A caring smart city: A bottom-up approach with older adults in Santiago de Chile

Abstract

Age-friendly and smart-city agendas have developed in parallel: the former foregrounds older adults’ wellbeing but lacks operationalisation, with indicators under-capturing digital inclusion and pedestrian safety; the latter deploys data platforms treating older people as passive subjects within privately governed systems. Although care is increasingly recognised as a principle of urban governance, few studies examine how co-designing civic technologies with older adults can generate context-sensitive spatial metrics for municipal decision-making. This article asks: how can digital technologies be repurposed as infrastructures of care to strengthen older people’s right to the city in Global South contexts? Drawing on the Ciudad Mayor project (2022–2024) in three municipalities of Santiago de Chile, a sequential mixed-methods design is employed: participatory collective mapping with older residents; iterative co-design and usability testing of a mobile app; and geospatial analysis producing ‘‘‘hyper-cartographies’’’ — maps combining citizen-generated reports with objective indicators. Participatory mapping revealed micro-barriers — such as uneven pavements and poor lighting — that escape standardised indicators but condition everyday mobility. The co-designed app functioned as a traceable channel linking older people’s situated knowledge to neighbourhood budgeting. Older participants demonstrated strong capacity to engage with accessible digital tools. Conceptually, infrastructures of care are positioned as a bridge between age-friendly and smart-city debates. Methodologically, a replicable protocol integrating co-design with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is proposed to produce context-sensitive metrics, reframing the smart city as a democratic, age-affirming project rather than a techno-managerial fix.