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International Development and Studies

Beyond the Smart City: Decentralization, Rural Agency, and the Computational Mapping of Smart Citizenship (2012–2025) Jia-Chi Liou*, Jia-Chi Liou, Chia-Hang Hsu,

1. Introduction and Problem Statement

Smart citizenship has emerged as a critical yet contested construct within environmental governance, ostensibly bridging the gap between top-down digital infrastructure and bottom-up civic participation. However, the concept remains theoretically ambiguous, oscillating between visions of citizen empowerment and neoliberal data extraction. Historically, the pursuit of 21st-century environmental governance has centered almost exclusively on the smart city as the dominant paradigm. This pervasive urban-normativity in the literature positions the “smart citizen” within dense, highly interconnected infrastructural networks. Consequently, this conceptual disarray hinders our ability to understand how digital technologies reshape environmental governance outside of metropolitan centers.

This paper argues that the latent thematic structures of smart citizenship hold profound, under-theorized implications for rural sociology. Specifically, we interrogate how alternative models of digital citizenship—rooted in decentralization, technological sovereignty, and energy co-production—can operate as mechanisms for rural agency.

1. Methodology: A Computational Literature Review

To systematically map the conceptual boundaries and thematic evolution of smart citizenship, we depart from traditional narrative reviews by employing a Computational Literature Review (CLR) methodology. The CLR utilizes unsupervised machine learning to uncover latent semantic structures across a large corpus, allowing distinct research themes to emerge inductively from the text.

Our dataset comprises 3,144 high-quality, peer-reviewed social science journal articles published between 2012 and 2025, retrieved from the Scopus database. Each document (comprising title and abstract) was encoded into a 384-dimensional semantic vector using the all-MiniLM-L6-v2 model from the SentenceTransformer family. To analyze the latent thematic structure, we applied BERTopic, leveraging transformer-based language models and HDBSCAN clustering to capture semantic similarities. This data-driven strategy mitigates human coding bias and detects discursive rhythms often neglected in traditional qualitative reviews.

1. Key Findings: Uncovering Pathways for Rural Agency

Our algorithmic analysis reveals that smart citizenship is not a monolithic ideal but is bifurcated into seven distinct thematic pillars. While the dominant trajectory of the field reflects a defensive turn toward “Digital Risks and Security” (Topic 1) in surveillance-heavy urban ecosystems, our clustering isolates critical counter-narratives that align with rural environmental governance:

• Sustainability and Decentralized Living: Topic 14 (“Energy & Energy Community,” n=72) explores the vital role of citizens as active prosumers in energy transitions. This discourse highlights how communities manage decentralized energy grids, a finding deeply relevant to rural off-grid resilience and cooperative energy models.
• Bottom-up Coproduction over Top-down Paternalism: The literature reflects a stark contrast between policies framing citizens as passive consumers (rooted in civic paternalism) and alternative models emphasizing technological sovereignty. Topic 20 (“Planning & Coproduction”) evaluates whether these co-production initiatives genuinely empower citizens as decision-makers and leaders.
• The Geopolitics of the Digital Citizen: Our spatial mapping confirms that definitions of citizenship diverge sharply across contexts, fracturing into regional specificities. This geopolitical fracture underscores that digital citizenship is a fluid signifier shaped by local regimes, supporting the argument that rural populations require highly contextualized digital governance frameworks.

1. Discussion and Implications for Rural Sociology Our computational analysis empirically validates a critical fracture in the environmental governance discourse: the schism between top-down technocracy and bottom-up agency. For rural sociology, these findings confirm that smart citizenship acts as a boundary object connecting two incompatible logics.

While the empirical reality of the smart city is heavily weighted toward data extraction and urban surveillance, the latent presence of the co-creator model provides a robust theoretical foundation for rural digital empowerment. We argue that rural sociologists and policymakers must actively cultivate the decentralized, active-logic models identified in our analysis—such as energy prosumption and open-source technological sovereignty. Ultimately, a rural smart citizen should not merely be someone who is passively integrated into an urban-centric digital grid, but an active agent with the power to reshape decentralized environmental governance.