New Open Access Book Chapter

In this book chapter, I try to capture the journey of ‘platform citizenship’ by using the Scaffold of Smart Citizen Participation, the analytical framework developed with Rob Kitchin (Cardullo and Kitchin, 2019a; 2025).

Adding new insights from my research in Barcelona around the platform for collaborative governance Decidim (Cardullo et al., 2023), in the chapter I will discuss the least explored rung of the Scaffold: citizen power. This is the stage of digital relations between citizens and the municipality (or the state) in which citizens are empowered in decision-making processes and consultations, discussion and deliberation.

On the citizen power rung of the Scaffold, communities and their advocates can control their own decision-making process, tweaking it accordingly; conversely, an inclusive and more democratic governance infrastructure might aid the constitution of temporary mini-publics positioning citizens as multiple (digital) subjects: neighbours, urban dwellers, members of local community and lobby groups, etc.

I conclude that contextualising software and governance cultures, and the infrastructure which derive from them, is a task of provincialising platform citizenship, sometimes enabling other discourses and futures to emerge (see Burns et al., 2021).

The full pre-print can be found on the Open Science Framework repository.