The concept of the 'smart city' as the confluence of urban planning and technological innovation has become a predominant feature of public policy discourse. Despite its expanding influence, however, there is little consensus on the precise meaning of a 'smart city'. One reason for this ambiguity is that the term means different things to different disciplines. For some, the concept of the 'smart city' refers to advances in sustainability and green technologies. For others, it refers to the deployment of information and communication technologies as next generation infrastructure. This volume focuses on a third strand in this discourse, specifically technology driven changes in democracy and civic engagement. In conjunction with issues related to power grids, transportation networks and urban sustainability, there is a growing need to examine the potential of 'smart cities' as 'democratic ecologies' for citizen empowerment and user-driven innovation. What is the potential of 'smart cities' to become platforms for bottom-up civic engagement in the context of next generation communication, data sharing, and application development? What are the consequences of layering public spaces with computationally mediated technologies? Foucault's notion of the panopticon, a metaphor for a surveillance society, suggests that smart technologies deployed in the design of 'smart cities' should be evaluated in terms of the ways in which they enable, or curtail, new urban literacies and emergent social practices.

Barbara Adkins, Queensland University of Technology, Australia. Hassan Arif, University of New Brunswick, Canada.Michel Bauwens, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands. Alice Birolo, Politecnico di Torino, Italy. Marianella Chamorro-Koc, Queensland University of Technology, Australia. Matthew Claudel, MIT, US.Roland Cole, Sagamore Institute, US. Isabel Cole, Independent Contributor, US. Bill Cope, University of Illinois, US.Gerry Derksen, Winthrop University, US. Mary Kalantzis, University of Illinois, US. Ayesha Khanna, Hybrid Reality Institute, Singapore. Parag Khanna, Hybrid Reality Institute, Singapore.Tony Kim, Independent Consultant, South Korea. Vasilis Kostakis, Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia.Kerry Mallan, Queensland University of Technology, Australia. .Anijo Punnen Mathew, IIT Institute of Design, US. Piotr Michura, Academy of Fine Arts, Poland. Vasilis Niaros, Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia. Carlo Ratti, MIT, US. Stan Ruecker, IIT Institute of Design, US. Michelle Selinger, Cisco Systems' Internet Business Solutions Group, UK.Olga Smirnova, East Carolina University, US. Lisa Stafford, Queensland University of Technology, Australia. Kevin Stolarick, University of Toronto, US. Tarun Wadwa, Singularity University, US.