The city and the sociopolitical construction of urban-technological planning

Abstract

The use of Information and Communication Technologies (ict) has been rapidly growing in the fields of urban planning and management. While, traditionally, the process of sociopolitical construction of urban technologies follows a sectorial and fragmented logic, now there is a growing need for a more comprehensive approach with integrated urban strategies. For an understanding of this possible need, we must rebuild the history of facts and episodes of icts deployment from the point of view of the social groups involved, their interests and specific activities, and relationships between all these aspects. This type of analysis takes into consideration the theory of social construction of technology, in order to produce a historical narrative of the case studies, from the perspective of social and political construction. Thus, in this paper, we analyze critically different urban strategies of ICT appropriation and their characteristics, as well as the sociopolitical process in which they have been created.

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