Since the regime change at Twitter there’s been a steady of stream of folks trying out Mastodon as an alternative. Mastodon is Twitter-like but is also very much its own platform, consisting of a federation of interlinked ‘instances’. As a newbie you select and join an ‘instance’, which makes a difference as to what posts (‘toots’) are viewed (there are 3 levels of viewing posts: home, posts by people you follow; local, posts by people in your instance; federated, posts from across the whole network that have link with your instance). Toots appear in chronological order rather than being sorted by algorithm. The instance someone belongs to is identifiable by their username and address (in my case @mastodon.social). See the Mastodon quick set guide for more info.
Within a couple of days of setting up I was following a couple of hundred folks and had a similar number of followers, many of whom I knew from Twitter. Quite a few of these are geographers, though I’m sure there are many more than this list, which is designed to help folk find each other and start conversations. You can also do that by joining the @geography@a.gup.pe group and tag your posts with group handle to share there. Also tag your posts with the #geography hashtag. My top tip: having a bio and posting builds your community.
Digital technologies should be making life easier. And to a large degree they do, transforming everyday tasks of work, consumption, communication, travel and play. But they are also accelerating and fragmenting our lives affecting our well-being and exposing us to extensive data extraction and profiling that helps determine our life chances.
Is it then possible to experience the joy and benefits of computing, but to do so in a way that asserts individual and collective autonomy over our time and data?
Drawing on the ideas of the ‘slow movement’, Slow Computing sets out numerous practical and political means to take back control and counter the more pernicious effects of living digital lives.
1 Living Digital Lives (PDF) 2 Accelerating Life 3 Monitoring Life 4 Personal Strategies of Slow Computing 5 Slow Computing Collectively 6 An Ethics of Digital Care 7 Towards a More Balanced Digital Society Coda: Slow Computing During a Pandemic (PDF)
Bristol University Press, £14.99 or $26.00; 20% discount (£11.99 or $20.80) at: Bristol University Press, or £9.75 if sign up for BUP newsletter. Select ‘Click to order from North America, Canada and South America’ to get dollar price.
Internationally, there is a drive to make coordinated management and emergency response (CMER) more data-driven and centralized through shared data infrastructures and control centres. While there are a few well-known case examples of data-driven CMER, in general it has been partially implemented. In this paper, we highlight the importance of historical institutional and spatial context and path dependencies in shaping the development of CMERs within and across jurisdictions. We examine the progress and prospects of data-driven CMER in Ireland, with respect to the general landscape of inter-agency cooperation and with reference to a single key agency: An Garda Síochána (AGS), the Irish police force. To do so, we draw on 36 in-depth interviews with key stakeholders and a critical discourse analysis of 15 key policy/guideline documents. Our analysis reveals the ways in which embedded institutional cultures, structures and working practices, which are relatively resistant to change, have thwarted data-sharing and data-driven analysis and decision-making. These factors act as barriers to the adoption of smart-city approaches more generally, not just in Ireland but globally.
Keywords: coordinated management and emergency response (CMER); big data; smart cities; all-hazards approach.
Creating Smart Cities, edited by Claudio Coletta, Leighton Evans, Liam Heaphy, Rob Kitchin, has been published by Routledge in their Regional Studies Association ‘Region and Cities’ series. It contains a selection of chapters originating from our third Progcity workshop.
Description
In cities around the world, digital technologies are utilized to manage city services and infrastructures, to govern urban life, to solve urban issues and to drive local and regional economies. While “smart city” advocates are keen to promote the benefits of smart urbanism – increased efficiency, sustainability, resilience, competitiveness, safety and security – critics point to the negative effects, such as the production of technocratic governance, the corporatization of urban services, technological lock-ins, privacy harms and vulnerability to cyberattack.
This book, through a range of international case studies, suggests social, political and practical interventions that would enable more equitable and just smart cities, reaping the benefits of smart city initiatives while minimizing some of their perils.
Included are case studies from Ireland, the United States of America, Colombia, the Netherlands, Singapore, India and the United Kingdom. These chapters discuss a range of issues including political economy, citizenship, standards, testbedding, urban regeneration, ethics, surveillance, privacy and cybersecurity.
Contents
1. Creating smart cities – Rob Kitchin, Claudio Coletta, Leighton Evans and Liam Heaphy
PART I The political economy of smart cities
2. A Digital Deal for the smart city: Participation, protection, progress – Jathan Sadowski
3. Politicising smart city standards – James Merricks White
4. Urban revitalization through automated policing and “smart” surveillance in Camden, New Jersey – Alan Wiig
5. Can urban “miracles” be engineered in laboratories? Turning Medellín into a model city for the Global South – Félix Talvard
6. Building smart city partnerships in the “Silicon Docks” – Liam Heaphy and Réka Pétercsák
7. Towards a study of city experiments – Brice Laurent and David Pontille
8. University campuses as testbeds of smart urban innovation – Andrew Karvonen, Chris Martin and James Evans
PART II Smart cities, citizenship and ethics
9. Who are the end-use(r)s of smart cities? A synthesis of conversations in Amsterdam – Christine Richter, Linnet Taylor, Shazade Jameson and Carmen Pérez del Pulgar
10. ‘Cityzens become netizens’: Hashtag citizenships in the making of India’s 100 smart cities – Ayona Datta
11. From smart cities to smart citizens? Searching for the ‘actually existing smart citizen’ in Atlanta, Georgia – Taylor Shelton and Thomas Lodato
12. Promises, practices and problems of collaborative infrastructuring: The case of Dublin City Council (DCC) Beta and Code for Ireland – Sung-Yueh Perng
13. Smart for a reason: Sustainability and social inclusion in the sharing city – Duncan McLaren and Julian Agyeman
14. Pseudonymisation and the smart city: Considering the General Data Protection Regulation – Maria Helen Murphy
15. The privacy parenthesis: Private and public spheres, smart cities and big data – Leighton Evans
16. The challenges of cybersecurity for smart cities – Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin
PART III Conclusion
17. Reframing, reimagining and remaking smart cities – Rob Kitchin
Paolo Cardullo and Rob Kitchin have published a new paper in Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space. “Smart urbanism and smart citizenship: The neoliberal logic of ‘citizen-focused’ smart cities in Europe” https://doi.org/10.1177/0263774X18806508
Abstract
This paper examines the neoliberal ideals that underpin participation and citizenship in the smart city and their replication mechanisms at the European level, particularly focusing on the work of the European Innovation Partnership for Smart Cities and Communities. The research consisted of three levels of data generation and analysis: a discourse analysis of policy documents and project descriptions of the 61 Commitments in the European Innovation Partnership for Smart Cities and Communities ‘citizen-focus’ cluster; interviews with a dozen stakeholders working on citizen engagement in a small sample of European Innovation Partnership for Smart Cities and Communities flagship projects; and twenty interviews with city officers and corporate exhibitors at the 2017 Smart City Expo and World Congress. We contend that smart cities as currently conceived enact a blueprint of neoliberal urbanism and promote a form of neoliberal citizenship. Supra-national institutions like the European Innovation Partnership for Smart Cities and Communities act at a multi-scalar level, connecting diverse forms of neoliberal urbanism whilst promoting policy agendas and projects that perform neoliberal citizenship in the spaces of the everyday. Despite attempts to recast the smart city as ‘citizen-focused’, smart urbanism remains rooted in pragmatic, instrumental and paternalistic discourses and practices rather than those of social rights, political citizenship, and the common good. In our view, if smart cities are to become truly ‘citizen-focused’, an alternative conception of smart citizenship needs to be deployed, one that enables an effective shift of power and is rooted in the right to the city, entitlements, community, participation, commons, and ideals beyond the market.
Rob Kitchin has published a new Programmable City working paper (No. 43) via OSF: Towards a genuinely humanizing smart urbanism. The paper is a modified, pre-print version of the closing chapter in the book ‘The Right to the Smart City’ edited by Paolo Cardullo, Cesare Di Feliciantonio and Rob Kitchin to be published by Emerald Publishing.
Abstract
This paper considers, following David Harvey (1973), how to produce a genuinely humanizing smart urbanism. It does so through utilising a future-orientated lens to sketch out the kinds of work required to reimagine, reframe and remake smart cities. I argue that, on the one hand, there is a need to produce an alternative ‘future present’ that shifts the anticipatory logics of smart cities to that of addressing persistent inequalities, prejudice, and discrimination, and is rooted in notions of fairness, equity, ethics and democracy. On the other hand, there is a need to disrupt the ‘present future’ of neoliberal smart urbanism, moving beyond minimal politics to enact sustained strategic, public-led interventions designed to create more-inclusive smart city initiatives. Both tactics require producing a deeply normative vision for smart cities that is rooted in ideas of citizenship, social justice, the public good, and the right to the city that needs to be developed in conjunction with citizens. Keywords: smart cities, citizenship, social justice, right to the city, future
