Christoph Raetzsch will give a presentation at the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting in Detroit (hybrid) on 28 March 2025. The title of the presentation is "Smart Cities Made Ordinary: Public Sector Digitization and Local Democratic Cultures" and addresses a gap in smart cities research to account for different local democratic cultures. It includes a case study of urban digitization in a mid-size German state capital and the divergent ways in which private communication networks and low-key digital media such as newsletters and messenger groups create civic infrastructures of neighbourhood cohesion and development. The paper retraces the ‘making of’ a smart city in relation to civic cultures and their historical legacies at the crossroads between federal urban digitization policies and efforts to reinvent democratic participation as central to sustainable urban governance.