Towards smart city democracy

In this article we discuss the current state of smart cities from a technological perspective. We argue that smart city developments are in a state of transition going from being technology focused to now putting emphasis on humans living in the cities. The transition is still latent in the smart city deployments, and we argue that quite a few existing, and new smart city deployments are still relying on the old technology-focused approach to smart cities. We elaborate our own experiences in this particular field, and provide two concrete cases on how we are approaching citizen empowered smart city technologies. Finally, we discuss how smart city technologies should respond to citizen needs.