What are some of the typical pitfalls when cities deploy smart city strategies without broader public engagement, and in what ways can citizens actually participate in the development of such strategies? 

How and to what extent citizens engage with smart city programs has been a vexed question for a long time.  

Initially, when I started to become interested in smart cities as a frame of reference for urban digitalisation in the late 2000s, there was quite a focus on the idea of digital participation, whereby digitally-enabled urban infrastructures could allow for a more porous and interactive approach between citizens and the urban services they encounter in their daily lives.  

At this time, digital participation was strongly linked to the idea of more bottom up, democratic opportunities, supported by the rise of Twitter and urban uprisings such the 'Arab Spring' (2011), so there was this expectation that adding the digital layer to urban services could also change the dynamics of how cities were planned, built and governed over time.  

However, when we look back further in time, we see that new technologies often come with the expectations that they will be encoded with some kind of radical, networked intelligence, which is more speculative and hopeful than it is grounded in historical precedent. I'm very much influenced by Armand's Mattelart's work on utopia and networked communications in this respect - very much the focus of my PhD in the 2000s, which I called 'The Death and Life of the Real Time City' because I was all too conscious that all the hopes for real-time cities would ultimately only entrench economic and political power in the long term, unless we actually paid attention to the political and civic capacities of people rather than just the ubiquitous devices they can interact with...  

As digital services act increasingly infrastructurally today I see the potential for citizen participation being no different to the potential for citizen participation in other domains, like water infrastructure provision, transport planning, housing and development, and so forth. This is partly because of their centrality to how these services operate, but also to the capacity for platforms as infrastructures to be democratically managed. In the case of the latter, the time to address these questions was 15-20 years ago, but no one then realised how much everyone's 'participatory interactions' was advancing certain platform ecosystems over others.... And akin to the Chinese saying about tree planting, if the time to address them was 15-20 years ago, the next best time is, of course, right now.  

How do infrastructures matter for citizens?  

Big question! I find this one difficult to answer, beyond the glib reply along the lines that 'citizens should be able to influence the design of their environments and the infrastructures that shape them'. I guess I would clarify here: what forms of citizenship do citizens engage in, what are the mechanisms for decision-making that are being advocated for, what scale do they operate on? Scales of active citizenship - whether at local, national or supranational scales - are determined by the forms of active participation, rights and responsibilities articulated at different scales whether legally or politically defined.  

I'm not sure we have a strong sense of infrastructural civics - even though we do have strong histories of urban civics, housing civics and so on. The civics of digital infrastructures are interesting to me because of the historical resonances between digital communication and participatory civics, but they also point to a planetary scale that is beyond current frameworks of civics and active citizenship as they have historically been defined. Arguably, it's only through reviving a culture of active citizenship, rather than cybernetic or digital capacities per se, that we will see any kind of shift in the direction we are heading in. 

And I'm not sure how we do this at a planetary scale, though I've heard folks like Kevin Kelly and Indy Johar are thinking about such things. How this translates into any meaningful form of active, planetary-scale civics is not something I can comment on, because I'm yet to be convinced that active citizenship is very possible at a planetary scale (notwithstanding existing multi-lateral forms of global governance, and the scale of 'design thinking' over reach).   

How should knowledge about infrastructures be communicated and what role can journalists, researchers or public officials play?  

The 'infrastructure turn' in academic circles is important but I also think it's critical to engage with policy dimensions of infrastructure design and governance. The historical dimensions of infrastructures - in the way they are mobilised to produce or contain certain behaviors and outcomes in societies over time - can sometimes be overlooked in the race to define infrastructures according to particular contemporary ideas (about civics, ecology, democracy, or other).  It's also challenging, particularly in the domain of digital infrastructure, to communicate the way platforms act infrastructurally, and what benefits or outcomes this produces in terms of asymmetries of knowledge and (AI-enabled) power. But this work is so important.