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This chapter provides an introduction to the smart city and engages with its idea and ideals from a critical social science perspective. After setting out in brief the emergence of smart cities and current key debates, we note a number of practical, political, and normative questions relating to citizenship, social justice, and the public good that warrant examination. The remainder of the chapter provides an initial framing for engaging with these questions. The first section details the dominant neoliberal conception and enactment of smart cities and how this works to promote the interests of capital and state power and reshape governmentality. We then detail some of the more troubling ethical issues associated with smart city technologies and initiatives. Having set out some of the more troubling aspects of how social relations are produced within smart cities, we then examine how citizens and citizenship have been conceived and operationalized in the smart city to date. We then follow this with a discussion of social justice and the smart city. In the fifth section, we explore the notion of the “right to the smart city” and how this might be used to recast the smart city in emancipatory and empowering ways. Finally, we set out how the book seeks to answer our questions and extend our initial framing, exploring the extent to which the “right to the city” should be a fundamental principle of smart city endeavors.

Sustainable development challenges have been gaining increased attention from scholars across a wide range of disciplines and governments and business leaders of developed and developing countries. In this chapter, we present selected Latin American socioeconomic indicators, and we note that much progress is needed to achieve the region's many sustainable development goals. We bring forth contributions from different streams of innovation studies for addressing grand challenges, and we discourse on how they push the sustainable development mandate forward. Innovation scholars have highlighted the need to elaborate novel transformational approaches to innovation for addressing such pressing grand challenges. Some scholars have also proposed that while the innovation systems framework is well-suited for addressing sustainable development challenges, it must first be profoundly and radically transformed to account for the novel ways of innovating and integrating a diversity of systemic economic actors and social stakeholders who have conflicting visions, interests, norms, and expectations. We present the different foundational strengths and weaknesses of the innovation systems framework and we discuss the pertinence for its profound and radical transformation. We conclude by organizing these different, yet complementary views of innovation in a conceptual framework while discussing the implications for Latin America and future research.