Project lead:  Prof. Dr. Verena Schreiber 

Projekt management: Projektbearbeitung: Dana Ghafoor-Zadeh

Status: ongoing (DFG, 2021)

In the past decade, numerous urban development projects have emerged worldwide under the term Smart City. With the goal of making urban development sustainable and future-oriented, Smart City urban developers specifically address young people. The research project focuses on the relationship between Smart Cities and childhood, thereby contributing to the expansion of Smart City research with childhood geographical perspectives.

In the transition towards a resource-efficient and livable city of the future, the Smart City concept has gained global significance in recent years. The deployment of intelligent technologies is associated with the hope of making urban processes more efficient and sustainable, as well as facilitating new forms of participation in urban society. Notably, this development targets young people, actively involving them in local Smart City initiatives. The project builds on this observation, examining the digital transformations of urban environments and their impact on contemporary childhood in the city.

The central thesis of the project posits that the Smart City concept generates new ideas about a good urban childhood, yet the use of digital incentive and control systems also poses exclusion and regulatory risks for children. While the city as a living space for children has been widely questioned due to significant urbanization processes in recent decades, the intelligent transformation of cities aims to make them more child-friendly and open up new access opportunities to public spaces. On the other hand, smart development strategies place a particular responsibility on young people – as future "nation builders" and "smart citizens" – to implement visionary lifestyles using optimized resources and services in their daily lives and to align their spatial use accordingly.

In the human geographical debate on Smart Cities, the relationship between childhood and smart environments has not yet been systematically examined. The project aims to fill this gap and expand Smart City research with a childhood geographical perspective. Empirically, the research project operates on two levels:

1. Through a program analysis of Smart City vision and planning documents, the role of children in shaping future cities is analyzed, examining how an urban childhood of the future is modeled and globally disseminated in these programs.
2. In a locally focused case study ("Smarter Together" Vienna Simmering), smart urban development strategies and measures are investigated concerning both participation potentials for children and exclusion risks and normative effects. This is done through participatory-creative research methods with children and expert interviews.

The project's goal is to reconstruct the influence of smart development strategies on the urban space appropriation by children and the conception of urban childhood. With this focus, the project makes a significant contribution to understanding how smart technologies alter our understanding and experience of space, impacting urban societal coexistence.