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Early smart city projects tended to be technology-driven, conceiving of the citizen as a data provider. New citizen-centered projects have emerged that challenge the role of the individual in these second-generation smart cities. While some works describe the political role that individuals play in these cities, they only indirectly address the place of technology in determining the participation of the individual in these projects. In this article, we draw on the work done on another technical system—cyberspace—to address the relationship between individuals and technology in the smart city and its consequences. Adapting a typology initially developed for cyberspace and using examples of the City of Montréal, we identify three potential categories of the individual's role within the smart city: (1) Active role (involved individual), (2) Passive role (synchronized individual), and (3) Victim (disadvantaged individual). We show that the individual is a misinformed figure, despite attempts to focus smart development on citizens. Moreover, we posit that the individual cannot have a real political role as long as the political vision of the city does not precede the technical dimension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an instrument for governance, summitry is a novel structure for the management of contemporary hemispheric regionalism in the Americas. Such regionalism is a clear case of the "structuralist paradox" of international cooperation. This article attempts to explain the particular asymmetric regionalism in the Americas by using the concept of cooperative hegemony. The underlying hypothesis is that the U.S. government, since 1994, has pursued a strategy of cooperative behavior, at least in regard to power sharing, in two specific phases of hemispheric regionalism: agenda setting and institutionalization. This study tests the hypothesis through a content analysis of the main documents produced at the Miami, Santiago, and Québec summits, then relates these findings to the progress of institutionalization from 1994 to 2003. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]