Democracy and the Smart City

Central question of this book approaches more than one topics simultaneously: democratization in the age of neoliberal globalization, urban governance models, and the concept of the Smart City. It is almost impossible to escape the word ‘globalization’ today. With the advancement of modern technologies, particularly communication and information technologies, the world has been transformed into something new since the 1980s. Globalization seems to be something unstoppable. The term neoliberalism is interlocked with the phenomenon. There are many aspects regarding the term. Free market economy in the hands of multinational giant corporations, state privatization and the state’s relative loss of control over the flow of economy, and even democracy is effected by neoliberalism. Thus, this book, on the one hand, defines neoliberalism and analyzes the circumstances in which neoliberalism negatively effects democracy; on the other hand, the research stays within the scope of municipal politics, policies and polities and offers different alternatives to neoliberal politics.