ABSTRACT
The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for smart city governments to collaborate with communities to effectively provide care. To achieve this, smart city governments must combine smart, data-driven insights for crisis management with local knowledges that can support trusted networks. This requires the creation of decision-making spaces that address barriers of mistrust and misalignment of priorities between stakeholders, and that challenge traditional power dynamics. We introduce care-ful governance as mode of governance that proposes collective arrangements initiated by either (1) a local government or citizens, where citizens (2) actively participate in a project implementation and (3) have decision making power about its means and ends, (4) where the process is guided by the distribution of caring responsibilities (5) for the common good. We then focus on the case study of the People’s Collaborative Governance Network, an urban living lab in Boston that gathered community members, city government workers, students, and researchers with the purpose of holding space for the creation of prototypes toward the democratic distribution of caring responsibilities.
