Evaluating the decision-making processes in smart cities as public spaces in the context of the Communicational Action Theory

The problem of this study is to evaluate decision-making processes of the stakeholders in the regulation of the public space in smart cities in the context of Habermas's "Communicative Action Theory". In this context, an examination has been made within the framework of the intersection points of the discourse of the idea of smart cities and Habermas's Communicative Action Theory. It is possible to list these intersections as "equal participation to processes", "parties having certain competencies", "making concessions to reach a common goal", "involvement in processes within the context of a certain background, common ground" and "transformations in the worlds of life and system world". As a sixth point, "forms of communication" in these decision-making processes is added. The study was carried out on the "Toronto Tomorrow" or better known as "Sidewalk Toronto" project in Toronto, Canada, which is managed by a partnership of Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Alphabet, and Waterfront Toronto, that manages the city's coastal area on behalf of the public. Embedded mixed research design was used in the study. The main data collection method of the research is the semi-structured interviews. Besides, within the scope of the study, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 24 participants, Smart City Participation and Smart Citizenship Scale was applied to 54 participants, documents over 2500 pages were examined through content analysis, and an unsystematic observation was made. According to the results of the study, Sidewalk Toronto Project and smart cities have been criticized on many points including but not limited to the following: gentrification, exclusion, surveillance and violations of privacy, erosion of democratic institutions, digital inequalities, commercialization of the public space, private data of citizens' becoming commercial commodities, the communication processes being intensely manipulated by the power holders, project managers' imposing their wishes on the citizens and the like. It has been revealed that there are serious differences and contradictions between the practice and the discourse.