Co-creating smart city innovations with local youth
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Masucci, 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.
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.