Bottom-Up Smart Cities

Smart cities innovation is currently dominated by technology companies, who are incentivised to create technologies in which residents are passive consumers, rather than active citizens. This paper investigates an alternative model, in which the planning regulations, economics, and physical structures of a technologically connected city are encoded in software that allows citizens, even those with modest technological ability, to participate in the construction of the smart city. These softwares, developed under the guidance of Winy Maas at MVRDV and The Why Factory, show how smart cities might be changed from a top-down product created by governments and technology companies, to a bottom-up endeavour led by technologically empowered smart citizens.