The City Before the Smart: Community & Smart Cities

Himali Singh Thakur
English
UC Davis

My dissertation takes Fujisawa City, Japan as a case study for the impact of smart cities on communities where such projects are built. Particularly, it focuses on the residents’ experience of community organization. Japan has a history of community-centered development of cities called machizukuri. Smart city projects intend to centralize and digitize ways for residents to express their expectations for urban development, lowering the necessity to organize around urban issues. The city becomes a problem to be solved online rather than through one’s senses and community relations. By analyzing city documents, recording observations at the Osaka Expo, and soliciting oral history from residents of Fujisawa, my project investigates how machizukuri has changed with the arrival of smart city projects—and what its shape in the future will be.