Co-creating smart city innovations with local youth
Download PDFMasucci, Michele, Dillon Mahmoudi, and Alan Wiig. 2026. “Bluetech in Baltimore: Co-creating smart city innovations with local youth.” Applied Geography, 187, 103887. doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2025.103887.
Abstract
This paper presents a case study of a climate-focussed digital internship pilot program intent on increasing engagement with, and jobs in, the “Bluetech” ocean-based economy in Baltimore, Maryland. Understanding participants’ lived experiences across multiple strands of alignment–including general interest, digital skills and technology access, environmental knowledge, and perceptions of climate and environmental problems–supported their engagement in the program and advanced their educational and workforce goals. Those experiences are undergirded by the historical setting of Baltimore, which is navigating contemporary interrelated impacts of global change due to climate, economic, and digital infrastructure transformations. Like many cities, Baltimore has developed a policy agenda focused on technological innovation, sustainability, and education as conduits of progress meant to address these concerns. However, the promise of innovation across these policy areas may not be realized if Baltimore’s youth do not attain the necessary digital competencies and relevant knowledge to address them. An iterative pedagogy was applied in order to help interns gain conceptual depth, technical skills, and content knowledge, and yielded insights about how youth may traverse the complexities of the modern Bluetech economy. Baltimore’s innovation-forward policy agenda continues to require technology, education access and opportunity to connect to the economic directions being designed. And yet, the same advancement of innovation may also exacerbate the longstanding poverty present in the city if more is not done to bridge everyday experiences of youth with opportunities to learn and engage in foundational experiences, skills and knowledge upon which innovation will be based.
Summary
The paper brings critical urban geography, youth-centered pedagogy, and everyday digital divides into the heart of “innovation” work in Baltimore’s Bluetech sector. Through a climate-focused internship with local youth, it co-designs game-based projects that connect artificial intelligence and environmental science to emerging blue economy jobs in the city’s harbor, while revealing that a “smart” future cannot be built on uneven access to broadband, devices, and STEM learning.
Baltimore cannot code its way to a ‘smart’ Bluetech future while youth are still borrowing laptops, chasing bandwidth, and learning climate science through sheer determination.
Situated at the intersection of smart city agendas, digital inequality, and participatory design, the paper starts “on the ground” with youth concept maps, lived experiences, and an iterative Learn → Teach → Learn model to rework Bluetech through community-led, locally embedded pedagogy. Its central argument is clear: if cities like Baltimore want climate-ready, digitally literate workforces, they must treat digital access, environmental knowledge, and youth agency as core infrastructure for innovation rather than peripheral policy goals.