Using and appropriating the smart city for community and capacity building amongst migrant language learners

Smart cities promise citizens access to networked services to improve their urban living, whilst offering city planners and managers detailed and current information about how services are used to enable better provision and responsive developments. We explore two educational approaches that enable citizens to take advantage of network infrastructures found in smart cities and other highly developed urban environments, combined with domesticated mobile devices (smartphones) to meet their needs and build community. We focus on a group that is particularly at risk of exclusion: recent migrants to the city who are language learners. This group faces challenges of cultural, social and linguistic inclusion. Providing information resources and language learning via smartphones which are integrated into their daily routines, and leveraging a city’s network infrastructure facilitates not only individual knowledge development, but also the opportunity to build communities. We suggest how technologies devised to support a top-down service provision model might also be used to enable a community managed knowledge repository triggering location-specific resources, the Open Beacons concept.