Technological transformations and the city: Emerging research themes towards a socially just smart metropolis from a Marxist perspective

Abstract

Metropolitan areas have been recently facing important challenges and transformations due to significant structural changes, such as consecutive crises, climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic. The important impact of these transformations brings to the fore the need to examine and address them in a socially just and geographically fair manner. Important, among these transformations, is the technological transition and particularly the deployment of smart city initiatives and tools. Literature in smart cities has been growing, although it has adopted a-political, a-spatial and a-critical approaches, neglecting crucial issues and thus leaving room for improvement and further need for studies highlighting and addressing them and particularly the socio-spatially uneven effects of smart city deployment. This intervention adopts a Marxist perspective and seeks to highlight important research themes, related to these neglected issues, whose exploration could provide socially useful insights and increase the chances for a socially just smart metropolis in the 2030s.