Cities are the greatest creation of humanity, and at the same time it’s biggest challenge. According to the United Nations up to 66% of the world’s population will live in cities by 2050 (UN-Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2014), which will represent the incorporation of more population to the existing problems and challenges that cities have today. Advancements in technology allowed city managers and planners to improve people’s quality of life over time through the development of infrastructure for health, water, transport, and communications, among others. While these commodities have been one of the greatest achievements in today’s cities, there are new challenges that arise from the present context in terms of sustainability in cities, democracy practice by citizens, inclusiveness in the production of the city, political and active participation and other societal realms. Finding a new intersection between technology and the reality of the city is crucial for the upcoming years, decades and centuries of urbanity. The recently Smart City agenda pretend to insert technology into the urban context in a new level, but it should go beyond the extension of new technological infrastructure in cities, hyper-connection of autonomous devices or populating streets with LED screens. The Smart City will be possible as long as Smart Citizens are capable of finding open infrastructure for creation, ranging from the use of open data platforms or allowing their devices to be part of the city planning, to the use of digital fabrication infrastructure to address local solutions while being connected to global networks. Cities can be productive as they were in the past, when artisans worked and lived mostly in the same place, and goods were produced inside medieval cities’ walls.; today digital artisans located in Fab Labs and makerspaces are shaping not only new software tools and platforms, but also hardware ones in a distributed and non-hierarchical manner; this is major opportunity to enable future cities’ development.
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