The concept of the 'smart city' as the confluence of urban planning and technological innovation has become a predominant feature of public policy discourse. Despite its expanding influence, however, there is little consensus on the precise meaning of a 'smart city'. One reason for this ambiguity is that the term means different things to different disciplines. For some, the concept of the 'smart city' refers to advances in sustainability and green technologies. For others, it refers to the deployment of information and communication technologies as next generation infrastructure.This volume focuses on a third strand in this discourse, specifically technology driven changes in democracy and civic engagement. In conjunction with issues related to power grids, transportation networks and urban sustainability, there is a growing need to examine the potential of 'smart cities' as 'democratic ecologies' for citizen empowerment and user-driven innovation. What is the potential of 'smart cities' to become platforms for bottom-up civic engagement in the context of next generation communication, data sharing, and application development? What are the consequences of layering public spaces with computationally mediated technologies? Foucault's notion of the panopticon, a metaphor for a surveillance society, suggests that smart technologies deployed in the design of 'smart cities' should be evaluated in terms of the ways in which they enable, or curtail, new urban literacies and emergent social practices.

Introduction. Smart Cities as Democratic Ecologies; Daniel Araya & Hassan Arif1. Smart Cities and the Network Society: Towards Commons-Driven Governance; Daniel Araya2. Government's Role in Growing a Smart City; Carlo Ratti, Matthew Claudel, and Alice Birolo3. The Generative City; Ayesha and Parag Khanna4. Urban Research Machines: Engaging the Modern Urban Citizen; Anijo Punnen Mathew5. Are Creative and Green Cities also Smart and Clean?; Kevin Stolarick6. Conversation and Narrative in the Smart City; Gerry Derksen, Piotr Michura and Stan Ruecker7. The Reconfiguration of Time and Place After the Emergence of Peer-To-Peer Infrastructures: Four Future Scenarios with an Impact on Urbanism; Vasilis Kostakis, Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Niaros8. Smart Cities: Towards the Surveillance Society?; Tarun Wadhwa9. Surviving the Electronic Panopticon: New Lessons in Democracy, Surveillance, and Community in Young Adult Fiction; Kerry Mallan10. Smart Cities Need Smart People: Songdo, South Korea; Tony Kim and Michelle Selinger11. Zoning Experiments for Smart Cities; Roland Cole and Hassan Arif12. Designing New Mobilities for Accessible Cities: Scenarios for Seamless Journeys; Barbara Adkins, Marianella Chamorro-Koc and Lisa Stafford13. ExtraUrbia, or, the Reconfiguration of Spaces and Flows in a Time of Spatial-Financial Crisis; Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis