New Progcity collaboration has been published in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers! Sung-Yueh Perng and Sophia Maalsen ask how we can make sense of the appropriation of the corporate city in the paper entitled Civic infrastructure and the appropriation of the corporate smart city.
Concerns have been raised regarding smart city innovations leading to, or consolidating, technocratic urban governance and the tokenization of citizens. Less research, however, has explored how we make sense of ongoing appropriation of the resources, skills, and expertise of corporate smart cities and what this means for future cities. In this article, we examine the summoning of political subjectivity through the practices of retrofitting, repurposing, and reinvigorating. We consider them as civic infrastructure to sensitize the infrastructural acts and conventions that are assembled for exploring inclusive and participatory ways of shaping urban futures. These practices, illustrated by examples in Adelaide, Dublin, and Boston, focus on capabilities not only to write code, access data, or design a prototype but also to devise diverse sociotechnical arrangements and power relations to disobey, question, and dissent from technocratic visions and practices. The article concludes by suggesting further examination of the summoning of political subjectivity from within established institutions to widen dissent and appropriation of the corporate smart city.
Key Words: citizen, infrastructure, political subjectivity, smart city, urban future.
I attended the Smart Cities and Regions Summit in Croke Park, Dublin, today and took part in the ‘smart spaces and smart citizens?’ panel. We were asked to produce a short opening statement and thought I’d share it here.
I’m going to discuss smart citizens by considering Dublin as a smart city. To start, I want to ask you a set of questions which I’d like you to respond to by raising a hand. Don’t be shy; this requires participation.
How many of you have a good idea as to what Smart Dublin is and what it does?
How many of you feel you have a good sense of smart city developments taking place in Dublin?
Would you be able to tell me much about the 100+ smart city projects that are taking place in the city in conjunction with Smart Dublin and it four local authority partners?
Would you be able to tell me much about the extent to which these projects engage with citizens?
Or how the technologies used impact citizens, either in direct or implicit ways?
Or whether Smart Dublin and the four local authorities have a guiding set of principles or a programme for citizen engagement or smart citizens?
You’re all people interested in smart cities. You’re here because it relates to your work in some way. You have a vested interest in knowing about smart cities.
Do you think that citizens in Dublin know about these projects, which might be taking place in their locality?
Do you think that they have sufficient knowledge to be able judge, in an informed way, a project’s merits?
Do you think they have an active voice in these projects’ conception, their deployment, the work that they do? In how any data generated are processed, analysed, shared, stored, and value extracted, etc.?
Do local politicians – citizen representatives – know about them? And do they have an active voice in smart city development in Dublin?
This panel is titled ‘Smart spaces and smart citizens’.
What is difficult to see in most smart city initiatives is the ‘smart citizen’ element. It seems that what is implied by ‘smart citizen’ is simply being a person living in a city where smart city technology is deployed, or being a person that uses networked digital technology as part of everyday life.
To create a smart citizen, all a state body or company apparently needs to do is say people should be at the heart of things, or enact a form of stewardship (deliver a service on behalf of citizens) and civic paternalism (decide what’s best for citizens), rather than citizens being meaningfully involved in the vision and development of the smart city.
In our own research concerning networked urbanism and smart cities from a social sciences perspective we have been interested in exploring these kinds of questions, and how the citizen fits into the smart city. It’s a central concern in our latest book published next month, ‘The Right to the Smart City’, which explores the smart city in relation to notions of citizenship and social justice.
What our research shows is that citizens can be varyingly positioned, and perform very different roles, in the smart city depending on the type of initiative.
It is perhaps no surprise then that citizens in numerous jurisdictions have started to push back against the more technocratic, top-down, marketised versions of the smart city – the on-going protests in Toronto over the Sidewalk Labs waterfront development being a prominent example. Instead, they demand more inclusive, empowering and democratic visions, with Barcelona’s notion of technological sovereignty often providing inspiration (see my recent piece comparing Toronto and Barcelona and links to articles and organisation websites).
It is difficult to argue that we are enabling ‘smart citizens’ if they are not informed, consulted or involved in the development and roll-out of smart city initiatives. As such, if we are truly interested in creating smart citizens then we need to make a meaningful move beyond the dominant tropes of stewardship and civic paternalism to approach smart cities in a smarter way.
For a fuller discussion see the opening and closing chapters of The Right to the Smart City, which are available as open access versions.
Kitchin, R., Cardullo, P. and di Feliciantonio, C. (2018) Citizenship, Social Justice and the Right to the Smart City. Pre-print Chapter 1 in The Right to the Smart City edited by Cardullo, P., di Feliciantonio, C. and Kitchin, R. Emerald, Bingley.
Kitchin, R. (2018) Towards a genuinely humanizing smart urbanism. Pre-print Chapter 14 in The Right to the Smart City edited by Cardullo, P., di Feliciantonio, C. and Kitchin, R. Emerald, Bingley.
This paper examines the neoliberal ideals that underpin participation and citizenship in the smart city and their replication mechanisms at European level. We examine self-proclaimed ‘citizen-focus’ projects funded by or aligned to the European Innovation Partnership for Smart Cities and Communities (EIP-SCC) by way of analysing policy documents and interviews with key stakeholders of smart city initiatives at European level and the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona (SCEWC 2017). We suggest that smart cities as currently conceived enact a blueprint of neoliberal urbanism and promote a form of neoliberal citizenship. Supra-national institutions like the EIP-SCC act at a multi-scalar level, connecting diverse forms of neoliberal urbanism while 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 rights, entitlements, community, participation, commons, and ideals beyond the market.
Key words: citizenship, smart cities, smart citizens, neoliberalism, European Union
CFP: AAG Annual Meeting, New Orleans, USA, April 10-14 2018: deadline October 6th.
“After the smart city?: The state of critical scholarship ten years on”
Today, the smart city imaginary is a recurring theme within critical urban geography and implies a particular set of rationalities. While it tends to centre upon digital technologies as a means to solve complex urban problems, it is also an entrepreneurial branding and boosting technique for cities. The implementation of smart city strategies transforms how cities operate and has resulted in an array of well-documented critiques around control, privacy, and technological determinist or solutionist visions of the urban. Furthermore, these data and software-driven solutions are often instrumental: merely treating symptoms, while failing to address the underlying problem. This has led to the idea that smart technologies are a solution looking for a problem.
This session seeks papers that explore approaches, policies, and practices that actively invoke and negotiate these issues, while also situating the smart city within wider, ongoing debates in and beyond urban geography. Thus, this session is not prescriptive and welcomes scholars interested in the smart city, data and digital transformations, digital infrastructure, technocratic and algorithmic governance, and the political economy of cities. In particular, we are interested in thinking through the ‘place’ of smart cities today: what have critical investigations of the topic achieved and where do we go from here?
Areas of potential interest for research papers may include, but are not limited to:
The nexus between governance, policy, technological innovation, and power;
How smart city initiatives are placed upon existing urban infrastructure and service provisions and the resulting consequences.
The role of the smart citizen.
The splintering effects of digital technologies.
The effects of technologies on everyday processes and environments.
Urban entrepreneurialism and the Smart City.
Please send titles and proposed abstracts (250 words max) to Aoife Delaney (Aoife.delaney@mu.ie) and Alan Wiig (alan.wiig@umb.edu) no later than Friday 6 October 2017.
The second set of videos from The Programmable City’s recent workshop “Creating Smart Cities”, Session 2: Citizenship and Democracy. [Session 1 here]
‘Actually existing smart citizens’: expertise and (non)participation in the making of the smart city
Taylor Shelton, University of Kentucky
Abstract
Amidst ongoing critiques of emerging smart city visions and policies has been a reflexive shift towards placing citizens at the center of these often technology-driven modes of urban planning and governance. From the writings of Anthony Townsend, Dan Hill and Saskia Sassen, among others, there has been a growing critical engagement with the smart city idea that seeks to position these new technologies in a more productive relationship, driven by the needs and goals of everyday citizens, rather than large technology companies. Indeed, as Kitchin (2015) has noted, these various critiques have actually led many of the leading corporate smart city advocates to tailor their more recent pitches towards a more citizen-centric framing. This paper reflects on ongoing research on and participation in a series of nascent smart city initiatives in Atlanta, Georgia and Louisville, Kentucky, asking: How are citizens and ideas of citizenship mobilized in the making of smart city policies and strategies on-the-ground in particular localities? How are citizens made, or allowed, to participate in the transformation of urban governance in an era of ‘smartness’? More specifically, this paper explores the ways that citizens are imagined within smart city policymaking exercises as central to both the means and ends of the smart city idea, despite their notable absence from such discussions. At the same time as the perspectives of everyday citizens are marginalized within official smart city policymaking, community-based organizations are seeking to use data as a way of engaging directly with the broader political structures from which these smart city initiatives emerge, albeit almost entirely separate from such conversations around smart cities. Instead, citizens and community organizations tend to frame their work around more conventional areas of urban policy – housing, jobs, education, transportation, environmental quality – rather than omnibus smart cities concept, speaking more directly to the specific concerns of their neighborhoods and everyday lives.
From start to smart: A 100 smart cities but where are the citizens?
Ayona Datta, King’s College London
Abstract
In January 2016, the Indian government announced the first 20 winners of its smart cities challenge. This is the start of the journey for these cities to becoming smart. As part of this challenge, each city developed a pan-city and area-based proposal to reflect their local context, resources, and priorities of citizens. At the end of this journey a total of 100 small to medium cities in India would have retrofitted their chosen urban areas with smart infrastructure, transport, housing and governance. The end of this journey for the 100 cities will seemingly mark the beginning of India’s new urban age.
In this paper, I search for the elusive citizens in India’s ambitious national urbanization programme of creating 100 Smart Cities. Examining the different smart city proposals submitted by the nominated cities for the smart cities challenge, I argue that each of these seek to present particular visions, imageries and fantasies of performing the smart citizen. These can be roughly presented as 1) Fast-tracked citizens- the near overnight production of a mega base of urban ‘population’ in each city for the mandatory citizen consultation in the smart city challenge. 2) Acquiescent citizens who contribute to open data, engage in e-governance and increase ‘civic discipline’ through citizen surveillance 3) Entrepreneurial citizens who contribute to economic growth and prosperity of the smart city, who are framed as careerist and heroic, but who individually and collectively take the risk and precarity of speculative markets on their shoulders.
Through these three figures, this paper will ask how the ‘citizen’ has become the biggest urban fantasy of India’s Smart city challenge, and what are the consequences of this fantasy. The answer to these questions will have profound consequences for the understanding of India’s urban futures and the urbanization of citizenships in the region.
[Video not available]
From Engagement to Participation in Future Smart Cities
Gyorgyi Galik and John Lynch, Future Cities Catapult
Abstract
The top-down deployment of smart technology has, in many cases, failed to fulfil the promises made by the leading technology companies. Meanwhile, citizens have rapidly become familiar with technologies that offer huge potential to quantify the urban context. The gap – wide citizen participation in the city enabled by technology – is the emergent “holy grail” of digital urbanism, and perhaps its most complex challenge.
This paper builds on the smart cities/engagement research project “OrganiCity”, and continuing PhD research “The Power to Act: Exploring agency, design and participation in cities”.
We look at some examples of projects emerging from the worlds of “citizen sensing” and “citizen engagement” and examine successes and failures. We do this through the lens of draft “principles for engagement” being tested in three cities across Europe, currently in an effort to provide a reference point in the rapidly emerging world of digital citizen participation.
Creating infrastructures with citizens: An exploration of Beta Projects, Dublin City Council
The relationships between government, citizens and engagements are changing. Several processes, developed separately, have influenced one another during their course of development and provided a distinctive backdrop to digital citizen engagement while cities become ‘smarter’ about engineering and interacting with connected infrastructures and citizens. Among them, civic hacking has sought ways to pursue long-term engagement with the city, community members and the problems they face. Local governments have experimented ways of engaging with citizens through digital technologies and/or social media. Enthusiastic civic hackers, when developing their projects, attempt to contact or involve public officials in their projects, earning their support, acquiring domain knowledge or obtaining necessary data for their causes. Government officials, curious or intrigued after being contacted by civic hackers, make them available to these initiatives and respond to their requests, as well as engaging with them to see if some of the work they cannot do within their organisations could have a different life developed through civic hacking initiatives.
At the nexus of this new landscape of digital citizen engagement in Dublin, as one of the global cities that are becoming ‘smart’, is ‘Beta Projects’ run by a loose network of staff members in Dublin City Council. In this paper, I explore how Beta Projects started, moved towards digital, engaged with civic hacking organisations, experimented alternative forms repurposing city infrastructure in the ‘Light Box’ project, reflected upon issues arising from this and other projects, discussed the problems they faced in relation to the city’s agenda of transitioning towards a smart city. By revisiting the steps and problems that Beta Projects encountered, I discuss some promises and problems when attempting to open up processes of (re-)making city infrastructure.
Abstract: Smart and data-driven technologies seek to create urban environments and systems that can operate efficiently and effortlessly. Yet, the design and implementation of such technical solutions are full of frictions, producing unanticipated consequences and generating turbulence that foreclose the creation of friction-free city solutions. In this paper, we examine the development of solutions for wait time predictions in the context of civic hacking to argue that a focus on frictions is important for establishing a critical understanding of innovation for urban everyday life. The empirical study adopted an ethnographically informed mobile methods approach to follow how frictions emerge and linger in the design and production of queue predictions developed through the civic hacking initiative, Code for Ireland. In so doing, the paper charts how solutions have to be worked up and strategies re-negotiated when a shared motivation meets different data sources, technical expertise, frames of understanding, urban imaginaries and organisational practices; and how solutions are contingently stabilised in technological, motivational, spatiotemporal and organisational specificities rather than unfolding in a smooth, linear, progressive trajectory.
