Tag Archives: right to the city

New paper: Towards a genuinely humanizing smart urbanism

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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

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New paper: Citizenship, Justice and the Right to the Smart City

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Rob Kitchin, Paolo Cardullo and Cesare Di Feliciantonio have published a new Programmable City working paper (No. 41) via OSF: Citizenship, Justice and the Right to the Smart City. The paper is a modified, pre-print version of the opening 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 provides an introduction to the smart city and engages with its idea and ideals from a critical social science perspective. After setting out in brief the emergence of smart cities and current key debates, we note a number of practical, political and normative questions relating to citizenship, social justice, and the public good that warrant examination. The remainder of the paper provides an initial framing for engaging with these questions. The first section details the dominant neoliberal conception and enactment of smart cities and how this works to promote the interests of capital and state power and reshape governmentality. We then detail some of the ethical issues associated with smart city technologies and initiatives. Having set out some of the more troubling aspects of how social relations are produced within smart cities, we then examine how citizens and citizenship have been conceived and operationalised in the smart city to date. We then follow this with a discussion of social justice and the smart city. In the final section, we explore the notion of the ‘right to the smart city’ and how this might be used to recast the smart city in emancipatory and empowering ways.

Keywords: citizenship, social justice, smart cities, right to the city, ethics

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Workshop: The Right to the Smart City: Citizenship, Civic Participation, Urban Commons and Co-Creation

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The 4th annual Programmable City workshop takes place next week (5-6 Sept) at Maynooth University. This year’s theme is the right to the smart city, exploring ideas of citizenship, civic participation, social justice, urban commons and co-creation. We’re very much looking forward to welcoming our speakers and guests and to listening to the papers and engaging in discussion. The event is already at capacity, but as with previous years we will be videoing all the talks and will make them available on the Progcity website in due course.

Introduction: Rob Kitchin, The Right to the Smart City.

Session 1: Citizenship and the Smart City
Katharine Willis (Plymouth, UK), Ava Fatah (UCL, UK), Ana Baltazar (UFMG, Brazil) & Satyarupar Shekhar (CAG, India): Whose Right to the Smart City?

Jiska Engelbert (Erasmus, Rotterdam): Whose right to (define) the smart city? Extending our critical pointers beyond citizen participation

Réka Pétercsák & Mark Maguire (Maynooth): Participation in the Smart City: An Ethnographic Study of Citizen Engagement in Dublin

Cesare Di Feliciantonio (Maynooth): Against the romance of the smart community. The case of Milano 4 You.

Session 2: Urban Commons
Ramon Ribera-Fumaz (UoC, Barcelona): Citizens for Digital Social Innovation: Between Smartness and Commoning?

Michiel de Lange (Utrecht, Netherlands): Datafying the commons: data publics and smart citizenship

Paolo Cardullo (Maynooth): Smart Commons or a smart approach to the Commons?

Session 3: Co-creation and city governance
Nancy Odendaal (Cape Town, South Africa): Appropriating ‘big data’: exploring the emancipatory potential of the data strategies of civil society organisations in Cape Town, South Africa

Anna Davies (TCD): Smart flows? Commodification, commons and consumption for smarter cities

Robert Bradshaw (Maynooth): Democratic Rationalizations in the Bikeshare Sector

Session 4: Public labs, citizen-centric living labs, citizen science
Tara Whelan (Limerick): Matters of fact and matters of concern: issues of legitimacy, trust and resistance in citizen science

Gabriele Schliwa (Manchester, UK): Smart cities by design? Interrogating human-centred design as a tool for civic participation

Claudio Coletta & Caspar Menkman (Maynooth): Calculating publics and citizenship distributed sensing

Session 5: Shared city making (civic hacking, civic media)
Andrew Schrock (Chapman, USA): Toward an Actual Theory of the City: “Civic Tech” as a Mid-Level, Organic Model of Urban Change

Catherine D’Ignazio, Eric Gordon & Elizabeth Christoforetti (Emerson, USA): Participatory Urban Sensing: a Blueprint for a Community-led Smart City

Sung-Yueh Perng (Maynooth): Civic technology, social innovation and the reshaping of smart cities