Digital Geography 3 (2022) 100030 Available online 6 February 2022 2666-3783/© 2022 The Author. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Alternatives to smart cities: A call for consideration of grassroots digital urbanism Niloufar Vadiati Digital City Science, HafenCity University Hamburg, Germany A R T I C L E INFO Keywords: Urban digitalisation Smart city Grassroots urbanism Urban space Governance Technological sovereignty ABSTRACT This article contributes to the emerging body of urban digitalisation scholarship concerned with alternative practices at the grassroots level by reviewing and structuring the literature in relation to the production of urban space and governance. By drawing a conceptual framework for grassroots digital urbanism, the paper frst brings the ongoing discussions around the smart city and platform urbanism into critical conversation through the lenses of right to city and platform capitalism discourses. Then it reviews the literature on the unfolding alter- native ideas and practices mobilised at the grassroots level to discursively and practically contest these techno- capitalist models. The outputs of this literature review are conceptualising a version of grassroots digital ur- banism that is at the intersection of grassroots urban movement and digital sovereignty and highlighting the lack of empirical work and critical accounts on the resulting implications of relevant initiatives in reshaping the production of urban space and reconfguring urban governance. 1. Introduction With the ubiquity of digital information and communication tech- nologies (ICTs) in all aspects of urban life, cities are increasingly becoming the feld of different techno-urban experimentation and transformation. The ‘smart city’ is the prevalent urban digitalisation model that reconfgures urban space production and restructures governance through data-driven systems (Bibri, 2019) and the increasing infuence of IT corporations on urban politics (Hollands, 2015; Karvonen, Cook, & Haarstad, 2020). Another major phenomenon in urban digitalisation is platform urbanism, which is the integration of platform services such as Uber, Google and Amazon within the everyday materiality of the city (Barns, 2019), disrupting existing economic, po- litical and socio-spatial relations across cities (Lee, Mackenzie, Smith, & Box, 2020). The techno-capitalist paradigm underpinning these models of urban digitalisation has prompted critical urban geographical ac- counts, such as a one-size-fts-all narrative (Kitchin, 2015), the ambiv- alence of space and power (Graham, 2005; Thrift & French, 2002), entrepreneurial smart cities (Hollands, 2008) and the platformatisation of urban life (Barns, 2019; Stehlin, Hodson, & McMeekin, 2020). Parallel to these critical accounts, burgeoning practices are contesting the mainstream models of urban digitalisation and seeking alternative ways to infuse technology into urban development, with greater participatory and human-centred compatibility. Some of these practices are unfolding at the grassroots level of the urban neighbourhood as collective exper- iments trying to align digitalisation with real urban problems and pro- mote equality. This paper aims to build an analysis of existing works on alternatives to smart cities and draw a conceptual framework for grassroots digital urbanism. Situating this literature review at the intersection of urban development and digital geography, two main aspects of grassroots digital urbanism will form the core of the enquiry. First, urban space, which has become increasingly digitally mediated, platformatised and surveilled, and second, governance, as any specifc technological choice has dramatic consequences for patterns of social and political alloca- tions. Therefore, this paper reviews past works and builds its conceptual framework based on these two aspects, urban space and governance. The paper frst traces work on urban digitalisation and the general trajectory of mediating urban space and governance. Then it reviews the urban geography scholarship that have critically refected on the current prevailing models of the digitalisation process in cities, smart cities and platform urbanism. As these models are discursively and practically contested, this paper reviews the literature on unfolding alternative ideas and practices that are being mobilised at the grassroots level. This is followed by identifying the revival of the ‘right to the city’ as a paradigm base for reviewing the critical discourses within urban Abbreviation: LDC, large digital company. E-mail address: niloufar.vadiati@gmail.com. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Digital Geography and Society journal homepage: www.sciencedirect.com/journal/digital-geography-and-society https://doi.org/10.1016/j.diggeo.2022.100030 Received 29 June 2021; Received in revised form 23 January 2022; Accepted 3 February 2022