[Article] Subversive smart urbanism: Tokyo’s underclass enacting phygital autonomy

What counts as ‘smart’ in the smart city, and who decides? Drawing on collaborative ethnography between an urban researcher and an activist–construction worker, this paper examines how the practices of Tokyo’s homeless underclass, which appear merely low-tech from dominant perspectives, enact a different standard of smartness. Japan’s smart governance mobilises the digital for fixation. It binds subjects to permanent addresses, locks them into platforms, and accumulates traceable identities. The underclass, however, invert each of these operations. Their shacks, built from discarded construction materials, are perpetually remade and moved ahead of eviction, while disposable SIM cards and bounded visibility render connection reversible and controllable. Read through vernacular, anarchist, and feminist technology studies, these practices are not deficiencies but enactments of ‘partial connection’, which this paper reworks as the lived practice of marginalised actors. These practices also enact what this paper conceptualises as ‘phygital affordance’, configurations in which material and digital dimensions co-constitute particular forms of agency. The construction knowledge these workers have embodied over lifetimes of building the city’s infrastructure is redeployed toward inhabiting the city autonomously. This reveals smartness to be no universal concept but a construct bound to particular ways of life and power relations, showing that its criteria can be redefined from below. Ultimately, this paper theorises these practices as ‘subversive smart urbanism’, a commoning of the urban from below that redefines smartness as the capacity to work with conditions rather than to fix, capture, and accumulate.