new avenues for activists, policymakers and interstitial actors to intervene in smart city politics, towards more just cities.

You can find the article through this link.
Abstract: The critical research agenda on smart cities has tended to assume a largely top-down orientation in which powerful actors like the state and corporations enact programmes to embed Information & Communication Technologies (ICT) in the urban landscape. Because of the way research has framed this relation of power, the dominant response has been to seek social justice by either contesting these top-down exercises of (digital) power or by reconceptualising the smart city ‘from below’. In this paper, we join a growing chorus of voices recognising the importance of interstitial actors that influence the ways in which the smart city manifests. We draw on a five-year ongoing study in Calgary, Alberta, to examine two actor groups that are, properly, neither top-down nor bottom-up, but play an important role in envisioning, implementing and contesting how ‘smartness’ is framed. The first set of actors, situated between the top and bottom of the smart city hierarchy, are most prominently community associations, non-profit organisations and ad-hoc task groups. The second group is comprised of groups with different digital practices, whose spectre of marginalisation influences how digital systems are articulated and pursued. These actors strategically move between different interstices in order to enact particular kinds of political influence, and often influence smart cities by virtue of their absence, profoundly impacting urban political geographies of smartness.
Connecting episodes you might be interested in:

No.060 - Interview with Gala Camacho about responsible technologies and steward ownership;
No.146R - Including marginalised communities in urban development and smart cities;

You can find the transcript through this link.
What wast the most interesting part for you? What questions did arise for you? Let me know on Twitter @WTF4Cities or on the wtf4cities.com website where the shownotes are also available.
I hope this was an interesting episode for you and thanks for tuning in.
Music by Lesfm from Pixabay