Third Places: The Social Infrastructure of the Smart City

The smart city promises a new model of integrated urban design that brings together people, urban spaces, and smart technologies at the city scale. It addresses not only The question of who owns the frameworks of the smart city, but more importantly, who has access and what this access enables them to do. We need to ask carefully who is included, and recognise that the smart city often excludes the very people, communities, and places it claims to help. This involves a process of establishing how marginalised or excluded groups may benefit—or not—in these initiatives, thinking beyond digital infrastructures, and considering how these communities can reclaim technologies at a place-based level. This requires thinking about not just the digital but also the social infrastructure of smart cities, and may include initiatives such as living labs, car-sharing, community currencies, hackerspaces, timebanks, and tool libraries. It also informs an approach called digital placemaking which considers how the city itself is designed, integrated with technology, and inhabited, establishing digital places in streets, squares, libraries, and parks. Drawing on Sassen (open source urbanism. Domus, 29 June 2011)’s model of ‘open sourced urbanism’, we expand on how communities themselves should decide on the problems they wish to address with smart technologies, led by their own local concerns and interests in an approach that sees the role of digital capital in third places contributing to meaningful social infrastructure. Additionally, we map some characteristics of social and digital infrastructure in terms of how they may be combined to contribute to third places. This framework provides a clearer insight into the characteristics and capacities that third places need to enable to overcome the challenges of digital and social divides.