Truly Smart cities, buen conocer, digital activism and urban agroecology in Colombia

This chapter comes out of two research projects carried out in Colombia, South America. One of them, finished in 2017, was called City of Data. It was an exploration of government-led, centralized Smart City projects being implemented in the cities of Bogotá and Medellín. The other one, still ongoing, is called Communication Practices in the Medellín's Gardeners Network: Knowledge, Territory and Social Fabric. It is an exploration of knowledge construction, and virtual and real territorialization through grass-roots gardening initiatives in Cali and Medellín. Both research projects had to do with approaches to public data: some 'centralized', government-led in the form of Smart City projects and others, more in the form of citizen-led initiatives. We analysed project documents, conducted semi-structured interviews with dozens of officials and citizen group leaders, and carried out participatory research with a citizen collective in the city of Medellín. Our main goal was to analyze government-led and grass-roots-led initiatives producing and managing data to empower citizens in Medellín and Bogotá. Our theoretical perspective comes from Critical Data Studies, Surveillance Studies, Decoloniality and Relational Ontologies. We found very closed and centralized data production practices in the government-led, smart city initiatives studied, but discovered what could be described as promising 'good data' citizen-led approaches in Medellín's Gardeners Network (RHM). We also found some issues and challenges arising from the particular, non-western, highly unequal context of these citizen-led initiatives.

• Autores: Restrepo Hoyos, Paula Andrea; Valencia Rincón, Juan Pablo
• Tipo de recurso: Part of book
• Fecha de publicación: 2019
• Institución: Universidad de Antioquia
• Repositorio: Repositorio UdeA
• Idioma: eng
• OAI Identifier: oai:bibliotecadigital.udea.edu.co:10495/45701
• Acceso en línea: https://hdl.handle.net/10495/45701
• Palabra clave: Redes Comunitarias; Community Networks; Ciudades capitales; Capitals (cities); Agricultura urbana - Aspectos sociales - Colombia; Urban agriculture - Social aspects - Colombia; Ciudades inteligentes; Smart cities; https://id.nlm.nih.gov/mesh/D019058; ODS 11: Ciudades y comunidades sostenibles. Lograr que las ciudades y los asentamientos humanos sean inclusivos, seguros, resilientes y sostenibles
• Rights: openAccess
• License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/