Living labs: Challenging and changing the smart city power relations?
本文通过加泰罗尼亚地区多个城市生活实验室的案例研究，探讨生活实验室能否纠正智慧城市中公民与组织参与者之间的权力失衡，发现“权力银行”机制有助于提升公民影响力，但公民融入智慧城市比简单理论描述更困难。
Smart cities refer to place-specific collaborative systems where multiple actors collaborate to collectively address public problems. However, smart city initiatives regularly frame citizens as the weakest link, as passive consumers rather than active creative agents. This article argues that power imbalances between citizens and other organisational participants structurally mute citizens' voices, ultimately compromising smart cities' aims. Living laboratories are a popular smart city intervention that have the potential to address this power imbalance and empower citizens to influence smart city development. This research theoretically and empirically explores this role of living labs through a multiple-case study of urban living labs in the region of Catalonia. The findings uncover a ‘power banking’ mechanism which, coupled with other critical factors, facilitates the effectiveness of such initiatives. The considerable efforts required to engage citizens at a fairly basic level suggest that incorporating citizens into smart city models is more challenging than simplistic Quadruple Helix discourses convey.