Catch up with the video of previous sessions: Session 1, Session 2, Session 3 and Session 4.

SESSION 5: SHARED CITY MAKING

Toward an Actual Theory of the City: “Civic Tech” as a Mid-Level, Organic Model of Urban Change
Andrew Schrock (Chapman, USA)

Abstract
“We don’t simply want to take a predictive analytics view of the world,” Nigel Jacobs told me, “because that means that we will never have an actual theory of the city.” Nigel co-founded the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics (MONUM), the most long-lived innovation team in the country and among the most respected. MONUM took an omnivorous, experimental approach to urban improvement. They tried everything from using iPhones to detect potholes and retrofitting a food truck as a “city hall to go.” The office is relatively autonomous, insulating collaborators from risk while running small-scale experiments to tangibly improve life for residents. Nigel’s grounded, iterative approach with MONUM aligned with my conversations and collaborations over the last several years with other civic technologists who used similar language to describe their goals and practices.
The benefits and drawbacks of “civic tech” are hotly debated. Policy makers see civic tech as a helpful way to balance competing demands in government for external participation and internal efficiency. Critical scholars regard it as Silicon Valley style tech “solutionism,” while political scientists believe it stretches thin a model of the informed citizen. Civic technologists themselves embrace such a variety of practices – participatory design, agile development, and open government – that they struggle to articulate shared convictions characteristic of social movements. As a result, they are often misunderstood as yet another elitist model of technocratic change. In this paper I explore a more nuanced alternative: civic technologists like Nigel Jacobs are engaging in theorizing about how to change notoriously obdurate systems (e.g. Weberian bureaucracy and built urban environment).
My intention in this paper – to situate civic tech as a mid-level, organic model of urban change – is far from armchair theorizing. We need shared models to collaborate, not just platforms and data. In this paper I follow how theories of Tocqueville, Robert E. Park, and Jane Jacobs arose from in situ interventions and reflexive interpretation. Second, I map how an organic model of change in “civic tech” contrasts with a dominant “smart cities” vision. Civic tech is a politically left effort that embraces small, scalable interventions and collaborations that change systems, tangibly improving lives of residents. Civic technologists use technology in tandem with infrastructure, policy, and process change. Behind a veneer of politically neutral liberalism lies a more radical approach that seeks to re-configure the very building blocks of democracy.

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

Abstract
The ability to gather, store and make meaning from large amounts of sensor data is becoming a technological and financial reality for cities. Many of these initiatives are happening through deals brokered between vendors, developers and cities. They are made manifest in the environment as infrastructure – invisible to citizens and communities. We assert that in order to have community-centered smart cities, we need to transform sensor data collection and usage from invisible infrastructure into visible and legible interface. In this paper, we compare two different urban sensing initiatives and examine the methods used for feedback between sensors and people. We question how value gets produced and communicated to citizens in urban sensing projects and what kind of oversight and ethical considerations are necessary. Finally, we make a case for “seamful” interfaces between communities, sensors and cities that reveal their inner workings for the purposes of civic pedagogy and dialogue. We conclude with five preliminary design principles for a community-centered smart city.

Programming rights to shared technology making
Sung-Yueh Perng (Maynooth)

Abstract
Shared technology making refers to the practices, spaces and events that bear the hope and belief that collaborative and open ways of designing, making and modifying technology can improve our ways of living. Shared technology making in the context of the smart city, where a majority of such events, initiatives and spaces are organised, reinvigorates explorations of the possibility of free, open and collaborative ways of engineering urban spaces, infrastructures and public life. Open innovation events and civic hacking initiatives often encourage members of local communities, residents or city administrations to participate, so that the problems they face and the knowledge they obtain can be leveraged to develop innovations from the working (and failure) of urban everyday life and (non-)expert knowledges. However, the incorporation of shared technology making into urban contexts and processes engender problems and concerns around the rights to participate in shared technology- and city-making. This paper addresses the issue by suggesting ways to consider both the neoliberal patterning of shared technology making and the patches and gaps that show the future possibility of shared technology- and city-making.

Catch up with the video of previous sessions: Session 1, Session 2 and Session 3.

SESSION 4: PUBLIC LABS, CITIZEN-CENTRIC LIVING LABS, CITIZEN SCIENCE

Matters of fact and matters of concern: issues of legitimacy, trust and resistance in citizen science
Tara Whelan (Limerick)

Abstract
This paper examines the tension between institutional science and citizen science. While ample consideration has been given to questions of the legitimacy of science done with and by citizens (i.e. scientist-led projects involving citizens, and citizen-led projects involving the scientific community, respectively), less attention has been afforded to citizen scientists whose practice operates wholly (and sometimes deliberately) outside the boundaries of the scientific academy. Rather than engaging with questions regarding how to, and who may, produce academically credible knowledge, this critical approach to citizen science is concerned with tackling personal, cosmopolitical, and explicitly value-laden approaches to knowledge production. In its tactical circumvention of the academy, critical citizen science can offer pertinent critiques of how science is done, and to what ends, as well as addressing issues of agency, universality, and the tension (and overlap) between “matters of fact” and “matters of concern”. This paper examines a number of cases of citizen-led science and explores what motivates citizens to take on the role of scientist.

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

Abstract
Citizen participation in urban governance has established itself as a paradigm, promising greater democracy, empowerment and more cost-effective public service delivery against the backdrop of increased urban conflicts. The dominant focus on the ‘citizen’ or even ‘smart citizen’ in the context of smart cities and urban innovation is however a relatively recent phenomenon. While the smart urbanism agenda fails to realise added value for cities and citizens alike due to a lack of acceptance and trust, a growing number of initiatives seeks to revamp the smart city as ‘human smart city’. Therein, design thinking and human-centred design have become the buzzwords of choice to describe ‘putting people first’ approaches to develop solutions tailored to citizens’ needs. What was previously known as user-centred design in the context of ICT product and service development, now proliferates the urban through a variety of organisations and initiatives such as innovation labs, living labs or civic hackathons. Just as urban infrastructures often only become visible and disrupt cities when they fail, good design is invisible and might function strategically like a ‘Trojan Horse’.
So what are the implications of using ‘human-centred design’ in the smart city context? And moreover, how does ‘human-centred design’ and ’design thinking’ fit into urban scholarship? This draft paper renders often implicit design processes explicit. It finds that the design industry offers ’design thinking’ as process commodity to facilitate citizen participation in innovation workshops and smart city initiatives. A variety of versions and (re-)appropriations of ‘design thinking’ increasingly link social innovation with military innovation processes, however the political implications of mobilising ‘design thinking’ as mode of governing are yet unknown. While ‘governing through design’ is becoming big business with the support of meta government and philantrocapitalists, existing research is dominated by private sector institutions. Drawing upon ongoing research in Manchester and Amsterdam, this draft paper encourages urban scholarship to critically engage with this emerging trend and to develop a research agenda that further links urban with design research.

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

Abstract
This paper deals with the secondary effects of the integration of sensing devices into publicly accessible infrastructures. The smart promise that foreground an increase in efficiency and sustainability has now been widely documented. Therefore we shift the attention to how the proliferation of sensors and systems of calculation impact not on those systems themselves but rather how they impact on publics and the modes of differentiated citizenship they generate as a result. We do so by focussing on smart meters and energy infrastructure on the one hand and sensing devices and Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWANs) on the other.
Across both cases we recognize a common shift. That is, through the addition of sensing devices traditional regimes of undifferentiated access to the public are acted upon. Rather it is through the addition of sensing devices that new regimes emerge that emphasise not ‘access to’ as the penultimate goal, but focus on forms of active management and governance of those spaces and infrastructures vis-a-vis their publics. A practical infrastructural inversion is what follows.
The politics of supply and management that comes with this infrastructural transition are acted upon by these sensing networks. Where these systems previously organic and operated according to a demand-following logics, they now follow that of calculation. This is where experimental circumstances like test-beds and living labs emerge not as incidents, but as part of a persistent reality of the public. We argue that in the same way as citizens are instrumented as sensing devices, publics become a prosthesis to those infrastructures initially designed as a service to them. What emerges are more hybrid and flexible relations between infrastructure and their publics as well as new civic rationalities and citizenship contingent on sensed environmental relations. Thus conceived, such infrastructures raise a number of concerns from an STS perspective regarding the relations between centralised and distributed calculation, differentiation of access, as well as the kinds and agency of publics mobilised.

Catch up with the video of previous sessions: Session 1 and Session 2.

Appropriating ‘big data’: exploring the emancipatory potential of the data strategies of civil society organisations in Cape Town, South Africa
Nancy Odendaal (Cape Town, South Africa):

Abstract
The smart city strategies of municipalities in South Africa have been grounded in developmentalism, seeking to harness the power of technology to enable improved governance. Cities such as Durban and Cape Town have embraced infrastructure-led approaches that seek to use state-mediated broadband ‘backbone’ development to enable last-mile ICT access to marginalised communities. With the advent of big data, the range of actors in the ICT-local government terrain has broadened to include partnerships with IT-multinationals and management consultants to streamline municipal bureaucratic procedures, enable data processing and contribute to greater efficiency. An important driver is the increasingly urgent need to accelerate the delivery of essential services whilst also encouraging investment and development through greater efficacy, (in processing development applications for example). This is the delicate balancing act that the City of Cape Town is aiming to achieve: broadening its tax base while delivering basic services to a vocal and largely dissatisfied populace. A ‘dashboard urbanism’ is becoming evident as access to a broadened range of data sources fits well with the system of indicators and performance monitoring that is embedded in the managerial South Africa’s local government system. The danger of an overreliance on these quantitative aspects is that it may overshadow the more qualitative aspects of development. Reinforcing a commitment to the ‘numbers game’, rather than paying attention to the finer details of socio-economic development, could perpetuate divides in what is considered to be one of the most unequal cities in the world. Based on exploratory research, this paper explores an emerging trend amongst civil society organisations that seek to collect, generate and process data as a form of empowerment and response to the state’s failure to respond adequately to social development pressures. Strategies range from self-enumeration, to participatory mapping, and online campaigning. This paper concludes on what these qualities of the ‘bottom-up smart city’ are, how it challenges the assumptions of ‘dashboard urbanism’ and such initiatives could potentially contribute to a more rounded appropriation of big data and a deepened and contextualized urban experience.

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

Abstract
Defining environmental governance as the sum of the ways we manage our environmental affairs, this paper compares and contrasts efforts to reorient resource consumption in the city onto more sustainable pathways through the utilisation of ICT. Drawing on an experimental transdisciplinary process of collaborative visioning and backcasting conducted in Dublin, Ireland, this paper begins by sketching the ways in which governing actors envisage a smarter system for managing two contrasting resources that are fundamental to cities and their citizens. The first of these, water, remains a public good in Ireland, but it is becoming increasingly commodified. The second, food, is seen as a private good but there are ongoing calls to reconceptualise it as a common good. Both are fundamental requirements for life and considered by the United Nations as human rights, with ‘zero hunger’ and ‘clean water and sanitation’ identified as sustainable development goals in the post-2015 development agenda. The second part of the paper compares and contrasts two of the ways in which ICT is being rolled out in these arenas in Dublin, water metering and surplus food redistribution, and links these developments to the wider governing context that shapes them. The ‘smart’ metering of water in Ireland has been an exercise in top-down, technocratic governance played out with close relations between state and the private sector, resulting in intense reactions and collective actions from an excluded citizenry. Surplus food redistribution in contrast has been led by grassroots action in collaboration with social innovators and the private sector – frequently in the absence of appropriate regulations – in what has been suggested is a hybrid tri-centric governance system shaped by market rules, public regulations and collective actions. Whilst the histories, practices and infrastructures of these two resources are highly differentiated, it is argued that there are possibilities for cross-fertilisation of lessons for both sectors in terms of managing flows and engaging citizens.

Democratic Rationalizations in the Bikeshare Sector
Robert Bradshaw (Maynooth)

Abstract
With its emphasis on the transformative power of information and communications technologies, discourses on the “smart city” make the promise not only of economic rewards through improved infrastructure management, competitive advantage and job creation but also the empowering of citizens by enabling the co-production of infrastructure, decisions, and policy. Presented in this way the city is framed as a platform which empowers participatory processes. Connecting data, people and knowledge, it is envisioned as a productive hub for the construction of the city by its people. Using a lens derived from Andrew Feenberg’s critical theory of technology, this paper reports on research conducted in Dublin and Hamilton (Canada) which explored these themes though an analysis of the design and implementation strategies mobilized by these cities in the creation their respective smart bikeshare systems. The findings reveal the technologies to be the product of context-dependant, socio-technical assemblages which position citizenship and co-production in distinctive and contrasting ways. While Dublin’s managerialist form of governance produced a technocratic, instrumental design which understands, and perpetuates, citizens as passive consumers of services and information, Hamilton combined institutional expertise and lay experience to create a generative technology which embodies a diverse but complimentary set of goals and ideologies. Understanding the processes by which both these systems we conceived and concretized may help us understand how normative and ethical considerations relating to citizenship can be embedded and preserved in technology production.

If you missed the video of the presentation in Session 1 on citizenship, you can watch them here.

SESSION 2: URBAN COMMONS

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

Abstract
Smart City strategies has been widely criticised as top-down post-political forms of governance. More recently, however, the idea of smart citizens empowered by smart technologies has gained prominence in the smart city discourse. For its advocates, the deployment of ICT in urban development promises more informed and efficient citizens, who are able to become active actors of economic growth and urban management and politics. In contrast, in recent years, there have been emerging counter-smart strategies on how to implicate and re-politicise citizens in more democratic forms through the intensive use of technologies. In both cases, it is argued that this is possible thanks to (a) new technological architectures and infrastructures that allow to put the citizen in the middle of urban governance (e.g. open source software, open data, crowdsourcing, Internet of things, low-cost hardware, etc), and, (b) new forms of urban governance such as quadruple helix models, public-private-people partnerships or sharing economy platforms in the case of Smart solutions, and p2p and communing for the later based on those architectures. In particular, these new, a priori emancipatory, forms of social organization are framed and argued through discourses of social innovation and more recently Digital Social Innovation (DSI). This paper explores the deployment of DSI initiatives aimed at empowering citizens in Barcelona. In doing so it contrasts how citizenship and DSI are conceptualised both under the umbrella of Smart City and Urban Commons strategies and what are the limits and potentialities in productively reframe, reimagine and remade citizenship and democracy through technologically driven urban governance.

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

Abstract
The proliferation of (big) urban data is spurring a research and design agenda that aims to increase and improve civic participation in the smart city. This agenda around civic media attempts to counter or complement the dominant rhetoric of efficiency and solutionism in corporate smart city visions. The promise of data is that it helps to address some of the complex societal ‘wicked problems’ that cities face. A variety of organizations work on fostering a ’data commons’ as a potentially valuable new resource for making decisions about urban futures, ideally with the involvement of people. A well-known example is Code for America and its various offsprings in other places in the world. By now it has become clear that just opening up data is not yet going to do much yet. How can we reimagine data as civic data, fostering engagement among so-called smart citizens with issues of common concern?
My starting point is to understand the ways data shape our notion of urban commons and publics. I discern three dominant theoretical imaginaries of urban publicness, each with their own ’urban interface’. This allows me to explore how data-driven urbanism may constitute new commonality and publicness.
First is a rational view of urban publicness. This entails a deliberative and supra-identitarian search for commonality, while ignoring difference. In terms of urban interfacing, this type of public is situated in early metropolis coffee houses with reading and debating tables.
Second is an emotional foundation of publicness, based on experiencing and consuming co-presence and difference though sensations, affect, and embodiment. Personal preferences are not something to be overcome but at the heart of this communal spectacle. The urban interfaces here are the sensual gazes and bodies of modern metropolitan flaneurs revelling in a dramaturgy of staging and watching.
Thirdly, a ritual publicness emerges from everyday symbolic interactions such as civil inattention, typically in spaces of mobility in the late modern city. The urban interface here is ‘code’: scripted common behavior between urban strangers.
The next step is to consider how data may support new kinds of publicness and civic participation. I so by building on the ownership framework developed in earlier work, which bears strong similarities to the Lefebvrian idea of the right to the city. Both refer to a non-contractual collective sense of common stewardship, and the right to appropriate. A series of short cases illustrate how data can play in role in:
1. Creating data-driven networked publics
2. Articulating an otherwise abstract issue through data
3. Engaging people with an issue by sensing and/or narrating through data
4. Providing a horizon for action
5. Pooling resources in reciprocal ways.
In the final part I reflect on the some of the challenges and questions that arise from the above. Issues that are addressed include the tension between self-description vs other-ascription, agency and the governance of/by platforms, splintering urban publics, and institutional legitimacy of governing civic data. This section ends by tentatively exploring how this affects existing imaginaries of data-driven urban publicness, and may impel us to imagine new ones.

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

Abstract
The paper offers a critical evaluation of smart cities (SC) in relation to the urban commons. This is intended as the space produced through practices of urban commoning, processes of cooperation and social reproduction, and entitlement rights. Both supporters and critics of the SC often claim to tap into the ‘collective intelligence of the crowd’, a socially accrued value which we can refer to, at its best, as a ‘smart commons’. However, this view hides the social relationship the commons implies because the maintenance of the commons is intrinsically linked to the everyday materiality of social reproduction. Instead, the paper suggests a ‘smart approach’ to the commons, which takes into account both the city as a commons and the way in which urban commons is produced under advanced capitalism. The ‘communal city’ would re-imagine the exchange of value and utilities between SC and its citizens and it can develop, the paper argues, only by taking into account established and expanding collective rights and entitlements such as: shared ownership of critical infrastructures, ‘rent’ and mechanisms of remuneration for digital labour, and processes of governance with Lo-Fi or non-tech practices of urban commoning which produce collectivities rather than interconnected individuals.

We will start to release the video of the presentations at our Right to the smart City workshop in September. You can find the video of Introduction and papers in Session 1 on citizenship below. Stay tuned for all other presentations that will be released on the coming Wednesdays!

INTRODUCTION

Citizenship, social justice, and the Right to the Smart City
Rob Kitchin (Maynooth)

SESSION 1: Citizenship and the Smart City

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

Abstract
This paper works with Lefebvre’s ‘Right to the City’ (1996) framework in order to consider the role of everyday and people centred agency in ‘smart’ urban transformation. According to Townsend the smart city can be defined as: ‘places where information technology is combined with infrastructure, architecture, everyday objects, and even our bodies to address social, economic, and environmental problems’ (2013, 15). Yet, authors such as Sassen (2012), Marvin et al. (2016), Kitchin (2015), Aurigi 2012) and Rose r than challenge it . Therefore, we focus on some of those excluded by smart city projects; the urban poor, street traders and those who live in informal settlements and explore the way in which they access and participate in the city. We will draw on empirical work undertaken in India and Brazil where we have investigated the way in which smart city projects (such as the India Smart City right to the oeuvre, to participation and appropriation’ in urban space.

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

Abstract
As critical scholarship points out, the smart city is a project that often serves the interests of private, non-democratic “stakeholders”. These interests converge in the political economy of the smart city, which typically excludes citizens and their democratic interests altogether, or marginalises them through a narrow, neoliberal conceptualization of “participation”. But is it enough to overcome this deficit by proposing better kinds of citizen participation and decision-making in smart city initiatives? This paper argues that we should also pay much more critical attention to the very basis of many—if not most—smart city initiatives: the different EU funding schemes that finance and steer them.
First, because schemes like the Framework Programmes, Horizon 2020 and Joint Programming Initiative(s) are constituted by, but particularly constitutive of smart city discourses and (research) practices. For example, they have been crucial in delineating which problems the smart city is to solve (“people-planet-prosperity:); in appropriating and normalizing methods like urban living labs and hackatons; in assessing the success of smart cities according to their ability to be “scaled up”, as well as in the production of inter-city networks and consortia, like “Lighthouse Cities” and, generally, Private-Public-Partnerships.
Second, because the EU’s growing research agenda on smart cities needs to be understood in relation to the EU’s/EC’s ambitions to influence urban governance policies, as for example evidenced in the 2016 “Amsterdam Pact”. Not only are these ambitions interesting—and problematic—given the EU’s lacking mandate to influence beyond the national level; these informal collaborations between the EU and ‘city makers’ also pave the way for circumventing formal local political structures and political accountability.
This paper explains how these two dimensions of EU funding programmes work, how they intersect, and how they warrant the notion of a (smart) city in which citizens are stripped from their political rights and in which problems are stripped from their political meaning. The paper concludes with a reflection on possibilities for disrupting this dynamic, which focuses particularly on the pivotal role that academic researchers—who are more reliant on EU funding than ever before—(should) play.

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

Abstract
‘Smart City’ solutions appear on all fronts of public life: they can take the shape of an e-government portal, an online community activity forum, a mobile application for urban travel, or a set of sensors that collect data about city life. Despite the extreme difference in function, these services all operate on the same principle: their smartness lies in their responsiveness, in their ability to recruit and engage with users. The Smart City, then, requires the (digitally) engaged citizen who interacts with it, actively creating and shaping the services they use. Of course, creative practice has always been central to urban theory. From Aristotle to Jane Jacobs, synekismos names the generative power of cities and offers a key to unlock the mechanisms through which urban life is regenerated continuously. However, while smart cities smoothen ‘equal access’ for some, others experience a world of striations, and in some cases previously accessible settings are closed off. Practicing citizenship thus becomes a question of aptitude, or even expertise, conditioned by new tools, ideologies and socialities.
In this paper, we show the contestations and contradictions of this multi-faceted city-citizen relationship illuminated through an anthropological research project. In 2015, we ethnographically tracked the creation of a community project prototype, mapping communities and their social activities within an EU-funded urban resilience framework. Our focus was on observing the practices through which citizen-experts negotiate their imagined city-scape. We tracked how different meanings, values, ideologies clash and collapse until the prototype took its final form as a digital innovation dashboard.
We attend to digital mapping, counting, and the visualising platforms that mediate the city-citizen relationship within the synekismos of urban life itself. Our specific interest is in how citizens participate in the problem-spaces that emerge between specific assemblages and the broader apparatuses for governing cities. We draw from the work of Benedict Anderson (1991) to explore knowledge production and ontogenetic social space, and we draw especially from the work of Paul Rabinow (2003, 2007) to explore the problem-spaces of the contemporary. Ethnography shows the ways in which citizens participate in the smart city participants but become expert navigators of the contemporary. Anthropologically, we draw conclusions about the contemporary production of space, together with the production of new asymmetries.

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

Abstract
In her seminal book (2002), Miranda Joseph deconstructed the hegemonic representation of communities as homogeneous, natural and spontaneous, highlighting the complex ways they are imbricated in capitalism. Building on her work, in this presentation I aim at discussing the preliminary results of my ongoing research about the ‘Milano 4 You’ development project, located in the municipality of Segrate and destined at creating the first ‘smart district’ of Italy. Which idea of community is portrayed in the development plan and the advertising material? How does ‘smartness’ marks a shift from the idea of gated community embodied by the ‘Milano 2’ district located in the same municipality? By trying to answer these questions, the presentation shows how the idea of a ‘smart community’ is primarily mobilized to support the dynamics of land rent.