New commentary: For or Against ‘The Business of Benchmarking’

A new commentary by Jim Merricks White and Rob Kitchin, ‘For or Against ‘The Business of Benchmarking’,’ has been published in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. It is a response to a paper by Michele Acuto, Daniel Pejic and Jessie Briggs.

Abstract
This short response does two things. First, it argues that urban benchmarks have
specific and structural limits not identified in the principal essay in this intervention, which
curtail the kinds of constructive and critical work such benchmarks might be expected to
perform. ISO 37120 is discussed as an example. Second, it proposes a pluralistic approach
to engagement and offers six suggestions for how academics might take urban benchmarks
and their makers seriously without becoming fully embedded in their business. These
are: ethnography, discourse analysis, self-reflexive critique, critical urban benchmarking,
alternative publication channels and scholarly debate.

PDF

New WP: Decentring the smart city

A new Programmable City Working Paper (No. 45) has been published. PDF

Decentering the smart city

Abstract
This short working paper provides a critique of the smart city and the alternative visions of its detractors, who seek a more just and equitable city. Drawing parallels with data activism and data justice, it is argued that two main approaches to recasting the smart city are being adopted: inverting the ethos and use of smart city technologies; and discontinuing and blocking their deployment. The case is made for decentring the smart city, moving away from the reification of technologies to frame and consider their work within the wider (re)production of social relations.

Key words: smart city, technological solutionism, decentring, equality, justice, citizenship

It is a pre-print of Kitchin, R. (in press) Afterword: Decentering the smart city. In Flynn, S. (ed) Equality in the City: Imaginaries of the Smart Future. Intellect, Bristol.

The core argument is captured in this passage.

We need to stop casting ‘smartness’ and digital technologies in a privileged, significant independent role and recognize them as the agents of wider structural forces. This requires us to focus on and imagine the future city in a more holistic sense, and how smartness might or might not be a means of realising a fairer, more open and tolerant city. Rather than trying to work out how to insert equality into smartness, instead the focus is squarely on equality and reconfiguring structural relations and figuring out how smart technologies can be used to create equality and equity in conjunction with other kinds of interventions, such as social, economic and environmental policy, collaborative planning, community development, investment packages, multi-stakeholder engagement, and so on.

The issues facing cities are not going to be fixed through technological solutionism, but a multifaceted approach in which technology is one just one component (Morozov and Bria 2018). Homelessness is not going to be fixed with an app; it requires a complex set of interventions of which technology might be one part, along with health care and welfare reform, tackling domestic abuse, and a shift in the underlying logics of the political economy (Eubanks 2017). Congestion is not going to be fixed with intelligent transport systems that seek to optimize traffic flow, but by shifting people from car-based travel to public transit, cycling and walking. Similarly, institutionalized racism channelled and reproduced through predictive policing will not be fixed solely by tinkering with the data and algorithms to make them more robust, transparent and fairer, but by addressing institutionalized racism more generally and the conditions that enable it (Benjamin 2019).

In such a decentred perspective, platform and surveillance capitalism are not framed as separate and distinct forms of capitalism, and racism expressed through smart urbanism is not cut adrift from the structural logics and operations of institutionalized racism (understood in purely technical and legal terms). Rather, smart city technologies and their operations are framed with respect to capitalism and racism per se, and the solutions are anti-capitalist alternatives and anti-racism in which smart city technologies might or might not play some part.

Read more Paper PDF

Rob Kitchin

Living well with data: Practicing slow computing

I had the pleasure of being a panellist for the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) plenary session yesterday, along with Helen Kennedy and Seeta Peña Gangadharan. I thought I’d share the text of my short presentation here.

In my time I want to focus on one part of the session descriptor, namely ‘how can we live well with data, rather than just survive.’ This is an issue that I’ve been giving some thought to and discuss at length in a recent book, Slow Computing: Why We Need Balanced Digital Lives, written with Alistair Fraser (available for the duration of the conference for £7 using the code SC20 at BUP website). Rather than simply critique how digital society is unfolding, we wanted to set out practical and political interventions which can be performed individually or collectively that push back against the negative aspects of living digital lives; that allow people to claim and assert some level of control and advocate for a different kind of digital world. In short, how can people live a ‘digital good life’, or as we put it in the book, ‘experience the joy and benefits of computing, but in a way that asserts individual and collective autonomy?’

In the book, we focus our attention on how our everyday lives have been transformed by digital technologies in two key respects.

The first is with respect to time and how networked devices have ushered in an era of network or instantaneous time, where people are always and everywhere available, encounters are organized on-the-fly, tasks become interleaved and multiply, there is working-time drift, and individuals can feel they are tied to a digital leash that leaves them harried and anxious. Technologies are altering the pace, tempo and temporal organization of digital life in ways that are not always to our benefit or well-being.

Our second concern is with respect to data and how increased datafication and dataveillance is enabling companies and states to profile, socially sort, target, nudge and manage us. How excessive data extraction is fuelling the growth of data capitalism and reshaping governance, governmentality and citizenship in ways that erode civil liberties. It is these issues, and living well with data, that I concentrate on here.

There is no doubt that the era of ubiquitous computing and big data has resulted in excessive data extraction. Many digital technologies and services practise ‘over-privileging’; that is, seeking permission to access more data and device functions than they need for their operation alone. This has eroded privacy, created new predictive privacy harms, expanded data markets and the ways in which companies can accumulation profit by leveraging value from personal data, and underpins new forms of technocratic, algorithmic, predictive and anticipatory governance. There is significant data power – expressed through data capitalism and the state’s use of data – that reproduce structural inequalities unevenly across people (related to class, gender, race, ethnicity, disability, etc.) and places (well-off and poorer neighbourhoods, regions, global north/south).

The question is what to do about this? Our answer is what we term ‘slow computing’, a term that draws on notions at the heart of the slow living movement – well-being, enjoyment, patience, quality, sovereignty, authenticity, responsibility, and sustainability. Slowness is about enacting a different kind of society, in our case both in relation to time and data. It is about using devices and apps without feeling harassed, stressed, coerced, or exploited; and it is about challenging and transforming iniquitous and exploitative structural relations.

Conceptually, our argument is underpinned by the concepts of an ethics of digital care, data justice, and time and data sovereignty. Rooted in the ideas and ideals of feminism, an ethics of digital care promotes moral action at the individual and collective level to ensure personal wellbeing and aid for others. It recognizes that we are bound within webs of responsibility, obligations and duties and advocates acting reciprocally and non-reciprocally to tackle data injustices. Data justice draws much of its moral argument from the ideas of social justice, seeks fair treatment of people through data-driven processes, and challenges data power in various ways, including data activism. Data sovereignty, rooted in the work of indigenous scholars, is the idea that we should retain some degree of authority, power and control over the data that relates to us, that we should also have a say in the mechanisms by which those data are extracted, and that other entities, such as companies and states, should recognize that sovereignty as legitimate.

Using these ideas we set out individual and collective tactics – both practical and political – for asserting data sovereignty and expressing an ethics of digital care. At an individual level, this includes various means to curate digital lives, use open source alternatives, step away from technologies, and obfuscate. At a collective level, it includes political campaigning and lobbying, placing pressure on companies, creating data commons, undertaking counter-data actions, producing open source, privacy enhancement tech and civic tech.

At the same time, we recognize that different groups of people have varying opportunities to practice slow computing; to live well with data. The ability to exert data sovereignty varies by class, gender, race, ethnicity, etc. Poorer and more marginalized populations are more often the focus of data power and are least able to resist and pushback. This is why a collective ethics of digital care is vital; to seek data justice for all.

Of course, we’re not the only folks thinking about this, with much of the work concerning data ethics, data justice and data activism seeking to envisage a different kind of digital society and push back against the worst excesses of dataveillance and data capitalism. However, there is much more theoretic, empirical, advocacy and activist work needed within and beyond the academy if we are to live well with data

New Book: Citizens in the ‘Smart City’: Participation, Co-production, Governance

Citizens in the ‘Smart City’: Participation, Co-Production, Governance

By Paolo Cardullo

Published by Routledge; ISBN 9780429438806

This book critically examines ‘smart city’ discourse in terms of governance initiatives, citizen participation and policies which place emphasis on the ‘citizen’ as an active recipient and co-producer of technological solutions to urban problems.

The current hype around smart cities and digital technologies has sparked debates in the fields of citizenship, urban studies and planning surrounding the rights and ethics of participation. It also sparked debates around the forms of governance these technologies actively foster. This book presents new socio-technological systems of governance that monitor citizen power, trust-building strategies, and social capital. It calls for new data economics and digital rights for a city founded on normative ideals rather than neoliberal ones. It adopts a normative approach arguing that a ‘reloaded’ smart city should foster citizenship as a new set of civil and social rights and the ‘citizen’ as a subject vested with active and meaningful forms of participation and political power. Ultimately, the book questions the utility of the ‘smart city’ project for radical municipalism, proposing a technological enough but more democratic city, an ‘intelligent city’ in fact.

Offering useful contribution to smart city initiatives for the protection of emerging digital citizenship rights and socially accrued benefits, this book will draw the interest of researchers, policymakers, and professionals in the fields of urban studies, urban planning, urban geography, computing and technology studies, urban politics and urban economics.

New book: Slow Computing: Why We Need Balanced Digital Lives

A BOOK ABOUT TAKING CONTROL OF OUR DIGITAL LIVES

By Rob Kitchin and Alistair Fraser

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)

ISBN 978-1529211269

Book website

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.

New paper: Progress and prospects for data-driven coordinated management and emergency response: the case of Ireland

A new paper by Aoife Delaney and Rob Kitchin has been published in Territory, Politics, Governance examining the:

Progress and prospects for data-driven coordinated management and emergency response: the case of Ireland

doi: 10.1080/21622671.2020.1805355

Abstract

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.