The Right to the Smart City 9781787691407, 9781787691391, 1787691403

Table of contents :
Front Cover
The Right to the Smart City
Copyright Page
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
About the Editors
About the Contributors
Chapter 1 Citizenship, Justice, and the Right to the Smart City
Introduction
Capital, Power, and the Smart City
Ethics and the Smart City
Citizenship and the Smart City
Social Justice and the Smart City
The Right to the Smart City
The Book
Acknowledgments
References
PART 1: CITIZENSHIP AND THE COMMONS
Chapter 2 Whose Right to the Smart City?
Introduction
The Right to the Smart City?
The Right to Participate: The Efficiency Paradigm for City Services
The Right to Centrality: The Smart City at the Margins
Case Study: Smart City Chennai
Smart City Chennai: The Urban Efficiency Paradigm
Smart City Chennai: Exclusion from the Center
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
References
Chapter 3 Reading the Neoliberal Smart City Narrative: The Political Potential of Everyday Meaning-making
Introduction
“Glimpses of Possibilities” in the Neoliberal Smart City
The Discursive Reification of the Neoliberal Smart City
The Radical Potential of Everyday Meaning-making
Conclusion
References
Chapter 4 Playable Urban Citizenship: Social Justice and the Gamification of Civic Life
Introduction
Social Justice and the (Digital) City
Gamification and Civic Engagement
Being Part of What Game?
Endnote: A Just Playable Urban Citizenship?
References
Chapter 5 The Right to the Datafied City: Interfacing the Urban Data Commons
Introduction: The Right to the Datafied City?
Urban Commons, Data Commons
Commons-as-interface
Interfacing the Datafied City
Discussion: From a Data-driven to a Data-enabled Right to the City
References
Chapter 6 Smart Commons or a “Smart Approach” to the Commons?
Introduction
Commons and Commoning
Maintaining and Defending the Commons in the Smart City
Google-Waze: A Matter of Collective Intelligence
Chattanooga, the “Gig City”
OWN: Informality and Commoning
Concluding Remarks
Acknowledgment
References
Chapter 7 Against the Romance of the Smart Community: The Case of Milano 4 You
Introduction
Community, Capitalism, and Consumption
Smart Milan
A Smart Community of Residents?
Toward a Dialectical Understanding of the “Smart Community”
Acknowledgment
References
PART 2: CIVIC ENGAGEMENT, PARTICIPATION AND THE RIGHT TO THE SMART CITY
Chapter 8 Sensors and Civics: Toward a Community-centered Smart City
Becoming Data
A Quantified Community?
A Community-centered Smart City?
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
References
Chapter 9 What is Civic Tech? Defining a Practice of Technical Pluralism
Introduction
Umbrella and Bucket Definitions
Between Social Movement and Government Reformers
Civic Tech as Technical Pluralism
Conclusion
References
Chapter 10 Hackathons and the Practices and Possibilities of Participation
Introduction
Methodological Consideration: API-assisted Data Collection
Hackathon Typology and Practices of Participation
Discussion
Conclusion
Acknowledgment
References
Chapter 11 Smart Cities by Design? Interrogating Design Thinking for Citizen Participation
It’s All about People, Isn’t It?
Contextualizing Design Thinking for Citizen Participation
The Emerging Business of Citizen (Dis-)empowerment
Design Thinking Spaces: Innovation Workshops
Design Thinking Facilitation: From Military to Industry to Everybody?
Design Thinking Tools: Between Stinky Fish and Double Diamonds
It’s All about Implementation, Isn’t It?
Acknowledgments
References
Chapter 12 Appropriating “Big Data”: Exploring the Emancipatory Potential of the Data Strategies of Civil Society Organizat...
Introduction
Data versus Knowledge, and Moving Toward a More Socially Just Smart Cities
The Performative and Emancipatory Work of Data Appropriation
“Reclaim the City”: Cyborg Activism and Inner City Politics
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
References
Chapter 13 Moving from Smart Citizens to Technological Sovereignty?
Introduction
From Smart City to Smart Citizens
From Smart Citizens toward Technological Sovereignty
Potentialities and Limits of Technological Sovereignty
References
Chapter 14 Toward a Genuinely Humanizing Smart Urbanism
Introduction
Future Present of Smart Cities
Present Future of Smart Cities
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
References
Index

Citation preview

THE RIGHT TO THE SMART CITY

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THE RIGHT TO THE SMART CITY

EDITED BY

PAOLO CARDULLO Maynooth University, Ireland

CESARE DI FELICIANTONIO University of Leicester, UK

ROB KITCHIN Maynooth University, Ireland

United Kingdom

North America

Japan

India

Malaysia

China

Emerald Publishing Limited Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK First edition 2019 Copyright r 2019 Emerald Publishing Limited Reprints and permissions service Contact: [email protected] No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. Any opinions expressed in the chapters are those of the authors. Whilst Emerald makes every effort to ensure the quality and accuracy of its content, Emerald makes no representation implied or otherwise, as to the chapters’ suitability and application and disclaims any warranties, express or implied, to their use. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-78769-140-7 (Print) ISBN: 978-1-78769-139-1 (Online) ISBN: 978-1-78769-141-4 (EPub)

ISOQAR certified Management System, awarded to Emerald for adherence to Environmental standard ISO 14001:2004. Certificate Number 1985 ISO 14001

Contents List of Figures

vii

List of Tables

ix

About the Editors

xi

About the Contributors

Chapter 1 Citizenship, Justice, and the Right to the Smart City Rob Kitchin, Paolo Cardullo and Cesare Di Feliciantonio

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1

PART 1: CITIZENSHIP AND THE COMMONS Chapter 2 Whose Right to the Smart City? Katharine S. Willis

27

Chapter 3 Reading the Neoliberal Smart City Narrative: The Political Potential of Everyday Meaning-making Jiska Engelbert

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Chapter 4 Playable Urban Citizenship: Social Justice and the Gamification of Civic Life Alberto Vanolo

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Chapter 5 The Right to the Datafied City: Interfacing the Urban Data Commons Michiel de Lange

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Chapter 6 Smart Commons or a “Smart Approach” to the Commons? Paolo Cardullo

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Chapter 7 Against the Romance of the Smart Community: The Case of Milano 4 You Cesare Di Feliciantonio

99

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Contents

PART 2: CIVIC ENGAGEMENT, PARTICIPATION AND THE RIGHT TO THE SMART CITY Chapter 8 Sensors and Civics: Toward a Community-centered Smart City Catherine D’Ignazio, Eric Gordon and Elizabeth Christoforetti

113

Chapter 9 What is Civic Tech? Defining a Practice of Technical Pluralism Andrew R. Schrock

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Chapter 10 Hackathons and the Practices and Possibilities of Participation Sung-Yueh Perng

135

Chapter 11 Smart Cities by Design? Interrogating Design Thinking for Citizen Participation Gabriele Schliwa

151

Chapter 12 Appropriating “Big Data”: Exploring the Emancipatory Potential of the Data Strategies of Civil Society Organizations in Cape Town, South Africa Nancy Odendaal

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Chapter 13 Moving from Smart Citizens to Technological Sovereignty? Ramon Ribera-Fumaz

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Chapter 14 Toward a Genuinely Humanizing Smart Urbanism Rob Kitchin

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Index

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List of Figures Chapter 2 Figure 2.1.

Map of Chennai with the Location of T. Nagar District Highlighted. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Figure 2.2.

Street Space in South Usman Road, T. Nagar, Chennai. . . .

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Figure 2.3.

Banner: “We Want Bread and Butter Not Smart City” Protest by National Hawker Federation, April 2016. . . . . .

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Chapter 11 Figure 11.1. Design Thinking Tools Encountered at Urban Innovation Workshops. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160

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List of Tables Chapter 1 Table 1.1.

Smart City Technologies.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Table 1.2.

Social Justice and Data-driven Harms. . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Chapter 2 Table 2.1. Table 2.2.

Excerpt from Smart City Chennai Proposals Summarizing Key Components of the Project. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Excerpts from Smart City Chennai Proposal.. . . . . . . . .

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Chapter 10 Table 10.1. Existing Hackathon Typology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

138 139 Table 10.3. Hackathon Typology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 Table 10.2. Hackathon Parts.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Chapter 11 Table 11.1. Selection of Design-led Innovation Workshops and Examples Encountered. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

156 Table 11.2. Examples of Design Thinking Schools and Organizations. . . 158 Chapter 13 Table 13.1. Barcelona’s Smart Citizen Flagship projects. . . . . . . . . .

181 Table 13.2. Barcelona’s Technological Sovereignty Areas of Intervention. 184 Table 13.3. Remaking the Smart City Agenda toward Technological Sovereignty. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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About the Editors Dr Paolo Cardullo is a postdoctoral researcher at The Programmable City at NIRSA, Maynooth University of Ireland. Previously, Associate Lecturer at Sociology Goldsmiths, University of London, where he defended his PhD in October 2013. He is a Zotero and FOSS evangelist and has published and peerreviewed for numerous journals: more info and publications from kiddingthecity.org Dr Cesare Di Feliciantonio is Marie Curie Research Fellow in the School of Geography, Geology and the Environment, University of Leicester. He holds a double PhD in Geography from Sapienza-University of Rome and KU Leuven. His articles have been published, among others, on Antipode, Geoforum, and International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. In 2018 he was the recipient of the Gabriele Zanetto Prize. Prof Rob Kitchin is a Professor in the Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute and principal investigator of The Programmable City and Building City Dashboards projects. He is the author/editor of 28 books and the editor of the journal, Dialogues in Human Geography. He was the recipient of the Royal Irish Academy’s Gold Medal for the Social Sciences.

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About the Contributors Elizabeth Christoforetti, Supernormal, USA, teaches at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Supernormal’s practice bridges the disciplines of architecture, urban design, and planning to bring increased sensitivity and systematization to urban space using improved quantitative methods. Christoforetti has conducted related research at the MIT Media Lab. Michiel de Lange is Assistant Professor at Utrecht University’s Department of Media and Culture Studies. He studies (mobile) media and urban culture. He is the co-founder of The Mobile City, a platform for the study of new media and urbanism, and the [urban interfaces] research group. https://blog.bijt.org Catherine D’Ignazio, Emerson College, USA, is an Assistant Professor and Visiting Faculty at the MIT Media Lab. Her work sits at the intersection of feminist technology, data, and civic engagement. Her forthcoming book from MIT Press, Data Feminism, co-authored with Lauren Klein, charts a course for more ethical and empowering data science practices in and with communities. Jiska Engelbert is Assistant Professor Media Studies at Erasmus University, Rotterdam. Her research focuses on the discursive construction of public issues under neoliberalism. She is a Senior Research Fellow (2018 2021) at the Centre for BOLD Cities and the Erasmus Institute for Public Knowledge, where she explores the political economy of smart cities. Eric Gordon, Emerson College, USA, is the founding director of the Engagement Lab and professor. He is the author of Net Locality: Why Location Matters in a Networked World (Blackwell 2011, with Adriana de Souza e Silva) and The Urban Spectator: American Concept Cities From Kodak to Google (Dartmouth 2010), and the editor (with Paul Mihailidis) of Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice (MIT Press 2016). Nancy Odendaal teaches city planning at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her research examines the interrelationship between infrastructure, space, and urban life at the margins. Her most recent work focuses on smart cities and technology appropriation in cities of the global South. Sung-Yueh Perng is Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology, Tunghai University, Taiwan. His research focuses on civic hacking to explore the influences of digital technologies on urban everyday life and governance. He has conducted research on Dublin and Boston and, in the future, on Taipei and other Asia-Pacific cities. Ramon Ribera-Fumaz is Director of the Urban Transformation and Global Change Laboratory (TURBA) at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute of the

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About the Contributors

Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain. His research centers on the understanding of the political economy of city economies and governance within global digital capitalism and the prefiguration of post-capitalist alternatives. Gabriele Schliwa is a postdoctoral researcher at the Utrecht University School of Governance. Her research interests focus on the interrelations between urban studies and design for governance innovation. Andrew R. Schrock received his PhD from the University of Southern California. His research broadly considers how people use communication technologies to re-configure family, community, and democratic institutions. Most recently, he has written extensively on the “civic tech” movement and organizing around public sector technology design. Alberto Vanolo, PhD in Spatial planning and local development at the Polytechnic of Turin, is Associate Professor of Political and Economic Geography at the University of Turin, Italy. His main research fields include urban studies and cultural geography. Katharine S. Willis is Associate Professor in the School of Art, Design, and Architecture at Plymouth University, UK. Her research interests include smart cities, digital technologies, and the role of space/place. She is co-author with Alex Aurigi of “Digital and Smart Cities” (Routledge, 2017).

Chapter 1

Citizenship, Justice, and the Right to the Smart City Rob Kitchin, Paolo Cardullo and Cesare Di Feliciantonio

Abstract This chapter 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 chapter 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 more troubling 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 operationalized in the smart city to date. We then follow this with a discussion of social justice and the smart city. In the fifth 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. Finally, we set out how the book seeks to answer our questions and extend our initial framing, exploring the extent to which the “right to the city” should be a fundamental principle of smart city endeavors. Keywords: Citizenship; social justice; smart cities; right to the city; ethics; political economy; governmentality

The Right to the Smart City, 1 24 Copyright r 2019 by Emerald Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved DOI: 10.1108/978-1-78769-139-120191001

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Introduction Since the 1950s and the birth of digital computing, the urban has become evermore entwined with the digital. Initially, computers were used to store and process city administration, were enrolled into Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems to monitor and control utility and other infrastructures, and used within academia and policy for modelling land use and transportation scenarios. By the late 1960s, cybernetic thinking led some to recast the city as a system of systems which could be digitally mediated and optimized (Forrester, 1969), though early deployments of such ideas failed to deliver on their promise (Flood, 2011; Light, 2004). In the 1980s and 1990s, personal computers began to become widespread in central and local government, along with specialist software (e.g., GIS), used in administration and the delivery of services. These computers started to become increasingly networked with the rapid growth of the Internet in the 1990s and 2000s, which was accompanied by a large investments in e-government (the delivery of services and interfacing with the public via digital channels) and e-governance (managing citizen activity using digital tools) (Castells, 1996). This also extended the networking of infrastructure, such as the widescale adoption of traffic management systems and surveillance cameras (e.g., CCTV) (Lyon, 1994). By the late 1990s, there was a fairly extensive literature that examined the myriad ways in which the digital was reshaping the politics, economy, culture, social relations, and functioning of cities (e.g., Castells, 1988, 1996; Graham & Marvin, 2001; Mitchell, 1995), with theses emerging with regard to “wired cities” (Dutton, Blumler, & Kraemer, 1987), the “city as bits” (Mitchell, 1995), the “computable city” (Batty, 1997), and “cyber cities” (Graham & Marvin, 1999). As the entwining of the digital and urban deepened throughout the 2000s with the emergence of ubiquitous computing and mobile ICT, these were accompanied by conceptual framings such as “digital cities” (Ishida & Isbister, 2000), “intelligent cities” (Komninos, 2002), “networked cities” (Hanley, 2004), and “sentient cities” (Shepard, 2011), among others (Kitchin, 2014; Willis & Aurigi, 2017). The smart city agenda is grounded in and emerges from this longer history of urban computing and networked urbanism. In simple terms, the smart city seeks to improve city life through the application of digital technologies to the management and delivery of city services and infrastructures and solving urban issues (see Table 1.1). Unlike other neologisms, the “smart city” quickly gained traction in industry, government, and academia from the late 2000s onwards to become a global urban agenda (see Söderström, Paasche, & Klauser, 2014; Willis and Aurigi, 2017). In part, this traction was driven by companies rapidly seeking new markets for their technologies in the wake of the global financial crash, and in part, by city administrations simultaneously seeking ways to do more with less through technical solutions given austerity cuts and to attract investment and boost local economies. This was aided by an already well-established neoliberal political economy that promoted the marketization and privatization of city services. Initial momentum grew, aided by the rapid formation of a wellorganized epistemic community (a knowledge and policy community) and advocacy

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Table 1.1. Smart City Technologies. Domain

Example Technologies

Government

E-government systems, online transactions, city operating systems, performance management systems. urban dashboards

Security and emergency services

Centralized control rooms, digital surveillance, predictive policing, coordinated emergency response

Transport

Intelligent transport systems, integrated ticketing, smart travel cards, bikeshare, real-time passenger information, smart parking, logistics management, transport apps, dynamic road signs, mobility apps, share-ride services

Energy

Smart grids, smart meters, energy usage apps, smart lighting

Waste

Compactor bins and dynamic routing/collection

Environment

IoT sensor networks (e.g., pollution, noise, weather, land movement, flood management), dynamically responsive interventions (e.g., automated flood defenses)

Buildings

Building management systems, sensor networks

Homes

Smart meters, app-controlled smart appliances, digital personal assistants

Source: Kitchin (2016).

coalition (a collective of vested interests) operating across scales from global to local, and a cohort of favorably minded technocrats embedded in government (Kitchin, Coletta, Evans, Heaphy, & Mac Donncha, 2017a). From its inception, the notion of the smart city has received sustained critique relating to how it: frames the city as systems rather than places; takes a technological solutionist approach; enacts technocratic forms of governance and reshapes governmentality; promotes corporatization and privatization of city services; prioritizes the values and investments of vested interests; reinforces inequalities; produces a number of ethical concerns relating to surveillance, predictive profiling, social sorting, and behavioral nudging; and potentially creates security vulnerabilities across critical infrastructures (see Datta, 2015; Greenfield, 2013; Hollands, 2008; Kitchin, 2014; Mattern, 2013; Townsend, 2013; Vanolo, 2014). In this book, we are particularly concerned with critique relating to issues of citizenship, social justice, and the “right to the city,” and the ways in which ordinary citizens’ lives are affected by the drive to create smart cities. Our concern is not to forward a line of argument that is simply “against the smart city”; after all, digital technologies are already extensively interwoven into the workings and everyday life of cities and produce many positive and

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enjoyable effects. Indeed, such technologies are, in Althusser’s (1971) terms, “seductive,” promising freedom and choice, convenience, productivity, optimization, and control (Kitchin & Dodge, 2011). However, seduction can be a veil, obfuscating the broader agenda and processes of neoliberalization and accumulation by dispossession that may disadvantage citizens in the long run (Leszczynski & Kitchin, in press). Instead, we seek to “reframe, reimagine and remake the smart city” (Kitchin, 2019, p. 219) as an emancipatory and empowering project, one that works for the benefit of all citizens and not just selected populations. This re-conception consists of highlighting further the politics and ethics of smart cities, and to move beyond the dominant postpolitical framing reproduced by its epistemic community and advocacy coalition; to reconceive notions of “smart” citizenship and the purposes and ideology of smart city endeavors in ways that are thoroughly political. This means not simply stating the need for citizen-focused or just smart cities at the level of the commonsensical, taken-forgranted, pragmatic, and practical, but to conceptualize what such notions consist of in concrete terms and how they can be operationalized to transform the smart city. This involves starting to work through a set of related questions, such as: • How are citizens framed and conceptualized within smart cities? • How are citizens expected to act and participate in the smart city? • How is public space and the urban commons framed and regulated in the smart city? • What sort of publics can be formed and what actions can they take? • What are the ethical implications of smart city approaches and systems? • To what extent are injustices embedded in city systems, infrastructures, and services and in their calculative practices? • What systems and structures of inequality are (re)produced within smart urbanism? • To what extent are forms of class, racism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, ableism, ageism, colonialism (re)produced in smart urbanism? • What models of citizenship are enacted within the smart city? • What forms of social justice operate in the smart city and what are their effects? • By whom and on what terms are these models of citizenship and justice being conceived and operationalized? • What kind of smart urbanism do we want to enact? What kind of smart city do we want to create and live in? • How can we move beyond the neoliberal smart city? In the rest of this chapter, we provide a framing for starting to think through and answer some of these questions drawing on the emerging literature and making connections with the chapters that follow. We have divided our discussion into five sections. In the next section, we detail the dominant neoliberal

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framing 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 more troubling ethical issues associated with smart city technologies and initiatives. In the third section, we examine how citizens and citizenship have been conceived and operationalized in the smart city to date, following this with a discussion of social justice and the smart city. In the final section, we set out the notion of a “right to the smart city,” making a case that this should be a fundamental principle of smart city endeavors.

Capital, Power, and the Smart City There is a plethora of work that has theorized and empirically excavated the ways in which capital and power drive the processes of urbanization and reproduce socio-spatial structures and relations of cities. Such work focuses attention on the circuits of capital accumulation, the operations of neoliberalism, imperialism, colonialism and nationalism, and the playing out of identity politics in shaping the urban condition across the globe (e.g., Castells, 1977; Harvey, 1973; Massey, 2007; Robinson, 2005). Cities, critical urban theory posits, “are sculpted and continually reorganized in order to enhance the profit-making capacities of capital” since they are “major basing points for the production, circulation, and consumption of commodities,” as well as themselves being intensely commodified (Brenner, Marcuse, & Mayer, 2012, p. 3). This continual unfolding shifts in shape and emphasis through the clash of vested interests, social forces, and political ideologies and is subject to instability, multiple setbacks and crises (e.g., overaccumulation, devalorization), but relentlessly prioritizes exchange-value (profit-oriented) over use-value (the satisfaction of basic needs) in urban development strategies (Brenner et al., 2012; Lefebvre, 1996). In other words, cities under capitalism operate for the benefit of a relatively small group of elite actors who own and control the means of production and reproduce inequalities and social and spatial divides (Harvey, 1973; Sassen, 1991). From this perspective, the smart city is the latest attempt to use and reconfigure the city as an accumulation strategy, forming a tech-led version of entrepreneurial urbanism (Hollands, 2008; Shelton, Zook, & Wiig, 2015), through which private interests seek to: deepen a neoliberal political economy, capturing public assets and services by offering technological solutions to urban problems; use financialization to capture and sweat or disrupt and replace private infrastructure and services; foster local economic development and attract foreign direct investment; drive real-estate investment; and set in place the architecture of neoliberal governmentality and governance. Through these strategies, the smart city enacts a new wave of “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey, 2008) and “capitalist enclosure” (De Angelis, 2007) that have significant consequences to the lives of citizens. With respect to capturing public assets, city administrations are under pressure to draw on the competencies held within industry to formulate “smart” urban policy and to deliver tech-led city services through public private

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partnerships, leasing, deregulation and market competition, and privatization (Shelton et al., 2015). Cities, it is argued, are behind the technology curve with respect to state-of-the-art ideas and systems for managing cities. They lack the core skills, knowledges, resources, and capacities to address pressing urban issues and maintain critical services and infrastructures, which are becoming more socially and technically complex and require multi-tiered specialist interventions (Kitchin et al., 2017a). Within this mindset, the place of the public sector is to act as broker, rather than service provider, with smart city units acting to source initial expertise and build partnerships. At the same time, companies seek to: capture private infrastructures and services and sweat these assets, seeking to extract value through minimizing maintenance and long-term investment and charging the highest bearable price depending on a user’s ability to pay (Morozov & Bria, 2018); or to disrupt existing public and private services and infrastructures, and their regulation and labor relations, by providing new techenabled platforms for example, Uber and Airbnb challenging traditional taxi and short-term accommodation markets. In both cases, smart city endeavors are part of a larger project of city assets (e.g., property, infrastructure, utilities, services) being captured and exploited through financialization (Christophers, 2011; Moreno, 2014). Beyond making the city a market in-and-of itself, the neoliberal smart city is an explicitly economic project, aiming to attract foreign direct investment, fostering innovative indigenous start-up sectors or digital hubs, and attracting mobile creative elites. Cities around the world have created “smart districts,” designating an area of the city as a testbed for companies to pilot new technologies (Evans, Karvonen, & Raven, 2016; Halpern, LeCavalier, Calvillo, & Pietsch, 2014). In the UK, the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills has funded smart city initiatives with the aim of positioning the UK as a leading exporter of smart city consultancy and technologies (Taylor-Buck & While, 2017). At the European scale, the European Innovation Partnership for Smart Cities and Communities (EIP-SCC) funds smart city projects where a key measure of impact is the attraction of significant private investment in the delivery of public services and a reduction in “technical and financial risks in order to give confidence to investors for investing in large scale replication” (European Commission, 2016, p. 111), so that eventually “private capital can take over further investments at low technical and financial risks” (European Commission, 2016, p. 108). In other words, the risks of creating new products are socialized in exchange for the privatization of services and, eventually, profits. In addition to urban-focused economic development, the smart city has become a key component of property-led development. Here, smart city technologies are a central feature of new real-estate projects, operating as an attractor for investors and future residents, as well as providing a shopfront for those technologies for other prospective development sites. Probably the most wellknown such development is Songdo in South Korea. A part of the Incheon Free Economic Zone (IFEZ) at the edge of the Seoul metropolitan area, Songdo, is one of three large-scale developments initiated in 2003. The IFEZ was explicitly an economic development initiative aimed at driving domestic growth and

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consolidating South Korea’s position in the global economy. From this perspective, the greenfield smart city was a means to create an urban growth machine designed to attract investment capital, anchor tenants, and global workers, with a side benefit of creating a potential exportable model of “smart” development (Carvalho, 2012; Shin, Park, & Sonn, 2015; Shwayri, 2013). Other examples include the 100 smart city developments in India (see Datta, 2015), Masdar in United Arab Emirates (Cugurullo, 2013), and Hudson Yards in New York (Mattern, 2017) (also see Karvonen, Cugurullo, & Caprotti, 2018; Di Feliciantonio, this volume). In areas where smart city practices are used in regeneration programs, such as Living Labs, they act as a magnet for the in-flow and retention of “creative classes” and as gateways for gentrification (Cardullo, Kitchin, & Di Feliciantonio, 2018). Within such new smart city developments, and through the deployment of smart city technologies across existing cities, the modes of governmentality and governance are shifting, further deepening the neoliberal project. For Foucault (1991), governmentality is the logics, rationalities, and techniques that render societies governable and enable government and other agencies to enact governance. For many analysts, the digital era of ubiquitous computing, big data, and machine learning is producing a shift in how societies are managed and controlled. The contention is that governance is becoming more technocratic, algorithmic, automated, and predictive in nature (Amoore, 2013; Kitchin & Dodge, 2011), shifting governmentality from disciplinary forms of management (designed to corral and punish transgressors and instill particular habits, dispositions, expectations, and self-disciplining) toward social control, in which their behavior is explicitly or implicitly steered or nudged. Governmentality is no longer principally about subjectification (molding subjects and restricting action) but also about control (modulating affects, desires, and opinions and inducing action within prescribed comportments) (Braun, 2014). Vanolo (2014) names this as “smartmentality,” enacted through technologies such as control rooms and dashboards, smart grids and meters, traffic control rooms, and smartphone apps that seek to modulate behavior and produce neoliberal subjects (Kitchin, Coletta, & McArdle, 2017b). For example, as Davies (2015) notes with respect to Hudson Yards, a development that will be saturated with sensors and embedded computation, residents and workers will be continually monitored and modulated across the entire complex by an amalgam of interlinked systems. The result will be a quantified community with numerous overlapping calculative regimes designed to produce a certain type of social and moral arrangement, rather than people being regulated into conformity.

Ethics and the Smart City The technologies detailed in Table 1.1 are designed to manage and control city infrastructure and services. As noted above, almost without exception, they are operated either on behalf of the state or for the generation of profit and they directly affect the management and regulation of society. A key aspect of their

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operation is that they produce, process, and extract value and act upon streams of big data that are highly granular and indexical (directly linked to people, households, objects, territories, and transactions) (Kitchin, 2014). Thus, smart city technologies raise a number of ethical issues concerning privacy, datafication, dataveillance and geosurveillance, profiling, social sorting, anticipatory governance, and nudging, that have significant consequence for how citizens are conceived and treated (e.g., as data points, subjects to be actively managed and policed, as consumers), and can work to reproduce and reinforce inequalities (Kitchin, 2016; Taylor, Richter, Jameson, & Perez del Pulgar, 2016). For example, a range of smart technologies has transformed geo-location tracking, eroding movement privacy (Kitchin, 2016; Leszczynski, 2017). Many cities are saturated with remote controllable digital CCTV cameras that can track individual pedestrians, increasingly aided by facial and gait recognition software. Large parts of the road network are monitored by inductive loops, traffic cameras, and automatic number plate recognition cameras that can identify vehicles. In a number of cities, sensor networks have been deployed across street infrastructure such as bins and lampposts to capture and track phone identifiers such as MAC addresses. The same technology is also used within malls and shops to track shoppers, sometimes linking with CCTV to capture basic demographic information such as age and gender. Similarly, some cities have installed a public wifi mesh which can capture and track the IDs of devices that access the network. Many buildings and public transport systems monitor smart cards used to access them. Smartphones continuously communicate their location to telecommunications providers, either through the cell masts they connect to, or the sending of GPS coordinates, or their connections to wifi hotspots. Such data gathering has profound implications for privacy, which many consider a basic human right. In addition, smart city technologies potentially create a number of other privacy harms through the sharing and analysis of data trails (Kitchin, 2016). A key product of data brokers are predictive profiles of individuals as to their likely tastes and what goods and services they are likely to buy, their likely value or worth to a business, and their credit risk and how likely they are to pay a certain price or be able to meet re-payments. Such profiles can produce “predictive privacy harms” (Baracos & Nissenbaum, 2014; Crawford & Schultz, 2014), used to socially sort and redline populations, selecting out certain categories to receive a preferential status and marginalizing and excluding others. In addition, such profiles can be used to socially sort places to receive certain policy interventions or marketing as practiced by the geodemographics industry (Graham, 2005). Specific predictive privacy harms can be produced through location tracking. For example, tracking data that reveal a person regularly frequents gay bars might lead to the inference that the person is likely to be gay which, if shared (e.g., through advertising sent to the family home or via social media), could cause personal harm. Similarly, co-proximity and co-movement with others might be used to infer political, social, and/or religious affiliation, potentially revealing membership of particular groups (Leszczynski, 2017). Such inferences can generate inaccurate characterization that then stick to and precede an

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individual. This has led to concerns that a form of “data determinism” is emerging in which individuals are not simply profiled, judged, and treated on the basis of what they have done, but on a prediction of what they might do in the future (Ramirez, 2013). Data determinism is most clearly expressed in forms of anticipatory governance, such as that used in predictive policing, where predictive analytics are used to assess likely future behaviors or events and to direct appropriate action (Goodman, 2015; Harcourt, 2006). A number of US police forces are now using predictive analytics to anticipate the location of future crimes and to direct police officers to increase patrols in those areas. For example, the Chicago police force uses arrest records, phone records, social media, and other data to produce both general area profiling to identify hotspots and guide patrols, and more specific profiling that identifies individuals within those hotspots (Jefferson, 2018). In such cases, a person’s data shadow does more than following them; it precedes them. Further, a number of police forces have invested heavily in new “smart” command-and-control centers that employ enhanced and extensive multi-instrumented surveillance (e.g., high definition CCTV, drone cameras, sensors, community reporting) to direct on-the-ground policing (Wiig, 2017). In addition, police forces monitor the communications of known activists to try and anticipate and control social unrest (Paasche, 2013). In other words, smart technologies can be used to suppress dissent and reproduce a particular polity. Smart city technologies, the data they generate and the analytics applied to them, can thus have significant negative direct and in-direct impact on peoples’ everyday lives (Kitchin, 2016). They also ensure that any “right to the smart city” derived through the present configuration of technologies is dependent on systems that inherently surveil and control. As such, there is a potentially heavy cost for the freedom and choices these technologies claim to offer, which requires careful consideration and redress.

Citizenship and the Smart City The discussion so far regarding power, capital, governmentality, and ethics reveals the dominant ways in which the citizen is framed within the smart city: as a data-point, a targeted consumer, a user, an investor, a sorted individual, and a surveilled, controlled and policed subject. In a previous paper, we reworked Arnstein’s (1969) well-known “ladder of citizen participation” to examine the various citizen roles enacted across smart city initiatives (see Cardullo & Kitchin, 2018a). What we found was that citizens most often occupy non-participatory, consumer, or tokenistic positions and are framed within political discourses of stewardship, technocracy, paternalism, and the market, rather than being active, engaged participants where smart city initiatives are conceived in terms of rights, citizenship, the public good, and the urban commons. Citizens are to be steered, nudged, and controlled; they can browse, consume, and act. If there is civic engagement, it is in the form of a participant, tester, or

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player who provides feedback or suggestions, rather than being a proposer, cocreator, decision-maker, or leader. Similarly, Cowley, Joss, and Dayot (2018) identify four modalities of “publicness” which denote how citizens are positioned within smart cities: “service user” in which citizens are framed as the consumers of services, “entrepreneurial” in which citizens are actively enrolled into co-creating and innovating, “political” in which citizens take an active role in decision-making and deliberation, and “civic” in which citizens take part in grassroots community activities that are not directly oriented toward market activity. They note that there is a significant variation of publicness across initiatives and cities, mostly favoring “service user.” In contrast, Shelton and Lodato’s (in press) study of Atlanta’s smart city program notes that while the city administration and companies attending their events often talked of producing a citizen-focused smart city, in practice, citizens were included as two empty signifiers and citizens themselves were excluded from the policy-making arena (see also Datta, 2018). The first is as a “general citizen,” a kind of catch-all community of seemingly homogenous recipients or consumers of services. Here, the smart city operates within the framework of stewardship (delivering on behalf of citizens) and civic paternalism (deciding what’s best for citizens), rather than citizens being meaningfully involved in the vision and development of the smart city. The second is the “absent citizen,” referring to all those diverse communities that hold differing identities, values, concerns, and experiences to the “general citizen” (which is largely framed as White, male, heterosexual, able-bodied, and middle class) and to the absence of citizens from the processes of formulating and implementing smart city strategies and programs. In addition to these, a third figure can be added that appears often in other smart city documents and programs, the “active citizen,” an entrepreneurial citizen that builds civic tech for community development through hackathons and other events (Joss, Cook, & Dayot, 2017; Townsend, 2013), though within any city, this usually consists of a relatively small number of people who work in the tech sector and on problems set by sponsoring companies and administrations (Perng, Kitchin, & MacDonncha, 2018). And yet, most smart city initiatives claim to be “citizen-focused” or “citizencentric.” The disconnect between supposed discursive intent and reality is caused by two factors. First, initiatives that were critiqued for their top-down, technocratic nature have sought to silence detractors or bring them into the fold, while keeping the central mission of capital accumulation and technocratic governance intact, by re-branding their endeavors as “citizen-centric” (Kitchin, 2015). Citizen-centric in such cases operates largely as an empty signifier, often calling for citizen inclusion or searching for the “missing citizen” but retaining the underlying neoliberal ethos and mode of governmentality (Hill, 2013; Sartori, 2015; Shelton & Lodato, in press). Second, funding programs designed to encourage city administrations to become a smart city, such as the European Commission’s EIP-SCC, structurally preclude any serious intent to include citizens in the formulation of projects (Cardullo & Kitchin, 2018b). Putting together a large, multi-million euro bid is time-consuming, complex, and largely unfunded task, and adding “non-expert” citizens into the process creates a

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significant additional overhead. What this means is that in most cases, the focus, objectives, and solutions are set before any problems and suggestions from citizens can be taken into account, and it is only when the funding is in hand that engagement occurs with local communities. Such citizen engagement has to meet pre-determined milestones and fulfil the deliverables of the contract, meaning participants have limited scope to subsequently reframe the initiative around their concerns and desires (Cardullo & Kitchin, 2018b). This discussion of citizen roles and framing starts to reveal the dominant neoliberal model of citizenship that underpins and operates within the smart city. In his classic text, Citizenship and Social Class (1950), Marshall denoted three sets of rights that define the citizenship status of citizens: civil/legal (e.g., right to own property; freedom of speech; liberty of the person, and the right to justice), political (e.g., right to vote and participate in the exercise of political power), and social (e.g., right to a certain level of economic welfare and security). To these rights, there have been added cultural/symbolic rights that concern recognition, respect, and protections with respect to identity (gender, race, sexuality, disability, faith, etc.). From this perspective, citizenship is “a set of practices (cultural, symbolic and economic) and a bundle of rights and duties (civil, political and social) that define an individual’s membership in a polity (usually a nation-state)” (Isin & Wood, 1999, p. 4). In contrast, neoliberalism shifts citizenship away from inalienable rights and the common good toward a conception rooted in individual autonomy and freedom of “choice,” and personal responsibilities and obligations (e.g., Brown, 2016; Ong, 2006; Vanolo, 2016). Here, the onus is on the individual to navigate and negotiate the provision of services and levels of access, framed within “commonsensical” constraints and neoliberal governmentality, based on their personal social, political, and economic capital. As such, there is a reorientation of citizenship toward market principles and the market acting as a “means of regulating and coordinating the activities of numerous actors without direction from a single controlling centre” (Hindess, 2002, p. 140). As the work of city administrations is marketized, deregulated, and privatized, the political and social aspects of citizenship likewise become transformed: instead of rights there are choices, with citizens framed increasingly as consumers able to select options on the basis of their ability to afford them. In the neoliberal smart city, “choice” is extended in space and time thanks to the proliferation of interconnected and location-aware devices. This is having profound effects on governmentality. Smart technologies, in the form of networked sensors and real-time big data streams, establish a neoliberal subject grounded in individual responsibility for instance, by counting steps or measuring diets, analyzing one’s own data, and then recalibrating selfbehavior (see Davies, 2015). Han (2017, p. 14) calls it “smartpolitics,” arguing that the politics of discipline and punishment is being replaced by exploitation of the psychic realm: “instead of forbidding and depriving, [neoliberalism] works through pleasing and fulfilling.” This chimes with the notion that software is “seductive” because it promises rewards for use, but at the same time, it conditions through automation and forms of control (Kitchin & Dodge, 2011). With

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the coupling of personal and environmental sensor data with the affordance of digital networking technologies, smartness can lead to a “gamification effect” which constitutes notions of “good” or “bad” citizen/user through disciplinary dispositives of ordering or ranking (Vanolo, in this volume; see also Gabrys, 2014). According to Han (2017), the neoliberal subject is not a “labourer” any more, but a “project.” Even in smart city initiatives that seek more effective forms of active citizenship and citizen empowerment for example, Living Labs, citizen science, open source software, and sharing platforms participation is achieved by co-opting citizen contributions into wider economic and neoliberal imperatives (Cardullo et al., 2018; McLaren & Agyeman, 2015; Perng et al., 2018). The paradox of fostering increased choice with less meaningful participation for citizens is due to the contradictory coming together of forms of technocratic and market-driven governance with poorly understood and practiced notions of conviviality, commoning, civic deliberation, resource sharing, trust building, and other face-to-face forms of confrontation and living that make polis and communities work (Cardullo & Kitchin, 2018b). While claiming to increase meaningful forms of direct participation, neoliberal governance works within structuring bureaucratic, technological, and ideological path dependencies and representational practices that defines a citizenship regime (Cardullo & Kitchin, 2018b; Joss et al., 2017) and often hinges on computational forms of participation which are set already within circumscribed software environments and solutions (Gabrys, 2014; Kitchin et al., 2017b). As Joss et al. (2017, p. 32) note, understanding the citizenship regime in operation within a smart city initiative needs to unpack: the “distribution of responsibility between the individual, the community, the market, and the state”; “the rights and obligations, which establish the boundaries of a political community”; and “the governing practices, including modes of citizen engagement and access to the state.” While this work has begun, including how postcolonial forms of citizenship are enacted in the Global South (Datta, 2018), there is much still to do across technologies, programs, and places.

Social Justice and the Smart City Linked to the notion of citizenship, and the roles, rights, and entitlements of citizens, is the notion of social justice and the expected and acceptable ways in which people are treated and the conditions in which they live. Social justice relates to the fair treatment of people in particular circumstances and how people should act (Smith, 1994). At a general level then, social justice concerns morality and human rights, where a right is an “obligation embedded in some social or institutional context where expectation has a moral force” (Smith, 1994, p. 36). In other words, moral rights are those things that we as members of a society expect as members, such as freedom of expression, access to accommodation, to vote in elections, full recourse to the law, access to education and medical treatment, etc. Such rights though are not given and inalienable, but are often highly contested, negotiated or imposed by members of a society. As

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Barry (1989) notes, theories of social justice are theories about the kind of social arrangements that can be defended. Indeed, there are a number of theories of social justice, with each theory appealing to a different form of authority, logic and what matters most in life, and which justifies or challenges socio-spatial processes that discriminate against, marginalize, and exclude some members of society (Harvey, 1996). In general, theories of social justice fall into four broad types: distributional (fair share), procedural (fair treatment), retributive (fair punishment for wrongs), and restorative (righting of wrongs) (see Sabbagh & Schmitt, 2016). Here, we want to consider the first two in relation to the smart city, though the effect on these can be shaped significantly by how punishments for wrong-doing are administered: in other words, if there is no effective sanction for social sorting and redlining within smart city initiatives, for example, then the moral argument with respect to distributional and procedural unfairness will have less traction. Importantly, which theory of social justice one subscribes to fundamentally alters how one understands fairness and rights and what one might consider to be a just smart city. Table 1.2 provides a snapshot of the main principles of seven theories and how they might apply in relation to some of the ethical issues of dataveillance, social/spatial sorting, anticipatory governance, and dynamic pricing that differentially affect groups of citizens within the smart city (for a fuller discussion of social justice theories with respect to cities and urban geography, see Harvey, 1973, 1996; Heynen, Aiello, Keegan, & Luke, 2018; Laws, 1994; Mitchell, 2003; Smith, 1994). What Table 1.2 highlights is that it is important to unpack the logics and principles as to how present smart cities are imagined and produced as “just” or “unjust” cities. As Don Mitchell (2003) notes, without such normative critique, the arguments used by smart city proponents will remain unchallenged in their claims to a commonsense, pragmatic, and non-ideological approach to urban issues. Vanolo (this volume) provides an example of such work using Harvey’s theory of social justice to interrogate gamification and nudge in smart city systems. Equally, Table 1.2 makes clear that it is not simply enough to say one is interested in creating a “just smart city,” as if the meaning of such a statement is self-evident. Indeed, for a libertarian, a neoliberal approach that prioritizes the free-market and individual autonomy and supports the notion of the survival of the fittest rather than a welfare state would argue that the neoliberal smart city and its attendant divides and inequalities are inherently just as one is treated as one deserves or can afford. Such a position is considered highly unjust by egalitarians, utilitarians, Marxists, and feminists. In other words, it is necessary for those seeking to create a normative argument for an alternative smart city vision to start to articulate the principles of a just smart city perhaps organized with respect to conviviality, commoning, equality, civic deliberation, resource sharing, and social reproduction and how these would work in practice. This does not mean that one should halt seeking to attend to perceived injustices in the absence of such articulated principles, working in a pragmatic, instrumental, and practical register (through activism and advocacy). Rather, it means that this should ideally be complemented with a nuanced, political, and normative

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Table 1.2. Social Justice and Data-driven Harms. Theory of Social Justice

Application to Data-driven Harms

Egalitarianism argues for equality in terms of distribution of wealth and power across all members of a society regardless of ability and inheritance

Egalitarians would see data-driven harms and differential treatment as an affront to their principles of equality and demand that it should be removed or made equal in effects across all citizens

Utilitarianism seeks the greater good for the greatest number

Utilitarians would treat the problem as a social nuisance that ought to addressed for the greater good as it reproduces and deepens inequalities and their long-term effects, or that it should be tolerated for greater good if benefits outweigh harms

Libertarianism prioritizes individual autonomy over the state and society and suggests that the free-market is inherently just

Libertarians would put the rights of data extractors and profilers at a premium and what happens between the parties involved is a private matter, with citizens receiving the treatment they deserve or can afford

Contractarianism seeks to find a distributional arrangement of resources that all involved considers just (not equal)

Contractarians would look at the problem from all sides, arguing that if one group is unwilling to tolerate such data-driven harms then nobody should and the systems should be dismantled

Marxism argues that society has to be restructured away from its current capitalist base into a society where the full value of an individual’s contribution is rewarded

Marxists would argue that system that led to surveillance capitalism needs to be changed to a social democracy where people are not discriminated, exploited, and alienated

Communitarianism rejects both individual self-determination and state sanctioned arrangements and promotes the ideas of community and shared practices and values

Communatarianists would suggest that within a community system based upon shared experiences and commonality, such a system would not have arisen and such principles need to be adopted

Feminism argues for the redistribution of power, so that power relations between different groups become more just

Feminism would argue for end to practices of discrimination and a redistribution of power relations so that citizens have a much stronger say in how such systems work and receive fair treatment

Source: Reworked from Harvey’s (1996) account of these theories with respect to lead paint poisoning in rented accommodation.

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argument that undermines the discourses and practices that support harmful and unjust outcomes and shifts the terrain of the debate in progressive ways. One way that such work has been advanced is through the political argument of the “Right to the City,” which has its roots in Lefebvre’s Marxist-inspired ideas of social justice.

The Right to the Smart City Henry Lefebvre (1996 [1967]) built his influential concept, “The Right to the City,” around the idea that citizens should not just have the right to occupy and use space, but that space should be shaped according to its inhabitants’ needs (Purcell, 2002). For Isin (2000, p, 14), the right to the city is “the right to wrest the use of the city from the privileged new masters and democratise its space”: it is the right of the excluded, the distressed, and the alienated to demand and receive the material (e.g., a living wage, shelter) and non-material (e.g., recognition, respect, dignity) necessities of life (Marcuse, 2012). It is a demand that the rights of private property and the profit rate do not trump all other rights; that the current “right to the city, as it is now constituted […], restricted in most cases to a small political and economic elite who are in a position to shape cities more and more after their own desires,” is radically reconfigured (Harvey, 2008, p. 38). As such, the “right to the city” “consist[s] of the right of all city dwellers to fully enjoy urban life with all of its services and advantages the right to habitation as well as taking direct part in the management of cities the right to participation” (Fernandes, 2007, p. 208). This includes citizens possessing a suite of related rights, such as “the right to information, the right of expression, the right to culture, the right to identity in difference and in equality, the right to self-management, […] the right to public and non-public services” (Fernandes, 2007, p. 208), as well as the right to free movement, the right to occupy public spaces and to protect the commons from private ownership, the right to meetings and gathering, and the right to political representation and to vote. It is the right for inhabitants to participate fully in the production of urban space “the right to control the urbanization process and to institute new modes of urbanization” (Harvey, 2008, p. 40) not simply be the recipient of the practices of stewardship and civic paternalism enacted by city administrations and the market (Mitchell, 2003). In other words, the right to the city is “a moral claim, founded on fundamental principles of justice” (Marcuse, 2012), and it is a direct challenge to the inequities and injustices of urban capitalism and neoliberalism. More recent extensions to the idea, important in the context of the smart city and its reliance on digital, networked technologies, and the production and analysis of big data, are the “right to the digital city” (de Lange & de Waal, 2013), “digital rights to the city” (Shaw & Graham, 2017a), and the “informational right to the city” (Shaw & Graham, 2017b). de Lange and de Waal (2013) are interested in the right to appropriation in the smart city and seek to advance an alternative form of ownership, one not grounded in contracts and proprietary

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rights but rather in a “sense of belonging to a collective place […] and [a] willingness to share a private resource with the collective in order to allow other citizens to act, without infringing on other people’s right of ownership.” Here, key infrastructures and resources, such as municipal data, are corralled within a commons and citizens have the right to use smart technologies to help solve shared issues by “networked publics” who convene around a shared matter of concern. Shaw and Graham (2017b) are concerned that in an age of big data and data-driven urbanism citizens have the right to understand what data are being generated about them and places, within a framework which guarantees transparency with respect to how these data are compiled into information and the uses to which they are put, and thus have the ability to challenge and reconfigure those uses. More broadly, Isin and Ruppert (2015) argue that, given the ubiquitous nature of digital technologies in everyday life, there is a need for digital citizens to possess a suite of digital rights. Indeed, as Attoh (2011) notes, the right to the city “constitutes not a singular right, but a set of rights.” At the same time, Marcuse (2012, p. 34), makes it clear that the “right to the city is a unitary right, a single right that makes claim to a city in which all […] separate and individual rights […] are implanted. It is The right to the city, not rights to the city. It is a right to social justice, which includes but far exceeds the right to individual justice.” In this sense, it is a common right, not an individual right, and exceeds individual liberty (Harvey, 2008). Marcuse (2012) notes an “analogous concept might be that of citizenship […] that provides all rights as a right to the single status of citizenship.” Indeed, the concept highlights the vital link between the emancipatory organization and operation of cities and more empowering forms of citizenship and social justice. As Marcuse (2012) details, achieving such a coupling requires a significant shift in the nature of social relations as “[t]o gain rights for those that do not have them will involve eliminating some rights for those that do: the right to dispossess others, to exploit, to dominate, to suppress, to manipulate the conduct of others.” Indeed, as Mayer (2012, p. 35) argues, in Lefebvre’s terms, the right to the city is “not about inclusion in a structurally unequal and exploitative system, but about democratizing cities and their decision making processes.” As Don Mitchell (2003, p. 19) notes, this sense of democracy requires systemic change in the underlying political economy, so that, “the use-value that is the necessary bedrock of urban life would finally be wrenched free from its domination by exchange-value.” In other words, pursuing the right to the city means creating cities that are not rooted in and driven-by capitalism. It is only on these terms, Harvey contends, that a “genuinely humanizing urbanism” can be enacted (1973, p. 314; see Kitchin, this volume). That said, many who seek a fairer society are not pursuing revolution, but rather a more equitable and inclusive set of social relations within the existing structural asymmetries of capitalism (Marcuse, 2012; Mayer, 2012). Nonetheless, the right to the city is a rallying cry for transformative political mobilization to create such a humanizing urbanism, a more emancipatory and empowering city. But what would such a smart city look like in practice? How can a “right to the smart city” be achieved? There are few examples of progressive smart cities,

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but Barcelona’s recent reorientation of its smart city ambitions offers some pointers (also see Ribera-Fumaz, this volume). Under a right-wing government, Barcelona was a blueprint for neoliberal smart urbanism, partnering with multinationals, such as CISCO, and performing various smart city initiatives with aggressive self-promotion, as well as initiating the Smart City Expo and World Congress to promote smart cities more globally (March & Ribera-Fumaz, 2016). Since May 2015, however, there has been a new political and organizational approach to smart cities. This has included making smart city initiatives much more citizen-centric and participatory, adopting the concept of “technological sovereignty” as a new form of citizenship, and appointing a new commissioner of Technology and Digital Innovation. Technological sovereignty is the notion that technology should be orientated to and serve local residents, and be owned as a commons, rather than applying a universal, market-orientated, proprietary technology (Galdon, 2017; Morozov & Bria, 2018). Here, there is a commitment to using open source technologies and to retaining ownership and control of its data infrastructure while guaranteeing access for its citizens (Galdon, 2017). A new set of experiments with open data, control of personal data, civic apps, and crowdsourced sensors are connecting citizens to technology without curtailing their rights and entitlements (Bria, 2017). Further, service provision (electricity and water) is being re-municipalized and there are experiments with universal basic income and forms of rent control. Barcelona has thus sought to re-politicize the smart city and to shift its creation and control away from private interests and the state toward citizens and communities, civic movements, and social innovation. The city’s attempt to re-envisage the smart city around technological sovereignty offers a different form of smart citizenship, one that seems much more grounded in the hopes and politics of the “right to the city” agenda. Beyond the Barcelona example, a number of other cities are considering or have implemented specific measures to address various concerns relating to the neoliberal smart city. Morozov and Bria (2018, p. 23) classify these into: “those offering an alternative regime for dealing with citizen-produced data; those promoting an alternative, more cooperative model of service provision […] which does not rely on or promote data extractivism by a handful of giant tech firms; those seeking to control the activities of platforms like Airbnb or Uber […]; and those promoting and building alternative infrastructures to compete with Silicon Valley.” In addition, within many cities, there are bottom-up, communitydriven, and activist initiatives that seek to enact a different kind of smart city. It is clear, nonetheless, that creating the right to the smart city will require a ground-swell of action by social and political movements to demand change and to formulate and implement alternative configurations, deployments, and uses of smart city technologies. As Morozov and Bria (2018) note, however, it is not a matter of deciding which strategy comes first, “technological sovereignty” or the right to inhabitation through, say, social housing and accessible services: both struggles are valid. Rather, this is a matter of understanding the limits and possibilities of each strategy and integrating one inside the others.

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The Book The role of critical urban studies in enacting the right to the smart city is to “expose, propose, and politicize” (Marcuse, 2007). As Marcuse (2012, p. 37) elaborates, “Expose in the sense of analyzing the roots of the problem and making clear and communicating that analysis to those that need it and can use it. Propose, in the sense of working with those affected to come up with actual proposals, programs, targets, strategies, to achieve the desired results. Politicize, in the sense of clarifying the political action implications of what was exposed and proposed and the reasoning behind them, and supporting organizing around the proposals by informing action.” This is the ambition of this book: to expose, propose, and politicize the smart city, to envisage an alternative smart city founded on the principles of the “right to the city.” Each chapter seeks to elaborate a particular aspect of such an endeavor and is an outcome of a workshop held at Maynooth University in September 2017, funded by the European Research Council (ERC-2012-AdG 323636-SOFTCITY). The book has been divided into two parts. The first part examines issues such as citizenship, social justice, and the commons, and tends toward a more conceptual discussion, though the chapters all include empirical examples. In Chapter 2, Katharine Willis examines who is and is not included within smart city visions, focusing on the urban poor, street traders, and those who live in informal settlements in Chennai, India. She contends that rather than creating a right to the city, smart urbanism is further reinforcing and reproducing the spatial and economic exclusion of marginalized groups. Jiska Engelbert then examines the critique of neoliberalism at the heart of smart city initiatives, and its assumptions concerning civic participation, and considers whether politically meaningful agency by ordinary citizens is possible in the neoliberal smart city. In Chapter 4, Alberto Vanolo examines the ethical and political implications of gamification in smart city technologies through the lens of governmentality and social justice, arguing that civic participation through gamified processes raises a number of troubling effects that need redress. Michiel de Lange then explores the production and use of a data commons to foster participatory smart citizenship and enable the “right to the datafied city.” Likewise, Paolo Cardullo similarly examines the notion of a commons and the practices of commoning with respect to the provision of public Internet infrastructure, advocating for a central role for the public as key stakeholder in creating and maintaining the urban commons. Closing the part, Cesare di Feliciantonio explores the nature of a “smart community” being developed in Milano 4 You, the first smart district in Italy, through the lens of critical political economy, noting that the residents are envisaged as self-entrepreneurs, willing to re-appropriate their lifestyles and data in order to live a smart lifestyle; the potential for alternative rationalities to emerge is also explored. The second part of the book considers more practical and political interventions and issues of civic engagement, participation, and the right to the smart city. Catherine D’Ignazio, Eric Gordon, and Elizabeth Christoforetti open the section, contending that community-centered smart cities can only be achieved if

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present invisible infrastructure, such as a sensing network, is made visible and legible to citizens, examining two projects that seek to create such “seamful” interfaces. Andrew Schrock then considers how to address the issues of inclusion in smart cities by examining the humanizing potential of civic tech to achieve sustainable technology design in urban contexts by bridging between community and government. In Chapter 10, Sung-Yueh Perng considers the extent to which different kinds of hackathons provide a means of enabling civic participation in city making and claiming the right to the smart city. Gabriele Schwila then examines the use of “design thinking” increasingly used by governments to tackle urban problems to enhance citizen participation in city making, principally through the strategy of co-design. This is followed by Nancy Odendaal’s account of the strategies used by civil society organizations in Cape Town, South Africa, to challenge what she calls “dashboard urbanism,” in which big data and data analytics are used to manage the city, seeking to re-appropriate and use such data in more nuanced and emancipatory ways. Ramon RiberaFumaz then details Barcelona’s attempt to reconfigure the ethos of smart cities to one underpinned by technological sovereignty that challenges neoliberal urbanism and instead promotes public infrastructures and services and open platforms designed to serve the public good. In the final concluding chapter, Rob Kitchin examines whether it is possible to create a genuinely humanizing smart urbanism, considering whether another smart city is possible, and arguing for the need not just to expose, propose, and politicize the present structures, processes, and injustices of smart cities, but also reconfigure their future visioning. Collectively, the chapters argue for a normative vision of smart cities that is rooted in ideas and ideals of citizenship, social justice, the public good, and the right to the city. Our challenge to readers is to help make such smart cities.

Acknowledgments The research for this chapter was funded by an ERC Advanced Investigator award, “The Programmable City” (ERC-2012-AdG 323636-SOFTCITY).

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Chapter 2

Whose Right to the Smart City? Katharine S. Willis

Abstract This chapter works with Lefebvre’s “Right to the City” (1996b) to understand how a Smart City initiative was being implemented and as a consequence who benefitted. While a model of citizenship is offered in smart cities, the “actually existing” smart city in fact reconfigures models of citizenship in ways that instrumentalize technology and data that can reinforce the patterns of exclusion for marginalized groups. Therefore, this chapter aims to understand how citizens participate in smart city projects and whether they can in fact lead to the exacerbation of existing urban historical, material, and social inequalities. The chapter focuses on some of those excluded by smart city projects: the urban poor, street traders, and those who live in informal settlements and explores the way in which they access and participate in the city. In the Global South context, India is a key actor in implementing a national-level smart city program, and research was undertaken in the city of Chennai to investigate the way that the India Smart Cities Mission was being planned and implemented and the corresponding implications for marginalized communities. The chapter argues that there is a need to recognize the value of a range of everyday, smallscale ways in which citizens employ technologies and data that meet their needs in a social and spatially embedded context. In this way, marginalized people may be empowered to have what Lefebvre describes as “the right to the oeuvre, to participation and appropriation” (1996, p. 173) in urban space. Keywords: Smart city; participation; inclusion; marginalization; technology; urban; data; city

The Right to the Smart City, 27 41 Copyright r 2019 by Emerald Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved DOI: 10.1108/978-1-78769-139-120191002

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Introduction This chapter works with Lefebvre’s “Right to the City” (1996b) framework in order to consider the role of everyday and people-centered agency in “smart” urban transformation. Authors such as Aurigi (2012), Kitchin (2015), Marvin, Luque-Ayala, and Mcfarlane (2016), Rose (2015), and Sassen (2012) have critiqued the technologically deterministic language of smart city rhetoric, focusing on the fact that it tends to focus on ICT solutions that are applied top-down. The smart city agendum rarely addresses the issues of social differences in already-existing cities (Datta, 2018), and this chapter argues that it is critical to reflect on a question raised by March and Ribera-Fumaz (2014, p. 826): “whose smartness and whose cities?” The smart city approach tends to focus on technological solutions to urban problems from the perspective of states and companies, whereas these technologies “need to serve and work for people and communities […] in relation to setting local civic and infrastructural priorities” (Sadoway & Shekhar, 2014). Although citizen consultation and participation are often described in smart city proposals, there is a marked dearth of effective mechanisms and technologies for public engagement with respect to issues of distribution of urban resources and amenities such as water, roads, street lights, drainage, waste services, and proposed smart solutions to them. In the Global South context, India is a key actor in implementing a national-level smart city project that arguably leads to the exacerbation of existing urban historical, material, and social inequalities (Datta, 2018; Ravindran, 2015; Sadoway & Shekhar, 2014; Vanolo, 2014b). The actual impacts of smart city projects include the displacement of informal groups from urban space, displacement, and spatial segregation through land-use planning, reinforcing digital divides, gender disparities, and exclusion from the economic benefits of development. Therefore, taking the right to the city as a framework, the chapter represents an attempt to answer the question: “Whose right to the smart city”? The chapter focuses attention on some of those excluded by smart city projects the urban poor, street traders, and those who live in informal settlements. It draws on empirical work undertaken in India, Brazil, and UK, focusing, in particular, on an examination of how Chennai in India is planning and implementing a smart city vision. Here, the India Smart Cities Mission (2016), a nationwide smart city project program, shows evidence of driving inequalities by bringing about “enclave” development that inordinately benefits private sector actors such as global ICT companies and wealthier populations over others (Datta, 2015). We outline two ways in which people are denied a right to the smart city: first, through the proposed optimization, automation, and privatization of urban services that seeks to centralize and drive out low paid and informal labor force, and second, through cleansing and expulsion of street hawkers and those operating in the informal urban economy from the street space. Although this was a small-scale and short-term study, similar patterns of exclusion from participation and benefit from the smart city have been documented by other studies, such as those by Datta in India (2018), Wiig in Philadelphia (2016), and March and Ribera-Fumaz in Barcelona (2014).

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The Right to the Smart City? Lefebvre describes how “the right to the oeuvre, to participation and appropriation are implied in the right to the city” (1996b, p. 173). Therefore, we cannot separate “the right to habitation” from the “right to participation”: “the right of all city dwellers to fully enjoy urban life with all of its services and advantages […] the right to habitation as well as taking direct part in the management of cities” (Fernandes, 2007, p. 208). Fernandez (2007) further unpacks this as a set of interrelated political rights that need to be fully recognized: the right to information; the right of expression; the right to culture; the right to identity in difference and in equality; the right to self-management, that is, the democratic control of the economy and politics; and the right to public and non-public services. Rather than being an institutional right, such as the right to vote, the right to the city is rather something practiced by living out the routines of everyday urban life. Lefebvre’s analysis further proposes a generalized form of selfmanagement as the basis and expression of that right (2003, p. 150). Lefebvre links the right to the city with the spatial concepts of the center and the periphery. He argues that the center creates a condition for the simultaneous presence of very different worlds and value systems of ethnic, cultural, and social groups, activities, and knowledge. The city is a social resource that creates the possibility of bringing together these different elements and making them productive as an essential device of the organization of society (Schmid, 2011). In a Lefebvrian framework, the center can thus be defined as a place which allows for participation and appropriation, particularly for the marginalised as outlined in the following quote (Lefebvre, 1996a, p. 34): The right to the city complimented by the right to difference and information […] the right of users [of multiple services] to make known their ideas in space and time of their activities in the urban area; it would also cover the right to the use of the centre; a privileged place, instead of being dispersed and moved to peripheries (for workers, immigrants, the “marginal” and even for the “privileged”). Implicit in the “right to the center” is the possibility of expulsion to the periphery, displacement, and exclusion from centrality. Therefore, exclusion is not just an effect caused by urbanization processes, but a much more fundamental rupture in the relationship between the city and its citizens. Lefebvre outlines how exclusion is based upon segregation “which rejects towards peripheral spaces all those who do not participate in political privileges. Equally, it stipulates the right to meetings and gathering” (Lefebvre, 1996b, p. 30). This is reflected in urban space not just through ownership of property but through habitation in public space: city streets, parks, and squares. According to Friedman, “a city can truly be called a city only when its streets belong to the people” (1993, p. 39). Therefore, urban planning or regeneration projects become critical processes where rights are either embedded or challenged. In

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fact, Harvey (2012, p. 40) outlines how the right to the city is the right to control the urbanization process and to institute new modes of urbanization. The smart city creates a new challenge to the right to the city. According to Shaw and Graham (2017, p. 912), “the conceptual separation of a right to information from the right to the city is challenged by digital technology […]; digital information complicates Lefebvre’s right to the city as a right to centrality.” Therefore, there is a challenge of how to enable citizenship in the Lefebvrian sense through modes of digital participation. Shaw and Graham (2017, p. 908) further explain that “the power afforded to traditional actors of urban power developers, planners, landlords is now rivalled by the rise of new informational monopolies such as Alphabet Inc’s Google.” ICT providers, such as IBM, CISCO, Siemens, and more recently Alphabet (Sidewalk Labs), have sought to position themselves as new actors in urban planning and regeneration projects.

The Right to Participate: The Efficiency Paradigm for City Services Smart city projects configure new relationships between citizens and city governance. The rationale of many smart city projects is grounded in a rhetoric where urban challenges are seen as urgent and growing “problems” that require fixing. Digital technology is seen as a “solution,” offering a new relationship between citizens and authorities, between governments themselves and common residents through better ways of communication and improved systems and services. This can happen on a range of levels. At a very basic level, cities can be seen as a local social information infrastructure, providing information about the “real” city to inhabitants. In a model of civic engagement and participation, smart technologies and systems are seen to enable new modes of citizenship. There is much debate as to whether these new, digital forms of governance and participation actually deliver the active level of participation that they promise or whether in fact they are just as limited in their approach as traditional models of governance (Willis & Aurigi, 2017). The gap between the rhetoric of the smart city around governance and the reality of what is delivered has been highlighted by authors such as Kitchin (2015, p. 132) who point out that “smart city advocates imagine themselves as creating technologies, techniques, and visions that are scientific, objective, commonsensical, and apolitical.” While digital technologies and platforms might often be presented as “tools” that enable certain forms of participation and governance, in fact, they are far from neutral and introduce new models of democratic engagement in the city. Indeed, underlying much smart city visioning is a new model of urban management that is delivered through an efficiency paradigm for city services (IBM, 2012). Gathering, accessing, and analyzing the urban data is championed as a process which leads not just to “solving” city problems but also to saving money, time, and resources as highlighted in IBM’s early marketing strategies around the smart city. The premise of these management systems is that “smart” delivers a more efficient management of city infrastructure, which in turn delivers better governance through better services. This should enable a more inclusive pattern of participation in smart city projects.

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However, this discourse is also opening up new tensions in the relationship between public and private sector in the management of cities. For example, IBM’s and other corporate IT firms’ strategies are designed going to establish these companies as partners in the delivery of future smart development. The promise of participation offered within these new coalitions of public and private actors masks an economic imperative where the actual beneficiaries of the smart city are often the corporate partners rather than citizens. The reality can be quite different, as Kitchin (2015, p. 132) highlights: Left untouched are issues such as panoptic surveillance, technocratic and corporate forms of governance, technological lock-ins, profiling and social sorting, anticipatory governance, control creep, the hollowing out of state provided services, widening inequalities and dispossession of land and livelihoods. In the digital or smart city discourse, producing “smart cities” inevitably also co-produces what we could call a “smart citizen,” which means that people have to be willing to adapt to, and to live in, smart cities. Vanolo (2014a, p. 893) highlights how this leads to patterns of exclusion since there is “little room for the technologically illiterate, the poor and, in general, those who are marginalised from the smart city discourse.” The smart city agendum therefore is not neutral, but has an effect on the way citizens are supposed to behave, and in fact contributes to a lack of participation for those who arguably should be the beneficiaries of smart city initiatives: the urban poor and marginalized groups. Therefore, there is a need to critically address how people participate by taking a direct part in the management of cities in smart city projects, since “despite the re-orientation towards creating ‘smart citizens’ to date there has been little critical conceptual scrutiny as to how citizens are imagined and engaged by different smart city technologies” (Cardullo & Kitchin, 2018, p. 5).

The Right to Centrality: The Smart City at the Margins Underlying the efficiency paradigm of the smart city agenda is the fact that the redistribution and allocation of resources are often not directed toward those who would most benefit, that is, the most marginalized citizens. The technological efficiency model in fact catalyzes a process which, in practice, further excludes those at the margins. This challenges the “right to participate” in the Lefebvrian sense, since “the right to the city legitimates the refusal to allow oneself to be removed from urban reality by a discriminatory and segregative organization” (Lefebvre, 1996b, p. 195). Smart city rhetoric propagates the idea that technologies can and will provide the solutions to all of our multiple problems without fundamentally changing our lifestyles or challenging the structures which enforce and maintain such problems. The optimization of services championed in the smart city model leads to access and benefits for a privileged sector of the urban population. This is because the vision of what a smart city is is largely matched to the aspirations and world view of a particular set of actors

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and subset of the population (Vanolo, 2014b). If we take a Feenbergian view, then “involvement with a technology makes certain interests salient. […] Once enrolled in a network individuals are motivated to address its failings and in some cases they also acquire potential power over its development” (Feenberg, 2011, p. 5). Technological development does not in itself overcome the broader challenges of the lack of technical skills, poor economic opportunities, and existing democratic divides (Mossberger, Tolbert, & Stansbury, 2003). It privileges those who fit into that certain space while excluding those who cannot or will not conform. In the smart city, there is little space for anyone at the margins to challenge, or even engage with the actually existing smart city. That is because the communities involved often lack the circumstances, access, and the understanding of the importance of technology for empowering themselves, either as individuals or as a collective: They lack agency (Melgaco & Willis, 2017). Rather than just perpetuating existing divides, the smart city can reinforce social inequalities, since informal or marginal populations often have limited access to existing technical and urban infrastructures.

Case Study: Smart City Chennai In India, the Smart City Mission (SCM)1 is a national, multicity program, which proposes massive urban regeneration projects in 100 Indian cities over the five years from 2016. Chennai was one of the first 19 cities chosen in the SCM, and the city selected the neighborhood of T. Nagar for its area-based development (see Figure 2.1). T. Nagar is Chennai’s main shopping area, known for its Sari shops and organized around a central axis of roads (Figure 2.2). The aim is that this pilot area will serve as a model for smart city development for other areas of the city. As part of our research, we conducted two workshops designed to explore how the smart city was being conceived and implemented in practice. The workshops had two modes of enquiry: a stakeholder discussion and a mapping exercise. The discussion took place around the publicly available smart city documents and applications for the India Smart Cities Mission and, in particular, those documents relating to the Chennai proposal (2016). The stakeholder workshop had 18 participants that included the following: Civic Consumer and Action group (CAG), a national activist group based in Chennai, local NGOs, academics, community IT organizations, architects, economists, urban planners, and also representatives from the Indian National Hawker Federation. In particular, two things became clear: very few organizations or people knew of the actual detail of the Chennai smart city plan; and the Chennai Plan appeared to be a re-purposing of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), a previous failed urban regeneration project (DASH, 2014). The second workshop consisted of a one-day mapping exercise where a group of

1

http://smartcities.gov.in/

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Figure 2.1. Map of Chennai with the Location of T. Nagar District Highlighted.

approximately 15 stakeholders visited the designated T. Nagar area to map the area to be implemented as part of the Chennai smart city plan. The participants included architects, community activists, local academics, and the research network partners. The mapping exercise was meant to prompt participants to look at street-level infrastructure in detail and visualize the ways in which the smart city proposal for Chennai could impact the area and conduct informal interviews with street hawkers and local vendors about their knowledge of the smart cities.

Smart City Chennai: The Urban Efficiency Paradigm The proposal for the area-based development plans of T. Nagar is structured around the following “components”: pedestrianization, retrofitting of open spaces, footpath widening along main roads, cycle sharing network, multilevel car parks, integrating all the public transport, robust IT connectivity and digitization, smart bus/e-rickshaw feeders, solid waste management, water supply management, sewage management, e-Governance, and storm water

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Figure 2.2. Street Space in South Usman Road, T. Nagar, Chennai. Source: Author. management including flood warning and monitoring system (see Table 2.1). The proposed solution to implement the initiatives, as outlined in the Smart City Chennai documents, is through the optimization and automation of utilities (power, waste, and water), transport, and ICT infrastructure. The stated rationale for the Smart City Mission in Chennai is very much along typical lines of urban crisis, with a focus on infrastructure: Chennai’s infrastructure is under constant strain. Traffic bottlenecks, restricted civic amenities and high pollution are all characteristics of this strain on infrastructure. (Ministry of Urban Development, 2016) The approach adopted uses this rationale to implement a technological management of these apparent “crisis” points in the urban infrastructure. The efficiency paradigm adopts the approach that current people-centered services are not only inefficient and unreliable but also not under control. In the following section, I compare the proposed initiatives in the Smart City Chennai proposal (see Table 2.1) against the “actually existing smart city” (Shelton, Zook, & Wiig, 2015), observed through the mapping exercise in the T. Nagar district. The solutions proposed for water, sanitation, and electricity focus on supplyside problems and are premised on the use of meters and sensors to control utility flows. They fail to address the availability of these services for sections of the population. Water supply is a challenge across India; in Chennai, more than 15% of households do not have water supplied from a treated source, 5% do not have toilets, and 3% do not have waste water connections within their premises (source CAG, http://smartcities.gov.in/). The SCM solution focuses on an automation of the existing system with a “sensor-based monitoring of flows” (see Table 2.2).

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Table 2.1. Excerpt from Smart City Chennai Proposals Summarizing Key Components of the Project. List the key components of your area-based development proposal (e.g., buildings, landscaping, on-site infrastructures, water recycling, dual piping for water supply, etc.) • Assured electrical supply: Provision of 24 × 7 power supply with 10% from renewable energy source, micro-grid monitoring with smart consumer meters; electrical and ICT utility corridor along with smart metering • Adequate water supply: Augmentation/rehabilitation of old networks, reliable source augmentation 24 × 7 water supply, DMA, 100% quality water meeting CPHEEO standards, rehabilitation/replacement of water storage and distribution network; DMA-based distribution system including pressure and flow monitoring; special emphasis on customer interactions and cost recovery; UFW reduction program • Waste water recycling: Waste water will be recycled and supplied to green spaces, medians, gardens, etc.; treatment meeting CPHEEO standards and its reuse, sensor-based monitoring of flows including automation of SPS and STP operations; augmentation/rehabilitation of sewerage network and existing pumping stations • Solid waste management: Convert exiting bins to sensor-based bins; GPS installation in vehicles to monitor the collection, introduction to 4R concept (reduce, recycle, reuse, and respond/refuse) waste to energy, special emphasis on segregation of waste at source • Rain water harvesting and storm water management: Rain water harvesting (at households and at community level) at an interval of every 30 minutes, augmentation of existing storm water network along sensor-based monitoring of flows • IT connectivity and digitization: Wi-Fi connectivity for T. Nagar, digital signages and billboards to integrate all the public transport, integration for all utilities including GIS conversions Source: Ministry of Urban Development (2016, p. 27).

Power supplies in Chennai are similarly unreliable, with regular citywide and statewide power cuts of 3 8 hours. A similar solution is presented for electricity infrastructure; again, a 24/7 uninterrupted supply is promised that will be achieved through sensor-based monitoring and smart meters (see Table 2.2). In the street, India has a remarkably localized infrastructure for power supply: transformers are located outside building blocks and much cabling is accessible. While this is problematic in many ways, first because of the number of people who simply don’t have electricity supply in the district of T. Nagar, the power infrastructure is accessible so that it can be managed by people at the scale of

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Table 2.2. Excerpts from Smart City Chennai Proposal. Water Adequate water supply: Augmentation/rehabilitation of old networks, reliable source augmentation, 24/7 water supply Waste water recycling: Waste water will be recycled and supplied to green spaces, medians, gardens, etc. Sensor-based monitoring of flows including automation of sewage pumping station (SPS) and sewage treatment plant (STP) operations Rain water harvesting and storm water management: Rain water augmentation of existing storm water network along sensor-based monitoring of flows Power Assured electrical supply: Provision of 24/7 power supply with 10% from renewable energy source, micro-grid monitoring with smart consumer meters, and electrical and ICT utility corridor along with smart metering Waste Solid waste management: Convert exiting bins to sensor-based bins; GPS installation in vehicles to monitor the collection, introduction of 4R concept (reduce, recycle, reuse, and respond/refuse) waste to energy, special emphasis on segregation of waste at source Source: Ministry of Urban Development (2016, p. 27).

the street. The shift to a centrally controlled and metered system removes the local interaction with the infrastructure. The pattern is replicated in the waste management proposals (see Table 2.2). RFID chips are proposed for solid waste management. This is a solution being delivered by a technology vendor and requires a “control room” setup where full rubbish bins are reported through the system which then activates a rubbish collection. Yet, rubbish collection in Chennai is a people-centered service, involving both formal and informal labor at a neighborhood and even street scale. By automating this service, it might create efficiencies by reducing formal sector labor costs but, as it has been found in previous projects, “expensive technologies create reverse institutional and systemic linkages that drive out the informal sector in order to pay for themselves” (CWG; GIZ., 2011). In addition, “privatization adds new large competitors to the waste sector and de facto transfers rights of access to waste resources from a public to a private domain” (WIEGO Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing, 2012). Water, power, and waste components in the Smart City Chennai proposal are transformed from utility flows that are locally managed through peoplecentric systems into services that are controlled and managed through automated and often privatized service pathways. In doing so, the informal economy and management of urban infrastructure at street level are effectively replaced by sensors and a centralized management structure. The financial resource,

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which previously focused on employment costs, is re-prioritized to technology delivered and maintained often by private ICT providers; the utility service is optimized with the benefit (value) moving to the private sector. This process often goes hand in hand with the “cherry picking” of lucrative customers and “social dumping” of marginal ones (Marvin & Graham, 1993, p. 10).

Smart City Chennai: Exclusion from the Center The mapping exercise focused, in particular, on observing street spaces in order to understand who presently has the right to the space and how they might be affected by the implementation of the Smart City Chennai project. What was observed (see Figure 2.2) is that the street space is currently a messy and somewhat chaotic, but consequently inclusive, space: in the Lefebvrian sense, as a place where “differences encounter, acknowledge, and explore one another, and affirm or cancel out one another” (Lefebvre, 1996b). The street space accommodates street traders, rickshaw drivers, shoppers, and a whole range of informal economic activities. Although not explicit in the smart city proposals, what became clear from a more detailed reading was that they constituted an urban “cleansing” strategy that involved the exclusion from the public space of street traders, informal taxis, and other workers in the informal economy. For example, street vendors, in particular, are articulated as a problem and the proposals include moving the traders en-masse into a separate building located out of the center of the T. Nagar district, quite literally displacing them from the center to the periphery. As a consequence, the National Hawker Federation had sought to mobilize its 40 million or so members across India to ensure their rights are recognized campaigning under the banner “We want bread and butter not smart city” (see Figure 2.3).

Figure 2.3. Banner: “We Want Bread and Butter Not Smart City” Protest by National Hawker Federation, April 2016. Source: Facebook page.

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Smart City Chennai proposals treat informal traders as “encroachments” in the urban space and justify sanitizing and exclusion of informal citizens using automated surveillance mechanisms to monitor streets. In this sense, “encroachments” can be seen as those who do not have the “right to the center,” and such should be excluded to the periphery.

Conclusion Aren’t cities and citizens already smart? Sadoway & Shekhar (2014)

The smart city proposals for Chennai, it has been argued, reinforce and reproduce the spatial and economic exclusion of marginalized groups from the city space on a range of levels. The proposals fail to recognize or give value to the existing urban informality, where “informality must be understood as an idiom of urbanization, a logic through which differential spatial value is produced and managed” (Roy & AlSayyad, 2004, p. 233). They are driven and rationalized by technological quick fixes and technologically deterministic plan-making (Graham & Marvin, 2001). Urban informality is treated as a set of conditions and resources that are equivalent to “leaks” in a system that need to be optimized and rationalized. This may be one of the factors that has meant that many of the plans outlined in 2016 for the Smart City Chennai have failed to be realized. According to a press report (Special Correspondent, 2018): The Minister said just one project of the Smart City Mission had been completed in Chennai in the past three years: “The Central government has given nod for 173 projects under Smart City Mission, estimated at 13,425 crore. Out of the 173 projects sanctioned by the Centre, three have been completed in the State at 3.65 crore,” The apparent failure in delivery of Smart City Chennai is one that it is echoed globally. The failure of digital technologies to solve urban challenges is linked to the strategy where technology is used to disenfranchise, fails to enable local knowledge, and black boxes devices and technical infrastructure (Haklay, 2013). Taking the right to the city framework, then, Cardullo and Kitchin (2018, p. 20) identify that “the normative challenge to creating truly ‘citizen-centric’ smart cities will be to re-imagine the role citizens are to play in their conception, development and governance.” The technology and governance model that underpins many smart technologies is, in fact, full of potential for marginalized groups it is accessible, cheap, and localized, utilizing low-cost sensors, cheap connectivity, and shared data assets. If it wants to recognize the social capital of marginalized groups, then it needs to involve not only engineers, coders, or systems scientists “but also civic hacktivists, local associations and longstanding community groups

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that make up civic-cyber space” (Sadoway & Shekhar, 2014). If urban informality is treated not as a condition, but as a “mode of production” within “sites of vibrant and entrepreneurial urbanism” (Roy, 2011, p. 226), then it has the potential to reclaim “smartness.” De Lange and de Waal (2019) highlighted the term “hackable cities,” and Sassen refers to “open source urbanism” (Sassen, 2011) that includes low-cost citizen sensing, crowdfunding platforms, open data initiatives, and repurposed social media-based sharing platforms. In order to reclaim “smartness,” there is an urgent need for a public awareness program that lets the general public behind the curtain of the smart city story and reveals the workings of smart technologies and infrastructures and that outlines some of the potential benefits. In doing so, this would recognize and celebrate some of the many ways in which cities and people are already “smart,” but which have not been given that name. Where cities often fail at smartness is in the role of urban planning, which inherently implies that infrastructure operates only to meet a predefined and fairly linear service or provision. Smart cities, to some extent, operate on the fly; their coordination is based on resources available at the time and on what’s needed. If smart cities could enable citizens to improvise and to tinker with their workings, then this could mark a shift to an “actually existing” smart city. What we can learn from the Global South is that many of the informal communities that operate at the margins have developed exceptionally resourceful and innovative ways of using technology for their own benefit. Rather than a post-colonial “shipping” of the Western model of the smart city to the Global South, there is a great deal to be said for carefully observing, documenting, and learning how urban informality adopts and works with technologies in a way that acknowledges that cities and citizens are already “smart.”

Acknowledgments The work in this chapter is supported by the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) International Research network entitled “Whose Right to the Smart City” (whosesmartcity.net). The Chennai workshop took place on June 16, 2016, and was organized and led by Satyarupa Shekhar, Director of Government Outreach and Advisory, CAG, Chennai, India, with support from Magdalena Cooper (intern). The report produced from the workshop is available here: https:// whosesmartcity.net/publications-and-outcomes/, which was researched and documented by CAG, Chennai. Other partners and contributors in the network are Dr Ava Fatah, University College London, UK, and Dr Ana Baltazar, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. We would also like to thank the many participants and contributors to the research network workshops, including those in Belo Horizonte (Brazil), London, and Plymouth (UK), between 2017 and 2018.

References Aurigi, A. (2012). Reflections towards an agenda for urban-designing the digital city. Urban Design International, 18(2), 131 144.

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Cardullo, P., & Kitchin, R. (2018). Being a ‘citizen’ in the smart city: Up and down the scaffold of smart citizen participation in Dublin, Ireland. GeoJournal (pp. 1 13) (online first). doi:10.1007/s10708-018-9845-8 CWG; GIZ. (2011). The economics of the informal sector in solid waste management. Collaborative. Collaborative Working Group on Solid Waste Management in Low and Middle Income Countries (CWG); Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ). Dash, D. K. (2014). Govt to scrap JNNURM scheme. The Economic Times. Retrieved from https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/auto/news/policy/govt-to-scrapjnnurm-scheme/printarticle/35707747.cms Datta, A. (2015). The smart entrepreneurial city: Dholera and a 100 other utopias in India. In C. McFarlane, S. Marvin, & A. Luque-Ayala (Eds.), Smart urbanism: Utopian vision or false dawn? (pp. 52 70). London: Routledge. Datta, A. (2018). The digital turn in postcolonial urbanism: Smart citizenship in the making of India’s 100 smart cities. Transactions of Institute of British Geographers (pp. 405 419) (online first). doi:10.1111/tran.12225 de Lange, M., & de Waal, M. (Eds.). (2019). The hackable city: Digital media and collaborative city making in the network society. Singapore, Springer. Feenberg, A. (2011). Agency and citizenship in a technological society. Lecture presented at IT University of Copenhagen. Retrieved from https://www.sfu.ca/ ~andrewf/copen5-1.pdf Fernandes, E. (2007). Constructing the right to the city in Brazil. Social and Legal Studies, 16(2), 201 219. Friedmann, J. (1993). The right to the city. In M. Morse & J. Hardoy (Eds.), Rethinking the Latin American city (pp. 135 151). Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Graham, S., & Marvin, S. (2001). Splintering urbanism: Networked infrastructures, technological mobilities and the urban condition. London: Routledge. Haklay, M. (2013). Beyond quantification: A role for citizen science and community science in a smart city. In B. Campkin & R. Ross (Eds.), UCL urban laboratory pamphleteer. London: UCL. Harvey, D. (2012). Rebel cities: From the right to the city to the urban revolution. London: Verso. IBM. (2012). Smarter cities: The insight to identify, transform and progress. IBM. Kitchin, R. (2015). Making sense of smart cities: Addressing present shortcomings. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 8, 131 136. Lefebvre, H. (1996a). Writings on cities. Oxford: Blackwell. Lefebvre, H. (1996b). The right to the city. Writings on cities (Lated by E. Kofman & E. Lebas (trans.)). Cambridge, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. March, H., & Ribera-Fumaz, R. (2014). Smart contradictions: The politics of making Barcelona a self-sufficient city. European Urban and Regional Studies, 23(4), 816 830. Marvin, S., & Graham, S. (1993). Utility networks and urban planning: An issue agenda. Planning Practice & Research, 8(4), 6 14. Marvin, S., Luque-Ayala, A., & Mcfarlane, C. (Eds.). (2016). Smart urbanism Utopian vision or false dawn? Abingdon: Routledge. Melgaco, L., & Willis, K. (2017). ICTs and technical agency: A case study of a rural Brazilian community. In M. Foth, M. Brynskov, & T. Ojala (Eds.), Citizen’s right to the digital city (pp. 101 117). Singapore: Springer.

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Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India. (2016). The smart city challenge stage 2: Smart city proposal Chennai. Retrieved from https://smartnet.niua. org/content/2ccc073a-1c5f-4c42-8f9a-a86ccb0bc8d8 Mossberger, K., Tolbert, C., & Stansbury, M. (2003). Virtual inequality: Beyond the digital divide. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Ravindran, S. (2015). Is India’s 100 smart cities project a recipe for social apartheid? The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/07/ india-100-smart-cities-project-social-apartheid. Accessed on June 7, 2015. Rose, G. (2015). Smart cities and why they need a lot more social scientists to get involved. Retrieved from https://visualmethodculture.wordpress.com/2015/03/20/ smart-cities-and-why-they-need-a-lot-more-social-scientists-to-get-involved/. Accessed on September 1, 2018. Roy, A. (2011). Slumdog cities: Rethinking subaltern urbanism. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 35(2), 223 238. Roy, A., & AlSayyad, N. (Eds.). (2004). Urban informality: Transnational perspectives fom the Middle East, South Asia and Latin America. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Sadoway, D., & Shekhar, S. (2014). (Re)Prioritizing citizens in smart cities governance: Examples of smart citizenship from urban India. The Journal of Community Informatics, 10(3). Sassen, S. (2011). Open Source Urbanism. Domus, June 29. Sassen, S. (2012). Urbanising technology. The Electric City Newspaper. Retrieved from http://ec2012.lsecities.net/newspaper/LSECities. 12 14. Schmid, C. (2011). Henri Lefebvre, the right to the city and the new metropolitan mainstream. In N. Brenner, P. Marcuse, & M. Mayer (Eds.), Cities for people not for profit: Critical urban theory and the right to the city (pp. 42 62). London: Routledge. Shaw, J., & Graham, M. (2017). An informational right to the city? Code, content, control, and the urbanization of information. Antipode, 49(4), 907 927. Shelton, T., Zook, M., & Wiig, A. (2015). The ‘actually existing smart city’. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 8(1), 13 25. Special Correspondent. (2018). Only 1 smart city project completed in Chennai in 3 years, says Minister. The Hindu. Retrieved from http://www.thehindu.com/news/ cities/chennai/only-1-smart-city-project-completed-in-chennai-in-3-years-says-minister/article22399821.ece. Accessed on January 9. Vanolo, A. (2014a). Smartmentality: The smart city as disciplinary strategy. Urban Studies, 51(5), 883 898. Vanolo, A. (2014b). Whose smart city? Open democracy. Retrieved from https:// www.opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/alberto-vanolo/whose-smart-city. Accessed on September 1, 2018. WIEGO (Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing). (2012). First global strategic workshop of waste pickers: Inclusive solid waste management. Cambridge, MA. Retrieved from http://www.wiego.org/reports/first-global-strategic-workshop-waste-pickers-inclusive-solid-waste-management Wiig, A. (2016). The empty rhetoric of the smart city: From digital inclusion to economic promotion in Philadelphia. Urban Geography, 37(4), 535 553. Willis, K. S., & Aurigi, A. (2017). Digital and smart cities. London: Routledge.

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Chapter 3

Reading the Neoliberal Smart City Narrative: The Political Potential of Everyday Meaning-making Jiska Engelbert

Abstract One of the key normative questions that critical smart city scholars pose is if, and how, politically meaningful agency of citizens in the neoliberal smart city is possible? The Lefebvrian concept of the “right to the city” proves particularly fruitful in this endeavor, as it allows for imaging ways and possibilities in which citizens can assert the use value of the city over the exchange value, and thus affirm the social “urban” over the economic “city.” This chapter seeks to contribute to this quest for and imaginations of politically meaningful agency in the neoliberal smart city. First, it does so by arguing that what smart city scholarship typically considers as politically meaningful interventions into the neoliberal smart city are too often initiatives that are strongly influenced by peoples’ and cities’ access to specific and unevenly distributed resources, like technological or political literacies and economic (infra-) structures. Therefore, and second, the chapter proposes that we look for critical interventions into the neoliberal smart city by “ordinary citizens” elsewhere, namely, in urban inhabitants’ everyday readings of the promotional and performative narrative of the neoliberal smart city. Keywords: Smart city; neoliberalism; promotional culture; discourse; political agency; meaning-making

The Right to the Smart City, 43 55 Copyright r 2019 by Emerald Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved DOI: 10.1108/978-1-78769-139-120191003

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Introduction While many, if not most, academic studies on the governance and technologies of smart cities acknowledge that there is no single, authoritative definition of “the smart city,” there are two distinct academic ways of dealing with this absence. There is scholarship that considers this lack as a problem that needs to be academically solved, by working toward a singular definition of “the” smart city (Albino, Berardi, & Dangelico, 2015; Meijer & Rodríguez Bolívar, 2016; Tranos & Gertner, 2012). And there is, what this chapter focuses on and considers itself part of, “critical smart city scholarship,” which takes the variety in smart city descriptions as the very subject of academic inquiry (Hollands, 2008; Vanolo, 2016). For critical smart city scholars, the definitional openness underscores that smart city descriptions are not neutral and, in fact, vested with a variety of neoliberal political and economic interests, of a variety of actors and institutions. For example, big technology consultancy firms, small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and start-ups typically present smart cities as technology-enabled progress that, thanks to the expertise and commitment of these businesses, can be brought to cities (Söderström, Paasche, & Klauser, 2014; Wiig, 2015). Similarly, city administrations often posit the smart city as a celebration of urban creativity, which also conveniently enables place branding (Vanolo, 2017) and navigating post-crisis municipal budgets (Tonkiss, 2013). Moreover, national and supra-national actors, particularly the European Commission, describe smart cities as avant-garde laboratories for social innovations and use urban spaces and residents in public private projects whose outputs are “scaled up” for competitive gain (Cardullo & Kitchin, 2018a; Engelbert, Van Zoonen, & Hirzalla, 2018). Precisely because critical smart city scholarship has so firmly connected the rise of “smart” urban development with neoliberalism, it is academically suspicious of the persistent occurrence of “citizen-centered” and “citizen-oriented” tropes and methods across smart city projects. These axioms suggest that smart city development and citizen participation are two sides of the same coin. This is, of course, a premise that is at odds with what critical analyses of neoliberal public governance and participation have taught us (Guarneros-Meza & Geddes, 2010; Walker, McQuarrie, & Lee, 2015). And indeed, critical smart city analyses of the logic that informs these tropes emphasize their “rhetorical emptiness” (Wiig, 2016). What are sold as opportunities for democratic participation, are in fact tactics to legitimize “the city” being increasingly inhabited and governed by those without any democratic mandate, be they technology and consultancy businesses, entrepreneurial city-makers, and city CEOs (e.g., Chief Technology or Data Officers) or research and development advisors (Cardullo & Kitchin, 2018b; Hollands, 2015; Kitchin, Coletta, Evans, Heaphy, & MacDonncha, 2017; Vanolo, 2016). Consequently, critical smart city scholars are increasingly concerned with the normative question if, and how, politically meaningful agency of citizens in the neoliberal smart city is at all possible? The Lefebvrian concept of the “right to

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the city” (1996) proves particularly fruitful in this endeavor, as it allows for imaging ways and possibilities in which citizens can assert the use value of the city over the exchange value and thus affirm the social “urban” over the economic “city” (Brenner, Marcuse, & Mayer, 2009; Marcuse, 2009; Purcell, 2013). This chapter seeks to contribute to this quest for and imaginations of politically meaningful agency in the neoliberal smart city. It does so, first, by arguing that what smart city scholarship considers as “critical interventions into the corporate smart city” (Hollands, 2015) are too often initiatives that are strongly influenced by peoples’ and cities’ access to specific and unevenly distributed resources, like technological or political literacies and economic (infra-) structures. The chapter therefore proposes that we look for critical interventions into the neoliberal smart city by “ordinary citizens” elsewhere, namely, in urban inhabitants’ everyday readings of the promotional and performative narrative of the neoliberal smart city.

“Glimpses of Possibilities” in the Neoliberal Smart City While critical smart city scholars purposefully avoid limiting the definitions of the smart city, they do have specific ideas about what constitutes the “typical” smart city. They deem it a brainchild love child, even of decades of neoliberal politics and years of post-crisis austerity policies, which have transformed local public government, privatized urban public space, and, consequently, depoliticized much of urban civic and social life today (cf. Aalbers, 2013; Lombardi & Vanolo, 2015; Peck, Theodore, & Brenner, 2009; Vanolo, 2015). Indeed, most scholarship situates “the” smart city as part of urban governance increasingly adopting market-based methods and mentality to assert the value of a city’s image, for both external branding and internal governance purposes. In this sense, the dominant use of the adjective smart today can be analyzed for the same ideological function that labels like creative or entrepreneurial had and continue to have (Hollands, 2008, 2015; Peck, 2005; Vanolo, 2014, 2015). Consequently, it is crucial that critical smart city scholarship focuses on “glimpses of possibilities” (Hollands, 2015, p. 70) for agency in the neoliberal smart city. However, critical smart city scholarship actually conceptualizes agency in or, despite the neoliberal smart city in very specific, and, I would argue, problematic, terms. For example, Hollands (2015) praises urban planning platforms, like Brickstarter, a crowdfunding/sourcing platform for urban services, and Face Your World, an Amsterdam project aimed at involving local residents in city planning and regeneration (cf. De Lange & De Waal, 2012), for stimulating residents to “shape the city using human initiative and technology for social purposes” (Hollands, 2015, p. 72, original emphasis). Cardullo and Kitchin (2018b) lauds the new, politically left, city government in Barcelona for its ability to “repoliticise the smart city and […] shift its creation and control away from private interests and the state towards grassroots, civic movements and social innovation.” Moreover, Engelbert et al. (2018) propose how grassroots smart citizen initiatives, particularly

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the kinds that cannot or do not want to be “scaled up,” can be strategically written into research calls and projects of the European Commission. A first problem with examples like these is that celebrations of “people-power type of smart initiatives” (Hollands, 2015, p. 62) are often inspired by what Kitchin (2015) terms and problematizes as “canonical examples.” They are a relatively small, but oft-cited, set of successful citizen/artist-led smart technology initiatives, in cities like Barcelona or Amsterdam. Drawing on these rare sites may, thus, wrongfully suggest that community-led or citizen-centered initiatives such as “hackathons,” living labs, and opportunities for citizenscience can naturally flow from the good ideas and creativity of communities anywhere. This suggestion discards that many of these initiatives were “coerced” into life by projects run by state or research institutions that received funding on the condition that they would “involve” citizens. Moreover, it downplays that most smart community initiatives are (infra-)structurally made possible and impossible by a city’s existing economic prosperity, its position in international competitions or rankings, and its participation in earlier smart city projects. A second problem is that (these) celebrations of smart citizen agency emphasize cases where urban residents “take ownership” through using smart technologies where and when they see socially or politically fit. These instances, thus, are interpreted as citizens contesting neoliberalism’s conceptualization of ownership (i.e., property) and, thus, as citizens claiming their right to the city (De Lange & De Waal, 2012; Hollands, 2015). Yet, such instances, I would argue, may also be read as extensions, and thus as hegemonic acceptances, of smart city discourse’s efforts to produce docile, neoliberal citizens (Vanolo, 2014). After all, the kind of citizens who take ownership are the ones who “step up” and take responsibility for the well-being of their communities, seek solutions in their own creativity and skill, and, crucially, accept that neither these actions nor such interventions are to be expected from state institutions or public services. Thus, many of the “radical” premises of citizen-led initiatives in fact normalize the conditions for participation in and under neoliberalism. While all of this might suggest that it is futile to think about the possibility of politically meaningful agency in the neoliberal smart city, this is not the case, nor my intention here. In fact, the remainder of this chapter conceptualizes such “glimpses of possibility” (Hollands, 2015, p. 70) in the neoliberal smart city in more everyday or “micro-” terms, in the readings and meanings that ordinary citizens produce in and about the neoliberal smart city as a text. More specifically, this chapter contends that even, or precisely, in instances where urban inhabitants are positioned as audiences of neoliberalism’s overtly performative and promotional smart city narrative, alternative imaginaries of the city and its people may be elicited and produced.

The Discursive Reification of the Neoliberal Smart City Acknowledging the smart city’s intimate ties with neoliberalism also means acknowledging the importance of the performativity of “smartness” and thus of

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discursive practices. Of course, the smart city is vitally made up of practices and processes with very material dimensions and real repercussions. However, as critical urban scholarship has demonstrated, discourses and ideas are crucial to urban development, planning, and governance (Lees, 2004; Peck & Theodore, 2010). Moreover, in the case of the neoliberal smart city, the paradoxical relationship between invisibility and visibility calls for (even) more attention to discourse. After all, on the one hand, much of the success of the neoliberal smart city relies on the invisibility of smart technologies and the seamless subjection of urban inhabitants to second-order cybernetics (Krivý, 2018). On the other hand, at least as much of that success depends on the visible performance and overt promotion of a city’s smartness. As a result, discursive practices are crucial, or, to use the term of critical discourse analyst Norman Fairclough, particularly “salient” (2000a, p. 156) in the social practice of rhetorically building and ideologically governing smart cities and citizens. Fairclough (2000b), furthermore, argues that contemporary social practices that are characterized by such a crucial role for discourse are typical manifestations of the “the neoliberal order.” This, he explains, is a “distinctive network of practices part of whose distinctiveness is the way semiosis [or: discourse] figures as an element of its material processes and in the reflexive construction of these processes” (Fairclough, 2000b, p. 47). The pervasiveness and reputation of promotional discourse practices in contemporary smart-city building consider, for example, the packed year-round calendar of (global) smart city events, expos, challenges, competitions, and award ceremonies support the diagnosis of the smart city as a quintessentially neoliberal project for social change. From this, we can draw two important conclusions about the epistemology of the neoliberal smart city or about the way in which urban inhabitants experience existing or imagine possible smart cities. First, that “building” a smart city is as much about the promotional production and circulation of smart city narratives as it is about procuring smart technologies, pushing for legislation, and enabling infrastructures. Second, that while the smart city may appear as the institution or entity behind or divorced from these promotional practices, it is in fact an “implicit construct […] reified as the res publica, the public reification, no less ” by these practices, somewhat crudely appropriating Philip Abrams’ (1988, p. 59) analysis of the state. This means that the neoliberal smart city exists to an important extent by virtue of a particular narrative about what a city and its people can or ought to be. The idea of the smart city as a “text,” or narrative, also informs critical smart city research that explores the discursive sites and mechanisms through which neoliberal narratives about the smart city are (re-)produced. This scholarship points to ideological significance of “epistemic communities” (Kitchin et al., 2017), of smart city imaginaries in popular culture and media (Vanolo, 2016), of formal government discourses (Joss, Cook, & Dayot, 2017; Vanolo, 2014), of smart city landscapes and architecture, such as “Fab Labs” (March & RiberaFumaz, 2016), and of the “participatory” methods most notably those of “Urban Living Labs” that are used in smart city research projects called for

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and funded by the European Commission (Cardullo & Kitchin, 2018a; Engelbert et al., 2018). To an important degree, the neoliberal smart city is thus publicly reified through everyday discursive practices that at once represent and construct the neoliberal smart city narrative. These discursive practices are “everyday” in the sense that many urban residents experience, witness, and take part in them, as part of going about their daily, urban lives. Consider, for example, the reading of the “smart meter,” which is (freely) provided and installed in people’s homes by commercial energy suppliers. Of course, the futurist design of the device itself is ideologically interesting, because it features and interferes prominently in people’s interior styles. However, the very act of checking the meter is particularly significant, because it can position urban residents as actors whose span of urban political control and civic responsibility is confined to monitoring their own consumption (see Strengers’s concept of “Resource Man,” 2013, p. 9). Examples that relate more directly to urban governance would be residents checking their own and others’ speed or pollution through smart technology devices in public spaces, or residents participating in a smart experiment in which the city council produces, stores, and links data about (their) movements and actions in designated urban areas or in relation to specific public services. More mundane discursive readings of the neoliberal smart city narrative are as follows: navigating a fancy district that is semiotically marked or “namescaped” (Berg, 2011) as “smart”; setting up office in a coffee bar where customers get the code for the Wi-Fi, or being asked to vote, through your smartphone for your city to become the world’s smartest city. Similarly, everyday readings of the neoliberal smart city text consist of encounters with the municipalities’ smart ambitions for the future, either through its documents, flags, posters, and designated website or through newly established quasi-public foundations and networking organizations (cf. Vanolo, 2014), whose names tend to follow the generic formula of “[insert city] Smart City.” The discursive practices of the neoliberal smart city narrative, in turn, are connected to other discursive practices in the neoliberal order of semiosis (cf. Fairclough, 2000b). They occur or, rather, co-occur with other everyday discursive practices that similarly (re-)produce the urban as a commodity, an arena for residents’ responsibility, creativity, and resilience, a “technocratic matter of speed and efficiency” (Wiig & Wyly, 2016, p. 487), and, generally, as a place of (post-)political consensus or “neutralized” conflict (Béal, 2011; Rosol, Béal, & Mössner, 2017; Swyngedouw, 2016). Consider, for example, how neoliberal smart city discourse practices co-occur with practices of city marketing such as the semiotic demarcation of high-end real estate developments, “hubs” and cities as locations for international conferences or how they co-locate with “big society” discourses, such as “pop-up” community centers and neighborhood renewal competitions. Similarly, think of the myriad ways in which smart city discourse practices feature in cities’ ambitions to become global beacons of creativity or green innovation, or in their “partnerships” with “stakeholders” to develop the capitalist business case for urban sustainability.

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In the same way that these other discursive practices themselves are constituted and held together by the commonsensical status of neoliberal urban tropes (Hall & O’Shea, 2013; Massey, 2013), so do they now provide the ideological cement for the novel neoliberal configurations of “the smart city.” This ideological connection with such other semiotic or discursive practices is a first explanation why neoliberal (smart city) discourse practices can be so effective. A second reason is, of course, that promotional practices are increasingly professionalized and imprinted in city government. This is evidenced by the sheer share of communications, public relations, and events officers in municipal departments, and, less visibly, by the fact that urban branding strategies increasingly decide the contents and direction of urban government programs (Eshuis & Edwards, 2013). However, does the ideological persuasiveness of the neoliberal smart city narrative mean that urban inhabitants thus accept and reinforce the narrative’s premises and logic? The next section turns to this question.

The Radical Potential of Everyday Meaning-making This contradiction of, on the one hand, assigning a crucial ideological role to the discursive encoding of the neoliberal smart city, while, on the other hand, disregarding the critical potential of decoding practices of that “text” by “not necessary technically or politically astute” audiences, raises three important questions. First, are urban inhabitants mere spectators, who fail to recognize, let alone problematize the underpinning logic of the neoliberal smart city narrative? How do engagements with, or readings of, the neoliberal smart city narrative feature as part of ordinary residents’ “everyday city life” (Cardullo, 2017)? And under what circumstances can ordinary urban residents’ readings of the neoliberal smart city text be considered as politically meaningful? These questions are not (often) considered in smart city scholarship, at least not beyond those citizens with “technical agency” (Melgaço & Willis, 2016), or with an ability to subversively build, appropriate or hack digital technologies and ICTs (Cardullo, 2017; Datta, 2015). One notable exception is the research report by Taylor, Richter, Jameson, and Perez del Pulgar (2016) that makes recommendations on inclusive smart city development. The report partly draws on focus group interviews with “participants currently missing from, or marginalized by, current discussions and practices of smart city development, and also those whose lives might be changed most by an increase in urban datafication” (Taylor et al., 2016, p. i). While the report finds that these non-expert interviewees do not feel very involved in or connected to smart city projects in the city (of Amsterdam), the bulk of the questions and findings are about the interviewees’ perceptions and understandings of data security, privacy, and data infrastructures. Of course, finding out what ordinary citizens know about the “technical” dimensions of the smart city is very important in destabilizing the smart city as a mode of neoliberal governmentality (Vanolo, 2014). However, as we have seen earlier, the smart city not only relies on invisible technologies and seamless subjection

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but is also publicly reified through the promotional and performative neoliberal narrative of the smart city. The fact that we know very little about how ordinary urban inhabitants read this narrative as part of their everyday city lives is thus a lacuna, not in the least because reading practices and positions may provide a crucial starting point in re-politicizing the neoliberal smart city. We can draw on the cultural studies’ theories of the politics of everyday meaning-making to further imagine this possibility. Four decades of cultural studies especially the legacies of cultural theorist Stuart Hall and sociologist David Morley has shown how texts are “open,” albeit ideologically limited in their polysemy. Consequently, the production and consumptions of texts is a major site for hegemonic struggle. In terms of producing and consuming the neoliberal smart city narrative, this means that the strategically encoded narratives have the influence of common sense and its connections to other forms of semiosis in the neoliberal order working to their advantage. However, audiences may produce different reading positions vis-àvis those narratives, and their ability to confirm, negotiate, or, in fact, challenge and oppose key aspects and premises of the preferred reading depends on audiences’ access to “discursive resources” (Morley, 1980). Access to these resources is, in turn, shaped by audiences’ social location. However, the ability to produce negotiated or oppositional readings is not just based on audiences’ social and cultural capital, as, for example, acquired through wealth, education, upbringing, technical skills, or political literacies. These discursive resources also mediate between a text and audiences’ experiences and reflections of their place for example, their gender, class, ethnicity, and race in the world. For example, feminist cultural studies scholarship (Ang, 1985; McRobbie, 1990; Press, 1991; Radway, 1984) focuses on the type of popular cultural texts soap operas, popular readings, and prime time television which critics claimed reinforced the dominant patriarchal ideology and, thus, positioned women as (un)wilfully accommodating their own subjection. However, these studies, which reconstruct the actual reading practices of actual women, found that these texts were, in fact, actively read and enjoyed by women. This occurred, for example, because watching soap operas or reading romance enabled women to critically reflect on their position within patriarchy and, crucially, to imagine other possibilities and futures. In other words, even in highly domesticated or privatized settings, the very “act of reading” (Radway, 1984) those texts, whose preferred readings are a-critical and depoliticized, were in fact made political by unexpected audiences and publics. These insights, of course, do not undermine the fact that public deliberations about the urban are increasingly superseded by privatized experiences of the city (Iveson, 2007). However, when we apply them to consider the neoliberal smart city narrative as publicly reified through a series of texts that are imprinted by the dominant (“city-as-exchange-value”) ideology, then an interesting perspective on political agency in the neoliberal smart city emerges. First, it would mean that negotiated and oppositional readings of the neoliberal smart city text are produced in everyday, rather than privileged or explicitly demarcated, discursive encounters. Second, that these critical readings can be produced by the

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very urban inhabitants who are typically conceptualized as being put and kept “in their place” by the neoliberal smart city. And third, that the ability to produce critical readings is not only shaped by socially stratified access to discursive literacies (like academic skills, technical knowledge, or political know-how) but also by equally stratified first-hand experiences of, and social positions in, the neoliberal smart city. The following concluding section reflects on the implications and obligations of this theoretical possibility for critical smart city scholarship.

Conclusion This chapter has argued that the promotional and performative neoliberal smart city narrative may provide an unusual space for the production of alternative, repoliticized (smart) city imaginaries and that it may do so for at least two kinds of “ordinary” urban inhabitants: those with privileged discursive literacies and those with underprivileged social experiences. These two types of inhabitants, of course, remind us of the Lefebvrian distinction between those that are “discontented” about and those that are “excluded” or “exploited” from, urban life, and, similarly, between those for whom the right to the city is a “demand” and those for whom it is a “cry” (cited in Marcuse, 2014). Similarly, we may recognize “the discontented” as the politically and technically astute urban actors, whose political actions and imaginations of critical smart city scholarship are considered as meaningful interventions in the neoliberal smart city. But the possibility of “the excluded” asserting their right to the city, in part, through producing everyday political readings of neoliberal smart city texts because of their asymmetrical or underprivileged social position in it, underscores the cultural politics of the neoliberal smart city. Critical smart city scholarship should hence continue investigating how neoliberal smart city technologies colonize and govern place through the modalities of invisibility and seamlessness (cf. Vanolo, 2014). But it should also research how neoliberal smart city narratives occupy public space, how they construct expectations about behavior in/attitudes toward that space, and how they consequently (re-)produce social in/exclusion. Similarly, critical smart city scholarship needs to consider neoliberalism’s inevitable fissures and possibilities for agency (Ferguson, 2010), and investigate if, when, and how ordinary citizens produce alternative meanings of these narratives. Inspired by Creswell’s thinking about the ideology of place (1996), I would argue that critical smart city scholarship should be vitally concerned with exploring when and how ordinary citizens (can be enabled to) “denaturalize” the neoliberal smart city narrative? We may witness manifestations of urban inhabitants’ everyday resistances (Creswell, 1996; McCann, 2002) or what Kaika (2017) terms “dissensus practices” in more or less coordinated and visible meaning-making practices, such as “culture jamming” (Carducci, 2006), “poaching,” or localized political protests. However, we may also, or particularly, expect alternative meanings of the neoliberal smart city narrative to be produced “privately” (cf. Iveson, 2007),

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when urban inhabitants have “micro-” experiences of discontent or exclusion through everyday encounters with the smart city narrative. Thinking about how to unearth these private readings not only poses an important methodological challenge for critical smart city scholarship but also provides a crucial opportunity for our scholarship to be politically relevant (Latour, 2000) and to facilitate the dissemination and using a typical neoliberal smart city term “scaling up” of repoliticized imaginaries for the (smart) city.

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Chapter 4

Playable Urban Citizenship: Social Justice and the Gamification of Civic Life Alberto Vanolo

Abstract Over the last few years, technological developments have allowed new possibilities for fostering civic participation and engagement, as testified by various smart city experiments. In this framework, game elements are diffusely mobilized in order to develop responsible and active citizens with the aim of tackling urban problems. Gamification may be effective in nudging citizens and promoting various forms of participation, but fundamental ethical and political questions have to be addressed. This chapter develops the argument by interpreting gamification in light of the classic conceptualization of social justice proposed by David Harvey, arguing that participation through gamification potentially implies critical elements of injustice. Keywords: Gamification; civic gaming; serious games; smart city; participation; civic engagement

Introduction Traffic Agent is a mobile app produced with large-scale funding from the city of Oslo, the Research Council of Norway, and IT corporation Capgemini. Basically, it is a GIS-based app which allows children to report safety hazards they encounter on the way to and from school. The app has been designed in order to crowdsource data for improving road maintenance and infrastructure planning; it enables the sourcing of cheap and up-to-date information straight from children who are subjects usually difficult to co-opt into planning. However, as with crowdsourced projects in general (Dodge & Kitchin, 2013), there is a concern about how to motivate children to take part and to maintain engagement. The core idea has been to develop the app as a kind of spy-based

The Right to the Smart City, 57 69 Copyright r 2019 by Emerald Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved DOI: 10.1108/978-1-78769-139-120191004

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game for mobile phones and tablets. Children are said to be excited about taking on the role of secret agents to help keep the city safe. According to the project manager: “the Traffic Agent engages young children and shows them they have a role in their community. This early exposure to civic responsibility is very important.”1 This is an example of gamification, which is widely intended as the mobilization and implementation of ludic elements in order to manage “serious” issues. In the sphere of urban management, this means that by introducing game mechanics such as competition, rankings, scores, badges, levels, rewards, and virtual currencies, software designers and policy-makers aim to stimulate public engagement and virtuous social behavior (Deterding, Dixon, Khalad, & Nacke, 2011). By reconfiguring citizens into players, and thus urban problems into games, people may be nudged to act and behave in civic, sustainable, and appropriate ways; for example, by separating waste, paying taxes on time, saving energy, consuming, and so on (Morozov, 2013; Vanolo, 2018). Of course, gamification is not limited to children, as in the case of Traffic Agent. For example, there are many apps developed in order to gamify tourist experiences by turning tourists into urban treasure hunters, in a way not too different from collecting characters in Pokemon Go! The gamification of civic life is arguably still limited in most cities, but experiments and discourses, including scientific debates, are blooming. Although a large strand of the literature is pretty positive, and even celebratory, about the potential of civic gaming, critical scholarship has also emphasized risks and limits. For instance, it is possible to think of gamification as a governmental technology: by taking part in games, citizens’ agency is reconfigured and moralized in the perspective of a specific rationality, ultimately “conducting the conduct” of subjects, to use a very popular Foucauldian phrase (Rose, 1999). The aim of this chapter is to develop critical reflections concerning gamification, participation, and citizenship, by mobilizing the notion of social justice as proposed by David Harvey (1973, 1992, 1996). The main idea developed in the chapter is that participation through gamification may trigger forms of injustice which have to be considered with caution by urban planners and policy-makers. In order to develop the argument, the next section discusses the concept of social justice, followed by a discussion on games and gamification. I formulate a hypothesis and develop a tentative map of the different kinds of threats to urban justice posed by the gamification of city life.

Social Justice and the (Digital) City Since the late 1960s, social justice has been a central concern within urban studies. One of the main contributions to the debate was by David Harvey, with his

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http://nws.eurocities.eu/MediaShell/media/CitiesInAction_TrafficAgent_Oslo_Jul16. pdf. Accessed on 26 April 2018.

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pivotal book Social Justice and the City (1973), exploring the relationships between the distribution of power and the dynamics of capital accumulation. He linked the concept of social (in)justice to the intrinsic contradictions of the capitalist mode of production and its crucial role in the production of urban space. The argument was further developed in his 1996 book, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, in which he bridges Marxian perspectives (dialectic materialism) with post-structuralist feminism in order to explore the notion of justice in relation to issues of otherness, difference, positionality, and situatedness. Harvey’s (1992) article, Social Justice, Postmodernism and the City, already mobilized this theoretical construction. By discussing two very different urban examples (the eviction of homeless in Tompkins Square Park in New York and the proposal for a highway infrastructural project in Baltimore), Harvey develops an understanding of social justice which is different from redistributive justice (Rawls, 1971). He rejects the relativism characterizing most post-modern cultural analysis, consisting of deconstructive exercises without taking any meaningful position or triggering action or transformation. Talking about the eviction of the homeless from the park, he asks: What should the policy-maker and planner do […]? Give up planning and join one of those burgeoning cultural studies programmes which revel in chaotic scenes of the Tompkins Square sort while simultaneously disengaging from any commitment to do something about them? Deploy all the critical powers of deconstruction and semiotics to seek new and engaging interpretations of graffiti which say “Die, Yuppie Scum”? Should we join revolutionary and anarchist groups […]? (Harvey, 1992, p. 591) In the article, Harvey takes inspiration from Iris Marion Young’s book Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990) in order to stress the centrality of the question of positionality in thinking about the production of urban space. The article proposes six core arguments (propositions) which may help in conceptualizing more just forms of planning (Harvey, 1992): (1) Just planning and policy practices have to support forms of social and political organization and systems of production and consumption which minimize the exploitation of labor power in the workplace and in the living place. (2) They must confront the phenomenon of marginalization in a nonpaternalistic mode and find ways to organize and militate within the politics of marginalization in such a way as to liberate captive groups. (3) They have to empower rather than deprive the oppressed of access to political power and they have to encourage the ability to engage in self-expression. (4) They must be sensitive to issues of cultural imperialism and seek, by a variety of means, to eliminate the imperialist attitude both in the design of urban projects and modes of popular consultation.

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(5) They must seek out non-exclusionary and non-militarized forms of social control to contain personal and institutionalized violence without destroying capacities for empowerment and self-expression. (6) Just planning and policy practices should recognize that the necessary ecological consequences of all social projects have impacts on future generations as well as upon distant peoples and take steps to mitigate negative impacts. In order to reflect on the impact of gamification processes in terms of justice, this chapter interprets the phenomenon in relation to these six propositions. It aims at contributing to ongoing debates about the social, cultural, and political implications of smart city projects, the multiple and uneven ways in which computer code can shape urban space, and the meaning of the Lefebrevian concept of “right to the city” in a scenario of progressive digitalization of urban space (see, e.g., Kitchin & Dodge, 2011; Shaw & Graham, 2017; Vanolo, 2014; and various contributions in this book).

Gamification and Civic Engagement The literature on gamification is wide, heterogeneous, and not yet fully codified, being composed in large part of conference proceedings, research papers, and other gray materials. Indeed, the main source for a definition of gamification is the well-cited conference paper by Deterding et al. (2011). It describes gamification as “the use of game design elements in non-game contexts” (Deterding et al., 2011, p. 1). According to the authors, gamification comes originally from the business sector, long before the diffusion of mass digital technologies. For example, frequent flyer programs introduced by United Airlines in the 1970s might be considered as a kind of game, designed with the goal of fostering customers’ loyalty: By flying, consuming, and using credit cards, it is possible to earn “points,” to reach upper “levels” and to enjoy exclusive experiences, such as accessing lounge spaces in airports (Reiners & Wood, 2015). But it is also possible to think of “civic” and “non-commercial” examples: The Scout movement mobilizes badges, medals, uniforms, and titles (General, Eagle Scout, etc.) in playful ways with the aim of educating young people (Zichermann & Cunningham, 2011). Contemporary forms of gamification are strongly connected to the affirmation of digital technologies and social media. Digital and mobile technologies offer a number of possibilities for gamifying life. In order to frame the phenomenon, it is important to be clear about concepts such as “game” and “playing,” which are at the core of game studies. Leyden J. Huizinga, author of the book Homo ludens, defines play as a free activity standing quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life; as being ‘not serious’, but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner (1938 [1950], p. 13)

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This understanding of play has been further developed by Roger Caillois (1958). In Les jeux et les homines, he distinguishes between play and games, describing the latter as activities which are formally free, separated in time and place, uncertain (the course cannot be determined), unproductive, and governed by rules and logics which differ from those of ordinary life (cf Bateson, 1972). It is easy to notice that Huizinga and Callois’ classical conceptualizations of game and play fall short in explaining many contemporary forms of gaming. For example, many “serious games” imply productive activities; there are games and videogames which are not governed by rules in strict sense (cf Rodriguez, 2006); and the idea that there is no profit in playing is controversial because as it will be further discussed later in the text people may play games for money, social capital, prizes, and other kinds of rewards. Rather than trying to define game and play, more recent contributions in game studies tend to approach them as cultural formations, for example, game cultures (cf Ash & Gallacher, 2011; Mäyrä, 2008; Shaw, 2010; Steinkuehler, 2006). This way, gamification may be intended as the progressive diffusion of gaming cultures in everyday life. As stressed by Palmer and Petroski (2016), gamification does not mean necessarily to play games; rather, it concerns embedding game thinking or game mechanics in daily activity such as shopping, consuming, training your body, studying, or working in order to render these practices more attractive and/or productive, particularly by nudging users. The idea of nudging comes from behavioral economy, and it has been popularized by Thaler and Sunstein (2008). According to them, people’s behaviors may be driven by developing “choice architectures,” which means shaping the contexts in which people make decisions. Choice architectures are inescapable, as choices are always presented and framed in partial and situated forms; nudging hence means altering these architectures in order to alter behaviors “in predictable ways, without forbidding any option or significantly changing their economic incentives” (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008, p. 6). The aim is to encourage behaviors and decisions which are supposed to be beneficial for society and for the individual, for example, acting in sustainable and healthy ways or participating in civic life. Choice architectures may be manipulated by shaping the way information is presented, by modifying urban design, by defining default choices, or by motivating people with different kinds of immaterial rewards. This latter case is specifically associated with gamification, as proper behaviors may be rewarded with extrinsic rewards (related to the game design: badges, trophies, awards, levels, scores, points, missions, quizzes, leaderboards, and other “tokens”), intrinsic rewards (implicit in playing, such as self-worth through beating records, and mastering the game), and social rewards (such as the narcissistic display of results and performances through social media). As anticipated, gamification elements (and games) have been implemented in the sphere of civic life and planning, particularly in order to nudge collaboration, participation, and deliberation (Lastowka & Steinkuehler, 2014). Lerner (2014) suggests that democratic engagement is most likely to occur when democracy is designed in a playful way. Games, in fact, may favor participation, cooperation, decision-making, and compromise. For example, by transforming

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political decisions into games, it is possible to include people who do not have specific technical knowledge of political and urban problems. Of course, the point is not to turn everything into a game, but to include playful elements in planning systems in order to nudge effective participation and interest, as testified by a number of experiments and initiatives carried out by urban laboratories such as Mexico City’s Laboratorio Para La Ciudad, Dublin’s The Studio, Boston and Philadelphia’s Offices of New Urban Mechanics, Copenhagen’s MindLab, San Francisco’s Office of Civic Innovation, and Singapore’s Human Experience Lab. These include the gamification of participatory budgeting, collective design of public space, and a number of other planning spheres (Ampatzidou, Bouw, van de Klundert, de Lange, & de Waal, 2015; Gordon, Haas, & Michelson, 2017; Schouten, Ferri, de Lange, & Millenaar, 2017). Furthermore, several city institutions are promoting initiatives aiming at creating playful cities, to be intended as spaces engendering or allowing a spirit of gaming and playing (Alfrink, 2014). Digital technologies may allow new sets of possibilities for heterogeneous experimentation with urban playfulness; examples include various forms of “pervasive games” based on augmented reality technologies, commercial apps such as Foursquare, which mobilize ludic elements, and artistic and technological experiments aiming to create new connections between people and the urban space (Nijholt, 2017).

Being Part of What Game? As anticipated at the beginning of the chapter, gamification can be deployed as a governmental technology, and it is not a coincidence that the expression “persuasive system” is quite diffused in the language of software design (cf Bogost, 2014). By providing rewards, points, and charts, games define “appropriate” and “inappropriate” behaviors, and hence, they subjectify “good” and “bad” citizens/users. The computational technology of measurements, charts, points, virtual trophies, and leaderboards assigns a position to each user, transforming them into assessable and enumerable units. Neoliberal rationalities inform the mechanics of performance and competition triggered through gamification constructing of a hierarchical social structure within the group of users, and it responsibilizes users/players in order to achieve results and performances (Berry, 2012; Rey, 2014). In fact, gamification simplifies the complexity of reality and everyday life by setting well-defined rules and enabling the constant quantification of user performances through status bars, progress bars, and other representational tools taken from videogame culture. We are therefore asked subtly to measure our own productivity, health, and well-being, with the implicit imperative to perform and to govern ourselves in relation to health care, education, sustainability, workplace productivity, etc. In exchange for the provision of personal data and quantified performances, the user is rewarded with a sense of participation. At the same time, the potentialities of games to achieve social goals and trigger transformative and progressive forces in society have not to be

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underestimated. The example of the Situationist movement (1957 1972) is emblematic, as it aimed at destabilizing and criticizing advanced capitalism and its related cultures by blending play, spontaneity, and critical thinking, ultimately celebrating the revolutionary potential of gaming in allowing reappropriation, re-employment, and re-configuration of public spaces beyond pre-given routines (Andreotti, 2000; De Certeau, 1980; Lefebvre, 1968). In more recent times, various playful practices connected to smart tech and civic hacking have been analyzed (Ampatzidou et al., 2015; Corsín Jiménez, 2014; de Lange, 2015). In this sense, rather than criticizing gamification per se, it may be interesting to try to map the forms of injustice which may be enacted through the gamification of civic life. Whit this aim in mind, the six propositions formulated by Harvey may offer some coordinates. The first proposition concerns the need to minimize the exploitation of labor power. In this sphere, gamification seems to be dangerous and subtle, being a powerful technology for the exploitation of digital labor. Turning work into a game is an effective strategy, as fully acknowledged by human resource management divisions in companies all over the world (Bogost, 2014, ironically names gamification “exploitationware”). By replacing “real” incentives for workers and customer with fictional rewards that have no meaningful value and require no meaningful investment, gamification allows new forms of exploitation of cheap work, which has been named “playbour.” This may be the case of the work of data-provision through gaming.2 But there is more: By blurring work and play, gamification does not just turn work into a playful activity, but it also turns game into productive work (Rey, 2014). For example, social media have been arguably gamified through the introduction of progress bars in users’ profiles, “like” and “share” buttons and related systems for enabling measurement on users’ posts and interactions, the connection of various external gamification applications (such as Nike + ), and the emergence of social games especially designed to be played within social media.3 Second, just planning has to confront marginalization. Gamification may allow interesting forms of inclusion of “marginal” subjects, as in the example of children as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. At the same time, it may produce other forms of marginalization. As stressed by Isin and Ruppert (2015), there are a number of ways citizens can cope with digital technologies, and the old binary division between those “having” and those “not having” technologies offers just a partial view over the complex landscape of positionalities associated to digital citizenship. Digital technologies are likely to determine new forms of exclusion in the process of producing gamified citizens. For example, various subjects may not have the capability or the will to be reconfigured as digital citizens and digital gamers. A number of people, for a number of different reasons,

2

https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2012/10/15/gamification-playbor-exploitation-2. Accessed on 26 April 2018. 3 See, for example, the software package GamEffective: https://www.gameffective. com. Accessed on 26 April 2018.

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do not have a Facebook or Google account. Most probably, issues of class, wealth, gender and race strongly influence attitudes to participation in digital citizenship projects and in engaging in civic games. It is hence difficult to imagine that gamification of civic life will be a universally inclusive exercise. The third proposition on social justice concerns empowerment and the ability to engage in self-expression. Most current experiments with gamification are not particularly helpful in this sense, as participation is often intended in a very codified and pre-packaged way (i.e., it is possible to express views and positions just in the ways set and coded by the software designer), and hence there seems to be little space for self-expression. Moreover, the evolving relation between citizens and gamified environments (and digital technologies in general) is producing a huge gap in empowerment and social positionalities: on the one hand, a limited number of technologically skilled citizens seem to have the capacity to modify software codes, to manipulate games, and to use gamified environments in creative and playful ways; on the other, many people arguably, most people simply experience gamified engagement in quasi-passive and pre-packaged ways, turning into what Gabrys (2014) names ambividuals, for example, malleable subjects that are expressions of a computerized ambient. This adds to a further line of reflection, that is, questioning whether avatars and online identities may be considered as forms of empowerment and expansion of personal identities into a virtual space of citizens; this issue might be linked with the problem of cultural imperialism (fourth proposition). Gamification is indeed a governmental technology mostly implemented by companies and institutions with a hegemonic position in order to nudge users and to extract their digital labor, but this is just one part of the story. It has to be taken into account that game identities may allow the playful experimentation of alternative ways of being and acting, and in this sense, progressive gamification may have an emancipatory and transformative role. An example is offered by Ahwaa, an open discussion platform for Arab LGBT individuals using game mechanics (e.g. custom cartoon avatars, scoring systems and unlockable features) in order to protect and engage its community.4 The gamified relational space of Ahwaa represents a form of virtual “third space” opening possibilities for self-expression, identity formation, and community building. It is a sort of “gated community” within a heteronormative society which tends to marginalize, stigmatize, and even repress non-hegemonic sexualities. Fifth, Harvey argues that just planning has to seek out non-exclusionary and non-militarized forms of social control. Gamification (unlike videogames, see Ash & Gallacher, 2011) has apparently limited connections with military powers and industries, but it has for sure a lot to do with social control. On the one hand, digital games are made up of algorithms which leverage a variety of data sources to develop interactions in effective ways; in this sense, games constantly

4

https://majal.org/ahwaa. Accessed on 26 April 2018.

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watch over users (O’Donnell, 2014). On the other hand, game mechanics and game designers take advantage of different forms of data gathering and analytics about the behaviors of users, and little is known about the use and values of these data which are in the hands of companies (Whitson & Simon, 2014). However, the relationship between gamification and surveillance is not that straightforward, because it is possible to mention examples of countersurveillance games and strategies. For example, in CCTV Treasure Hunt, participants have to scout English cities in order to photograph CCTV cameras; data generated by users are then mapped in order to make the cities’ surveillance apparatus visible.5 In Berlin, a more radical version of the game, named Camover, requires the physical destroying of the cameras.6 Gamification may become then subversive and counter-hegemonic. Finally, according to Harvey, policy practices have to think about the ecological consequences of social projects. Of course, gamification may nudge behaviors in sustainable ways, and there are countless examples of green gamification. TerraCycle, for example, is a portal collecting programs offering individuals, businesses, and organizations the opportunity to earn TerraCycle points for the waste they collect and send in, which are redeemable for cash donations to charity or non-profit organizations.7 Recycling is rewarded with points, and additional points may be obtained through brand sponsored contests. TerraCycle was born in 2001 as a start-up, and it is now a flourishing company acclaimed on the web as a model of eco-capitalist and ethical business, currently operating in 20 countries. Together with game development company Guerillapps, in 2011, it introduced a Facebook game named Trash Tycoon. Sponsored by various commercial and non-commercial organizations, the game generates profits by advertising brand logos and by the use of a virtual currency; 10% of the profit is donated to Carbonfund.org. Green gamification, like the one proposed by TerraCycle, may be interesting and useful, but it also worth noting that it supports a quite narrow understating of sustainability, one that accommodates and tames the concept in a way that not only is not threatening capitalism, but it even encourages it. As a sort of “sustainable modernization,” it fuels the idea that the right game and the right app will provide an environmental fix, without the need of a radical rethinking of our society, as stressed by more radical scholars in the sphere of urban political ecology (Heynen, Kaika, & Swyngedouw, 2006; Keil, 2007) and in debates about the ideologies of smart city techno-solutionism (Cardullo, Kitchin, & Di Feliciantonio, 2018; Morozov, 2013).

5

https://cctvtreasurehunt.wordpress.com. Accessed on 2 August 2017. https://camover.noblogs.org. Accessed on 2 August, 2017. 7 https://www.terracycle.com. Accessed on 26 April, 2018. 6

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Endnote: A Just Playable Urban Citizenship? At present, in China, there are at least eight social credit systems in operation, which assign scores based on behavior (Liang, Das, Kostyuk, & Hussain, 2018). The main two are run by two giant corporations. One is Sesame Credit, a private credit scoring system developed by an affiliate of the Chinese Alibaba Group: It uses data from Alibaba, and customers receive a score related to social media interactions and purchases. The other is run by Tencent: It gives scores ranging from 300 to 950 by combining subscores related to various subcategories: social connections, consumption behavior, wealth, etc. The rewarding system produces real effects: Some Chinese companies, for instance, do not require a deposit for renting bicycles, cars, and apartments to individuals with higher scores. In a similar way, applications to get a visa are easier, since people with high credit scores are considered “financially reliable.”8 Scores are also displayed in some Chinese online dating websites. The Chinese government is currently allowing private companies to run pilot schemes with the intention to combine successful systems into one unified “social trust” system to rate citizens and to make scores publicly available. The potential consequences in terms of justice and social control may be huge, and it is easy to guess that this will further transform the self-governance of citizens. Those with lower scores, in fact, will be “guilty” of poor citizenship for example, because of bad-driving, smoking in forbidden zones, or posting fake news online and they thus potentially excluded from public offices, good jobs, luxury hotels, good restaurants, etc. The point of these examples from China is not to forecast a dystopian future. On the contrary, the aim is to point out that there are countless examples of gamification in the here-and-now of everyday life, and new technologies are just expanding the interconnections between games and life. While the separation of the spheres of life and games has traditionally been difficult to trace, it has now become even more difficult under the growing diffusion of ludic mechanisms in everyday life, including civic life. By mobilizing Harvey’s ideas on social justice, this chapter has suggested that there are several reasons for considering gamification with caution, as it might produce new forms of injustice at the very same moment when gamification aims at nudging positive and inclusive behaviors. If gamification is going to represent a new force in the production and experience of spaces and relations, critical analysis and serious reflections on the politics of gamification are surely needed in urban studies.

8

https://supchina.com/2017/06/07/good-credit-visa-japan-luxembourg-chinas-latest-business-technology-news/. Accessed on 26 April, 2018; https://www.independent.co.uk/ life-style/gadgets-and-tech/china-social-credit-system-punishments-rewards-explaineda8297486.html. Accessed on 17 August, 2018.

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Chapter 5

The Right to the Datafied City: Interfacing the Urban Data Commons Michiel de Lange

Abstract The current datafication of cities raises questions about what Lefebvre and many after him have called “the right to the city.” In this contribution, I investigate how the use of data for civic purposes may strengthen the “right to the datafied city,” that is, the degree to which different people engage and participate in shaping urban life and culture, and experience a sense of ownership. The notion of the commons acts as the prism to see how data may serve to foster this participatory “smart citizenship” around collective issues. This contribution critically engages with recent attempts to theorize the city as a commons. Instead of seeing the city as a whole as a commons, it proposes a more fine-grained perspective of the “commons-asinterface.” The “commons-as-interface,” it is argued, productively connects urban data to the human-level political agency implied by “the right to the city” through processes of translation and collectivization. The term is applied to three short case studies, to analyze how these processes engender a “right to the datafied city.” The contribution ends by considering the connections between two seemingly opposed discourses about the role of data in the smart city the cybernetic view versus a humanist view. It is suggested that the commons-as-interface allows for more detailed investigations of mediation processes between data, human actors, and urban issues. Keywords: Smart city; datafied city; urban commons; interfacing; ownership; the right to the city; commons-as-interface; translation; collectivization

Introduction: The Right to the Datafied City? The proliferation of (big) data is spurring a research and design agenda that aims to improve the management of smart cities (Kitchin & Perng, 2016). One

The Right to the Smart City, 71 83 Copyright r 2019 by Emerald Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved DOI: 10.1108/978-1-78769-139-120191005

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of the key challenges is to make sure that these data in practice do not just promote the interests of the few but peoples’ collective interests to fully participate in urban life and culture (Shaw & Graham, 2017). In other words, the datafication of the city raises renewed questions about “ownership” as a non-legalistic kind of stewardship, or what Lefebvre and many after him have called “the right to the city” (Brenner, Marcuse, & Mayer, 2012; Harvey, 2008, 2012; Lefebvre, 1996; Mayer, 2009; Mitchell, 2003; Pugalis & Giddings, 2011; Soja, 1989).1 Theorizing the rise of digital media in the urban realm has led to a renewed interest in Lefebvre’s work in general and the “right to the city” in particular, with some authors treating the city itself as a commons (e.g., Huron, 2017; McCullough, 2013; McQuire, 2016; Ramos, 2016; Stavrides, 2016; Teli, Bordin, Menéndez Blanco, Orabona, & De Angeli, 2015). For instance, Foster and Iaione (2016, p. 288) state: the city is a commons in the sense that it is a shared resource that belongs to all of its inhabitants. As such, the commons claim is importantly aligned with the idea behind the “right to the city”— the right to be part of the creation of the city, the right to be part of the decision making processes shaping the lives of city inhabitants, and the power of inhabitants to shape decisions about the collective resource in which we all have a stake. Likewise, Stavrides (2016, pp. 1 2) in his work on the urban commons asks whether “contemporary city-dwellers discover in and often against current forms of urban order opportunities to appropriate their own city, to create or even reinvent shared spaces and inhabiting practices based on cooperation?” In this contribution, I investigate how data may strengthen the “right to the datafied city.” The notion of the commons allows me to explore how data may serve to foster a more participatory “smart citizenship” around collective issues, at a level distinct from both the public and the private. Foster and Iaione (2016, p. 335) make an argument for “urban collaborative governance,” by which they mean allowing people to govern their city as a commons. In this scenario, they argue, government will become a facilitator instead of clinging on to a “command and control” system of governance. This underscores a tension in the datafied smart city. On the one hand, cities are becoming renewed centers of political power with strong leadership and a variety of new technologies that support efficient management goals of centralized remote control via data and dashboards (Bettencourt, 2014; Kitchin, Lauriault, & McArdle, 2015; Mattern, 2015; Medina, 2006; Perez & Rushing, 2007). On the other hand, an emerging domain of groups and organizations generate and open up data to advance collective goals and empower citizens. This is part of a broader set of developments

1

See also the 2018 special issue of Urban Planning 3(3). Retrieved from https://www. cogitatiopress.com/urbanplanning/issue/view/93.

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in the realm of “civic media” or “civic technologies,” terms that have gained some traction to designate the potential of media technologies to foster engagement (Gordon & Mihailidis, 2016; Schrock, 2016). This agenda attempts to counter or complement the hitherto dominant rhetoric of efficiency in datadriven smart city visions. Current research and design projects about urban data tend to shift from focusing on individual or single-party usage (e.g., businesses, governments) to more collective ways to harness the potential of data (Teli et al., 2015, pp. 17 18). The promise of civic data is that it helps to address some of the complex societal problems that cities face (Ciuccarelli, Lupi, & Simeone, 2014; Flowers, 2013; Goldsmith & Crawford, 2014; Goldstein & Dyson, 2013; Kitchin, 2014; Townsend, 2013). The notion of the commons is frequently invoked or alluded to as a counterpoint to dominant narratives of normalizing control through the datafication of cities. Terms such as “data commons” (Cuff, Hansen, & Kang, 2008), “knowledge commons” (Hess & Ostrom, 2007), “networked commons” (Paul, 2006), “commons-based peer production” (Benkler & Nissenbaum, 2006), “digital commons” (Teli et al., 2015), “informational commons” (Boyle, 2008), “ambient commons” (McCullough, 2013), and so on suggest that data are potentially valuable new resources for making decisions about collective issues, including the future of our cities. Ideally, this involves communities who share a sense of ownership and self-organize using digital media, in what has been called “platform cooperativism” (Scholz & Schneider, 2016). After briefly discussing and further operationalizing the commons in relation to the datafied city, I propose the term “commons-as-interface” to connect urban data to the human-level political agency implied by “the right to the city.” This term is then applied to analyze the “right to the datafied city” in three short case studies, followed by a discussion.

Urban Commons, Data Commons The commons have been theorized as goods, collectively managed resources; as systems, institutionalized sets of rules and conditions for collective selforganization and governance; and as practices of “commoning,” actual social interactions that (re)produce the management of the resource.2 Traditionally, the term commons refers to a finite and rivalrous good, such as a pasture, that is difficult to protect from so-called freeriders and hence runs the risk of depletion without proper management (Hardin, 1968). In response to Hardin’s assertion that to avoid “tragedy” the commons must either be state-controlled or privatized, Ostrom demonstrated that “common pool resources” (CPOs) are systems that can be sustainably governed by collective institutions (1990). For Harvey (2012, p. 73), the commons is not a thing but “an unstable and malleable social relation between a particular self-defined social group and those aspects of its

2

For instance, Stavrides makes the distinction between common goods, community, and commoning (Stavrides, 2016, pp. 20 21).

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actually existing or yet-to-be-created social and/or physical environment deemed crucial to its life and livelihood.” The commons typically is positioned somewhere between the public (state) and the private (market or individual), at the level of self-organizing collectives (see Harvey, 2012, pp. 72 74). In the context of urban studies, the commons is pitted against tendencies toward spatial enclosures and social enclaves, from state monopolies to the commodification of urban spaces and infrastructures (e.g., Foster & Iaione, 2016; Stavrides, 2016). How can a focus on the commons help to conceptualize and analyze the “right to the datafied city”? While the conceptualization of the city as a commons is an attractive idea, we must critically examine it in light of current datafication of urban life. On closer inspection, Foster and Iaione’s suggestion that the city is a resource that belongs to its inhabitants provokes some thorny questions. First, for whom does this right count and who are excluded? Is this “ownership” just for stationary inhabitants? What about mobile populations: tourists, migrants, travelers, expats, visitors, foreign entrepreneurs, and even global humanity in the case of world heritage cities? And from a temporal angle, do older residents have more rights than newcomers? Is permanent ownership favoured over temporary use? We see how the urban commons appears to be skewed toward a “sedentary metaphysics” of ownership (Cresswell, 2006, pp. 26 27). There is also the risk of reinstating a container view of urban life as a closed ecosystem of inhabitance. As many cities today have become globalized media cities, defined by “glocal” data flows and hybrid spatio-temporal mobilities, questions about scale and boundaries of urban commons and frictions around ownership become particularly challenging. Second, the city-as-resource suggests a fairly functional view of urban life. Like Hardin’s classical metaphor of the pasture, the city is to be used responsibly but not overused. Obviously, a city is not a meadow. Cities also are sites of non-utilitarian cultural “excess”: innovation and waste, pleasure and affect, deviation and transgression, (collective) esthetic experiences, and encountering difference. Interestingly, (big) urban data too are understood in terms of their “excess,” with their vastness and illegibility exceeding human cognitive capabilities (Tenney & Sieber, 2016, p. 106). As goods, as well as discursively, urban data are overabundant. Big data come with big hopes.3 Yet what appears to be lacking are meaningful interfaces for people to engage with the datafied city through systems for just governance and practices for fair commoning. Third, conceptualizing the entire city as a commons is a totalizing oversimplification that loses sight of a more fine-grained, differentiated, or nested form of the commons. This is especially urgent with new goods, systems, and practices arising around the datafication of the city. Crime data, for example, are something completely different than clean air in how it is valued as a good, with regard to institutionalized governance, and the social practices it requires and

Indeed, “overflow,” expectations of a “more” to come, can be said to characterize our digital life and to propel innovations (e.g. Mackenzie, 2010, pp. 15, 21, 213). 3

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engenders. Along this line, Shaw and Graham (2017, p. 920) suggest that ICTbased commoning strategies might be more effective and feasible if the selfmanagement of technologies and resources target “smaller, more tangible points and densities of lived space and human relations” instead of chasing after “the new Wikipedia” that covers everything. Likewise, Kitchin and Perng (2016, p. 3) warn about the “fetishization” of code and data that might occur if they are not considered as part of a wider socio-technical assemblage. Municipal open data platforms have been launched to provide overarching frameworks for addressing civic use of data. This is often done in conjunction with hackathons, with mixed results at best (Maalsen & Perng, 2016). In my view, this indicates a conceptual misfit between, on the one hand, the one-size-fits-all model of the big data warehouse and the zero-sum game of the app contest and, on the other hand, “lived” urban issues that are collective, frictional, and messy. In conclusion, the commons perspective of the datafied city that I propose highlights tensions around data ownership in the smart city. It addresses not just the single-currency use-value of the datafied city but also focuses on culture and experience. Moreover, it is particularly attuned to highlight controversial collective issues. Such an understanding of the commons broadens our myopic focus on the economic aspects of data as the metaphorical twenty-first-century “oil” to the variegated ways in which data serve as the “grease” between different people’s rights to engage with public and collective issues.4

Commons-as-interface How, then, can we tie urban data to the human-level political agency implied by “the right to the city”? How do we connect urban data to the domain of human experience and the capacity for collective political action? In my view, these are matters of meaningfully “interfacing” with data (translation) and with shared urban issues (collectivization). Interfacing between humans and data is about finding a common language and zone of exchange for translation. Interfacing with issues is about finding ways to let these issues speak to people and create collective awareness and action. The notion of “commons-as-interface,” I suggest, allows us to address how data, issues, and people can properly speak to each other. The term interface has in abstracto been conceptualized as simultaneously connecting two or more elements through processes of transmission, communication or force, and articulating their distinct identities, while often rendering itself invisible in the process (Drucker, 2011; Galloway, 2012; Hadler, 2018; Hookway, 2014). There is a striking parallel with how Stravrides (2016, pp. 4 5) conceptualizes the commons as “thresholds” that connect and separate and create the conditions of entrance and exit. In their discussion of an

4

Credit for this idea goes to my colleague Mirko T. Schäfer, who already informally suggested this metaphor in 2013.

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“informational right to the city,” Shaw and Graham (2017, p. 908) use a similar vocabulary to describe the current state of city life, suggesting that “[u]rban society is now materially produced as a function of networked informational circulation—a point defined by entries and exits.” Hence, I claim that the commons-as-interface operates at such thresholds, the points of entry and exit between the informational and material, between data and urban issues, between state, market, and individual interests, and between enclave communities and the general public. Translation involves rendering the logic of one domain intelligible to another. Collectivization is the process of group formation around controversial “matters of concern” that occurs when a thing becomes social or the social becomes a thing (Latour, 2005, pp. 114 120). In the cases below, we will see in more detail how this happens, for example when the “excess” of data is linked to concrete everyday goals, when the quantitative is made qualitative, or when the abstract is made tangible and vice versa. Despite the somewhat technical perhaps even “managerial” ring of the word “interface,” I consider power relations and the political as central to the idea of the commons-as-interface. A major challenge in the right to the datafied city is to give voice to the marginalized. As Chandler (2015, pp. 841 842) notes, big data can only help to better manage what already exists. Hence, big data may not empower those people who most need actual social change (see also Tenney & Sieber, 2016, p. 106). In dominant tech and policy narratives, urban data figure as a form of rationalized management by numbers, with tech companies supplying city governments with data and computational tools for decisionmaking (Goldsmith & Crawford, 2014). By contrast, more critical perspectives of urban data tend to be concerned with disciplinary projects and mechanisms of lateral control, or with corporate logics where informational ranking produces new inequalities and injustices and where filtering and prioritizing disrupt or weaken the potential for political encounter and dissent (Shaw & Graham, 2017, p. 913). A focus on the commons, in my view, allows for a more affirmative view of “the right to the datafied city” than purely oppositional perspectives of data-activism as political dissent or anticorporatism, which ironically only reaffirm the status quo.5 The commons-as-interface not only counters existing state or corporate narratives but also produces new alternatives. It advances the programmatic idea of a non-exclusive “ownership” of urban issues in processes of translation and collectivization that connect, and at the same time articulate and respect, differences. The commons also interfaces between, on the one hand, a political economy view of platforms, code and data as hegemonic technologies and, on the other hand, the sometimes overly optimistic and a-political accounts

5 An example of this catch-22: “[B]ecause urban space is increasingly defined by Google’s regime of information mediation, an informational right to the city depends upon the ability to enunciate dissent within this regime” (Shaw & Graham, 2017, p. 914, my italics). Nonetheless, I fully realize that my attempt at a more affirmative view is a departure from Lefebvre’s more radical system critique.

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of DIY user practices around participatory media, sharing economy, open source, and civic tech (see Kitchin & Perng, 2016, p. 11).

Interfacing the Datafied City To substantiate the claim that a commons-as-interface provides a productive perspective on the use of data to foster a “right to the city,” I discuss three cases from the Netherlands. Each serves to underpin one dimension of the commons (goods, systems, practices). Understanding data as common goods, in the case of neighborhood platform Verbeterdebuurt, suggests that data are resources that can be “owned” collectively and add value to support or sustain matters of concern. As already mentioned, data are part of larger socio-technical assemblages that involve code, algorithms, platforms, protocols, governance structures, and so on. An understanding of these assemblages as commons systems, in the case of sensor network Geluidsnet, highlights the formation of new collective institutions, with stakeholders entering into new mutual relationships. The case of Datastudio Eindhoven serves to illustrate data commoning practices that give rise to community-building and expand the issues to larger or new constituencies. Verbeterdebuurt (www.verbeterdebuurt.nl, “improve the neighbourhood”) is a platform that allows users to report problems and contribute ideas in urban public space and connect them to local city councils. The platform was inspired by the UK-based FixMyStreet project but wanted to allow people to also contribute with ideas and not just complaints. The interface uses a proprietary Google Maps backend as a geospatial canvas for pinning problems and ideas using a browser or mobile app. The platform can also be embedded in local authority webpages or other neighborhood websites. Different data inputs appear as fairly intuitive icons on the map: A red pin signals a reported problem, a yellow light bulb indicates an idea, and a green flag a solved problem. During an interview I conducted, one of the founders of the platform recounted the story of two young boys from the small city of Hoorn who wanted to have skate park in their neighborhood.6 Their initial direct request to the local authorities was not honored. Then, they started a campaign on the platform and collected 200 signatures of support, which resulted in the municipality indeed building a skate ramp in their neighborhood. In the context of this contribution, I take this story to be about the production of a common good. The boys managed to generate a social “currency,” a quantified and visible number of backers, that provided value to a community. Datafication of an issue allowed for the translation of group desires into a quantified social constituency exerting political force, in a manner similar to Latour’s (1990) early actor-network analysis of a weight attached to a hotel key, which translates the manager’s desire to have keys returned at the front desk. Datafication also helped in collectivization: the

6

See de Lange & de Waal (2012).

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production of a subculture around a controversy, namely the lack of shared space for a hobby that individuals have in common. Through self-generated data entries (the backing of the idea), this fairly unorganized and spatially distributed subculture became visible as a group on the platform. This led to a readjustment of the relationship between local authorities and citizens. An insight from this anecdotal case is that data played a minor but nonetheless decisive role. Decisive, because the data allowed for what Teli et al. (2015, p. 20) call “recursive engagement,” namely “the capability of a public of being able to take care of the infrastructure that allows its existence as a public.” Without the data, there would have been no “thing” around which to establish a public. The common good consisted of a digital/material hybrid: collective desires, a pinned light bulb on the platform, quantified shows of support, a list of signatures, a formal decision, a skate ramp, and a community of skaters. Another tentative insight is that the commons can be nested inside closed platforms. Instead of categorically treating closed and open platforms as incommensurable, I suggest that the commons, in a case like this, spills over when it becomes an interface between private, communal, and public interests. Geluidsnet (www.sensornet.nl/english, “noisenet”) was started in 2003 as a citizen-driven initiative to measure noise pollution around Schiphol airport. There was at that time considerable controversy in the media about noise pollution in dense (urban) areas, about whether it was better to calculate or measure, which party did the calculations or measurement, and about feasibility and affordability. Schiphol Airport’s NOMOS system combined measurements with calculation models and published numbers four times per year. Geluidsnet started with the intention to provide, in their own words, a more “factual” basis for these discussions. It set up 25 measurement points on the roofs of houses of private citizens and municipalities willing to contribute/sponsor. This distributed noise measurement network used fairly cheap certified microphones, servers running open source operating system Free BSD, a centralized server, and proprietary audio analytics software developed at Groningen University, and ended up being to be much cheaper than Schiphol’s NOMOS system. This setup collected and displayed real-time aircraft-generated noise in dB(A) on their website through a cartographic interface that showed periodically blinking green, yellow, orange, or red dots depending on the dB(A) measurement displayed in it. Geluidsnet managed to translate an abstract issue like noise pollution and make it tangible through a data visualization. The combination of hardware, spatial nodes, data and software, maintenance, institutional support, agenda-setting, and a public communication strategy established a commons system that provided continuous translations between the issue of noise pollution, quantified data visualizations, local residents’ lived experiences and the emotions related to it, and public policy. The project managed to engage citizens and municipalities as a collective with an issue they previously felt powerless about (see Nold, 2016 for a similar case about Heathrow Airport). The initiative had a public impact. It influenced the agenda and advice of the state-appointed commission “Aircraft Noise.” The mandate of this commission was extended to include advise on using measurements for public information-provisioning. This was an

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acknowledgment that sensing data shape peoples’ collective views about matters of concern. In this case too, what matters is not the data on their own but how they constitute a common system that acts as an interface to rebalance the relationship between citizens, governments, and corporations. What interests me is how the self-proclaimed “factuality” of citizen-generated data translated into a performative force behind the justificatory inclusion of collective civic initiatives in policy recommendations. By making facts public, the project established a public, which in turn became a social fact that could not be ignored. New commoning practices can be seen in a recent cultural project called DATAstudio Eindhoven (http://www.datastudio-eindhoven.nl/en). The project was an initiative of Eindhoven municipality and Institute for Architecture, design, and e-culture Het Nieuwe Instituut around the question what the datafication of the “smart city” means for the involvement of people who are not part of a technologically savvy avant-garde in Eindhoven (known as a technology and engineering city). During the exploratory phase, the project initiators set up camp in a park in the residential neighborhood Woensel Noord. They asked passers-by what they considered important local issues. From these interviews and a subsequent series of talks and discussions in public places like the library, the project zoomed in on what it called “data deserts”: urban issues that are difficult to be adequately captured with data.7 The challenge became to open up non-datafied and fairly invisible issues that nonetheless have large societal impact, like loneliness, and make them publicly debatable. In the next phase, design concepts were developed during a workshop led by Dan Hill (Arup Digital Studio) that linked social data to city planning. One proposed outcome was the project Roomsel Noord, a community-led platform linking lonely elderly people who own a home with young freelance workers looking for flex spaces to work. While that remains a hypothetical and perhaps somewhat solution-oriented proposal, what interests me about the overall project is that it builds on the conviction that truly tenacious societal issues tend not to come with neatly packaged data to match. In my view, the project was an attempt to “common” a mostly closed-behind-doors phenomenon that tends to be monopolized by public professionals (social workers, housing corporations, municipalities, health care). Commoning practices involved translating an intangible private issue into a series of public social interactions and discussions. This required prolonged engagement with people, places, and issues, from street interviews to design intervention workshops to an exhibition. It involved collectivization by tying the issue to current developments of relegating an increasing number of social welfare tasks to the local municipality, which in turn looks expectantly at citizens to do-it-themselves. Commoning the issue provided an interface for citizens to start talking about issues like these, their relation to other stakeholders, and to claim their right to the datafied city.

7

See reports here https://innovationorigins.com/combine-data-reality-street/ and here http://www.datastudio-eindhoven.nl/en/cloud-atlas-3.

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Discussion: From a Data-driven to a Data-enabled Right to the City It has been argued that smart technologies tend to promote technocratic rule and a “new managerialism” (Kitchin et al., 2015, p. 14), instead of a true politics of the city. Data, so we are constantly told, pervade every aspect of our lives and direct us to work out solutions to every kind of problem. Thanks to our big data-driven knowledge of the world, the map can indeed become the territory. This contribution has attempted to explore another narrative about data and collective urban issues, one that is not data-driven but data-enabled. We have looked not at the collective management of “utilitarian” infrastructures (e.g., water, waste, energy management; cooperative projects around food production, housing, or insurance), but at frictional socio-cultural issues that have to do with “the right to the city”: having a space for a shared hobby and lifestyle, living quality and environmental justice, or making issues like loneliness public. In these cases, I argued, the gaps between the issue, the data, and the affective experiences of the people involved have been interfaced by the commons, understood as a good, a system, and a practice. Data in these cases are neither very big, nor leading, nor very spectacular or sexy. Rather, they were unassuming supporting “actants” in larger “assemblages” that involved networks of people, issues, and data negotiating their right to the city (Latour, 1990, 2005). This exploration leaves open many questions about, for instance, the governance of/by the data commons; about biases in urban data, social sorting, and “splintering publics”; about diversity and giving voice to the powerless; and about the limitations of the commons frame and possible conflicts between communal goals and general public values. I will limit myself here to one suggestive point. Engagement with the smart city through data is frequently cast in a series of opposing terms: top-down versus bottom-up, passive versus active participation, corporate versus civic, closed versus open and accessible, and expertproducer versus amateur-user (see Tenney & Sieber, 2016). Underneath such framing, I observe a more fundamental split of discourses about the role of data in the smart city: a cybernetic view versus a humanist view. On the one hand, data are considered as the building blocks for the automation and management of cybernetic smart cities. Data in this view serve posthumanist arguments about, for instance, algorithmic democracy as a fairer and more just type of governance (e.g., Hughes, 2018). On the other hand, data are considered as the foundation underneath humanist ideals of the well-informed citizen located in the deliberative and rational subject. “True participation” in this second view involves individuals having unfettered access to data, actively and voluntarily contributing data for civic purposes, and using data for democratic decisionmaking and action. Ironically, what binds these views together is a shared epistemic glorification of data as the precursors to transparent information (be it systems or people) and the latest incarnation of old ideals about an omniscient future perfect. In both of these data-driven discourses, the mediating interface disappears. In our cases above, however, we saw that data are not just informational objects but equally performative objects with the power to enact new

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realities (see also Kitchin & Perng, 2016; Verhoeff & Wilmott, 2016). I suggest that future research develops perspectives on data-enabled citizen participation that are more agnostic about machine versus human agency or top-down versus bottom-up and instead investigates how data, human actors, and urban issues come together in networks that interface and constitute “the political” in the sense of serving to align common interests and/or to articulate controversies. The commons can serve as a heuristic for such processes of interfacing. The right to the datafied city, then, is less about abundance and transparency and more about intensity: the degree to which data affect people to feel and act on a shared sense of ownership of their city.

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Paul, C. (2006). Digital art/public art: Governance and agency in the networked commons. First Monday; Special Issue #7: Command Lines: The Emergence of Governance in Global Cyberspace. Perez, T., & Rushing, R. (2007). The citistat model: How data-driven government can increase efficiency & effectiveness. Retrieved from https://cdn.americanprogress. org/wp-content/uploads/issues/2007/04/pdf/citistat_report.pdf Pugalis, L., & Giddings, B. (2011). A renewed right to urban life: A twenty-first century engagement with Lefebvre’s initial “cry”. Architectural Theory Review, 16(3), 278 295. Ramos, J. M. (2016). The city as commons: A policy reader. Retrieved from https:// cdn5-blog.p2pfoundation.net/wp-content/uploads/city-as-commons.pdf Scholz, T., & Schneider, N. (Eds.). (2016). Ours to hack and to own: The rise of platform cooperativism, a new vision for the future of work and a fairer internet. New York, NY: OR Books. Schrock, A. R. (2016). Civic hacking as data activism and advocacy: A history from publicity to open government data. New Media & Society, 18(4), 581 599. Shaw, J., & Graham, M. (2017). An informational right to the city? Code, content, control, and the urbanization of information. Antipode, 49(4), 907 927. Soja, E. W. (1989). Postmodern geographies: The reassertion of space in critical social theory. London: Verso. Stavrides, S. (2016). Common space: The city as commons. London: Zed Books. Teli, M., Bordin, S., Menéndez Blanco, M., Orabona, G., & De Angeli, A. (2015). Public design of digital commons in urban places: A case study. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 81, 17 30. Tenney, M., & Sieber, R. (2016). Data-driven participation: Algorithms, cities, citizens, and corporate control. Urban Planning, 1(2), 101 113. Townsend, A. M. (2013). Smart cities: Big data, civic hackers, and the quest for a new utopia (First ed.). New York, NY: Norton. Verhoeff, N., & Wilmott, C. (2016). Curating the city: Urban interfaces and locative media as experimental platforms for cultural data. In R. Kitchin & S.-Y. Perng (Eds.), Code and the city (pp. 116 129). London: Routledge.

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Chapter 6

Smart Commons or a “Smart Approach” to the Commons? Paolo Cardullo

Abstract The chapter advances some critical reflections around commons and commoning in the smart city. It suggests that so-called smart commons that is, forms of ownership of data and digital infrastructure increasingly central to the discourse around appropriation and co-production of smart technologies tends to focus more on the outcome (open data or free software) rather than the process which maintains and reproduces such commons. Thus, the chapter makes a positional argument for a “smart approach” to the commons, advocating for a central role for the public as a stakeholder in advancing, nurturing, and maintaining urban commons in the smart city. The argument is illustrated through three brief case studies which reflect on instances of commons and commoning in relation to the implementation of public Internet infrastructure. Keywords: Smart city; public Internet; smart commons; commoning

Introduction There is now a broad, interdisciplinary literature related to smart cities, much of it rooted in critical social science. Kitchin (2014, p. 5) contends that smart cities are “increasingly composed of and monitored by pervasive and ubiquitous computing” that use “real-time analytics to manage aspects of how a city functions and is regulated.” Here, technocratic forms of governance enacted through control centers, apps, and dashboards increasingly mediate everyday life, but are used also for predicting compelling urban futures (Kitchin, in press). For Hollands (2008, p. 305), such smart cities represent a technology-led stage in the process of neoliberalization and gentrification of cities: a “high-tech variation of

The Right to the Smart City, 85 98 Copyright r 2019 by Emerald Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved DOI: 10.1108/978-1-78769-139-120191006

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urban entrepreneurialism” that seeks to attract the creative class and evades notions of social justice. Shelton, Zook, and Wiig (2015) demonstrate the complexity and diversity of the ways in which the smart city idea(l) is implemented in particular places: “smart city interventions are always the outcomes of existing social and spatial constellations of urban governance and the built environment” (p. 14). They note the way in which smart city policies travel uneasily across places, eventually widening the gap between the smart city idea(l) and “the actually existing cities, territories and relationalities where these policies are being constructed and implemented” (p. 22). These critical scholars, and many others (e.g., Cardullo & Kitchin, in press; Kitchin, 2015; Rossi, 2017; Vanolo, 2014), unpack the relation between neoliberalism and smart cities, suggesting that the governance push behind this new urban strategy aims at bolstering technological solutions to urban problems and the privatization of city service provision. Yet, by exposing the ideological premises and the actual functioning of smart cities and by de-coupling “smartness” from topdown technological solutionism and corporate-led efficiency, they also provide some space for imagining alternative urban futures. Recent critical interventions have started delineating alternative ways of thinking technologies in cities through sharing and owning data in common (e.g., Balestrini et al., 2017; Bria, 2017; Corsin Jimenez, 2014). They advocate radical transformation in the way smart technologies are produced and put in use, suggesting that the city should be a shared environment with shared resources, in other words, a commons. But, can “smart commons” guarantee citizens’ right to the city through inclusive digital and social policies while promoting citizens’ meaningful participation to urban life? “Smart commons” initiatives seem often to focus more on taking resources back from the circuit of capital circulation, rather than on the process that maintains and reproduces such a commons (see De Angelis, 2017; Huron, 2015). These critical interventions suggest also a different meaning of “smartness,” concerning the complexities and wickedness of city living, and thus fostering an idea of “the urban” which is very different from the knowable, programmable, and linear processes postulated by the present smart city. This is particularly relevant to researchers investigating informality in the Global South where the informal use of scarce resources displays a great deal of collective intelligence, making it possible for people to reproduce their livelihood beyond the coercive, regulatory, and controlling gaze of existing institutions and the market (Smart, forthcoming). There are concerns that the formalization of informality will have pernicious effects on those people who make their right to inhabitation based on informal relations and on sharing livelihoods in common (e.g., Ascensão, 2016; Smart, forthcoming; Willis, this volume). A smart city in common, as postulated by this chapter, would instead be relaxed toward informal practices, recognizing these as vital to city living and to the accrual of collective intelligence for the common good. This chapter examines the possibility of public Internet provision as a commons. In the collective imaginary and in most people’s everyday uses, access to unlimited, super-fast, and possibly free Internet, has become symbolically crucial in the making of smart cities. The chapter makes a positional argument for a

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“smart approach” to the commons, advocating for a central role for the public as a stakeholder in advancing and maintaining urban commons in the smart city. In the following sections, the distinction between urban commons and commoning is discussed with reference to critical urban scholarship and the “right to the city.” The chapter presents briefly three case studies which reflect on instances of commons and commoning in relation to the implementation of public Internet infrastructure. The first case evaluates the data extractive practices from a private digital platform, the Google-owned app Waze, and its claim to harvest the “intelligence of the crowd.” The second case concerns the provision of municipal extra-large broadband in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and addresses the opportunities offered by public ownership of infrastructures, although with a critical eye to its governance processes. The third case revisits an ethnographic account of a shared community asset, a wireless network in inner-city London called Open Wireless Network (OWN), reflecting on commoning and on its links with informality (Cardullo, 2017). Together, they highlight a trajectory along the provision of the Internet as critical infrastructure, reflecting on smart cities in common, informality, and democratic governance.

Commons and Commoning A useful line of thought in the vast literature on commons suggests that this concerns not so much the conflict between public private urban space, although this is also an important aspect of the struggle for the commons (e.g., De Angelis, 2001; Stavrides, 2016). Rather, commons manifests itself, historically, as the locus within which peoples’ social reproduction is put into practice. The confusion is exactly at the point of departure from the idea of the commons that emerges, in medieval England, as a fight against the enclosures of land. According to Illich (1982), people saw this common space not as a “non-private space,” rather as the space where their everyday subsistence was guaranteed. Using the commons was an act of temporary appropriation, an everyday practice for the purpose of social reproduction: thus, a commons is determined not so much by its proprietary regime, but by the uses and practices around it. A common good, in other words, has no ontological substance in itself. It becomes a commons because of the qualitative relationship with one or more subjects; it is the use value, of a place or an object, that makes it relevant to the commons: “you don’t have a common good, you share in common good” (Mattei cited in Iaione, 2012, p. 112). For McLaren and Agyeman (2015, p. 24), “sharing and cooperation are universal values and behaviours” and, therefore, “sharing is an opportunity to release [people’s cooperative] capacity, confined by competitive markets and bureaucratic states.” So, if cities are shared creations with shared public services, streets, mass transit, and shared spaces, “truly smart cities must also be sharing cities” (McLaren & Agyeman, 2015). Thus, critical scholars prefer to put the emphasis on “commoning,” a set of practices which “actively seek to integrate resources from the state and capital into commons circuits” (Birkinbine, 2018) and also reproduce the commons via

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sharing such resources in emerging solidarity networks. This shifts our focus on the long-term maintenance of the commons which, according to Huron (2015, p. 973), is “the true challenge of the commons.” De Angelis (2017) argues that this challenge hinges around the daily practices of the community of interest involved, as well as the bundle of rights attached and their enforcement, which should protect the commons and guarantee its reproduction. Thus, “commoning” highlights the contested, open-ended, and political character of urban commons (De Angelis & Stavrides, 2010), now “a grass-roots project to build a new form of consensus” around a different set of values and ethical codes (Susser, 2017, p. 1). But, what does this mean nowadays when most people’s livelihood, especially in the Global North, might depend on access to information, communication, and coding (Lash, 2002)? And if these are non-expendable commons their use does not deplete the digital resources is it a governance challenge to provide rewards for these contributions while maintaining access and benefit for all (McLaren & Agyeman, 2015, p. 130)? While Hardt and Negri (2009) deem the new digital commons as “immaterial,” it is important to hold on the fact that, by being produced, this presents in itself a new set of social relations and spatial organizations: People living in (smart) cities are not just urban-dwellers or neighbors or residents, but the producers and the products of urban commons (including data). Thus, a materialist critique to digital commons (information, knowledge, data, software, etc.) centers on a radical reading of the “right to the city”: It fosters urban commons, commoning, and sharing practices as daily materiality of inhabitation and social reproduction. Henry Lefebvre ([1967] 1996) coined his influential concept around the idea that urban space is a “work of art” of its users, appropriated by the everyday practices of the people who inhabit it. According to Purcell (2008), with the “right to appropriation” Lefebvre suggests something more than the right to be physically present in city space, rather the possibility of shaping that space according to its inhabitants’ needs. In this guise, the right to the city is “a right to change ourselves by changing the city more after our heart’s desire” (Harvey, 2003, p. 1). Clearly, in this formulation, questions of radical democracy cannot be disjointed from claims to fairness and equality, to the point of entailing “some kind of shaping power over the processes of urbanization” (Harvey, 2003, p. 2), which brings us back to Holland’s (2008) “social justice critique” of the neoliberal smart city. For our argument, there are two important consequences to this reading of Lefebvre. First, the right to the city shifts the scale of reference to the urban, where life itself is fought for: “the urban is the hegemonic scale at which political community is defined” and, consequently, “urban inhabitance must come first in defining political community” (Purcell, 2008, pp. 99, 108). It follows that inhabitation, as a modality of existence, takes over other political communities and entitlements (e.g., belonging to a national state). Further, re-scaling toward the urban suggests a different arrangement for policy and decision-making in city. This is a space ready to accommodate citizens’ political claims: According to Marcuse’s reading of Lefebvre (2009), this is the most radical idea he brings forth because it opens the city to those people deprived of material subsistence and

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legal rights (a cry) and of alternative futures (a demand). Taking this further, and second, the democratization project suggested by this reading of Lefebvre opens a critique of the neoliberalization of urban space. This is because it suggests a radical shift from exchange to use values, making a compelling argument for the right to inhabitation over market-led organization of city space (Purcell, 2008). Thus, the right to the city is not written in legal frameworks only, nor linked to nationality, rather it is the political struggle for the future city, the struggle for radical democracy itself. As a consequence, the right to the city appears to involve a bundle of rights claims and codified rights (these being previous expressions of people’s “cry and demand”) which extends or contracts according to various contexts, historical conjunctures, and political struggles. However, what Lefebvre means by “rights” stays vague to the point that “rights themselves remain a black box” (Attoh, 2011, p. 669). It follows that, on the one hand, a renewed attention to civic, social, symbolic, and newly emerging digital rights is welcome, to the point that “[responsive] communitarianism can be combined with more liberal concepts of rights” (McLaren & Agyeman, 2015, p. 203). On the other hand, the communitarian values of sharing one’s surplus can be vital for cities struggling with scarce resources, competing claims and, often, austerity measures (McLaren & Agyeman, 2015). In sum, it seems more appropriate to reframe the “problem” of the commons, from the classic triad private/public/ commons, to the emerging configuration capitalism/city/commons (see also De Angelis, 2017). Here, the scale of reference is at the city and infra-city level, while the struggle moves back and forth across the two circuits for the creation and circulation of wealth and well-being: the circuit of capital and that of the commons. It is through this conflictual, dynamic, and place-based lens that I understand public Internet provision. Thus, the chapter starts advocating for a policy direction alternative to the prevalent (neoliberal) mode of making cities “smart”: This would include municipalization and democratic governance of critical infrastructures (including “data infrastructure” and the Internet) and public commons partnerships between city and urban co-operatives and movements.

Maintaining and Defending the Commons in the Smart City This section discusses maintenance of urban commons in the smart city by presenting very briefly three case studies around the uses and proprietary regimes of the Internet provision and its effects on commoning. These draw on previous primary research on communitarian wireless networking in inner-city London, more recent interviews around European smart city projects, and many secondary sources. Although smart cities are not just about broadband connectivity, access to unlimited, super-fast, and possibly free Internet has been symbolically crucial to the making of smart cities: the Internet backbone is thought to be the smart city backbone. Pioneering works in this regard have warned against the fragmentation and polarization of urban territories under the pressure of informatization, with the creation of exclusive high-tech (and now “smart”) enclaves and highways (Graham & Marvin, 2001). So, the following three examples are a

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preliminary investigation on the Internet as a critical infrastructure, that is, as a basic need for citizens and their participation to the smart city.

Google-Waze: A Matter of Collective Intelligence The first example is in line with a myriad of critiques around the production and use of data under advanced capitalism: Technology critic Evgeny Morozov calls it “data extractivism” (2015), others “data colonialism” (Thatcher, O’Sullivan, & Mahmoudi, 2016) or “platform capitalism” (e.g., Shaw & Graham, 2017). They all point to the extraordinary concentration of data produced through consumption and leisure into the hands of a few Silicon Valley’s start-ups. Although this example is not exhaustive of all smart city initiatives since it presents a second-order cybernetic instance with semi-automatic feedback from users (Kitchin, Coletta, & McArdle, 2017), mobility though traffic mapping has become arguably the most popular and easily recognizable features of what “smart city” would include (Picon, 2015). The congestion-avoiding app Waze is said to have transformed travel into a collective knowledge effort where, “like birds in a flock, IoT-connected cars and drivers now routinely exhibit a high degree of collective intelligence” (Eggers, Guszcza, & Greene, 2017). The argument put forth by supporters is that, by all people using Waze, a social effort is produced that makes cities more navigable and with a higher degree of efficiency than any individual capability. Ultimately and unquestionably we make cities better. The crowd, in fact, has become a powerful metaphor to signify “the power that can emerge from a mass of individuals converging to tackle a set of tasks” (Dodge & Kitchin, 2013, p. 19). The Google-owned (since 2013) Waze offers congestion data to cities for free for the purpose of transport planning. Or, more likely, Google-Waze is trying to “aggressively build partnerships” with local authorities, exchanging data with them for “the benefit of the public.”1 Google, like other “gig economy” giants such as Airbnb and Uber, is thought to monetize the enormous amount of data collected via shared efforts by building deep-learning AI and competitive edges on other public or private authorities (e.g., Morozov, 2017; Thatcher et al., 2016; Zuboff, 2015). The example shows how digital commons are now created by life itself, in mundane and very material practices of urban-dwelling, social encounters and social reproduction. This commons extends to the city in its totality: It is the social factory 4.0 which has moved away from the constraints, both physical and social, of the workplace to the spaces of the everyday. This is also an example of privatization of socially accrued value (a form of urban commoning) which taps into the “wisdom of the crowd” (an urban commons): That is, capital appropriates resources from the circuit of the commons. It is also important to note that smart initiatives can impact on other commons although this is often neglected due to their assumed efficiency and “post-political” affordance (see Swyngedouw, 2011). While Waze might benefit individual journeys, it has

1

https://www.fastcompany.com/3045080/waze-is-driving-into-city-hall

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brought traffic to previously less congested side streets and neighborhoods (Weise, 2017). Moreover, this imagined crowd of users cannot take control on any aspect of Waze: In other words, the “intelligent crowd” participate only as data-products, customers, and users of a private app. The pernicious aspects of data capitalism have brought many activists and scholars to advocate for a “smart commons,” where ownership and control of data are paramount to democracy (e.g., Bria, 2017; de Waal & Dignum, 2017; De Lange, this volume). Partly acknowledging this, I suggest though that forms of democratization of data and software are not per se immune to falling into the “post-political trap of technological determinism” (McLaren & Agyeman, 2015, p. 201): There is a risk these initiatives sometimes foster “commons” as a goal in itself, rather than “commoning” as the process that leads to such a goal.

Chattanooga, the “Gig City” Although fast connectivity is crucial to the development of data capitalism, the above example shows also that the Internet backbone is generally assumed. As Mazzucato has been suggesting for some time (e.g., Lazonick & Mazzucato, 2013), the private sector and the dominant neoliberal discourse downplay massively the role of the public in driving innovation and growth via core infrastructures, investments in skills and literacy, and more generally in taking on board the political economic risks of failure. Similarly, Hu (2015, p. XVII) argues that “the all-but-forgotten infrastructures that undergird the cloud’s physical origins [are] often originated in a state’s military apparatus,” where “the cloud” is a catchy metaphor for the Internet: “a cultural fantasy, always more than its presentday technological manifestation” (p. 97). This is never been more true than for Chattanooga, Tennessee, which in 2010 was the first city in the United States to offer 1 Gbit/s high-speed Internet (at the time, over 200 times faster than the national average), thus transforming the image of a polluted and failing city into the thriving “Gig City” (Kitheka, Baldwin, White, & Harding, 2016). More notably, this super-fast Internet was offered via the municipal and non-profit Electric Power Board (EPB), making it the largest public investment in the US on the matter. This mid-sized Tennessee city (170,000 people) made the headlines again in 2015 when it implemented the world’s first community-wide 10 Gbit/s Internet service, available to all homes and businesses in EPB’s service area. This is particular relevant in the context of the US, where Internet activists have long complained of the widening digital divide caused by private contractors’ (the so-called Big Cable: private giant providers such as Comcast and AT&T) dis-investment, which has left behind small and rural towns and impoverished neighborhoods (e.g., Gonzalez, 2018).2

2 A handful of towns are following now on the example offered by Chattanooga, for instance, Hopkinsville, Kentucky. Retrieved from https://hop-electric.com/news/ introducing-the-new-energynet/

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The Chattanooga case study offers interesting points for the debate on public infrastructure, governance, and commoning in the smart city. First, it dismantles a few myths: That the public is always behind the technological curve and thus needs private consultancy, interventions, and skills (Kitchin, Coletta, Evans, Heaphy, & MacDonncha, 2017), and that the public is slow, unreliable, and inefficient in delivering EPB completed its ambitious project few years earlier than planned using a federal loan issued to implement cables for its electric smart grid (Davidson & Santorelli, 2015). Second, it highlights the relevance of urban scale vis-a-vis county, state, and federal scales, whose legislations hinder rather than facilitate such endeavors (e.g., positing limits to EPB pricing policy and geographical expansion). In other words, the City inverted the cycle of privatizations and market-led solutions, in a particularly hostile environment: Big Cable and the conservatives brought forward countless legal challenges to Chattanooga City in order to limit the “monopoly” of the public and guarantee a “free market,” including TV commercials warning against the perils of public investments (Rushe, 2014). Moreover, the EPB fiber disrupts powerfully the “net neutrality” debate that certain types of data should be throttled, metered, or charged at different rates, which are hot topics in the US at the present (Gonzalez, 2018). Finally, it is almost commonsensical to believe that citizens might lobby the mid-sized town administrators more successfully than when acting as individual customers dealing with off-shore call centers funded by Big Cable. There is little doubt that the Stanford-educated Democratic mayor of Chattanooga has a typical “smart city” strategy in mind: attraction of creative class via digital hubs, which bolster now several tech incubators and attract new businesses, including venture capital funds (Rushe, 2014). If the material and symbolic effects of this “Internet boomtown” (Koebler, 2016) appear solid on the local economy aggregate indicators show smaller unemployment rates and double average salary these are also typically assumed to “trickle down” to the poor. More research would be needed to evaluate the impact of “the Gig” on the overall population, a third of which is said to be at risk of poverty and social exclusion. A degree of skepticism that superfast Internet translates automatically into greater benefits for lay people is also due: if it takes “just 33 seconds to download a two-hour, high-definition film in Chattanooga” (Koebler, 2016), then we might want to ask how many films, or similar content, an average family can possibly use in one day? As an indirect evidence, EPB has now nearly 100k Internet customers (more than half of the civil and commercial residents of Chattanooga), which drops to about 20% in its poorer neighborhoods (Koebler, 2016): despite EPB offering half-price subsidized Internet for families that have students enrolled in school lunch programs, it appears that poorer residents prefer signing up with Comcast which offers a cheaper service although much slower and capped. In other words, what is the use value of such an initiative?

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OWN: Informality and Commoning For Stavrides (2016), an essential feature for the perpetration of urban commons is the possibility of controlling and eventually revoking appointed leaders. He argues that any commons is held in a dialectic relationship with its users because “common space keeps on producing those who produce it.” Thus, researching the exclusionary practices of urban life is central for understanding commoning, “the social process that creates and reproduces the commons” (De Angelis & Stavrides, 2010). Harvey (2003) too prefers the verb “commoning,” in order to focus on the active and agentive social relations between people as they become enmeshed with the social and physical environment they dwell in. The move from the object to the action is crucial here because the emphasis is now on practices and agencies, from exchange value to use value, and from present returns to longer-term “soft” outcomes. OWN started in 2008 from the rooftops of an iconic hack-space in Deptford, inner-city London.3 It was a mesh of independent radios (“nodes”) which provided broadband access to the immediate neighborhood or passers-by in the reach of its wireless signal. Soon after its establishment, OWN peaked to almost 100 nodes and over 400 users at any one time, but in the last few years, the project went through a period of decline since, with smartphone data network access as standard and a wider public provision in libraries and cafés, “some of the passion for independent Wi-Fi infrastructure building has fallen away” (Cardullo, 2017, p. 5). Informality and commoning were key to the initial popularity of OWN. This is because OWN had a huge use value, responding to the local population’s real needs: a working-class and diverse neighborhood where the digital divide and gentrification pressure of displacement are high. The mesh of nodes suited particularly transient and migrant people, students, and temporary workers, but also less wealthy locals, who did not have the capability to enroll in any official provision (for lack of residential documentation or money). My research on the development of this wireless network (2013 2015) revealed also that maintaining a mesh of hardware, patching the software, and training people to use it was possible only with a large amount of stewardship from trusted community advocates who themselves had strong technical skills (Cardullo, 2017). We can call them “ethical hackers,” a mix of the recurrent “civic hacker” and the more obscure figure of the “hacktivist.” With a degree of social and technical skills, good amount of voluntary work, and some occasional funding, they set up and maintained also a free training space (“Wireless Wednesday”). This is because making community operative is an endeavor rooted in trust, which is a long-term relationship involving at least two things: a place easy to recognize in the locale where people actually live and projects that are engaging because they are deemed “useful,” that is, they are perceived as doing “something” for their users.

3

Recently evicted after H&S and Fire regulation checks by Greenwich Council. Retrieved from http://wrd.spc.org/described/deckspace/

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There was another problem affecting the provision of OWN, as with many other public hotspots. One of the hosts of the mesh recalls that, “because of the speed involved, OWN is not good for videos, but it is for general browsing” (Cardullo, 2017; Interview extract). This reminds of the Chattanooga case: The backbone provision can be key to the success of such many DIY projects; speed and bandwidth matter sometimes. Although the mechanism of governance needs to be evaluated case by case, it is tempting to suggest that the coming together of public investments in critical infrastructures and a communitarian ethos can perhaps find some shared ground in public commons partnerships and platform cooperativism (see De Angelis, 2017; McLaren & Agyeman, 2015; Scholz, 2016). These would re-propose the role of the public as a competitive stakeholder (Mazzucato’s argument for “public value,” 2018) while preserving ethos, autonomy, and some degrees of informality proper of grass-root organizations.

Concluding Remarks There is certain determinism in discourses around data and digital commons, these focusing more on the object (a certain data set or software being made available as common good) rather than the process that leads to and maintains it (commoning). The Internet and data availability do not translate automatically into fairer communities, nor greener and more liveable cities. This is because cities are messy and complex places and because infrastructures are socio-technological assemblages that depend for their functioning on the practices, uses, and therefore skills of those involved around the milieu they fosters. With algorithm-led technologies, this assumption is subsumed to the process of acquiring data, selecting optimal profiles and responses, and enabling feedback. Thus, there is room for a conclusive cautionary note around smart city solutions in relation to commoning. It is important to note that provision of the Internet requires medium levels of stewardship; however, stewardship becomes essential with regard to communitarian involvement because the higher the involvement of lay people, the harder it will become to include them in the development and adoption of the technology. Smart technologies demand the deployment of cultural and social capitals, because they are linked to social exchange and their implementation is conditional to complex contextual arrangements in communities of interest and localities. In addition, some of the technologies currently in use in the smart city are beyond peoples’ agentive interaction with their computational processes enabling black-boxed, autonomous, and automated responses (e.g., Ascensão, 2016): That is, there is nothing automatic and deterministic about platforms and sensors in making communities “operative.” Finally, smart city innovations risk fostering exclusionary outcomes, because city space itself the spaces of social reproduction and production of the commons is increasingly divided by “rent,” which displaces both communitarian hacktivists and local residents. To sum up the argument developed, rather than a heroic immersion in the back alleys of cybernetics, the chapter suggests a more pragmatic approach to

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commons in the smart city. This approach would consider, for instance, that the myriad of citizen science and crowdsourced projects, which make for a “bottomup approach” to the smart city, would not work without conspicuous stewardship and a solid infrastructural provision, such as the Internet backbone. In addition, there is an uncertain but crucial role of the city in drawing policies that support (or hinder) the inclusion of communities, devolve (or take) power to (from) citizens, and enact (or re-centralize) forms of open and democratic governance. As McLaren and Agyeman suggest (2015, p. 1), “good governance and collective city structures” are what truly smart cities need. Here, of course, the keywords are “good” and “collective,” which require a more articulate response than this chapter can offer. These are ethical and political questions: In what form these modalities are combined is difficult to forecast and should be evaluated case by case. However, this chapter has offered a preliminary argument for the direct involvement of citizens and the city in the provision and governance of public Internet infrastructure.

Acknowledgment The research for this chapter was provided by a European Research Council Advanced Investigator Award, “The Programmable City” (ERC-2012-AdG323636).

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Davidson, C., & Santorelli, M. (2015). Understanding the debate over governmentowned broadband networks. ACLP, New York Law School. Retrieved from https://docplayer.net/18441556-From-understanding-the-debate-over-governmentowned-broadband-networks-context-lessons-learned-and-a-way-forward-for-policy-makers.html. Accessed on 10 August, 2018. De Angelis, M. (2001). Marx and primitive accumulation: The continuous character of capital’s ‘enclosures’. The Commoner, 2. Retrieved from http://www.commoner.org.uk/02deangelis.pdf De Angelis, M. (2017). Omnia Sunt communia: On the commons and the transformation to postcapitalism. Zed Books. De Angelis, M., & Stavrides, S. (2010, June). On the commons: A public interview with Massimo De Angelis and Stavros Stavrides. An Architektur, e-Flux, Journal #17. Retrieved from http://www.e-flux.com/journal/17/67351/on-the-commons-apublic-interview-with-massimo-de-angelis-and-stavros-stavrides/. Accessed on 12 July, 2017. de Waal, M., & Dignum, M. (2017). The citizen in the smart city. How the smart city could transform citizenship. IT Information Technology, 59(6), 263 273. Dodge, M., & Kitchin, R. (2013). Crowdsourced cartography: Mapping experience and knowledge. Environment and Planning A, 45(1), 19 36. Eggers, W., Guszcza, J., & Greene, M. (2017, January). Making cities smarter. DU Press, 20. Retrieved from https://www2.deloitte.com/insights/us/en/deloittereview/issue-20/people-for-smarter-cities-collective-intelligence-decision-making. html. Accessed on 04 August, 2017. Gonzalez, L. (2018, March 13). Grassroots group forming to take action on broadband in Massachusetts City. Retrieved from https://ilsr.org/grassroots-group-formingto-take-action-on-broadband-in-massachusetts-city/. Accessed on 29 March 2018. Graham, S., & Marvin, S. (2001). Splintering urbanism: Networked infrastructures, technological mobilites and the urban condition. London: Routledge. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2009). Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Harvey, D. (2003). The right to the city. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 27(4), 939 940. Hollands, R. G. (2008). Will the real smart city please stand up? Intelligent, progressive or entrepreneurial? City, 12(3), 303 320. Hu, T.-H. (2015). A prehistory of the cloud. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Huron, A. (2015). Working with strangers in saturated space: Reclaiming and maintaining the urban commons: The urban commons. Antipode, 47(4), 963 979. Iaione, C. (2012). City as a commons. In Second thematic conference of the IASC on design and dynamics of institutions for collective action: A tribute to Prof. Elinor Ostrom (Vol. 29). Retrieved from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm? abstract_id=2589640. Accessed on 15 December, 2016. Illich, I. (1982). Silence is a commons. The coevolution quarterly. Retrieved from http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Silence.html Accessed on 08 December, 2016. Kitchin, R.. (2014). The real-time city? Big data and smart urbanism. GeoJournal, 79(1), 1 14. Kitchin, R. (2015). Making sense of smart cities: Addressing present shortcomings. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 8(1), 131 136.

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Kitchin, R. (in press). The timescape of smart cities. Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Kitchin, R., Coletta, C., Evans, L., Heaphy, L., & MacDonncha, D. (2017). Smart cities, epistemic communities, advocacy coalitions and the ‘last mile’ problem. IT Information Technology, 59(6), 275 284. Kitchin, R., Coletta, C., & McArdle, G. (2017). Urban informatics, governmentality and the logics of urban control. In Programmable City Working Paper 25. Retrieved from https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/27hz8/ Kitheka, B. M., Baldwin, E. D., White, D. L., & Harding, D. N. (2016). A different “we” in urban sustainability: how the city of Chattanooga, TN, community defined their own sustainability path. International Journal of Tourism Cities, 2(3), 185 205. Koebler, J. (2016, October 27). The city that was saved by the internet. Motherboard. Retrieved from https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ezpk77/ chattanooga-gigabit-fiber-network Accessed on 27 March, 2018. Lash, S. (2002). Critique of information. London: Sage. Lazonick, W., & Mazzucato, M. (2013). The risk-reward nexus in the innovationinequality relationship: Who takes the risks? Who gets the rewards? Industrial and Corporate Change, 22(4), 1093 1128. Lefebvre, H. (1996). The right to the city. In E. Kofman & E. Lebas (Eds.), Writings on cities. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Marcuse, P. (2009). From critical urban theory to the right to the city. City, 13(2), 185 197. Mazzucato, M. (2018). The value of everything: Makers and takers in the global economy. London: Allen Lane. McLaren, D., & Agyeman, J. (2015). Sharing cities: A case for truly smart and sustainable cities. Cambridge: MIT Press. Morozov, E. (2015). Socialize the data centres! New Left Review91, 45 66. Morozov, E. (2017, October 21). Google’s plan to revolutionise cities is a takeover in all but name. The Observer. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/21/google-urban-cities-planning-data Picon, A. (2015). Smart cities: A spatialised intelligence. Chichester: Wiley. Purcell, M. (2008). Recapturing democracy: Neoliberalization and the struggle for alternative urban futures. New York, NY: Routledge. Rossi, U. (2017). Cities in global capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Rushe, D. (2014, August 30). Chattanooga’s Gig: How one city’s super-fast internet is driving a tech boom. The Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian. com/world/2014/aug/30/chattanooga-gig-high-speed-internet-tech-boom. Accessed on 27 March, 2018. Scholz, T. (2016). Platform cooperativism. Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Nyc. Retrieved from http://www.rosalux-nyc.org/platform-cooperativism-2/. Accessed on 16 October, 2017 Shaw, J., & Graham, M. (2017). An informational right to the city? Code, content, control, and the urbanization of information. Antipode, 49(4), 907 927. Shelton, T., Zook, M., & Wiig, A. (2015). The ‘actually existing smart city’. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 8(1), 13 25.

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Chapter 7

Against the Romance of the Smart Community: The Case of Milano 4 You Cesare Di Feliciantonio

Abstract In this chapter, I unpack the idea of “smart community” conceived in relation to the first “smart district” in Italy, Milano 4 You, that will be realized in Segrate, one of the wealthiest municipalities of Italy located in the Milanese metropolitan area. Through the lenses of critical political economy, notably the work of Miranda Joseph and David Harvey, the chapter focuses on the economic rationality behind the “smart community,” that is, a community of production and consumption. In fact, the new residents are envisaged as self-entrepreneurs willing to re-appropriate their data and sell them for profit, while sharing a “smart” lifestyle. However, the chapter avoids a reductionist and negative reading, highlighting the potential for contestation and alternative rationalities to emerge. Keywords: Community; smart district; neoliberalism; real estate; Milan; political economy

Introduction In the early months of 2017, the Italian national and local media widely reported the approval of the construction of the first Italian “smart district,” Milano 4 You, located in Segrate, one of the wealthiest municipalities in the Milan metropolitan area. The project concerns the regeneration of a 300,000 m2 brownfield site next to a plot of land that has been the object of several uncompleted urban development projects in the past, which left the residents of the few buildings realized in a difficult situation since primary services are lacking and there have been serious technical construction issues.

The Right to the Smart City, 99 110 Copyright r 2019 by Emerald Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved DOI: 10.1108/978-1-78769-139-120191007

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The decision to approve the Milano 4 You project was primarily taken to solve the ongoing problems of the residents of the existing buildings, while promoting a new urban model centered on technological innovation and sustainability for both housing and business activities. 80% of the proposed new buildings will be for housing, consisting of a variety of unit types: regular flats, social housing, “residential houses” (a sort of mini-villa), and “senior housing.” The latter will consist of residential units for elder people equipped with smart health technologies to reduce the residents’ need to go to the hospital for check-ups. The project results from the partnership between different private actors (as presently listed on the project website,1 the real estate company RED, IBM, Samsung, and the Politecnico of Milan; in public presentations, several additional business partners are listed). Segrate is located in the eastern area of the Milanese metropolitan area, just at the border with the city, next to Linate airport. Segrate is ranked eighth nationally for average income per capita.2 Beyond Milano 4 You, Segrate is currently experiencing strong real estate dynamism, the main project being the Westfield Mall, expected to be completed in 2020 and promoted as “the biggest mall in Europe.”3 To better connect the mall to the city, a metro line extension is currently under construction. The project for a “smart district” reflects the main trend within the urban political economy of Milan, with large real estate development projects working as the primary vehicles to attract private investment into the city (Anselmi, 2015; Kaika & Ruggiero, 2016; Savini & Aalbers, 2016). This property-led process is presently at work in all the main urban economies of the world, favored because it produces a “spatial fix” for financial investors (Fernandez, Hofman, & Aalbers, 2016; Harvey, 1982). With the spreading of the smart city concept, several multibillion dollar smart real estate projects have been created, the most well-known (and researched by academics, e.g., Shin, Park, & Sonn, 2015) being Songdo in South Korea. Started in 2003, Songdo already hosts more than100,000 new residents and several business activities thanks to the creation of a special economic zone (SEZ) in order to attract investments. According to Kim (2010), since its initiation Songdo has been framed as a “living space of U-life” and “the world’s largest “ubiquitous city” with a high-tech infrastructure digitally linking homes, streets and business” (p. 16). Other similar high-profile real estate-led smart city urban developments include Hudson Yards in New York, Masdar in United Arab Emirates, and Quayside in Toronto (e.g., Carr, 2018; Cugurullo, 2013). Who is expected to move to Milano 4 You? As the chapter will show, the promoters of the project have repeatedly made reference to the formation of a “smart community” of residents. Through the lens of critical political economy, the chapter critically unpacks the notion of community deployed by the project,

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See http://www.milanofouryou.com/. Accessed on 15 August, 2018.. Retrieved from http://www.milanotoday.it/economia/redditi-2015.html. Accessed on 15 August, 2018. 3 Retrieved from http://www.milanotoday.it/economia/westfield-segrate.html. Accessed on 15 August, 2018. 2

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which interests and accumulation strategies (such an evocation of the community) it fuels, and also which political possibilities and elements of novelty it unveils. When analyzing the idea of community developed in Milano 4 You, I also account for the territorial embeddedness of the project, demonstrating how the principles of the “smart community” echoe the representation and the materiality of the community of the Milano Due project, the first gated community in Italy created in the 1970s and also located in Segrate. Methodologically, the chapter results from fieldwork conducted in Milan in 2017 that utilized a suite of research methods (semi-structured interviews with stakeholders of the project, analysis of secondary data concerning the role of land rent in the city economy, and content analysis of development projects and local press articles). The chapter is structured as follows. In the next section, I review the political economy debate with respect to the idea of the community. In the third section, I briefly describe the five main objectives of Milano 4 You in relation to the smart city policies in Milan. In the fourth section, I analyze the idea of community conceived in the project, highlighting how it echoes the ideas behind the gated community of Milano Due. Finally, in the conclusion I build on the dialectical perspective of Miranda Joseph to avoid a negative and closed reading of the project.

Community, Capitalism, and Consumption In order to frame the evocation of the community in the case of Milano 4 You from a critical political economy perspective, I build on the work of Miranda Joseph, notably her book Against the Romance of Community (2002). This lens offers the possibility to think through the tight and ambivalent connections between capitalism and community, the latter being one of the most controversial concepts used by scholars, political elites, and grassroot movements. Although different actors make use of the concept for different purposes, they still tend to imply the existence of an authentic, original “community” within a bounded and clearly defined territory or around shared values, while capital is usually portrayed as global, driven only by economic value and alienating human interaction. Against such a widespread representation, Joseph’s book illustrates how the existence and workings of community (as we know it) needs to be related to the history and working of capitalism, although invoked to either support or challenge capitalist forces and rationality. By framing the use and representation of “community” as tools of capitalist rationality that reify social hierarchies, Joseph dismantles the idea of a common identity linking the members of the community; in fact “communal subjectivity is constituted not by identity but rather through practices of production and consumption” (p. viii). In other words, “social formations, including community, are constituted through the performativity of production” and “capitalism is the very medium in which community is enacted” (p. xii). However, Joseph avoids monolithic and reductionist readings of such a relation in which:

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How can such perspective relate to communities centered around real estate and digital technologies as in the case of Milano 4 You? Following Joseph, we could adopt the work of David Harvey as a foil (1978), notably his work on the specific role of the built environment under capitalism as a profitable alternative to the over-accumulation of the “primary circuit of production” (i.e., industrial production in its most traditional sense). The work of Harvey appears particularly relevant since he openly engaged with the notion of community in his book The Urban Experience (1985). In his view, “community is a highly ambiguous notion that nevertheless plays a fundamental role in terms of the reproduction of the labour power, the circulation of revenues, and the geography of capital accumulation” (p. 231). As a matter of fact, “the particular kinds of communities we call cities, towns, or even neighborhoods are in contrast, definite places constructed by a way of definite socioeconomic and political process. From the standpoint of the ‘communities’ of money and capital, such places are no more than relative spaces to be built up, torn down, or abandoned as profitable dictates. But from the standpoint of the people who live there, such places may be the focus of particular loyalties” (p. 233). However, this opposition between the interests of capital and those of the people inhabiting a “community” is still based on contradictions; in fact, one could oppose the dismantling of one’s own community for capital interests but still profit from specific financial tools or investments based on speculations (e.g., pension funds). So the dialectical relation between capital and community needs to be critically scrutinized by acknowledging the potentialities for agency and empowerment involved by the evocation and construction of community, but also their limits and contradictions. This means accounting for the tight connections between community formation and the dynamics of production and consumption. This debate can be translated to the smart city literature, where such tensions and contradictions resonate with the increasing attention devoted to “smart citizenship.” Following those critical voices who emphasized how the smart city agenda reinforces the neoliberalization of urban policies (e.g., Hollands, 2015; Kitchin, 2015; Townsend, 2013) while increasing control and surveillance (e.g., Kitchin, 2014), an increasing number of scholars have started to question the social and grassroots dimensions behind smart initiatives (e.g., Cardullo & Kitchin, 2018; Joss, Cook, & Dayot, 2017; Sadoway & Shekhar, 2014). Particularly relevant for the scope of the chapter is the recent work of Vanolo (2016) who has explored the role and place of citizens in the main imaginaries at the heart of smart city initiatives. Among the four categories of “smart citizenship” imaginaries identified and traced by Vanolo, two appear useful in framing

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the ambivalent relation between capital and community in the case of smart housing projects. The first one is imaginary #3 (pp. 33 34), “active citizens and inhabitants-as-sensors,” connected to the idea of the smart city as receiving feedback from citizens’ smartphones and collecting data through sensors embedded in the environment designed to make the city more efficient and sustainable since it is able to deliver services in real time. So, urban citizens participate in computational sensing and monitoring; to do so, they need to be pretty homogeneous: “s/he is digitally educated, s/he possesses a smartphone and a PC, s/he constantly generates data and feedback about everything in her/his daily life” (p. 34; see also Gabrys, 2014). The second one is imaginary #4 (p. 34), “the citizen of the future in the city of the future,” based around an ambiguous politics of time which considers “actually existing” citizens as “condemned to constantly trade off welfare (pleasures) of now for the politics of the future” (Gabrys, 2014). This imaginary is based on a vision of “past citizens” as guilty and irresponsible, while “future citizens are undefined subjects, claiming for an inescapable (and even post-political) right to live in a decent world” (Vanolo, 2016; see also Datta, 2018; Kitchin, 2019).

Smart Milan The idea of the “smart district” to be realized in Segrate does not emerge from nowhere; in fact, as acknowledged by Vanolo (2015), since 2011 the Italian government has invested massively in smart cities as a tool to fuel economic growth in both stagnant and wealthy metropolitan areas. In this respect, the city of Milan has been one of the most active in developing smart projects, often partnering with private actors in order to bid for EU funding. In 2013, the City Council and the Trade Chamber of Milan organized a public hearing to make Milan a smart city and subscribed to an agreement for “Milano Smart City.” Following that, the City Council published “Guidelines for Smart Milan,”4 concerning different domains, such as public transport, energy policies, social inclusion and diversity, residents’ well-being, and a more transparent and efficient city governance. These guidelines include all the main characteristics and criticisms around the smart city idea (e.g., Hollands, 2008; Kitchin, 2014; Vanolo, 2014) with the whole strategy built around the main ideas and ideals of neoliberal urbanism, such as promoting the city as a living laboratory, prioritizing private investments in public infrastructures and services, chanting the mantra of sustainability, and seeing citizens only as consumers and users (e.g., Kaika, 2017; Künkel & Mayer, 2012; Swyngedouw, 2016). In line with these ideas, the advertising material of Milano 4 You lists five main objectives. The first one is the “zero cost city,” that is, a strong reduction

4 Retrieved from http://www.milanosmartcity.org/joomla/images/sampledata/programma/SmartCity/milano%20smart%20city%20-%20linee%20guida.pdf. Accessed on 15 August, 2018.

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of the energy and maintenance costs thanks to advanced construction technologies, including building blankets with high thermal insulation performance and the presence of common electrical, thermal, and refrigeration micro-generation systems interconnected by the bidirectional district energy infrastructure, specially designed for this purpose. Moreover, the project aims at making intensive use of “local” renewable energy sources (75 80% of total energy need). The second objective is a “safer life,” digital technologies allowing constant and longdistance surveillance, thus reifying one of the main narratives associated with digital technologies and smart cities (Kitchin, 2014). The third objective refers to “inclusion and participation” through a diverse community of residents, in terms of age and social class, since the project includes social housing. This represents a counter-tendency with respect to both the overall Italian housing sector and urban development projects realized in Milan in recent years. In fact, social housing has historically been extremely marginal in Italy since the fascist regime (1922 1943) and has traditionally framed as a temporary step toward homeownership; this trend has remained unaltered, with almost no public expenditure for housing (only 0.1% of the national GDP in 2009; see Di Feliciantonio & Aalbers, 2018). Concerning recent urban development in Milan, most real estate projects have been massive in scale, involving major banks, developers and “archistars,” as in the very recent case of City Life (Mosciaro, 2018). The making of such counter-tendency is made possible by the low cost of land as the result of bankruptcy by the investment funds and the actors involved in previous projects. The fourth objective is the creation of different services to improve the quality of life for residents as well as the reduction in living costs through sharing platforms for care work and transport. The last objective concerns a new work model by creating the infrastructure which enables work at a distance, coworking, and other forms of digital work.

A Smart Community of Residents? Following the objectives of the project presented in the previous section, I now focus on the expected community of residents who will move to Milano 4 You, showing how the narrative behind the “novelty” of the project is not unprecedented in the case of Segrate as it echoes the narrative around the realization of Milano Due in the 1970s. When reviewing the advertising material for the project, there is a constant reference to the “social” dimension of Milano 4 You, mainly through hypothesizing “smart community” that will move and form there. In a presentation given at the Urban Innovation Centre in Vienna,5 a spokesperson for Milano 4

5

The presentation is retrieved fromhttp://www.urbaninnovation.at/util/dateiloader. cfm?id=1317. Accessed on 16 August, 2018.

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You talked of a “social & well-being pillar” for the project as made by five elements: (1) social leverage as an integration of the community and driven by services, assistance, healthy lifestyle, solidarity, and sharing; (2) optimization of time and costs through easy and efficient access to services and information; (3) the rewarding for good social practices concerning environmental sustainability, mobility, socioeconomic sharing, social cohesion, and inclusion; (4) enhanced e-government and e-democracy solutions through the creation of a digital platform to interact with public administration; and (5) a cultural center engaged with different activities. The use of these socially engaged and communitarian principles confirms how neoliberalism subsumes and commodifies some of the principles historically associated to contestation social movements and utopianism (e.g., Boltanski & Chiapello, 1999; Schwanhäusser, 2014). During an in-depth personal interview with the same spokesperson for the project in July 2017, he elaborated more in-depth about the idea of “smart community” envisaged in the project, highlighting that a key feature will be the reappropriation of the digital data residents produce. In his words, this would be “a big community using their own data to sell them to the health sector, business, retail, insurances, banks.” Although the legal form of this collective remains undefined, the main idea is that people living in Milano 4 You will share all their data through a communal platform; this platform will then “organize, interpret, clean, and sell data” to the market. The profits made will be reinvested to cover the maintenance costs of buildings and other communal services, thus supporting the first goal of the project, the “zero cost city.” Such a “smart community” appears to embody some of the basic characteristics traditionally associated with neoliberal citizenship and subjectification: market rationality enters and shapes everyday life, including residential and communal decisions, the subject consciously deciding to self-monitor and selfcontrol themselves for profit (e.g., Dardot & Laval, 2014; Di Feliciantonio, 2016; Scharff, 2016). The neoliberalization of housing reaches therefore its climax, the financial investment relating to both the housing choice and life itself (e.g., Cooper, 2008; Rolnik, 2013). When thinking about the ideas of “novelty” and “safety” shaping the project of Milano 4 You, it is clear there is a very tight correlation with the Milano Due project, the first gated community in Italy. Indeed during the interview with the abovementioned spokesperson, he too created a comparison between Milano Due and Milano 4 You. Several studies have investigated how the idea of a gated community is complicit in the neoliberal project across different places (e.g., Atkinson & Blandy, 2006; Grant & Rosen, 2009); the case of Milano Due is in line with this trend despite being temporally antecedent to the rising of neoliberalism. In fact, as shown by Lidia Monza (2017), the construction of

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(privatized) urban space in the Milano Due project anticipated some of the main trends at the work under neoliberalism, notably: (1) social segregation in the name of having a “safe” space far from “risk” and “danger” and (2) consumption as the main marker of class. In Monza’s words: Milano Due represented an elitist project which offered a way to escape from the unsustainable urban environment of Milan. Even though Milano Due is now over forty years old, the community is a current expression of the privatization process in urban spaces. Furthermore, Milano Due encourages a “re-definition” of urban life and establishes a new social order. (p. 239) However, as the quote by Monza reveals, important differences with respect to the current process of the neoliberalization of urban space can be found, the main one being the anti-urban narrative driving the realization and promotion of the project. Likewise, in most Italian cities, at the end of the 1960s, Milan was characterized by intense social conflict, used by the elites to portray cities as dangerous and unsafe spaces (for the middle classes). Milano Due was built on this conception, that is, the need of a space “safe” from urban conflict and crime, but also from pollution and traffic congestion characterizing the main urban areas. This imaginary of an isolated space (not too) far from a dystopian urban space collides with the current hegemonic narrative around Milan (and cities in general). In fact, Milan is currently portrayed as a “cool” place to live for the young “creative” class, as shown by the rampant gentrification of several neighborhoods and the massive investments in big regeneration projects (Manzo, 2016). In order to respond to such a trend, the developers of Milano 4 You do not aim at emphasizing distance but connection to the main urban core. Connection here operates at a multiplicity of levels, from car sharing to ultrafast Internet allowing to work from home. While embedding the history of Milano 4 You into the history of place and the previous use made of the idea of “community” to create a private space based on social class and lifestyle, this short account reveals also the countertendencies at work in this project, such as mixed social class (while both Milano Due and the recent urban development projects in Milan are mostly destined to upper classes and international investors) and affordable prices.

Toward a Dialectical Understanding of the “Smart Community” In this chapter, I have analyzed the ongoing project for the first Italian “smart district” which is to be built in Segrate, one of the wealthiest municipalities of the country located very close to the city center of Milan and experiencing a dynamic real estate sector. While acknowledging the “exceptional” character of the project, I have shown how it reifies some of the main trends of the neoliberal city: privatization of space and surveillance to guarantee “safety” and “control”

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from “risk” and “danger” are the core of the main narrative. To best promote the project (and sell units), the advertising material is centered around the idea of a “smart community” that will move there, that is, people who are aware of the main importance of data for capital accumulation and social reproduction. Willing to re-appropriate the data they produce, these new residents will consciously self-monitor in order to sell data to private companies. Through the lenses of the political economy critique of the community, including the work of Harvey, we can clearly see how, in the case of Milano 4 You, the “smart community” is mobilized to maximize land rent and fuel capital accumulation and reproduction by combining production and consumption. In fact, the main value shared by the envisaged residents is represented by the primary importance of having a “smart” lifestyle, that is, consuming “smart,” even though this implies dynamics of self-control and monitoring. Following Joseph’s argument (2002), this process does not concern just consumption, but also production. Indeed, the residents will become self-entrepreneurs by selling data concerning their everyday life, this embodying neoliberal subjectification in its purest form. However, in line with the dialectical perspective of Joseph (2002), I do not want to conclude on a pessimistic note asserting the inescapability and the full subjection of people to digital capitalism, thus overlooking the possibilities of change and rupture. We can indeed speculate that, because of the affordable prices in a good location, Milano 4 You will probably attract precarious, low/ medium income workers who will be then able to develop new forms of mutualism, solidarity, and self-help thanks to gathering together and sharing everyday spaces. Moreover, they will consciously re-appropriate data and control them, thus breaking the current logics that make our data appropriated for free by digital companies often working in monopolies (Shaw & Graham, 2017). The expected scope of this action of re-appropriation is the generation of profit. Of course, we could easily frame this gesture as another form of reproduction of neoliberal rationality; alternatively, we could follow Gibson-Graham (e.g., 2005) and think about the possibilities opened by generating alternative forms of surplus: what if that money will be channeled in community programs? Or used to create new communal services? Surplus and profit need to be thought in different ways, otherwise thinking of alternative forms of living and organizing social life would be impossible. Reimagining the “right to the city” in order to move beyond the neoliberal smart city idea, as addressed in the introduction of this edited volume, requires such a critical theoretical and political stance. Will Milano 4 You be a more just and inclusive urban reality? Will the residents’ needs represent the core of the project? Will surplus be reinvested for social reproduction? Since Milano 4 You is an ongoing project, there is no final answer to these questions yet; however, it is important to register how there is room for the “active” intervention of residents (“citizens,” as referred to in most smart city literature) in determining what the “smart district” they will be living will be like.

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Acknowledgment The research for this chapter was funded by an ERC Advanced Investigator award, “The Programmable City” (ERC-2012-AdG 323636-SOFTCITY).

References Anselmi, G. (2015). I Megaprogetti immobiliari nell’epoca di finanziarizzazione e austerity: i casi di Milano e Salford. PhD Thesis, Milan: University of Milan-Bicocca. Atkinson, R., & Blandy, S. (Eds.). (2006). Gated communities. Abingdon: Routledge. Boltanski, L., & Chiapello, E. (1999). Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme. Paris: Gallimard. Cardullo, P., & Kitchin, R. (2018). Smart urbanism and smart citizenship: The neoliberal logic of ‘citizen-focused’ smart cities in Europe. Environment and Planning C. Online first, doi: 10.1177/0263774X18806508 Carr, C. (2018). Wagering the waterfront? Angling the abc & xyz of Quayside Toronto. Urbanization unbound. Retrieved from http://urbanunbound.blogspot. com/2018/08/wagering-waterfront-abc-xyz-of-quayside.html Cooper, M. (2008). Life as surplus: Biotechnology and capitalism in the neoliberal era. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Cugurullo, F. (2013). How to build a sandcastle: An analysis of the genesis and development of Masdar City. Journal of Urban Technology, 20(1), 23 37. Dardot, P., & Laval, C. (2014). The new way of the world: On neoliberal society. London: Verso books. Datta, A. (2018). Postcolonial urban futures: Imagining, governing and reclaiming India’s urban age. Environment and Planning D (online first). doi:10.1177/ 0263775818800721 Di Feliciantonio, C. (2016). Subjectification in times of indebtedness and neoliberal/ austerity urbanism. Antipode, 48(5), 1206 1227. Di Feliciantonio, C., & Aalbers, M. B. (2018). The pre-histories of neoliberal housing policies in Italy and Spain and their reification in times of crisis. Housing Policy Debate, 28(1), 135 151. Fernandez, R., Hofman, A., & Aalbers, M. B. (2016). London and New York as a safe deposit box for the transnational wealth elite. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 48(12), 2443 2461. Gabrys, J. (2014). Programming environments: Environmentality and citizen sensing in the smart city. Environment and Planning D, 32(1), 30 48. Gibson-Graham, J. K. (2005). Surplus possibilities: Postdevelopment and community economies. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 26(1), 4 26. Grant, J. L., & Rosen, G. (2009). Armed compounds and broken arms: The cultural production of gated communities. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 99(3), 575 589. Harvey, D. (1978). The urban process under capitalism: A framework for analysis. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2(1 3), 101 131. Harvey, D. (1982). The limits to capital. Oxford: Blackwell. Harvey, D. (1985). The urban experience. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Hollands, R. (2008). Will the real smart city please stand up? City, 12(3), 303 320.

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Hollands, R. (2015). Critical interventions into the corporate smart city. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 8(1), 61 77. Joseph, M. (2002). Against the romance of community. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Joss, S., Cook, M., & Dayot, Y. (2017). Smart cities: Towards a new citizenship regime? A discourse analysis of the British smart city standard. Journal of Urban Technology, 24(4), 29 49. Kaika, M. (2017). ‘Don’t call me resilient again!’: The new urban agenda as immunology… or … what happens when communities refuse to be vaccinated with ‘smart cities’ and indicators. Environment and Urbanization, 29(1), 89 102. Kaika, M., & Ruggiero, L. (2016). Land financialization as a ‘lived’ process: The transformation of Milan’s Bicocca by Pirelli. European Urban and Regional Studies, 23(1), 3 22. Kim, C. (2010). Place promotion and symbolic characterization of New Songdo City, South Korea. Cities, 27, 13 19. Kitchin, R. (2014). The data revolution. Big data, open data, data infrastructures & their consequences. London: Sage. Kitchin, R. (2015). Making sense of smart cities: Addressing present shortcomings. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 8(1), 131 136. Kitchin, R. (2019). The timescape of smart cities. Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Künkel, J., & Mayer, M. (Eds.). (2012). Neoliberal urbanism and its contestations: Crossing theoretical boundaries. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Manzo, L. (2016). il processo di gentrificazione di via Paolo Sarpi, la Chinatown di Milano (1980 2015). Archivio di studi urbani e regionali, 117, 27 50. Monza, L. (2017). Milano 2: The conceptualization of the ‘re-definition’ of urban life. Zeitschrift für Wirtschaftsgeographie, 148(4), 238 252. Mosciaro, M. (2018). The real estate/financial complex: The cases of Brazil and Italy. PhD thesis, Politecnico di Milano & KU Leuven. Rolnik, R. (2013). Late neoliberalism: The financialization of homeownership and housing rights. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 37(3), 1058 1066. Sadoway, D., & Shekhar, S. (2014). (Re)Prioritizing citizens in smart cities governance: Examples of smart citizenship from urban India. The Journal of Community Informatics, 10(3). Retrieved from http://www.ci-journal.net/index. php/ciej/article/view/1179. Accessed on 12 August, 2018. Savini, F., & Aalbers, M. B. (2016). The de-contextualisation of land use planning through financialisation: Urban redevelopment in Milan. European Urban and Regional Studies, 23(4), 878 894. Scharff, C. (2016). The psychic life of neoliberalism: Mapping the contours of entrepreneurial subjectivity. Theory, Culture & Society, 33(6), 107 122. Schwanhäusser, A. (2014). Berlin capitalism. The spirit of urban scenes. In G. Stahl (Ed.), Poor but sexy. Reflections on Berlin scenes (pp. 103 122). Bern: Peter Lang. Shaw, A., & Graham, M. (2017). An informational right to the city? Code, content, control, and the urbanization of information. Antipode, 49(4), 907 927.

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Shin, H., Park, S. H., & Sonn, J. W. (2015). The emergence of a multiscalar growth regime and scalar tension: The politics of urban development in Songdo New City, South Korea. Environment and Planning C, 33(6), 1618 1638. Swyngedouw, E. (2016). The mirage of the sustainable ‘smart city’: Planetary urbanization and the spectre of combined and uneven apocalypse. In O. Nel-lo & R. Mele (Eds.), Cities in the 21st century (pp. 134 143). New York, NY: Routledge. Townsend, A. M. (2013). Smart cities: Big data, civic hackers, and the quest for a new utopia. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company. Vanolo, A. (2014). Smartmentality: The smart city as disciplinary strategy. Urban Studies, 51(5), 883 898. Vanolo, A. (2015). Smart city e sviluppo urbano: Alcune note per un’agenda critica. Scienze del territorio, 3, 111 118. Vanolo, A. (2016). Is there anybody out there? The place and role of citizens in tomorrow’s smart cities. Futures, 82, 26 36.

PART 2 CIVIC ENGAGEMENT, PARTICIPATION AND THE RIGHT TO THE SMART CITY

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Chapter 8

Sensors and Civics: Toward a Community-centered Smart City Catherine D’Ignazio, Eric Gordon and Elizabeth Christoforetti

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 chapter, 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. Keywords: Smart cities; sensors; civic tech; urban development; civic engagement; interface

Becoming Data While research and development for “smart cities” have been underway for some time, it is only recently that the ability to gather, store, and make meaning from large amounts of sensor data has become a technological and financial reality for cities. Urban sensor data can be defined as information that is collected through a physical device located in or trained toward the city. This includes data from fixed sensors monitoring their immediate physical surroundings for

The Right to the Smart City, 113 124 Copyright r 2019 by Emerald Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved DOI: 10.1108/978-1-78769-139-120191008

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features such as air quality, decibel levels, and public space usage. It also comprises data produced by remote sensing platforms such as satellites, mobile sensors mounted on vehicles, and information collected through phones carried by individuals in their pockets.1 Indeed, mobile phones are packed with sensors that can be leveraged in an urban context, including Wi-Fi, microphones, cameras, GPS chips, accelerometers, gyroscopes, proximity sensors, and ambient light sensors. Newer versions will likely include heart rate monitors, temperature sensors, and fingerprint scanners. When data are collected and contributed into the civic realm by individuals, it has been referred to as “participatory sensing” (Christin, Reinhardt, Kanhere, & Hollick, 2011) or “citizen sensing” (Gabrys, 2014) or “popular sensing” (D’Ignazio & Zuckerman, 2017). Numerous projects that use urban sensors to monitor things such as street usage, air quality, and recycling rates are underway in cities from Bangalore to Barcelona. A central tenet of the contemporary smart city is the instrumentation of the city through networked urban sensors. Indeed, there is growing enthusiasm around urban sensors, among technology vendors and municipal governments. Markets are emerging around newly defined infrastructure needs, propelling the smart city from a distant curiosity to a mainstream imperative. Smart city discourse has captured the popular imagination as a meeting point between anxiety and promise, no longer focused on the distant future, but on the proximate present. Sensor technology is available and proliferating. Urban sensors generate data from the environment, including from individual occupants, and as such represent a conflation between private and public space, where aggregated personal data take on the character of public infrastructure. Martin Heidegger’s conception of modern technology provides some insight into this effect. When we do things with or in the midst of technology, he argues, the objects and activities of experience are converted into what he calls “standing reserve,” a process through which, “everywhere everything is ordered to stand by to be immediately on hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering” (Krell, 1993, p. 320). A sensor mounted to a street lamp collects data on the number of people walking across an intersection. That data may be used in real-time but it is simultaneously placed in a “standing reserve” for its use later. In fact, a primary quality of the paradigm shift to big data is to collect everything you can now and figure out what to do with it later. As the former director of the United States National Security Administration (NSA), Keith Alexander said in 2013: “You need the haystack to find the needle” (Gellman & Soltani, 2013). The logic of the smart city is the transformation of the standing reserve into public infrastructure. And the logic of infrastructure is that it remains unseen. As a result, the bias in smart city growth has been invisibility the capturing of

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Importantly, such mobile sensing devices can collect data on the physical and social environment that is linked to location with precise, time-stamped latitude longitude coordinates. This allows for an increasingly high-resolution measurement of change or difference across time and space.

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data into standing reserve, and the reassertion of that data as seamless and efficient functionality. When immediacy is transformed into reserve, the power of ordering is not equally distributed. People of color, or poor people, become data, like everyone else, but with decidedly less access to ordering and with significantly more susceptibility to be ordered by others. The use of arrests data in impoverished neighborhoods to justify an increase in police presence, for example, can serve to perpetuate racism and subjugate residents (Goel, Rao, & Shroff, 2016). Or, as was the case in mid-century urban renewal efforts, that same data justified the wholesale clearance of slums (Caro, 1974). The inequities built into the seemingly neutral invisible data infrastructures have the potential to destroy marginalized communities by placing them on call to be ordered by others (Eubanks, 2018). The challenge for the smart city, as it asserts its technocratic vision for urban function, is to make visible the interaction between human subjects, their data, and the resulting urban infrastructure. In this chapter, we ask how critical interfaces can be produced and maintained that would enable a greater diversity of choices around ordering for those with historically less power to make choices? We want to shift the discourse of smart cities from infrastructure (invisibility) to interface (visibility), where the process of ordering is laid bare for the purpose of acknowledging difference and disparities. We challenge the dominant paradigm of the Internet of Things that adopts Mark Weiser’s conception that “the most profound technologies are those that disappear” (Weiser, 1999, p. 3). Smart city technology is largely driven by this drive toward invisibility. Yet, as we’ve been discussing, the costs of such seamlessness are potentially great. As such, there is room for public sector innovation in cultivating “seamful” interfaces for the smart city, or legible interactions that contain the characteristics of accommodation and appropriation (Chalmers & Galani, 2004). A seamful smart city interface is not simply visualization. It requires public interaction at every stage, not simply a public hearing at the start. In the smart city, before public participation, there needs to be a process of making visible. This is not a simple dichotomy of clear interfaces versus complicated interfaces, but rather the idea, following Galloway (2012), that interfaces are political and historical. Clarity and usability as design values often work to support seamlessness whereas bugs, breakdowns, and errors can bring forward the seams “the boundaries between zones of operation and non-operation, regions of stability and difference” (Dourish & Bell, 2011, p. 120). We begin the critical process by thinking about smart city interfaces across three overlapping dimensions: pre-deployment, in situ, and post-deployment. (1) Pre-deployment: Who decides what to measure? What role do citizens and communities play in determining what to sense in the city, based on what (whose) value proposition and criteria? (2) In situ: Once deployed, are urban sensors designed for legibility and participation or backstage monitoring and control? This is to say are they conceived as interface, and thus opportunity for engagement and dialogue, or

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infrastructure, and thus designed for invisible service provision? What values do we see embodied by these design choices? (3) Post-deployment: Given that data are collected at one time and location in the urban environment and then used to inform processes and decisions afterward, when and where are the interfaces between city, sensors, data and citizens? These questions correspond to opportunities for the people managing urban sensors to interface with citizens and communities. In the next section, we survey the literature, secondary sources, and reports from two examples of smart city initiatives, New York’s Hudson Yards and Bristol’s Dampbusters, and attempt to understand how critical interfaces are produced (or not) in each dimension. These examples are by no means exhaustive, but they can help illustrate the practical difficulties of realizing seamful interfaces for the smart city.

A Quantified Community? Hudson Yards is a 28-acre private development between 30th and 34th Street on the far west side of Manhattan. It is the largest private real-estate development in US history expected to cost US$20 billion and involve the construction of 16 skyscrapers by its completion in 2024. The master plan includes a mix of commercial office space, retail space, residential space, a cultural space, a school, an on-site power plant, and multiple public spaces and expects to support 65,000 visitors a day. Sidewalk Labs, a company owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, will be one of the first tenants. One of the most interesting constraints about the site is that it will continue to operate as a railyard. New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority invested US$400 million to cover existing tracks and tunnels. Thus, only 38% of the site is available for construction, making high-density planning a necessity for return on investment (Mattern, 2016). Hudson Yards has been conceived from the beginning as a “smart district” or “quantified community.” The latter is the terminology of Constantine Kontokosta, whose lab at the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) is the academic partner on the project. Numerous aspects of the urban environment will be monitored by sensors, including air quality, heat islands, noise levels, and usage of public spaces. The green spaces make use of “smart soil” to help promote optimal growth even though roots cannot reach deep into the ground, since there are trains under the ground. At the building level, sensors will monitor energy and water consumption, the flow of people in and out, indoor air quality, and solid waste management (which, incidentally, will happen through chutes and vacuum tubes rather than garbage collection by the city). And finally, residents, workers, and visitors to the site will be encouraged to download the Hudson Yards app and voluntarily provide information on their health, nutrition, and mobility to the development. In return for opting-in, these citizens theoretically receive optimized services.

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The first building in Hudson Yards opened to the public in 2016, but the majority of the development is still underway in an area of the city without existing residents. As such, we talk about the development as both real and speculative, and treat it as both discourse to be analyzed and phenomena to be observed. We begin with the theoretical assumptions guiding the development. According to Kontokosta (2016, p. 16), quantified communities (QCs) are centered on stakeholder engagement: “The QC team have partnered with local stakeholders to identify priorities and goals and deploy an informatics infrastructure to develop a more complete inventory of needs and a more robust capability to evaluate alternative responses.” Interestingly, because Hudson Yards stakeholders do not include residents (since there are not yet any to be consulted), this participation is sourced from the financiers and developers with financial interests in the site, rather than small businesses and residents that abut the development, potential future residents and workers, homeless people, or maintenance staff. Thus, there have been few or no opportunities for citizen engagement prior to the design and deployment of urban sensors. Mattern (2016, p. 6) asks: Are there opportunities for meaningful citizen participation in creating the smart technologies that will define Hudson Yards? And what about the visitors? What about the conscientious objectors? What about the residents who lack the tools for participation —“smart” devices or technological “smarts” — and who are thus subjected to the city’s monitoring without being able to monitor back? She asked these questions to CUSP and the developer and was told that the QC concept was still “under development.” So, if QCs are centered on stakeholder engagement, which is doing the work of convincing powerful stakeholders (those who control the means of production) that this is the case? Historically, public participation has been a nuisance to overcome, a bug not a feature. If indeed, it is at the center of these new developments, it needs to be factored in from the very beginning. Who decides what to measure prior to deploying sensors in public space? In this case, it is driven by the private funder, authorized by the city, designed in the university, and implemented by the private firms to ultimately serve the firm’s clients (who are not necessarily the same as the city’s citizens). Likewise, in its promotional materials Hudson Yards has made very specific design decisions about what the sensors and smart systems look like on site. For example, trash is sucked away in pneumatic tubes installed out of view from every building to a dispensary on 12th Ave (Clarke, 2014). No rendering of the public park or buildings includes a sensor device. Mattern (2016) points out that there is a missed opportunity for civic pedagogy and that hiding trash in chutes promotes an “out of sight, out of mind public consciousness.” Developers cite aesthetic reasons for this. Vice president Michael Samuelian was quoted as

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saying: “Even in the most posh buildings uptown, you’ll see trash bags in front of the building on trash day. You won’t see that at Hudson Yards” (Clarke, 2014). These also translate into financial reasons. The homepage of Hudson Yards’ site promotes the “iconic brands” that have decided to move in and the “wealthy buyers” who like “culture with their condo.”2 Monitoring traffic and pedestrian flows, air quality and noise, trash, and soil are not highlighted as a public activity or offered to the residents and visitors (either as education, PR or debate), but rather designed to be layered invisibly into the infrastructure like a sewage system. The creation of invisible infrastructure, concealed in trash chutes and buried underground, is consistent with Modernist dreams of efficiency, bypassing any seamful interface of the city’s function. And yet, importantly, designers of smart city projects continue to present their work as “citizen centered.” As Dietmar Offenhuber and Carlo Ratti (2017) describe, when infrastructure is conceived as data, it is vastly more controllable. When infrastructure becomes legible to machines and specialized humans, it serves a purpose well beyond its immediate utility. So different questions need to be asked. Who accesses the data and in which context? In Heideggerian terms, who does the ordering and who is ordered? Promotional materials state that “operations managers will be able to monitor and react to traffic patterns, air quality, power demands, temperature, and pedestrian flow to create the most efficiently navigated and environmentally attuned neighbourhood in New York.”3 The goal for operations managers is to more efficiently tune resources to save money, to be more resilient in a crisis situation, and to provide more “personalized” experiences to residents and visitors. And Kontokosta states that instrumenting neighborhoods in this way will open up tremendous possibilities for academic research, “allowing unprecedented studies in urban planning and design, urban systems engineering and management, and the social sciences” (2016, p. 3). So, operation managers and academic researchers have exclusive access to the data for specific purposes. But when and how do citizens, comprised of more than just Hudson Yards’ paying clients, access and engage with the data? “In this universe, citizens relate to their city by consuming and administering its systems, and by serving as sources of measurable behavioral data” (Mattern, 2016, p. 4). The main mechanism for citizen engagement with sensor data would seem to be an opt-in mobile app where people volunteer their health and wellness information in return for services. And Kontokosta and other researchers are exploring ways to convince people to volunteer more of their personal information (Kontokosta, 2015). Apart from the mobile app, it is unclear whether residents and visitors would have access to any dashboards or displays about the information being monitored and collected. Certainly, these are not part of the sales strategy, which is premised on the idea that the city is “smart” but the

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citizen needs not engage with question, debate, or worry about that smartness because the professional managers and scientists have it under control. While Kontokosta claims that focusing at the neighborhood scale “allows for meaningful interaction with, and participation by, the people who live, work, and play in that space” (2016, p. 3), Hudson Yards, as currently conceived and despite its rhetoric about being neighborhood-centered, is driven from the top-down values of efficiency, optimization, consumerism, and professional management.

A Community-centered Smart City? In Bristol, UK, the “Dampbusters” project represents a completely different approach. It emerged as a partnership between the City Council of Bristol (UK), Ideas for Change, the Knowle West Media Centre (KWMC), and academic researchers, with the express purpose of implementing a “people-led” smart city initiative. It is notable that the project was not initiated by the community, but rather responded to consultation from these four organizations and then proceeded to consult community organizations. After these initial meetings with community groups in Bristol, the team determined that measuring dampness was the most useful active, applicable, and realistic issue to use for their pilot. From seeing the dampness-measuring initiative through to implementation in the homes of many residents in the city, the team identified various challenges and opportunities for citizen-focused urban sensing (Hassan & Balestrini, 2015). In this model, citizens were co-designers and partners in a targeted effort to pilot a single sensing effort from ideation to implementation. Dampbusters utilizes a clear capacity building process to identify, clarify, and drive outcome-based change around the clear and present issue of dampness and its ills, including impacts upon human health. What they have dubbed “the Bristol Approach” is a self-aware model for building an interface for social infrastructure that serves as a critique of (1) smart cities projects, which are often inaccessible to key stakeholders, and (2) current public processes, which often lack effective bottom-up development and inclusivity in their approach to project development and outcomes (Hassan & Balestrini, 2015). The Bristol Approach aims to balance bottom-up and top-down planning, utilizing engagement strategies such as public art and person-to-person contact as a cultural intermediary and point of public access, and giving a diverse citizen user group a leadership role in the identification of issues and smart city solution finding. The “city commons” is the Bristol Approach framework utilized to guide Dampbusters and other, future citizen-led urban sensing projects. The concept of the commons is meant to capture the spirit of the participatory process. They claim that it “encompasses the resources we create, the way we share the resources, and the collective agreement about how we will use the resources for the common good” (Hassan & Balestrini, 2015, p. 8). Importantly, it is meant to set up a seamful interface for a diverse user group to shape, develop, and utilize an urban sensing tool for the specific needs of local communities. The commons serves to clarify project development and governance, the generation, ownership,

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and the use of shared assets, and the deployment of skills in relation to product development and data collection in the urban environment. The City Commons can be described as something like Wikipedia for urban data collection, in which information is generated, maintained, and utilized by all (Hassan & Balestrini, 2015). In the Dampbusters project, residents directly affected by the dampness issue served as stewards of quantitative and qualitative data collection by deploying sensors in their homes and sharing their experiences of the impact dampness has had in their day-to-day lives. During and after data collection, the Dampbusters project relied upon the Commons to systematically collect, maintain, and utilize the data collected by the sensors. Essential pre-deployment assessments included issue relevance and interest within the community, the applicability of sensor technologies and open data to solution-finding, and a determination of the potential impact and feasibility (Hassan & Balestrini, 2015). Mechanisms for engagement, led by KWMC and Ideas for Change, included identification and teaming with already-active community groups in affected areas to build on existing social efficacy, and working with artists embedded in these communities. Enabling the community to codesign the project and data collection tools is a notable aspect of the Dampbusters project and Bristol Approach. Citizens worked together, led by experts and others with relevant technical experience, to build humidity and temperature sensors, named Frogboxes, and to deploy them in affected housing. This playful approach to sensor building functioned as what Gordon and Walter call a “meaningful inefficiency” (2016), or an approach wherein less efficient means are chosen over more efficient means to achieve a goal. That these boxes took on the shape of frogs were intended to produce a kind of delight in users, as well as visually connect the device to the idea of humidity. The Bristol Approach team engaged experts around issues of open data, energy, and building retrofit to identify “commons tools” including data collection infrastructure and existing municipal data sets. It is worth noting that such co-design efforts require significant coordination, skills, and expertise. While the ideas were shared by the larger network, a small group of individuals were involved in the physical design and making process. Technologists were paired with citizens that had no technical experience. Participants and designers collectively agreed on open source licensing and attribution, guided by creative commons. All engagement and framing was led by the initiating project leaders. In situ processes included tools for data collection and sharing. The Frogbox deployment occurred over two months in 2016. The team leaders established partnerships with the local energy providers, charities, and other local organizations to support the deployment of sensors in five households. The participants, recruited through active outreach, were trained to use the sensor technology and were willing to participate in the data agreement established by the City Commons. Additionally, a “community Dampbusters” team was trained to utilize the technology and share their skills with the neighborhoods. The complex balance of social efficacy on-boarding participants and training community support teams that buy into the City Commons agreement and reliable technology sensors with a clear user interface that collect and transmit data

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reliably across location and were supported by local institutions required a balance of bottom-up participation and top-down coordination and incentivization by external team leaders (Balestrini et al., 2017). Post-deployment processes included engagement with professionals to assess the collected and shared data and action-oriented pathways toward self-help including report generation and engagement with a community damp team. Evidence generated by the effort in the form of temperature and humidity data, as well as reports of resident impact and experience, was provided to the city council. The Dampbusters initiative created a connection with the Bristol City Council to translate findings into policy recommendations, such as the licensing of private landlords. In addition to the sensors themselves, the Dampbusters team developed an online tool to enable citizens to map dampness issues and continue to share their own experiences post-deployment. The Dampbusters project can be described as an urban sensing initiative that balances bottom-up (citizen stakeholders) and top-down (initiating institutions and external funders, along with the Bristol City Council) processes using outside experts (KWMC and Ideas for Change) to frame and coordinate the process. This balanced approach acknowledges the organizational challenges of solely citizen-led initiatives and the need to seek new approaches to urban problems that can utilize urban sensing for accessible and relevant civic projects with outcomes that are meaningful to public stakeholders (Balestrini, Diez, Marshall, Gluhak, & Rogers, 2015). But the leap from bottom-up participatory sensing initiatives to the creation of municipal policy and sustained long-term participation remains challenging. The issues of motivation to participate, prolonged and reliable engagement, technological robustness and data quality, and clear (or relevant) incentives for post-deployment action have been recorded in participatory smart city projects (Balestrini et al., 2015). Cases that demonstrate outcomes related to policy integration and sustained adoption of participatory sensing initiatives are needed to complement the strength of the Bristol Approach, which lies in the creation of a clear framework for coordinating civic engagement to result in a project with relevance and meaning and shared ownership within a local community. The issue of outside coordination and funding is also relevant in the Dampbusters case. While it is unclear precisely who paid the consultants to facilitate the project and develop the Bristol Approach, there is a clear demonstration of funding and coordination by both local and non-local experts and interested parties. The Bristol Approach project received some portion of its funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program in the form of a grant (Hassan & Balestrini, 2015). The Bristol City Council also provided grant funding; KWMC allocated these funds to cover intervention costs and participants administered the funds through a participatory budgeting process (Balestrini et al., 2017). The fact that expert coordination and orchestration was involved is significant in that it catalyzed and sustained both municipal and citizen support and enabled the Dampbusters case to be shared and utilized as a model beyond Bristol. While bottom-up crowdfunded efforts are effective to onboard participation, more centralized organization by

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an entity that champions and facilitates the effort is key to effective and meaningful outcomes. Embedding external expertise can both foster learning and more meaningful participation (Balestrini et al., 2015). This important finding suggests that coordinated efforts to obtain external funding and organizational assistance are advantageous; however, establishing such relationships will likely become a barrier for communities with fewer resources, connections, and access to information. Finally, moving from DIY participatory efforts to accessible and robust civic interface is a significant challenge. The scale and nature of private sector smart city funding requires that most companies are developing and deploying smart city technology directly to municipal entities so that they can deploy quickly and at a significant scale. Such companies, called “vendors” in municipal terms, develop technology remotely far ahead of outreach and deployment. Unlike large physical building projects, in which robust approval processes often require public participation and input during all stages of project development, policy for civic engagement in smart city project development and the approval of such technology is generally unprecedented. While sensing technology is generally less visually intrusive than the obvious physical impact of a real estate development project, the invisible impact of such technologies is significant and in need of policy to guide its integration into local communities (Offenhuber & Ratti, 2017). As such, the Dampbusters and Bristol Approach case may provide a pathway for citizens to shape, and participate within, the development and deployment of larger-scale sensing infrastructures. The framework outlined by the Bristol Approach may be a platform for both DIY participatory urban sensing projects (which build awareness, educate users, and solve real community problems) and larger infrastructural sensing deployments (which are largely shielded from community input at all stages of project development). More case studies like Dampbusters are needed to build a bank of project references for citizens and invested institutions to utilize as tools for municipal and institutional advocacy. A range of cases that demonstrate effective outcomes, as well as clear funding and organizational mechanisms, would be a great contribution to the challenge of scaling up such efforts to bridge participation in both community-developed sensing and larger infrastructural sensing projects.

Conclusion The two examples of smart city projects presented here, Hudson Yards and the Dampbusters project, are different in almost every way scale, style, and approach. We present them not as opposites, but as two parts of a whole. The push toward the QC is present in each. With quantification comes the uncanny ability to turn human interaction into standing reserve to be ordered by others. Even if it is discursively resisted in the Bristol Approach, all smart city interfaces are built on data. Likewise, what is represented in Bristol is a people-led participatory approach that seems to have been authentically executed in Dampbusters. That same “stakeholder engagement” rhetoric is adopted in

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Hudson Yards, but rings untrue because the stakeholders consist primarily of the developers and funders. The smart city is a powerful idea, one that is stuck in the collective consciousness as a persistent promise. But like all promises that are too good to be true, it needs to be scrutinized and acted on by the receivers of that promise. We presented an argument for the necessity of a critical interface to the smart city and proposed a more “seamful” approach to smart city projects. What is being sold as infrastructure, as a project of maximized efficiency best left invisible, is in fact interface and needs to be premised on interaction, dialogue, and feedback. The data sourced and collected in the smart city are of a private nature, even as they are aggregated, anonymized, and sold as public infrastructure. As city-dwellers, embodied and imbued with social difference, are abstracted into data, the designers of smart cities need to build structures that make visible the process. As we have demonstrated in this chapter, there is need for a seamful design of the smart city, where the implications of becoming data are made legible and the affordances made usable for the purpose of serving everyone, not just customers of smart city products.

Acknowledgments Parts of this chapter will be published as “Seamful Interfaces for a Communitycentered Smart City” in the Leonardo Electronic Almanac in their forthcoming special issue on “Urban Interfaces.”

References Balestrini, M., Diez, T., Marshall, P., Gluhak, A., & Rogers, Y. (2015). IoT community technologies: Leaving users to their own devices or orchestration of engagement? EAI Endorsed Transactions IoT, 1(1), 1 11. Balestrini, M., Rogers, Y., Hassan, C., Creus, J., King, M., & Marshall, P. (2017). A city in common: A framework to orchestrate large-scale citizen engagement and urban issues. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 2282 2294). New York, NY: ACM. Caro, R. A. (1974). The power broker: Robert Moses and the fall of New York. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf Incorporated. Chalmers, M., & Galani, A. (2004, August). Seamful interweaving: Heterogeneity in the theory and design of interactive systems. In Proceedings of the 5th conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques (pp. 243 252). New York, NY: ACM. Christin, D., Reinhardt, A., Kanhere, S. S., & Hollick, M. (2011). A survey on privacy in mobile participatory sensing applications. Journal of systems and software, 84(11), 1928 1946. Clarke, K. (2014, June 27). Trash to be handled by pneumatic tube at Hudson Yards. NY Daily News.

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D’Ignazio, C., & Zuckerman, E. (2017). Are we citizen scientists, citizen sensors or something else entirely? Popular sensing and citizenship for the internet of things. In B. S. De Abreu, P. Mihailidis, A. Y. L. Lee, J. Melki, & J. McDougall (Eds.), International handbook of media literacy education (pp. 193 210). London: Routledge. Dourish, P., & Bell, G. (2011). Divining a digital future: Mess and mythology in ubiquitous computing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Eubanks, V. (2018). Automating inequality: How high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press. Gabrys, J. (2014). Programming environments: Environmentality and citizen sensing in the smart city. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32(1), 30 48. Galloway, A. R. (2012). The interface effect. Cambridge: Polity. Gellman, B., & Soltani, A. (2013). NSA collects millions of e-mail address books globally. Washington Post, 1. Goel, S., Rao, J. M., & Shroff, R. (2016). Precinct or prejudice? Understanding racial disparities in New York City’s stop-and-frisk policy. The Annals of Applied Statistics, 10(1), 365 394. Gordon, E., & Walter, S. (2016). Meaningful inefficiencies: Resisting the logic of technological efficiency in the design of civic systems. Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice, 243 266. Hassan, C., & Balestrini, M. (2015). The Bristol approach in action by Knowle West Media Centre Issuu. Bristol: Knowle West Media Centre. Kontokosta, C. E. (2016). The quantified community and neighborhood labs: A framework for computational urban planning and civic technology innovation. SSRN Electronic Journal, 1 18. doi:10.2139/ssrn.2659896 Kontokosta, C. E., Johnson, N., & Schloss, A. (2015). The quantified community at Red Hook: Urban sensing and citizen science in low-income neighborhoods. Retrieved from https://ssrn.com/abstract=2659896. Krell, D. F. (1993). Basic writings: Martin Heidegger. London: Routledge. Mattern, S. (2016). Instrumental city: The view from Hudson Yards, circa 2019. Places Journal. Offenhuber, D., & Ratti, C. (2017). Waste is information: Infrastructure legibility and governance. MIT Press. Weiser, M. (1999). The computer for the 21st century. Mobile Computing and Communications Review, 3(3), 3 11.

Chapter 9

What is Civic Tech? Defining a Practice of Technical Pluralism Andrew R. Schrock

Abstract Over the last decade, engineers, designers, community organizers, and government employees have rallied around “civic tech.” What exactly does this term mean for urban technologists and “smart cities”? In formulating a definition, after describing the relationship of this term to the city, I examine how civic tech has been defined by practitioners. They have typically defined civic tech using umbrella definitions based on broad values and bucket definitions based on technologies. Although helpful, these definitions tend to obfuscate the political nature of civic tech’s practices and organizational techniques. In response, I suggest civic tech is a form of “technical pluralism” iterative technology design and implementation among organized actors working toward predominantly administrative reforms. Because practitioners are inspired by redesigning systems of governance and redistributing power, civic tech’s most important provocations are organizational and political, rather than purely technological. Civic tech, as a form of technical pluralism, presents a route to bridging community and government in the pursuit of more equitable ways to achieve sustainable technology design in urban contexts. Keywords: Technology; civic engagement; politics; design; participation; urbanism

Introduction The rise of civic tech has several alignments with “the city” as an urban system and social imaginary. The more bottom-up, participatory, and inclusive approach in civic tech helps humanize the “smart cities” paradigm, while

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extending its promise of pragmatic reforms (Kitchin, 2015). Civic tech has also found fertile soil to grow in large cities in the United States, where the local executive branch largely controls how technologies are selected and developed. This has led to civic tech practitioners regarding cities as experimental “laboratories” for improving civic life. For example, urban planner Anthony Townsend (2013) sees the city as a shared project, similar to Jane Jacobs did Boston’s North End. Civic technologists, in his vision, organically collaborate on city improvements, reducing the need for top-down control, as a way to locate a middle-ground for tech-friendly urbanism. Yet in other ways, civic tech’s migration toward infrastructural improvements and bureaucratic reforms does not demand a particular vision of the city. At higher levels of government state and federal levels in the United States there is less of a sense that the city is a social system that is ripe for intervention. It is simply not necessary to operate under an eco-systemic vision of the city if you are “hacking” a malfunctioning bureaucratic system for outsourcing government services. What is civic tech, if not intrinsically linked with an urban imaginary? What might it offer smart cities, and vice-versa? As an interpretive communication scholar, I am foremost concerned with how people use terms to make meaning in their political lives and organize around it. Therefore, in this chapter, I turn first to how practitioners have defined civic tech and identified shortcomings with it. Next, I draw from five years of participation with civic tech organizations to consider how these definitions predominantly, although not entirely, promoted by foundations and organizations shape the political practices and social imaginaries of grassroots participants. Finally, I conclude by tentatively defining civic tech as a form of “technical pluralism”: organizing in political borderlands to iteratively improve the relationship between community and government.

Umbrella and Bucket Definitions Practitioners have promoted two common types of definitions of civic tech: the bucket and the umbrella. Bucket definitions rely on a list of technologies or outcomes. For example, the Knight Foundation (2013, p. 6) described civic tech as a convergence of technologies including government data and crowd-funding platforms. Bucket definitions can also focus on outcomes, such as the Omidyar Network’s definition, “technology that is used to empower citizens or help make government more accessible, efficient, and effective” (Donohue, 2016, p. 3). By contrast, umbrella definitions emphasize broad shared values. Chris Whitaker (2015), a central figure in the Chicago scene and Code for America Brigade Manager, defined civic tech as “any technology that intersects public life.” A 2014 report by IDC sponsored by Accela similarly defined civic tech as simply “[merging] technology innovation with civic purpose” (Clarke, 2014, p. 1). Some use both bucket and umbrella definitions. Civic Hall’s “Civic Tech Field Guide” Google sheet lists numerous categories of technologies, alongside the statement “civic tech is the use of technology for the public good.” Public life and public

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good are broad concepts that retain a certain liberalist concern with uniting behind shared values to achieve broad reforms. Both bucket and umbrella definitions presume, sensibly enough, that the goal is to use technology more wisely. However, these definitions rarely describe what techies actually do or what motivates them. By “techie,” I refer to the geeks, government employees, designers, and activists who work together on projects that involve the application of technical practices, including (but certainly not limited to) software engineering and design. Umbrella definitions use a claim of broad public benefits to attract participation. Yet, in a familiar problem with broad claims of liberalist reforms, what exactly is in the “public good” can always be disputed. For example, many United States residents do not view universal health care or assistance for low-income residents as a “public good,” even though techies do. Bucket definitions, by contrast, tend to mirror existing disciplinary and organizational goals. Foundations want a term that enables them to put money behind projects that add value to their existing portfolios, while government officials are attracted to being able to balance being datadriven and responsive to resident needs. This too says little about how techies on the ground view their work. As a result, techies find themselves in a perpetual definitional quandary. For example, Emily Shaw rightly questioned whether civic tech involves organizing around problems, reaching a particular public, or using a particular approach (2014). Toward addressing these concerns, the major shortcoming with dominant definitions of civic tech is they bury the political practices and cultural logics carried over from previous eras under a shroud of technological neutrality. I have found quite the opposite in my research: Techies are aware of the political nature of their activities. They are driven to humanize technology and integrate it within systems of governance to improve social conditions, rather than perpetuate state violence. That is, they are both “political” in how they act and are aware of the non-neutrality of technology. In this regard, civic technologists share a cultural kinship with previous waves of tech organizers that have sought to humanize how communities and governments develop and implement technologies. While my goal in this chapter is not to trace these ideas historically, considering the “Appropriate Technology” movement of the 1970s (Schumacher, 1973), Kenneth Laudon’s (1977) “citizen technology,” and Reinventing Government in the 1990s (Osborne & Gaebler, 1992). Civic tech is hardly the first wave to suggest that a combination of user-oriented design, process improvements, culture change, and open communication might improve democratic institutions through technology it is at least the fourth. Each wave emerged out of moments of societal unrest to bring together a variety of political actors around some of the same tenets now visible in civic technology. What is currently missing is a close consideration of the cultural logics in which civic technologists operate and result in new organizational configurations for improving shared governance. The primary difficulty is that civic tech’s model of organizing only partly resembles a social movement.

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Between Social Movement and Government Reformers A definition gets more elusive when we acknowledge that civic tech has some but not all features of a social movement. It has sites, events, and publications where humanist values are worked out, and a sense of community established. It also has high numbers, at least by the standards of historically small movements organizing to humanize technology. Exact numbers of participants or “techies” are difficult to establish, as civic tech overlaps with existing occupations and has evolved from previous waves of interest in technology, particularly open data in Europe (Baack, 2015) and the United States (Schrock, 2016). Over 100,000 participants have used meetup.com to register for a Code for America brigade, and 10,000 took part in the 2014 National Day of Civic Hacking. Code for America’s official number of participants in tax returns is 40,000. Organizations such as g0v (a decentralized organization in Taiwan), MySociety, Civic Hall, and Code for America support techies and their work by helping to grow capacity and build bridges with institutional partners. In addition to the foundation reports cited earlier, smaller, semi-autonomous groups across the world have produced numerous publications, from the magazine Civic Quarterly to a book series published by the Smart Chicago Collaborative. Each of these are inroads for participation, making exact numbers of techies particularly worldwide difficult to confirm. What is certain is that this mix of events, organizations, and publications offer techies a political identity and opportunities for collaborating on shared projects (Schrock, 2018). While many techies are software engineers, not all are technological experts. Despite the emphasis on coding that pervades the discourse, many techies I have met do not know how to code, and instead are designers, political wonks, and community organizers. Their motivations are not simply to find an easy way to exercise technical competencies. Rather, they are attracted to civic tech for familiar reasons as participants in social movements: balancing personally fulfilling work with a desire to give back to their community. Yet, by other measures, civic techs’ begrudging embrace of market dynamics and administrative reforms defies being a grassroots social movement. It opens the door for corporate funding typically the death knell of social movements (Tilly & Wood, 2012). While tens of thousands of techies might sound like a lot, civic tech hardly garners the numbers and media attention of social justice movements that reach and mobilize millions. Further, civic tech often situates administrative reforms as participation, a move that would not be embraced by scholars of civic engagement who regard participation as voluntarist (Skocpol & Fiorina, 1999). Another challenge to widespread participation is civic tech brings together two things that are generally perceived as boring and apolitical: administrative reforms and technical work. Dunbar-Hester (2013) notes that technological movements oriented toward equality experience a double-bind: They try to expand participation in technical issues, even as these techniques can deny truly diverse public participation. For these reasons, civic tech may never be a widespread activist movement oriented around social justice, but remain a relatively elite organizational practice among the already educated, who try to build

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bridges to those with less technical and political interest. This does not mean we should ignore civic technologists, but rather recognize how they are doing a particular type of political work. Critical scholars also remind us that civic tech can be just another convenient vehicle for high-technology corporations to influence politics. For example, Schulte (2018) recently critiqued the US Digital Services (USDS) agency for relying on a notion of being a “startup” in its founding. She argued that, by modeling itself on Silicon Valley, the USDS gave tech corporations a new route to influence federal politics. Irani (2015), looking at civic hackathons in India, saw a precarious alignment between elite politics and a technology-centric model of social change, which she termed “entrepreneurial citizenship.” She correctly notes that participation can be coercive and may be difficult alone to change the way government operates. To many local governments, civic tech simply provides a way to say they are reaching out to the public before they proceed on the path they already planned to go down. Mayors and government employees are typically all too receptive to the idea that a cadre of civic hackers might create for free what previously would take a year and hefty payments to produce. A definition of civic tech, then, should account for power dynamics of governance.

Civic Tech as Technical Pluralism One way to describe individuals in civic tech is mobilized around mending the historically tortured relationship between technology and equality by reforming systems of governance. This reading casts techies as a liberalist (Hall, 1986) mirror image of hackers driven by freedom (Coleman, 2012). “Technical pluralism” is my term for their approach to social and political change. Technical refers to a broad range of scientific and administrative techniques. Far from the stereotype of the naïve engineer, I have found them to be theoretical omnivores always interested in questions of power, iteratively testing theories of social change. They draw from vocabularies including design, urban studies, political science, sociology, and technological philosophers. Similar to Karl Popper’s (1945) “piecemeal social engineers,” they recursively try to reduce societal suffering using tools at their disposal. In an era of heated rhetoric and divisive politics, the rise of new political actors interested in new ways of improving governance should not be surprising. People have always evaluated their participation in politics through sensemaking. That is, they draw on cultural vocabulary from the media and political climate to understand what civic action means and adopt these practices in their own lives. We vote, unless we believe our vote doesn’t matter. We volunteer, but not if the non-profit organization we devote time to starts to lose their ability to have an impact on the social issue we care about. Responding to the “crisis in civics” debate, Zuckerman (2014) wrote that, “it’s not that people aren’t interested in civic participation,” he wrote rebutting a common view, “they’re simply not interested in feeling ineffectual or helpless” (p. 155). Much as any politically engaged actors, techies are trying to improve their communities and address shortcomings of democratic institutions they just go about it a different way.

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Techies are constantly testing out theories of social change in a pragmatic cycle that includes observation and implementation as a way of learning (Dewey, 1915). Chris Kelty’s (2008) defines a “recursive public” as a collective constituted through discourse and technological practices. His Internet-based Free and Open-Source Software (F/OSS) geeks are, “constituted by a shared, profound concern for the technical and legal conditions of possibility for their own association” (Kelty, 2005, p. 185). That is, through practice they are always testing ideas for improving how they organize. Coleman similarly noted that among transparency activists, “a concern for civil liberties is not separate or supplemental to an engagement with […] technologies: it is constitutive of the experience” (2017, p. S98). The difference with techies is they are united not under a single goal or even singular technology, but a “big tent” message of social change through reforming governance. Techies, then, are pragmatists in a particular philosophical tradition (Ansell, 2011). As a result, they are liable to get caught in a loop when trying to address systemic problems. This “recursive civics” also helps explain why norms of civic engagement are transgressed in the messy spaces of civic tech: techies are constantly pitching and prototyping ideas to improve social conditions that range from rudimentary to the radical. In the process of recursively addressing public problems, they are organizing and gaining the capacity for technology design and implementation beyond the boundaries of “local government” or “the state.” Here, I turn to theories of pluralism, and literature from political philosophy that considers the expression of political power (Dahl, 1961, 1963), and diversity in society (Bagharmian & Ingram, 2000). Pluralists see power not as being held by “the state” or political parties, but as being distributed through influence across organizational and institutional boundaries. Yet, pluralism also has limitations. Pluralists tend pay less attention to institutional boundaries and party dynamics hence, techies’ desire for “open government” and openness as a whole. As a result, they have limited ability to cohere widespread support across voting blocks on specific issues, as Daniel Kreiss (2015) notes. Because they often tackle social issues with technological interventions first, only later addressing questions of policy and process, their practices can be critiqued as “trickle-down technocracy” where leaders have little incentive to craft more robust proposals. These are central challenges for anyone interested in not just “civic tech,” but public sector technology design as a whole.

Conclusion Current definitions of “civic tech” reflect a belief that technologies, when wielded wisely, can improve public life. Bucket and umbrella definitions also mutually position technology as instrumental and ideologically neutral. I suggest that these definitions obscure that the enduring contributions of civic tech are predominantly organizational and political rather than solely technological. A practice-oriented perspective draws attention to how techies recursively address public problems through iterative problem-solving. That is, techies

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employ recursive civics to re-arrange power dynamics by hacking infrastructure, sifting through data, and creating prototypes. Through these practices, techies try to open up space between government and community, changing the political system as a whole. Power is playing out not just when civic identities are forged and technologies shaped, but when government boundaries are expanded and reconfigured. Behind the hype of the term “civic tech” lie enduring political questions: how do we improve recognition in politics and redistribution of resources through technical reforms? Can government cede power to the community and non-profit organizations? How can these collaborations generate or maintain community infrastructure in urban environments? Umbrella definitions that place weight on the “public good” make more sense once we understand that techies are collectively constructing the very idea of a “public good” through communication and practice. As David Nye (2006, p.3) notes, “to tell a story or to make a tool is to adopt an imaginary position outside immediate sensory experience”. By imbuing technical work with moral meaning through shared work and communication, technology is “made to mean” (Maher, 2015). Civic tech is hardly apolitical or value-neutral, as policy-makers and philanthropic agencies often claim. Neither does the “public good” obviate practitioners from adopting particular political positions. Lasswell (1951) and Dahl (1961) define political power as about how entities within and outside of government affect distribution of shared resources. From a perspective of technical pluralism, civic tech is a deeply political attempt to hack and reconfigure institutional arrangements that dictate how resources are distributed in urban environments. Successive waves of technological reformers tempt us to regard previous paradigms as passé, when the way forward is typically more synergistic. In other words, civic tech’s interest in distributive justice, organizing, and humanistic technology design should animate seasoned practitioners operating in “smart cities,” who can bring their experience and theories to the table to propose more robust frameworks of urban change.

References Ansell, C. K. (2011). Pragmatist democracy: Evolutionary learning as public philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baack, S. (2015). Datafication and empowerment: How the open data movement rearticulates notions of democracy, participation, and journalism. Big Data & Society, 2(2), 1 11. Bagharmian, M., & Ingram, A. (2000). Pluralism: The philosophy and politics of diversity. New York, NY: Routledge. Clarke, R. Y. (2014). Civic tech fuels state and local government transformation. Retrieved from http://engage.accela.com/RLWhitePaperIDCCivicTechReport_ RLWPCDGWhyCloud.html Coleman, G. (2012). Coding freedom: The ethics and aesthetics of hacking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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Coleman, G. (2017). From internet farming to weapons of the geek. Current Anthropology, 58(S15), S91 S102. doi:10.1086/688697 Dahl, R. A. (1961). Who governs? Democracy and power in an American city. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Dahl, R. A. (1963). Dilemmas of pluralist democracy: Autonomy vs. Control. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Dewey, J. (1915). Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of education. New Delhi: Aakar Books. Donohue, S. (2016). Engines of change: What civic tech can learn from social movements. Retrieved from https://www.omidyar.com/sites/default/files/file_archive/ Pdfs/Engines%2520of%2520Change%2520-%2520Final.pdf Dunbar-Hester, C. (2013). Producing “participation”? The pleasures and perils of technical engagement in radio activism. Public Culture, 26(1(72)), 25 50. Hall, S. (1986). Variants of liberalism. In J. Donald & S. Hall (Eds.), Politics and ideology (pp. 34 69). Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Irani, L. (2015). Hackathons and the making of entrepreneurial citizenship. Science, Technology & Human Values, 40(5), 799 824. Kelty, C. (2005). Geeks, social imaginaries, and recursive publics. Cultural Anthropology, 20(2), 185 214. Kelty, C. (2008). Two bits: The cultural significance of free software. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kitchin, R. (2015). Making sense of smart cities: Addressing present shortcomings. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 8(1), 131 136. Knight Foundation. (2013). The emergence of civic tech: Investments in a growing field. Retrieved from https://www.knightfoundation.org/media/uploads/publication_pdfs/knight-civic-tech.pdf Kreiss, D. (2015). The problem of citizens: E-democracy for actually existing democracy. Social Media + Society, 1(2), doi:10.1177/2056305115616151 Lasswell, H. D. (1951). The political writings of Harold D. Lasswell. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press. Laudon, K. C. (1977). Communications technology and democratic participation. New York, NY: Praeger. Maher, J. H. (2015). Software evangelism and the rhetoric of morality: Coding justice in a digital democracy. New York, NY: Routledge. Nye, D. E. (2006). Technology matters: Questions to live with. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Osborne, D., & Gaebler, T. (1992). Reinventing government: How the entrepreneurial spirit is transforming the public sector. New York, NY: Addison-Wesley Publishing. Popper, K. (1945). The open society and its enemies. London: Routledge. Schrock, A. (2016). Civic hacking as data activism and advocacy: A history from publicity to open government data. New Media & Society, 18(4), 581 599. Schrock, A. (2018). Civic tech: Making technology work for people. Long Beach, CA: Rogue Academic Press. Schulte, S. R. (2018). United States digital service: How “Obama’s startup” harnesses disruption and productive failure to reboot government. International Journal of Communication, 12, 131 151. Schumacher, E. F. (1973). Small is beautiful: A study of economics as if people mattered. New York, NY: Blond & Briggs, Ltd.

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Shaw, E. (2014). Civic wants, civic needs, civic tech. Retrieved from http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2014/09/29/civic-wants-civic-needs-civic-tech/ Skocpol, T., & Fiorina, M. P. (1999). Civic engagement in America. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Tilly, C., & Wood, L. J. (2012). Social movements 1768-2012. New York, NY: Routledge. Townsend, A. M. (2013). Smart cities: Big data, civic hackers, and the quest for a new utopia. London: W. W. Norton & Company Ltd. Whitaker, C. (2015). What is civic tech? Retrieved from https://medium.com/@ CivicWhitaker/what-is-civic-tech-b61a58c3eba8 Zuckerman, E. (2014). New media, new civics? Policy & Internet, 6(2), 151 168.

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Chapter 10

Hackathons and the Practices and Possibilities of Participation Sung-Yueh Perng

Abstract Smart city developments have been subjected to technocratic envisioning and neoliberal urban developments. However, there have been attempts to reclaim the right to the city through organizing civic initiatives to widen the access to the making of future technologies and cities. This chapter draws on Mouffe’s concept of agonistic relations to explore the diversifying ideals, rhetoric, and practices of hackathon organization to consider how they might cooperate with or contest one another and provide alternative means to technology and city making. The chapter analyzes different ways of organizing hackathons and discusses the opportunities for participants with diverse social backgrounds, knowledges and technical competences to join and work together. By examining the conflictual positions, articulations, and arrangements to widen participation, the chapter suggests that more open, inclusive, and collaborative city-making events might be possible. Further work is needed to examine conflictual hackathon participation practices and other civic initiatives to pursue a more egalitarian smart city. Keywords: Hackathon; innovation; participation; civic hacking; agonistic; hegemony

Introduction Smart city initiatives are often black-boxed projects that exclude the participation of those without special expertise, technical knowledge, and vested political and private interests. The result is the production of “cities for profit, not for people” (c.f. Brenner, Marcuse, & Mayer, 2009), where the right to participate in technology and city making is replaced by technocratic envisioning and

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neoliberal developments of urban future (Kitchin, 2015). However, cities and urban everyday life have continuously been sites to contest the strategies of commodification and to fight for the “right to urban life” (understood in Lefebvre’s sense, see Purcell, 2002, p. 102; Boudreau, Boucher, & Liguori, 2009). Indeed, in the context of smart or digital cities, digital commons or civic initiatives attempt to exercise the right to the city by organizing free, open, and collaborative ways of technology making as a means to explore new possibilities of participating in the production of urban spaces (Cardullo, 2019 (this volume); Shelton, 2018). Local communities or city administrations are encouraged by organizers to participate in these initiatives so that innovations are developed from the first-hand experiences and local knowledge obtained from living in the city. Furthermore, “citizen-centric” approaches become a popular choice in setting up urban living labs, civic hacking initiatives, or innovation districts to create socially sustainable ways of urban living (Cardullo & Kitchin, 2017; Cowley, Joss, & Dayot, 2018). To further unpack the range of strategies continuously developed and mobilized to reclaim the right to urban life, this chapter examines hackathon organization as an example. Hackathons deploy celebratory rhetoric of citizen engagement and bottom-up innovation. However, concerns have been raised regarding the ways in which hackathons are organized, in effect, to exploit participants’ altruism and labor (Gregg, 2015), build weakly and tentatively formed “proto-publics” (Lodato & DiSalvo, 2016), facilitate entrepreneurial citizenship (Irani, 2015), and sustain neoliberal governance through entrepreneurial life (Perng, Kitchin, & Mac Donncha, 2018). At the same time, different ideals, rhetoric, rationalities, and practices have been developed for opening access to innovation processes and the production of the smart city. Under this context, hackathons have been appropriated to explore how alternative event organization practices can generate new possibilities of participation in the making of future technologies and cities. Accordingly, instead of focusing on the hegemonic effects of hackathon that perpetuate the neoliberalization of cities, the chapter draws on Mouffe (2013) to explore how alternative conceptions and practices of hackathon might develop and ask if different organizational practices can build agonistic relations that challenge a dominant hegemony and provide further opportunities to advance the right to the smart city. To do so, the next section discusses the API-assisted data collection used for searching hackathons beyond the proximate and immediate, before exploring the diverse ways in which hackathons can be organized and the opportunities of participation emerging in (un)expected ways.

Methodological Consideration: API-assisted Data Collection Hackathons are usually studied using ethnography (e.g., Gregg, 2015; Irani, 2015; Lodato & DiSalvo, 2016; Perng et al., 2018). While these methods provide detailed accounts of the social dynamics in hackathons, the events that can be studied are temporally and spatially proximate due to various practical research considerations, including the locations of research projects, timing for empirical

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research, budgetary constraints, the social and familial responsibilities of researchers, etc. These methodological and practical considerations can limit the opportunities for exploring the diverse ways that hackathons can be organized. Conducting web searches to discover a range of hackathons can mitigate some of these constraints. However, such searches should be used with caution. The results are subjected to the rules and workings of search engine algorithms which might (un)intentionally prioritize certain types of events or locations, as well as the profiles of researchers where search result personalization can generate results according to the specific query terms, preference settings or search histories of individuals (Introna & Nissenbaum, 2000; Mager, 2012; Rogers, 2013). Taking these constraints and potential biases into account, data relating to hackathons beyond the temporally and spatially proximate of the researcher were generated for this chapter using an API to query the database of Eventbrite. Eventbrite was selected because it is a popular ticketing platform for a wide range of events and is also a promotion tool where event details can be publicized, including aims, sponsors, or types of participants who are encouraged to attend. Querying the Eventbrite API, a total of 374 unique hackathons, mostly organized for between April to June 2017, were accessed and included in the analysis. While a sizeable sample, the experiment is by no means exhaustive or comprehensive. On the contrary, there are a number of concerns raised by the process (also see Gerlitz & Rieder, 2013; Helmond, Rieder, & Rogers, 2012; Marres & Weltevrede, 2013; Rogers, 2013 for a discussion on research using social media APIs and on digital platforms more generally). These include rate limits (how frequently its API can be queried), prescription (the data made available), distillation (the parameters of temporal search), linguistic biases (the language used in the event details and search queries), and accidental inclusion (false returns). Care was taken to try and handle these issues effectively. After the dataset was compiled, manual processing and analysis of the data were carried out. Data processing involved looking for information about hackathon organization, for example, organizers or event themes, either in the field of “Event Description” in the dataset or official hackathon websites. Data analysis sought to identify constitutive parts of hackathon organization from the ground up, as well as exploring how these parts were assembled to organize different hackathons. The data generated from the API was then used to identify the form and nature of hackathons, constructing a typology of different kinds of hackathon events. Such an exercise was considered useful because, although hackathons are considered citizen-focused events, the extent to which they are organized and include citizens in ways beyond participants, and the extent to which they focus on issues deemed important by citizens themselves vary.

Hackathon Typology and Practices of Participation Current understandings of the differences among hackathons are summarized in Table 10.1. Meyer and Ermoshina (2013) and Briscoe and Mulligan (2014) suggest categorizing hackathons according to their focuses on technical

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Table 10.1. Existing Hackathon Typology. Hackathon Main Type Tech-centric

Focus-centric

Sub-type

Definitions and Examples

Single-application

Focus on particular applications, for example, a O/FSS project

Application type

Specific platforms, for example, mobile applications, games

Technology-specific

Develop specific software languages or frameworks

Socially-oriented

Address social concerns, for example, public services

Demographic-specific

Intended for, for example, women or teenagers

Company-internal

For company’s engineering staff, for example, Facebook

Data-centric

Focus on using the data provided by organizers

Business-centric

Focus on developing future products and business concepts

developments, specific topics, demographics, and data reuse. Van Waart, Mulder, and De Bont (2015) also note the business orientation of hackathons where stakeholders, participants and local authorities are engaged for the development of future business concepts and products. However, these typologies do not explore the organization of hackathons, where the associations between different actors and practices could affect hackathon goals, practices and results, and more importantly the possibilities of participation in innovation processes. To address these shortcomings, the analysis of the Eventbrite dataset focused on “organizational data,” including organizers, sponsors, proposed challenges for participants to work on, intended participants (and also desirable knowledge, skills, experiences), and rewards for participation. The analysis of the dataset was also informed by ethnographic case studies of hackathons and other hacking initiatives conducted in Dublin (2014 2015) and Boston (April, 2016) (see Maalsen & Perng, 2017; Perng & Kitchin, 2018; Perng et al., 2018). The analysis of the organizational data provides a sense of “hackathon parts,” shown in Table 10.2, where the parts in each category (e.g., organizers) are assembled according to specific hackathon rationales and preparations. In terms of the participating organizations (be they private companies, civic organizations, or any other kind of organizations), they operate at international

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Table 10.2. Hackathon Parts. Organizers

Wider Stakeholders

Skills, Expertise and Knowledges

Project Proposition

Rewards

Corporations Corporations Professional developers

To set challenges

Cash

Industries

Industries

To broad issues

Placement

Universities

Governments Domain experts

Propose problems

Visibility

Civic

Societies

Communities

Set problems

Entrepreneurship

Tech enthusiasts

Sciences

Civic

Recruitment

Individuals

Societal

Governments Tech groups

Other tech professionals

Tech mentors Non-tech mentors

or national scales, are associated with different industries and sectors, and target diverse societal or technological issues. In the case of corporations, they can be multinational companies in the IT industry, such as Microsoft and Google, or in other industries heavily dependent upon IT infrastructure, such as Banking (e.g., BNP Paribas), telecommunication (e.g., AT&T), fashion (e.g., Gucci), or ticketing (e.g., Ticketmaster), as well as other national or local ones. Furthermore, there are several ways problems can be identified and potentially solved, ranging from broad “challenges” set by event organizers, to specific issues that collaborating organizations face. In some events, there can be no overarching theme and participants can propose their own problems or projects. Similarly, civic organizations differing in focus and scale also participate in hackathons as organizers or stakeholders. Many of these organizations have an emphasis on diversity issues in tech culture and the sector. Hackathons are adapted as a strategy for broadening access to technology and education for socially disadvantaged groups, most notably women, children and teens, and ethnic minorities, instead of acting purely as a place for invention. There are other civic or activist groups that re-appropriate hackathons as a strategy to respond to emerging critical issues or to pursue their long-term goals. For example, open knowledge and open data initiatives can use these events as part of their long-term strategies to advocate for transparency in governance; meanwhile, emergent societal issues such as refugees or the travel ban in the USA can lead to the organization of hackathons by civic or activist groups targeting these issues specifically. The analysis above demonstrates a growing pluralization of hegemonies (Mouffe, 2013). Mouffe is concerned with the possibility of conceiving and

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establishing political worlds that are beyond a unipolar hegemony. In such political worlds, agonistic relations are important because conflictual relations and adversaries are inevitable even when opponents share similar values. Accordingly, an important task for democratic institutions is to construct more egalitarian arrangements to accommodate these different political positions. Drawing on Mouffe, the chapter considers if there is a pluralization of hackathons whose interpretations of and arrangements for participation in innovation might not be in full harmony with one another, but collectively, despite their differences, challenge the hegemonic approach to innovation and city making. Observing the Eventbrite dataset, the discussion below focuses on six different ways of assembling hackathons, dependent on their configuration of actors (organizations and participants), rationalities (framing of motivations and achievements), and practices involved (the recruiting and rewarding of organizations and participants). Entrepreneurial machines are facilitated by a “hackathon industry” that focuses on helping companies and organizations in the planning of the events and selecting the ideas and teams that have the potential to attract seed funds and transform into start-up companies (see Table 10.3). These hackathon consultancy companies, for example, AngelHack, focus on helping multinational or local companies set up hackathons, which in many cases, are organized in series and themed around the commercial focus of the organizing and sponsoring companies. Apart from advising on the overall event theme, structure, and challenges, hackathon consultancy companies also provide guidelines for organizers to follow, particularly in terms of securing local sponsorships, venues, and partnerships with other companies. Accordingly, participation in these hackathons serves the entrepreneurial developments of individuals and lifestyle and benefits the involved companies. State economic machines have similar emphases on entrepreneurship and innovation as entrepreneurial machines do. However, economic state machines deploy strong discourses on national or regional economic growth through a start-up economy and innovation at smaller scales, which in turn attract public and private funding to support them. Different from entrepreneurial machines, state economic machines have direct and indirect involvement of various governmental agencies. For example, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade of Barbados partnered with Microsoft in the organization of a hackathon to create prototypes to meet national challenges. This hackathon is part of a diaspora conference organized to attract inward investment on technological innovation from Barbadian emigrants as part of the country’s foreign affairs policy. Also, national and regional economic development strategies and funds can provide financial support for using hackathons as a means to grow a startup economy. For example, Garage48 organizes hackathon series for Estonia and the Balkans and is partly funded by the European Regional Development Fund to support the innovation and economic development of the region.1 The

1 Hackathon series organizer, Garage48, and one of their collaborative projects funded by EU, see http://garage48.ee/blog/erdf-is-supporting-garage48-hardwareand-arts-in-tartu-for-the-next-three-times.

Table 10.3. Hackathon Typology. Organizing Hacks

Organizers and Sponsors

Knowledge and Expertise

Project Proposition

Rewards

Examples

Responding to pre- Cash, visibility arranged challenges (product and personnel) and entrepreneurship

Angelhack hackathons; AI Hackathon Series

State economic machines

Corporations, industries and government agencies

Professional developers, individuals and tech mentors

Responding to pre- Cash, visibility, arranged challenges entrepreneurship and recruitment

Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade of Barbados; Garage48

Open innovation instruments

Corporations, industries, government agencies and tech enthusiasts

Professionals in tech, domain experts, individuals and tech and non-tech mentors

Responding to pre- Cash, visibility, Deutsche Bahn arranged challenges entrepreneurship, Hackathon; hacking recruitment and health societal

Specialist dives

Corporations, industries and tech enthusiasts

Professional developers, domain experts and tech mentors

Responding to pre- Cash and arranged challenges recruitment or problems

Viper (on digital payment)

Appropriating research and innovation

Corporations, industries, universities, societies

Professional in tech, domain experts, communities and nontech mentors

Responding to Visibility, broad issues or pre- entrepreneurship arranged challenges and societal

Open Geneva Hackathon; unihack

Hackathons and Participation

Entrepreneurship Corporations (local Professionals in tech, machines and multinational) individuals, and tech and and industries non-tech mentors

141

Civic appropriations

Organizers and Sponsors Corporations and civic organizations

Knowledge and Expertise

Project Proposition

Rewards

Professional in tech, domain experts, communities, civic organizations, non-tech mentors

Responding to Visibility, broad issues, entrepreneurship proposed problems and societal or specific problems

Examples Techfugees; random hacks of kindness

Sung-Yueh Perng

Organizing Hacks

142

Table 10.3. (Continued )

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hackathons focus on impressing Silicon Valley ideals of innovation on the participations and introducing start-up cultures and entrepreneurial practices to the region: “Garage48 is here to show that it’s all about positive ‘let’s do it’ attitude, creative team members and a motivating deadline.” However, participation in state economic machines in “postcolonial” countries is equally about economy and nation building. The emphasis on entrepreneurship and innovation capacities provides the possibilities to break from their colonial past and construct new state identity (Datta, 2015). Given the technological and political motivations, there is less control on the technical skills of hackathon participants and the specific problems proposed as project ideas, as long as the innovation capacity of the countries can be showcased. However, there are reservations regarding how well the civic purposes behind such participation can be realized and if such participation only fosters “entrepreneurial citizenship” (Irani, 2015). Open innovation instruments are events that generate business ideas and prototypes by leveraging the expertise outside the organizing companies or organizations. These hackathons often involve companies of different sizes and multiple stakeholders, and call for participation from those who have tech, design, or business skills. Hackathons for open innovation can be organized by large (multinational) companies, which usually are not in the IT industry, but depend heavily on either IT infrastructure to operate or IT innovations to provide new services. These corporations can also have digital engagement strategies for attracting new ideas outside of the organizations. For example, Deutsche Bahn (DB) hackathon 2017 was part of DB’s digital strategy. It was also supported by corporate and civil society partners including the Open Knowledge Foundation in Germany, a data visualization platform company (Tableau), an accelerator program (Data Pitch), a female-focused designer organization (Ladies that UX Berlin), etc. These partnerships aim to increase the diversity of social groups, technical skills, and knowledges and are highlighted by the organizers as important ingredients to successful outcomes. Participants can propose their own interpretations of hackathon challenges and project ideas, while others decide if they (dis)agree with them. As such, there is considerable uncertainty around whether the participants can negotiate through their different interests, skills, and knowledges and if a convincing idea or workable prototype can be produced. Specialist dives focus on solving specific technical problems and are less frequent. They are led primarily by companies and only occasionally partnered with other types of organizations, such as technology enthusiast groups or startup accelerator programs. These hackathons have a narrower focus, which results from the size and resources of the organizing companies. While these events employ a similar rhetoric of welcoming any interested participant, the participation in these hackathon is limited due to the specialist knowledge and the high levels of technical competences required to attend. Research and innovation appropriations showcase the research and innovation capacity of universities or academic communities through hosting hackathons. Universities can become part of an organization team and inform, if not lead, the preparation of hackathon themes and challenges. This way, hackathons

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work as stakeholder engagement strategies for research purposes.2 In addition, hackathons can be incorporated into university digital engagement or commercialization strategies where university accelerator programs or innovation centers can be set up and include hackathons into their programs to look for potential ideas and teams for commercializing their research outputs.3 The participation at these events, more common in North America, Europe, and Australia, becomes a tool for these universities to promote their innovation capacities and the employability of their students. Societal appropriations are events that repurpose hackathons to respond to social and political issues. Organizationally similar to open innovation hackathons, societal appropriations involve even more diverse social entities as lead or contributing partners to shape the issues, challenges, or problems the events focus on. The participating organizations can include both multinational and local companies, civic, non-profit, or cultural organizations, as well as government agencies or technology enthusiast organizations. For example, Techfugees hackathons4 are supported by a global network of volunteers and local organizers in Jordan and Australia that partnered with tech and start-up companies, charities, and non-profit and non-governmental organizations, with the aim of improving the life of refugees and integrating them into hosting countries.5 Another example is Hack4FI,6 co-organized by Open Knowledge Finland and AvoinGLAM, the Finnish branch of a global network facilitating collaboration with participating countries’ galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM) institutions, proposing various “tracks” and “themes” related to increasing engagement with cultural heritage. Meanwhile, civic hacking organizations take a considerably different approach to hackathons. These organizations, such as Code for America (CfA) and Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK), share with those involved in organizing open innovation hackathons the interests in developing technological innovations to facilitate better provision of care and services for local communities or members of the public. However, civic hacking organizations disagree with several organizational aspects of open innovation hackathons and have developed alternative arrangements to change them. These arrangements revolve around “conducting research with real people to understand who they are, what

2

Hacking, Eating, Tracking (HET; http://www.hackingeatingtracking.org/hackathon/), and IMED Hackathon (http://www.hackathon.isid.org/) are examples of such appropriations. 3 For example, the Center for Innovation and Business Creation at Technical University of Munich in innovate.healthcare hackathon (http://munich.innovate. healthcare/). 4 https://techfugees.com/ 5 For an Australian example, see https://techfugees-adelaide-4948.devpost.com/?ref_ content=default&ref_feature=challenge&ref_medium=discover; https://techfugees-auyoung-people.devpost.com/submissions; or https://techfugees.com/news/melbournehackathon-continues-the-spirit-of-techfugees-australia/. Accessed on 01 August, 2017. 6 http://hack4.fi/

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they need, and how they behave’ before any design starts and also ‘building the capacity of subject matter experts and local stakeholders to identify problems where technology can help, and to define and refine those problems so that volunteer technologists can tackle them’”.7 Further, recognizing the time required for such change of practices to take effect and unsatisfied with the limited time and engagement with communities at hackathons, civic hacking organizations take a longer-term approach to extend the scope of engagement with affected communities. Methods of engagement have also been revised so that innovations are grounded in the collaborative explorations of problems and suitable technologies between participants who have professional expertise of technology development and those with local knowledge and connections. In practice, Code for America and Random Hacks of Kindness, for example, organize annual hackathons that emphasize problem clarification and capacity building for the leader team of local brigades, rather than seeking solutions. Furthermore, CfA also provides sets of “how-to” documents outlining instructions for a wide range of activities, from the initial setup of local brigades to engaging with communities. Also, both CfA and RhoK establish their accelerator programmers to create alternative funding arrangements to sustain the development of prototypes. Finally, hackathons can be further repurposed as a means of activism. An increasing number of hackathons specifically focuses on enhancing the diversity of participation, for example, women, ethnic groups, or creating opportunities of exposure to programming for children.8 Also, against the removal of environmental and climate data from US governmental websites, events such as “data rescue” or “data refugee” are forms of activism organized as hackathons in many US cities to ensure that “climate data are comprehensively collected, mirrored, and accessible to everyone.”9 In these cases, “hackathon” becomes a loose term for events of intense collaboration, and the rhetoric on innovation is replaced by access, equality and justice. Some participants might have technical skills and professional knowledge to be mentors, but people with all kinds and levels of skills are encouraged to participate and contribute to all aspects pertinent to the operation of these initiatives, including event promotions, resource management, or finances.

7

Quoted from https://www.codeforamerica.org/how/#practices and http://rhok.cc/ about, respectively. 8 Examples: focusing on children and teens: https://www.eventbrite.it/e/bigliettiscratch-hackathon-codemotion-kids-33304804567; https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ coderdojo-indiana-hackathon-tickets-30491217051; female: https://www.eventbrite. com/e/womens-hackathon-csusm-april-22-2017-registration-32359304551; Ethnic groups: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/black-boys-code-spring-2017-hackathon-tickets32930167016. Accessed on 01 August, 2017. 9 Quoted from https://libraries.mit.edu/news/rescue-hackathon/24362/. Accessed on 01 August, 2017.

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Discussion Throughout the examples discussed in the chapter, the heavy presence of local and multinational corporations and the emphases on entrepreneurship and economy can certainly support the argument that hackathons have been extending the hegemony of the business-led, entrepreneurial developments of cities and subjectivities. Their partnerships with research institutions and civic organizations can also cause concerns regarding the co-optation of civil society and scientific communities. However, the discussion also reveals how participation in the process of innovation has been enacted in ways not in complete harmony with one another. Societal appropriation hackathons negotiate and confront prevailing neoliberal rationalities and practices that tokenize and exploit participation, while also appropriating hackathon practices, resources, and event structures to mobilize actions against social and political adversity. State economic machines take cue from entrepreneurial machines but repurpose hackathons to rupture colonial histories and identities. In the process of organizing hackathons, project proposition can be a key element to foster the participation of those without technical training and backgrounds, which also challenges the logic and practice of corporate hackathons. To derive useful observations or new insights from event participants, corporate hackathon organizers plan project propositions in a top-down manner, as seen in entrepreneurial machines or open innovation instruments, in the form of “challenges.” However, project proposition can also be bottom-up, which is often the case in “societal appropriation” hackathons or hacking events, where participants, usually without technical competences, bring their own problems for technical developers and designers to create prototypes. Alternatively, a broad and wellestablished concern, such as climate change, can be adopted as a theme and event organizers then work with other organizations, ranging from governmental agencies to NGOs, to identify specific social or technical problems to attract participants to work on. In doing so, hackathons also become a means of, rather than an end to, engagement. They can be organized to elicit problems and broaden access to participation, but also require subsequent arrangements and programs to further develop relationships with affected communities, governments, and funders/sponsors. Furthermore, multiple rationalities can be found within hackathons, cooperating but also resisting or repurposing hackathon organization practices that are developed to exploit the “wisdom of the crowd.” From the ethnographic studies I conducted on hackathons, participants at open innovation hackathons have conflictual views on the values and beneficiaries of innovation (Maalsen & Perng, 2017; Perng et al., 2018). They engage in debates about the purpose and direction of their project development. The debate did not reach a consensus and in effect disrupted corporate co-optation of participants’ ideas and labor. Mouffe’s concept of agonistic relations is helpful in further considering participation and hackathons. The different hackathon types discussed above attempt a pluralization of hegemonies wherein the conflictual relations among

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them enable new possibilities of participation. Not conforming to established hackathon ideals and practices, alternative hackathon arrangements reconsider the validity of hackathons as instruments of innovation and repurpose the event structure for social and political actions. The adaptations, appropriations and resistance against predominant hackathon arrangements explore critical issues for widening participation and shaping socially desirable innovation, which include how opportunities can be created for those who have been excluded, how innovation processes can be collaborative rather than competitive, how project problems can be proposed, and how event outcomes can align better with civic interests and social and political activism. Also, the coexisting but confronting rationalities during hackathon participation mentioned above might provide opportunities to further the pluralization of hackathon hegemonies. Indeed, some refusal of neoliberal logic to innovation might be considered “antagonism” in Mouffe’s term. However, it is through differentiating the positionality toward participation that alternative visions and practices of a more inclusive and collaborative model of innovation can be articulated and exercised.

Conclusion The chapter examined different types of hackathons to understand the agonistic relations and ongoing negotiations arising from the struggle for the right to participate in the smart city. The cooperation and confrontation occurring as hackathons are organized were explored to demonstrate emergent ways in which individuals, institutions, project propositions, and societal rewards (incentives apart from cash or entrepreneurship) work together to repurpose hegemonic hackathons and their neoliberal ideals, rhetoric and practices. Alternative hackathon organization practices have sought to establish innovation environments that are inclusive of people from diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and expertise and set up programs that foreground ethical and societal values during innovation processes. In doing so, these practices mark, register, and exercise the refusal to perpetuate the established political economy of technology and city making even though the presence of corporate entities is widespread. Building on these observations, future work can examine the diverse rationalities and practices contesting one another at hackathons to consider how they might widen participation in the making of technology. Also, the agonistic relations in other civic initiatives can be explored to consider how they might encourage continued refusal of neoliberal urban developments and the conflictual but vibrant explorations of visions and arrangements for open, inclusive, and collaborative making of future cities.

Acknowledgment The chapter is supported by The Programmable City project, funded by a European Research Council Advanced Investigator award (ERC-2012-AdG-

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323636-SOFTCITY) and a Ulysses award co-funded by the Irish Research Council and the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I am grateful for the productive comments from the editors and the participants of The Right to the Smart City and Ulysses knowledge exchange workshops.

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Chapter 11

Smart Cities by Design? Interrogating Design Thinking for Citizen Participation Gabriele Schliwa

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. A growing number of initiatives seek to revamp the smart city as a human smart city. Therein, design thinking and human-centered design have become the buzzwords of choice to describe “putting people first” approaches that promise to develop solutions tailored to citizens’ needs. What was previously known as user-centered design in the context of information and communication technology (ICT) product and service development now proliferates the urban through innovation labs or civic hackathons. But what are the implications of using design thinking in a smart city context? And moreover, how to unpack human-centered design and design thinking within urban scholarship? This chapter contextualizes the phenomenon of design thinking in cities and renders implicit design thinking processes more explicit. Drawing upon ongoing research in Manchester and Amsterdam since 2014, my work-in-progress suggests that governing through design thinking results in a designing of the social rather than for the social. This trend requires historically informed political analysis and alternative ways to govern if the “right to the smart city” is not to become yet another iteration of shape-shifting neoliberal strategies. Keywords: Design thinking; smart cities; urban innovation; citizen participation; governance; urban co-design

The Right to the Smart City, 151 164 Copyright r 2019 by Emerald Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved DOI: 10.1108/978-1-78769-139-120191011

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It’s All about People, Isn’t It? A variety of initiatives have mushroomed across the globe with the promise to empower people through so-called “design thinking” approaches. Processes that were more recently deployed in the context of information and communication technology (ICT) development and business innovation are now proliferating public spheres. Particularly, urban living labs or innovation labs provide collaborative platforms for urban co-design and city making together with citizens (Schliwa & McCormick, 2016; Voytenko, McCormick, Evans & Schliwa, 2016). Alongside and within these collaborative governing spaces, energetic workshoptype events have started to mobilize design thinking and human-centered design as popular participatory approaches. Their themes are as varied and ambitious as tackling climate change (Climathon), reducing barriers to cycling (CycleHack Global Movement), improving public services (Global GovJam), saving the UK’s national health service (NHS Transformathon) or making children “future ready” (Designathon). Images of colorful post-it notes tagged with hashtags such as #empoweringpeople or #humancentereddesign have flooded social media, leaving us with the impression that citizens are collaboratively solving the problems of our time. Faced with the enthusiastic spread of public and industry-led participatory initiatives, this chapter aims to raise critical awareness to the proliferation of design thinking as a mode of governing in a “smart” city context. Design thinking has become increasingly staged as a tool to shape how institutions in the twenty-first century operate, yet design scholars argue that design is at a critical point, especially as demand in practice as driven by participatory innovation initiatives exceeds academic research capacity (Armstrong, Bailey, Julier, & Kimbell, 2014; Manzini, 2015). Urban scholarship is still lacking critical engagement with implicit design thinking processes. Existing research and debates on the changing role of design and the designer are dominated by private sector institutions, which offer design thinking consultancy. Despite the necessity to distinguish between a participant’s identity as user vs. citizen in the pursuit of sustainability (Schliwa & McCormick, 2016) and the need to conduct normative work (Cardullo & Kitchin, 2017), the lines between participants’ identities continue to blur both in discourse and practice. While an increasing scholarly effort continues to define, redefine, and assess urban lab-style initiatives (Evans & Karvonen, 2014; Voytenko, McCormick, Evans, & Schliwa, 2016), this chapter is predominantly concerned with the cross-cutting element that emerges within them, which is a design-led mode of governing. So who is the human around which the design process is centered? What happens when we address human and urban complexity with a design process? And how can we better understand and analyze design thinking in cities? This chapter renders spaces and processes of design thinking more explicit to start unpacking these questions. I do so in three steps. First, I provide some background on the emergence of design thinking in cities. Second, I render explicit the milieus and techniques that form part of governing through design thinking in smart cities.

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To conclude, I provide some reflections about design thinking as a tool for citizen participation in a smart city context.

Contextualizing Design Thinking for Citizen Participation According to design critic Alice Rawsthorn (2013), one of the earliest examples of applied design thinking could be attributed to Ying Zheng, the First Emperor of unified China in 221 BC. One of his problems was that each of his archers made their own arrows, meaning they were not portable across bows. The solution was to standardize the design of the arrows across the army (Rawsthorn in Gary Hustwit’s documentary Objectified (2009)). While we can read a lot into this example of Chinese history, one aspect is of particular importance in the context of urban governance: the role of industrial design for mass production of standardized objects. So how does design as a process and mode of thinking become mass produced and made available to millions of people? We could attribute the mass production of design thinking to design agency IDEO and the advocacy of its CEO Tim Brown. IDEO along with a growing number of design agencies and management schools promote the idea that you need to learn to think like a designer, while offering design facilitation and creative problem-solving as a new service commodity. Since 2009, we see large corporations building their design capacities, appointing designers to executive roles. IBM has been identified as the most aggressive company in making design one of their core activities. It has grown its in-house design team to 1,000 people and branded its own IBM Design Thinking process called The Loop. This makes one of the leaders in smart city technologies also the largest design firm in the world (Fabricant, 2014). Institutions such as the World Bank, as well as “philanthrocapitalists” (Wilson, 2014) such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or the Rockefeller Foundation, list design high on their agendas. Debates on “[w]hy democratic capitalism needs design thinking” illustrate similar logics at work (von Busch & Palmås, 2016) and support understandings of design thinking as “the new spirit of capitalism” (Seitz, 2017). In contrast to object design and urban design, today’s notions of design thinking and human-centered design emerge from ICT development and business management where they serve industries as approaches for service innovation and creative problem-solving (Boehnert, 2014; Cowley, Barnett, Katzschner, Tkacz, & Boeck, 2018; Johansson-Sköldberg, Woodilla, & Çetinkaya, 2013).1 Buchanan was amongst the first who populated the term “design thinking” in the 1990s. His early understandings of design thinking describe it as “a new liberal arts of technological culture” that not only changes external manifestations of our culture, but its internal character (Buchanan,

1 Famous designers for each category are for example Philippe Starck and with his iconic object design for a citrus squeezer or Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann and his radical redesign of Paris’ boulevards.

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1992). In line with this development, design itself has become increasingly understood as an epistemic culture (Mareis, 2011). Today’s definitions of design thinking remain vague and scholars argue that the phenomenon needs to be understood within the context in which it emerges (Johansson-Sköldberg et al., 2013; Kimbell, 2011). This leads us back to the contemporary city. After the sustainable city promised to solve urban problems through behavioral change and green technologies, current academic debates are still predominantly concerned with the smart city (de Jong, Joss, Schraven, Zhan, & Weijnen, 2015). Vanolo (2014, p. 883) describes the smart city as a disciplinary strategy, providing a discourse that may therefore be a “powerful tool for the production of docile subjects and mechanisms of political legitimisation.” While the general public is still largely unaware of the smart city, a new era of urbanists and technologists started calling for the “smart citizen” instead (Hemment & Townsend, 2013). This gave rise to a new form of city strategies that revamp the smart city as “human smart city” (Concilio & Rizzo, 2016) or “hackable city” (Ampatzidou, Bouw, van de Klunder, de Lange, & de Waal, 2016), where smart citizens “prototype early” (Kresin, 2013) and become active participants in city making. Moving from the techno-centric critique to the human-centric promise, we encounter new jargon such as “prototyping,” “learning by making,” or “empathy.” Not only do we witness a change toward process-oriented vocabulary, but also changes in discourse that let the heavily criticized smart city disappear, to be resurrected under the banner of design and the city along with altered motivations and meanings. Going beyond the rhetoric surrounding sustainable or smart urban strategies, cities worldwide have started to embrace design for governance innovation. This suggests that the ways in which design plays out in today’s society are undergoing a number of transformations, two of which are of particular importance in a public policy context (Bason, 2014) and are also of particular relevance for cities more generally. First, design is argued to be shifting to the concept of “co-”: collaboration, co-production, co-creation, and co-design as central features emphasize the explicit involvement of users, partners, suppliers, and other stakeholders in the design process, discarding the image of the heroic single designer (Bason, 2014). Second, design is increasingly embracing the social in form of social design discourses and practices (Armstrong et al., 2014). This shift within the economies of design is partially represented by the movement toward social entrepreneurship and social innovation (Julier, 2017). This has led to a wider change in design culture which has arguably been under way since the design science movement of the 1960s (Margolin, 2010) and the proliferation of the Californian Ideology as emancipatory and optimistic form of technological determinism (Barbrook & Cameron, 2015). However, it is not California’s Palo Alto or the design industry alone that brought about shifts from hierarchical government toward more networked “governance-beyond-the-state” (Swyngedouw, 2005) innovations. Governmental organizations and nation states play a crucial role as community and citizen engagement are increasingly a requirement to secure public funding. For example, Horizon 2020 is the biggest EU Research and Innovation program to date

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with about EUR 80 billion of funding available from 2014 to 2020 and endorses citizen engagement (e.g., in its Smart Cities and Communities calls). While governance-beyond-the-state innovations are democratizing and empowering in some ways, they are fundamentally Janus-faced and often serve as institutional fixes. Cities and communities left underserved are more vulnerable, suffer more from painful shocks which in return undermines further state legitimacy and demands alternative models of governance (Swyngedouw, 2005). To address such alternative models of governance, this chapter acknowledges different conceptions of design, social design, and the design industry, while focusing on the latter. Building on discussions of “governing through code” (Gabrys, 2014; Klauser, Paasche, & Söderström, 2014) and “governing through Urban OS” (Marvin & Luque-Ayala, 2017) shall further provide a framework to understand how smart technologies get implemented in the city. While governing through code represents a more passive mode of governing (Gabrys, 2014), the rhetoric around design thinking suggests active participation that works at the interface between citizens and smart city projects. Such interface function resonates with the idea of an “urban interaction designer” (Brynskov, 2014) and the role of the designer to be an “intriguing question” (Hill, 2016). Refusing to put the heroic designer yet again center stage in favor of contextual awareness, I suggest “governing through design thinking” as a framework to understand networked, less hierarchical modes of governing that seek to address issues of common concern in an urban context.

The Emerging Business of Citizen (Dis-)empowerment Citizen participation in smart city projects is increasingly facilitated by designers and private sector actors rather than public authorities. This trend has significant implications for urban space. It concerns the development of infrastructures through experimental ways of governing (Hodson, Evans, & Schliwa, 2018; Schliwa & McCormick, 2016) and moreover the ways in which people think and act politically. Just as urban infrastructures often only become visible and disrupt cities when they fail (Graham, 2009), good design is invisible and might function strategically like a “Trojan Horse” (Hill, 2014). Focusing this discussion back to design thinking and our example about the First Emperor of unified China, we need to ask ourselves: Who is creating and holding bow and arrow today? The following sections provide starting points to address this question.

Design Thinking Spaces: Innovation Workshops While the rhetoric around innovation initiatives and labs appears new and exciting, what unites most of them is the use of workshops as sites of governance. A workshop is commonly defined in dictionaries as a period of discussion or practical work on a particular subject in which a group of people share their knowledge or experience. The workshops in Table 11.1 provide examples of different types of innovation workshops encountered through fieldwork. While they covered a wide range of issues (e.g., urban infrastructure, air quality, internet of

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Table 11.1. Selection of Design-led Innovation Workshops and Examples Encountered. Workshop Label

Duration

Civic hackathon

48 hours “CycleHack Global Movement” 2015, Manchester

Design charrette

24 hours “Labs of Labs” at Various design Design & The City tools, incl. 2016, Amsterdam “personas”

Festival lab

48 hours Public Festival Lab at Future Everything festival 2015, Manchester

[Issue] Lab

6 hours

Event

4 hours

Community 2 hours forum

Event Example

Examples of Relevant Features

Hosts and Facilitators

Provides tools Incl. Hyper and space to Island alumni “prototype” ideas to improve cycling Incl. Waag Society

Use of “design probes” and the idea of “friction” in the city

Incl. Future Everything, Edinburgh Design Informatics

“City Infrastructure Lab” 2015, Manchester

“Led by experts in civic innovation”

Incl. Red Ninja, Digital Catapult, Hyper Island

“Citizens and inclusive growth” 2017, Manchester

Facilitated an “immersive experience”

Incl. RSA, Hyper Island alumni

“CityVerve Community Forum” 2016, Manchester

Use of “Stinky Fish” as a tool to build trust

Incl. Future Everything, “Creative Experts”

Source: Author’s own based on personal experience and event websites.

things technology), I attended most events with the intention to improve cycling in the city. Workshops are time and place bound, taking usually two hours to two days and usually accommodate between five to up to 50 participants, depending on the format and facilitation. The majority of innovation workshops encountered were hosted in the creative districts in cities, for example, London’s “Silicon Roundabout” between Old Street and Shoreditch, the tech and design community around Stevenson Square in Manchester’s Northern Quarter, or the area in and around “Pakhus de Zwijger” in Amsterdam. These spaces are often connected to a co-working space and sponsor their facilities to support the local “community”. What unites them is the use of design thinking methods to engage

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participants and their function as interface between the “citizen” and the city or smart city projects. What distinguishes these workshops from one another is predominantly the context in which they emerge, the specific goal they set and the stakeholders hosting them. The specific format, context, and process then defines the given name of an innovation workshop. A civic hackathon describes usually a 24- or 48-hour event targeted at solving a specific challenge. While this format emerged within the context of coding, it has been meanwhile adapted to become applied to various issues as a way to accommodate citizen participation in an efficient way. “Climathon”, for example, is an initiative that seeks to address climate change by developing solutions within 24 hours (Climate-KIC, 2018). On the other end, a Festival Lab as part of a conference or arts festival can take more experimental forms and challenge participatory approaches (Abel et al., 2015). A number of organizations and institutions are involved in the facilitation of innovation workshops. Table 11.1 gives indication of different hosts and facilitators working in the fields of design and design thinking. Many examples from the UK context (Manchester) were found to be directly or indirectly sponsored by Innovate UK, which is the UK innovation agency and was until August 2014 known as Technology Strategy Board. Innovate UK had a budget of £561 million for 2016 2017 and is reporting to the UK Department for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy. Associated organizations include the UK-based Catapult centers and innovation foundation Nesta. The following section provides insights into organizations that offer design thinking education and facilitation.

Design Thinking Facilitation: From Military to Industry to Everybody? To “facilitate” is loosely defined as making an action or process easy or easier. Facilitators during workshops have the central yet invisible task to enable conversation and make sure that the goal of the workshop has been achieved by the end of the day. This remains often unnoticed by the workshop participants, as a smoothly running process causes little friction and facilitators often appear as “normal” participants despite their professional function, representing a leader who does not feature as a leader. In the case of Manchester, a majority of workshop facilitators encountered were designers that have been educated at the Manchester branch of “Digital Harvard” management school Hyper Island (The Heureka, 2013). Worldwide, we find more examples of design schools that train their students and staff to become design thinkers and facilitators, often in close collaboration with industry and businesses (see Table 11.2). Some design thinking schools and the techniques they mobilize are historically, or are in the process of becoming, associated with military organizations with respect to the “unconventional” approaches deployed within them. In the case of Hyper Island, the headquarter is based on a previous military prison on the island of Karlskrona, Sweden, and teaches a diverse set of programs, including the so-called Understanding Group and Leader (UGL) training. The intensive UGL course has been developed within the Swedish Armed Forces and became

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Table 11.2. Examples of Design Thinking Schools and Organizations. Organization

Description

Hyper Island, Manchester (UK)

Unlike typical education or service providers, we follow a tried-and-tested methodology and a wide network of real industry experts. Through our global network of schools and business services, we put people at the heart of innovation, leadership and change for success today and tomorrow. Source: https://www.hyperisland.com/about

The RSA, London (UK)

[…] we after a new RSA methodology: “think like a system, act like an entrepreneur”. Source: http://www. thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/reports/ from-design-thinking-to-system-change

Waag Society, Amsterdam (NL)

Our work focuses on emergent technologies as instruments of social change, and is guided by the values of fairness, openness and inclusivity. Waag’s dedicated team of 60 thinkers and makers empowers people to become active citizens through technology. Source: https://waag.org/en/about-us

Contact Theatre, Manchester (UK)

Connect your business with the people that matter with Creative Experts. Bridge the gap between you and the communities you serve through a creative engagement program developed and delivered by Creative Experts and Contact. Source: https://contactmcr.com/hire-us/ creative-experts/

IDEO U, Online

Learn IDEO’s approach to design and thinking and creative leadership through IDEO U an online school that equips individuals with the tools and mindsets necessary to ignite creative confidence and tackle complex challenges. Source: https://www.ideou. com

Source: Author’s own based on organization websites (last accessed October 8, 2018).

one of the most popular education for leadership in business, promising to provide insight in how a group develops over time, and what behavior or actions promote or inhibit constructive development (Hyper Island, 2018). While this might be desirable within a business environment, the mobilization within an urban context raises the critical political question who gets to define what “constructive” development is. Considering historical developments and reappropriations of military technologies (Light, 2002), it would be oversimplifying to talk about a militarization of the public sphere or a next stage of the

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New Military Urbanism (Graham, 2008). Instead, these notions need to be better understood in their particular contexts. Innovation labs work at the intersection between a variety of actors and stakeholders to mobilize collective intellect and knowledge. As is evident in Table 11.2, the facilitation of creative processes and design thinking has become a process commodity, taught and offered by design and creative industries in an increasingly urban as opposed to private sector context. As the descriptions highlight, design thinking programs are developed “put people at the heart of innovation” (see Hyper Island in Table 11.2) and promise to “[c]onnect your business with the people that matter” (see Contact Theatre in Table 11.2). This implies that workshop facilitators act on behalf of organizations or businesses on the basis of commissioned work.

Design Thinking Tools: Between Stinky Fish and Double Diamonds Professionally trained workshop facilitators use design thinking tools and design methods that have different functions at various stages during the workshop. Management school Hyper Island provides a public design thinking Toolbox2 that offers a variety of methods aimed at enabling trust, reducing conflict and extracting creative ideas. Figure 11.1 shows a set of different tools and methods that might be deployed throughout innovation workshop. UGL is the previously mentioned intensive course taught at Hyper Island that a facilitator might have been trained with to facilitate workshops and manage human behavior (Hyper Island, 2018). The “Stinky Fish” is a tool used to gain trust at the beginning of a workshop. Participants are encouraged to write down their fears and anxieties surrounding the topic at hand and share it with the group at the start of a workshop. “Checking in” and “checking out” are other design techniques that encourage to briefly share how someone feels at the start or end of a session to examine the initial baseline and to manifest lessons learned. The process between start and end of a workshop follows often the UK Design Council’s Double Diamond framework. The UK Design Council started in December 1944 as Industrial Design Council on a mission to promote design of the British Industry (UK Design Council, 2018a). The Double Diamond has been heavily promoted by the UK Design Council and is one of the most popular processes for design-led problem-solving. It can be deployed over two days, with the first day used to discover and define the problem and the second day to develop and deliver the solution (see Figure 11.1, in the middle). This process is also described as iterations of divergence and convergence. Divergence expands the scope of thinking and acting (for example through brainstorming of ideas in relation to a problem), while convergence signifies to focus on one specific issue for the development of a solution (UK Design Council, 2018b). Design thinking language can be identified based on questions framed as “How might we […],” which encourages a mindset that turns a problem into an

2

The Hyper Island Toolbox is retrieved from https://toolbox.hyperisland.com

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Figure 11.1. Design Thinking Tools Encountered at Urban Innovation Workshops. Source: Author’s own based on UK Design Council (2018b) and Hyper Island (2018). (economic) opportunity. This is often abbreviated with “HMW” and sometimes accompanied with a default sentence structure like “HMW improve/solve [problem] through [tool]?”. In the case of cycling, this translates for example into “How might we inspire the next 1 billion people to use the bicycle as their primary mode of transport?”. Design thinking jargon might not be immediately understood by participants, which is why some facilitators try to avoid it and talk instead about “learning by doing” instead of prototyping, to use more common language. Design theorist Claudia Mareis (2017) highlights how the conception of design thinking implies a strong correlation to creativity and creative thinking, with brainstorming used as a technique to mobilize the “gold mine between your ears”. While brainstorming used to be promoted as a way to stimulate commercial ideas, it was previously employed by military and governmental efforts during and after the Second World War as a way to produce ideas (Bruder & Mareis, 2015). Some design methods also reflect approaches and insights from industrial psychology. In the 1920s through the 1940s, small groups were researched as miniature models of society as a whole. The aim of this collaborative creative-technical practice was to optimize their economic and social performance in the sense of “democratic social engineering” (Graebner, 1986; in Mareis, 2017). Considering this information, we might start to understand social design differently, with an emphasis on the designing of the social, rather than for the social.

It’s All about Implementation, Isn’t It? Design thinking proliferates urban governance as a tool for citizen participation through a variety of innovation initiatives. Particularly, smart city initiatives suggest the active participation of citizens. This trend is driven by national and

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international innovation funding requirements, but also as a response to technocratic smart city discourses and practices. Design agencies and designers have started to offer human-centered design as process commodity and facilitate citizen participation around issues of common concern in smart city projects. As this chapter exemplified, design thinking is mobilized in the urban context through professionally trained facilitators and design thinking tools in innovation workshops. This chapter suggests “governing through design thinking” to complement “governing through code” (Gabrys, 2014; Klauser et al., 2014; Marvin & Luque-Ayala, 2017) by functioning as the interface between smart city projects and “citizens” in the process of implementing “smart” city strategies and technologies. In combination, they can be understood to foster collaboration and creativity in the face of friction (e.g., during technology implementation) or conflict (with respect to the general socio-political climate). It is necessary to expand academic analysis to the wider local and global contexts as well as historical backgrounds to be able to understand its political implications. The ways in which industrial design thinking differs from other design approaches can arguably be explained based on the historical origins of creativity and problem-solving techniques that emerged from the military industrial complex. With more certainty, we see the (re-)introduction of design thinking approaches into military operations research (Zweibelson, 2017). This suggests that, under our current socio-political climate, innovation activity and modes of governing between civil society and the military blur and converge. This notion requires attention from critical urban scholarship as such modes of governing have the potential to profoundly change the way we think, the way we act, and the way we organize ourselves politically. Early findings suggests that current mobilizations of design thinking tools in an urban context might lead to a designing of the social, rather than for the social in the process of the implementation of smart city visions and projects. This work-in-progress is a starting point to render design thinking more explicit for the analysis of design processes that are currently mobilized for citizen participation. I encourage critical urban scholarship to engage with design and design thinking in the urban context. Particularly, the political implications need to be understood along with the ways in which design thinking might lead to more democratic or autocratic modes of governing. If we talk about “the right to the smart city”, we should not only ask for the right to participate in it, but carefully consider how such participation will be empowering rather than disempowering over the long run not only for the participating individuals but for society as a whole.

Acknowledgments This chapter is work-in-progress based on my PhD thesis Designing Urban Citizenship. I would like to thank the participants and convenors of the Right to

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the Smart City workshop for providing feedback and space for discussion as well as and the EPSRC for funding this research.

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Rawsthorn, A. (2013). Hello world: Where design meets life. London: Hamish Hamilton. Schliwa, G., & McCormick, K. (2016). Living labs: Users, citizens and transitions. In J. Evans, A. Karvonen, & R. Raven (Eds.), The experimental city (pp. 163 178). London: Routledge. Seitz, T. (2017). Design Thinking und der neue Geist des Kapitalismus: Soziologische Betrachtungen einer Innovationskultur (2. Aufl.). Bielefeld: Transcript. Swyngedouw, E. (2005). Governance innovation and the citizen: The Janus Face of governance-beyond-the-state. Urban Studies, 42(11), 1991 2006. doi:10.1080/ 00420980500279869 The Design Council. (2018a). The design process: What is the double diamond? https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/news-opinion/design-process-what-double-diamond (retrieved September 10, 2018). The Design Council. (2018b). Our history. https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/aboutus/our-history (retrieved September 10, 2018). The Heureka. (2013). Meet the cool creatives from Hyper Island the “digital Harvard” grooming a crop of top startup talent. https://theheureka.com/hyperisland (retrieved September 10, 2018). Vanolo, A. (2014). Smartmentality: The smart city as disciplinary strategy. Urban Studies, 51(5), 883 898. doi:10.1177/0042098013494427 von Busch, O., & Palmås, K. (2016). Designing consent: Can design thinking manufacture democratic capitalism? Organizational Aesthetics, 5(2), 10 24. Voytenko, Y., McCormick, K., Evans, J., & Schliwa, G. (2016). Exploring urban living labs for sustainability and low carbon cities in Europe. Journal of Cleaner Production, 123, 45 54. doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2015.08.053 Wilson, J. (2014). The Juissance of philantrocapitalism: Enjoyment as a postpolitical factor. In J. Wilson. & E. Swyngedouw (Eds.), The post-political and its discontents: Spaces of depoliticization, spectres of radical politics (pp. 109 125). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Zweibelson, B. (2017). An application of theory: Second generation military design on the horizon. Small Wars Journal. 19 February 2017. http://smallwarsjournal. com/jrnl/art/an-application-of-theory-second-generation-military-design-on-the-horizon (retrieved September 10, 2018).

Chapter 12

Appropriating “Big Data”: Exploring the Emancipatory Potential of the Data Strategies of Civil Society Organizations in Cape Town, South Africa Nancy Odendaal

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 marginalized 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 while also encouraging investment and development through greater efficacy (e.g., in processing development applications). A “dashboard urbanism” is becoming evident that 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 perpetuate divides in what is considered to be one of the most unequal cities in the world. Based on exploratory research, this chapter explores strategies used by civil society organizations to challenge the assumptions of “dashboard urbanism” and contribute a more rounded appropriation of big data and a deepened and contextualized urban experience. Keywords: Smart urbanism; technology appropriation; data activism; global South; Cape Town

The Right to the Smart City, 165 176 Copyright r 2019 by Emerald Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved DOI: 10.1108/978-1-78769-139-120191012

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Introduction The original digital city surge in the early 2000s in South Africa conveniently coincided with the restructuring of local government. The country’s postApartheid landscape is replete with reconstruction discourses that place great faith in the state to enable more inclusive and representative cities. Given the country’s turbulent history, the focus on social justice is apt and understandable. Cities became battlegrounds of (often violent) struggles against the Apartheid state during the late 1980s, and the focus was overwhelmingly on the material inequalities represented by skewed infrastructure provision. Thus, in the early 2000s, not only did newly restructured city administrations focus their energies on service delivery, but the digital revolution was seen as a means to enable that more efficiently by an accountable and transparent city government (Odendaal, 2003). The smart city discourse is imbued with developmentalist zeal. The decontextualized new-town visual narratives that are currently peddled in Southeast Asia, India, and Africa (Datta, 2015; Watson, 2014) as smart cities have simply not landed in South Africa. The advent of big data and the foregrounding of the processing power of algorithms have shifted much of the literature focus onto data. There are two dimensions that are significant in the South African context (and I would argue resonate globally). One is the conflation of the ongoing trend of evidence-based policy-making, with the availability of open data, and a corporate sector happy to package the processing power for municipalities for a fee. The data-driven urbanist trend is motivated by the need for service delivery and political accountability globally (Kitchin, Lauriault, & McArdle, 2015). The second dynamic relates to ongoing dissatisfaction among social groups that are economically and spatial marginalized, with social media becoming a means to organize and mobilize. Together with the usual offline mechanics of activism, the arsenal of digital media available for information dissemination and publicity has been well harnessed toward social justice in South African cities (Mitchell & Odendaal, 2015; Odendaal, 2015). Elsewhere, I have explored these two dynamics as representative of a tension between the post-Apartheid State’s aspirational digital consensus, and the workings of a messy democracy at the margins (Odendaal, 2015). In this chapter, I delve deeper into what I argue is a shift in the knowledge domain of governance discourses. By exploring the landscape of digitally informed social activism in Cape Town, I aim to uncover the performative nature of data appropriation and its implications for inclusive governance.

Data versus Knowledge, and Moving Toward a More Socially Just Smart Cities The era of big data has enabled a more articulate technological foundation for evidence-based planning and policy-making. The use of benchmarking to monitor progress and enable informed decision-making is a logical extension of neoliberal governance. Managerialism and new public management (NPM) are

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considered passé now in the age of digital-era governance (DEG) but many of the business planning and monitoring practices are still embedded organizationally in the quest for ongoing accountability (Dunleavy, 2005; McLaughlin, Osborne, & Ferlie, 2002). Dashboards, indicators, and benchmarking are employed by cities to report on performance, give a health check snapshot (Kitchin et al., 2015), and fit well with notions of accountability, transparency, and efficiency. While it is tempting to bemoan the technological determinism that appears to inform DEG in the age of big data, McLaughlin et al. (2002) show through a number of country cases, that embedded government practices coexist with the digital desire to enable more open, yet less complex, institutional structures. Technical “fixes” are not enough given the messy work of deliberative democracy and the need for problem-solving that is contextually appropriate (Kitchin & McArdle, 2016). In the ongoing quest for accountability and predictability in the governance space, data representation has a particular currency in the message it chooses to present as “knowledge” of a place. A constant evolution toward more agile and responsive service delivery is the hope for DEG, but one cannot deny the political “work” of indicators and data-driven representation. While dashboards are intended to reflect “where we are” in a moment in time, their representation is nevertheless selective and often thematically packaged (Kitchin et al., 2015). The choice of theme and delineation of indicators is informed by whom the data should serve. Knowing the messy city through indicators and aggregating its complexity into a “snapshot” is the ultimate in scientific rationalization and objectification (Kitchin & McArdle, 2016). Numbers are not neutral, neither are the computation processes that produce dashboards. Algorithms are productive, through the processes of abstraction and prediction that feed more subjective aims through modelling and computation (Leszczynski, 2016). The act of encoding and packaging fragments into “sound-bite” formats is performative. Ultimately, data are disassociated from identifiable subjects/objects, stripped of context, making algorithmic governance productive of subjects and spaces (Leszczynski, 2016). Indicators are “assemblages” of human and inanimate agency, rather than objective “truths” (Kitchin et al., 2015). Reducing and oversimplifying complex relationships into manageable variables decontextualizes the city and assumes replicability across places. Benchmarking across cities (and countries) is commensurable with managerial governance and the ongoing “worlding” of cities (McCann, Roy, & Ward, 2013). It runs the risk, however, of duplicating pre-packaged urban “solutions” not mindful of the uniqueness of place. The “cut and paste” urbanism that permeates policy mobility is well served by big data. Together with longitudinal analysis, it assumes patterns and trends can be redirected through focused intervention and fails to recognize endemic, systemic urban processes that require attention. The use of data benchmarking and governance-by-numbers by international development agencies in tracking progress in the global South is of particular relevance in contexts considered “marginalized.” The New Urban Agenda

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(NUA) adopted at Habitat 3 in Quito serves as a crystalized example of the hope invested in numbers. The emphasis is on cities as places of opportunity and connection, relationally connected, and hence able to be compared in the quest to learn from one another. The sustainable development goals (SDGs) and associated indicators assume a normative base that is universal and quantifiable, whereas the growing literature on Southern Urbanism strongly suggests comparative endeavors are strongly tied to Northern normative constructs of the “good city” (Barnett & Parnell, 2016). The global as well as national systemic constraints to inclusive and just cities are intrinsically tied to history and place, or as Maria Kaika (2017, p. 6) puts it: The failures of the past have made us more savvy and more knowledgeable. They should have also made us wise enough to stop claiming that global socio-environmental equality, social welfare or value creation can be reduced to indicators. The overarching issue, with regard to this piece, is the “masking” work that numbers do in the name of transparent governance. Indicators and associated benchmarks signal consensus on “what counts and what doesn’t” what could be considered indicative of progress. Signals of “dissensus” are perhaps more adept at capturing “what is not working” through insight into conflict and disagreement (Kaika, 2017). By focusing on what lacks, the spotlight can shine on the dysfunction of urban systems and governance, allowing the cracks to emerge. This could hardly be a political ambition for state decision-makers and hence oppositional data-driven initiatives tend to evolve in response to crises, dramatic policy interventions, or events. The Arab Spring illustrates the performative dimensions of ICT, for example. In Egypt and Tunisia, social media played an important role in influencing key debates before both uprisings and assisted in spreading democratic messages beyond the countries’ borders, during and after demonstrations (Howard & Hussain, 2011). ICT was part of broader heterogeneous networks that included television and radio and built upon existing social and kinship capital (Allagui & Kuebler, 2011). The power of the media no longer vests in the state alone, enabling distributed voices and visual content that potentially challenge official discourses. These multilayered, technology-mediated exchanges are subject to context, differentiated access, and existing social networks. Moments of crisis that gel oppositional forces can also activate what South African anthropologist Steve Robins calls “slow activism” (2014b). In examining the work of social movements that have challenged the City of Cape Town’s claims to pro-poor service delivery, he explores the combinational use of new media together with social network connections that date back to the Apartheid struggle in enacting an ongoing oppositional voice and keeping critical social justice issues in the public imagination. Voicing dissent through repackaging of data and documenting the “everyday” is an important strategy in challenging the state consensus. Enabling such work to become part of the public discourse

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speaks to an epistemological shift that values the experiential dimensions of the urban: contingency, emergence, and embodied testimonies that counter aggregated official narratives. If data-driven, dashboard-based representation decontextualizes and aggregates the complexity that defines urban life, then what exactly does the alternative look and feel like?

The Performative and Emancipatory Work of Data Appropriation The objectification of urban life through enumeration and quantification plays an important role in targeting policy and focusing planning efforts. Increasingly, civil society organizations are using data to challenge policy discourses (Odendaal, 2015), to make the “invisible” (the informal, the marginalized) “visible” through documentation practices (Hagen, 2010), using census practices for self-identification and visible empowerment (Baptist & Bolnick, 2012) and motivating social action across scales (Kellogg, 2016). Social media enable connection and dissemination, often underpinning these dissension practices that are “living indicators” (Kaika, 2017) of urban life at the margins; the real smart solutions and real social innovation embedded in dissention practices. They are performative indicators that reflect what is missing, rather than what is. Turning numbers on their heads is one strategy of enabling debate on the essentials of urban life. There is an important emancipatory quality to the work cited above; the power of numbers can work both ways for and against the state. However, the question remains as to whether this counts as knowledge production. To make the shift from data to knowledge generation is more than who “makes the numbers dance” but a shifting in discourse and public imagination. The networking and connective power of media avails opportunities for translocal activism and knowledge exchange; what might be termed a “knowledge intensive” urbanism as opposed to technology-driven, corporate smart city initiatives (McFarlane & Söderström, 2017). Here, the acts of data sampling and collection, processing, and representation are as significant as the means toward which they are used: They are acts of appropriation. Using and exchanging this information across organizational and geographic boundaries in enacting networks of exchange have been particularly significant in the Shack/Slum Dwellers International’s (SDI) global activism on the rights of informal settlements inhabitants across the globe, for example (Baptist & Bolnick, 2012). Power lies in the generation and exchange of data. Creating an alternative discourse to data-mediated policy perspectives and official narratives requires, however, ongoing social action in order to shift narratives, to focus attention on systemic issues. Dissensus provides one such window onto systemic inequality (Kaika, 2017). Understanding the scaffoldings of such dissensus, the means through which it is communicated and represented, provides insight into strategies of knowledge production that take us to a more accurate representation of urban life. It necessitates technology appropriation but it also implies an aspirational shifting of policy discourses. Furthermore,

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I would argue, it entails conveying an experiential dimension to sharing that seeks to evoke an emotional response. Unlike “cold, hard facts,” using strategies such as spectacle, or dramatic portrayals of “everyday” suffering taps into the public imagination. Robins (2014b) documents what has become known as the “poo-protests” in Cape Town, where (among other public actions) activists emptied human waste onto the concourse of the Cape Town International Airport to draw attention to the adverse sanitation conditions in informal settlements on the city’s fringes. Here, information is transmitted through visual media, hashtagging in order to link events in real-time and draw the attention of the mainstream media. The power of the spectacle lies in elevating issues to policy discourses. “Prior to the Toilet Wars, the shocking sanitation conditions in informal settlements seldom made it into the mainstream media or national political discourse” (Robins, 2014b, p. 480). There is also the “slow burn” that is necessary: the “bricolage” that connects people and technology to exert pressure on the state for change. Importantly, the work that enables knowledge networks sustains an ongoing discourse alternative to that which the state represents. That work, the “slow activism” Robins (2014a) refers to, builds on alliances stretched over time and across geographic boundaries, as well as political economies. In South Africa, relationships forged during anti-Apartheid activism now manifest in new forms. Much of this is enabled through a free press and a context that allows for civil society activism. Where such organizing is not possible without repercussions, the ability of digital media to enable network relations across geographies is meaningful. Kellogg’s work on the Cuban blog Voces Cubanas reflects on the use of narrative technologies in “enabling nodes around which relationships form and alliances are built […] Within networks, narrative technologies allow new relationships with other actors” (2016, p. 44). The work that technology does, in concert with human agency, form part of alliance building and network making. Not only, in the Cuban example explored by Kellogg, as well as in Robins’ work on South Africa, does it challenge the state’s control of knowledge, but it is productive of “alternative discursive spaces and subversive narratives” (Kellogg, 2016, p. 23). It is performative and experiential. The power of the spectacle is that it evokes an emotional response that lingers in the public imagination and carries political currency. The sway of the “slow burn” of ongoing networking and mobilization is that perpetually builds alternative narratives. Using a sociotechnical lens on his work in Cuba, Kellogg writes of the heterogeneous range of actors that contributes to networks becoming “cyborg entities, homeostatic assemblages of heterogeneous techno-social elements with porous borders and radical political motivations” (2016, p. 33). Here, the written narrative, produced in blog form, is an actant that contains the flexibility and fluidity, potentially shaping political discourse. The “cyborg” motif, as an entity that integrates and transcends the visceral boundaries of the body shaped by biology, provides a useful frame for understanding data-mediated activism. The intimate exchange between algorithm, human, and urban space entails a reassembling of the individual as containing elements of human and machine, nature, and technology (Asenbaum, 2018).

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In thinking through the elements of a technology-mediated activism, the usual “binaries” of nature versus technology, identity versus anonymity, and public private are reconfigured to allow for the reason-emotion divide to blur. “As the private pervades public spaces, the modern separation of rationality, objectivity and cool-headed politics, on one hand, and emotion, passion and affect, on the other, is reconfigured” (Asenbaum, 2018, p. 5). The use of spectacle is therefore not only a media strategy to shine a dramatic light on injustice, but also a “choreographies of assembly” that become trending places, which together with devices such as hashtags become magnetic, heterogeneous assemblages (Gerbaudo, 2012, p. 12). The emotional tension created through social media acts as a different kind of aggregator from the numeral ilk, constructing common symbols and momentary unified identities from diverse participants, or what the activist Zackie Achmat, in Robins’ portrayal of the Social Justice Coalition in Cape Town refers to as a “moral consensus” (2014a). Thus, the experiential dimension is key to not only mobilizing consensus and assembly, but also creating dissension, that combines the “slow burn” of monitoring, reporting, and information processing, with emotionally charged representations of suffering. In appropriating technology, emergent qualities of technology are enrolled as time and situation demands. The question is, are these largely fleeting assemblies situationally focused, or do they represent an epistemological shift where the experiential and emotional dimensions of urban data can shift public discourse, or essentially what counts as knowledge and truth? The functioning of this kind of cyborg activism is explored in the following example from Cape Town.

“Reclaim the City”: Cyborg Activism and Inner City Politics “Cape Town is the most segregated city in the world,” is a refrain often heard when considering the city’s status as an international tourist destination in the midst of extreme urban poverty. This is a tagline well employed by “Reclaim the City” (RtC), a campaign formed in February 2016 with the explicit purpose of confronting the City of Cape Town (CoCT) administration on policies that entrench spatial apartheid (www.reclaimthecity.org.za). The campaign emerged from a proposed sale of publicly owned land, the site of a former school called Tafelberg, in the Atlantic Seaboard suburb of Sea Point (a high-density, middleto-high income, mixed use neighborhood on the oceanfront; approximately 3 km from the central business district) in late 2015. The public advertisement sparked the mobilization of domestic workers and low-income earners in Sea Point to protest this, arguing that the city should follow through on its stated policy intentions to deliver social housing on well-located publicly owned land in the city. Local civil rights non-governmental organization (NGO) Ndifuna Ukwazi (NU) supports the campaign logistically and organizationally (www.nu. org.za). The RtC campaign has subsequently evolved to include two campaigns. The first is continued pressure on the municipality to deliver affordable housing on inner city state land, beyond the Sea Point site. The second follows the

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eviction of tenant families in a gentrifying neighborhood called Woodstock, also near the CBD, demanding from the CoCT that temporary accommodation be provided in the area (www.reclaimthecity.org.za). The two campaigns are normatively significant and speak to urban trends internationally. Cape Town’s strategic vision contained in its spatial development framework is strongly supportive of inner city densification (South African cities are notoriously sprawled) and racial integration, yet it is also subject to property market trends. Its immediate post-Apartheid focus on spatial integration was largely frustrated by institutional restructuring and a convoluted national housing policy that constrained the delivery of well-located social housing (Turok & Watson, 2001). More recently, the city’s attraction to international property capital has increased the market value of centrally located land and also contributed to the gentrification of formerly low-income neighborhoods on the fringes of the CBD. The gap between the stated intentions of the city’s policies and actual delivery has widened as spatial plans inadequately consider market trends and property dynamics (Odendaal & McCann, 2016). The campaign has oscillated between a steady process of documentation and legal work, and digitally augmented public events and interventions. The employment of the “spectacle” in enabling emotional connection through personal sharing is a significant element of the campaign’s public profile and essentially defines its origins. The campaign’s tagline “Land for People not Profit” soon became a familiar feature in public spaces in Sea Point, following the first protest march on March 1, 2016. Ongoing protests at the Tafelberg site were augmented with social media. A significant feature of this is the personalization of key actors implicated in the sale: the Provincial Premier, Helen Zille; the first judge appointed to hear the court case where NU challenged the sale of the site, the leaders of the RtC campaign, the national minister for Human Settlements, Lindiwe Sisulu, and the mayoral committee member for urban development for the CoCT Brett Heron. As is the case with social media, the discourse becomes uncomfortably personal at times, yet succeeds in creating the storylines necessary to convey household struggles against gentrification and the follies of property capital. The importance of place is central to the activities of RtC, due to the spatial focus of the campaign itself as well as the stories that relate so specifically to home and identity. Media and social online platforms use photo essays and personal stories to shine the light on household struggles while the networking capacity of social media is used to thematically connect disparate accounts into an overall narrative that challenges the market logics of property speculation. The networking capacity of new media is also employed in the creation of a hashtag portal an online “place” where diverse voices can be collated around particular moments/events in the campaign. The sale of the Tafelberg site was suspended as a result of the public pressure facilitated by RtC. A call for architectural proposals has subsequently deepened the technical viability of social housing for the site, with the ultimate proposal currently being negotiated. However, the systemic issues that led to the creation of the campaign in the first place still needed to be addressed, and what was

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initially a protest against the sale of the one site became an ongoing campaign for the reallocation of centrally located public land for social housing. Here, RtC activists took the experiential dimension of the campaign further with the subsequent “symbolic occupation” of two vacant public buildings in the city.1 The location of these properties is significant. One is located on the fringes of the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront, a mixed-use shopping precinct, combined with high-end residential development, and hotels. The latest high-profile addition to the precinct is a grain silo conversion by London-based Heatherwick Studio, which includes a luxury hotel and the location for the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA) that opened in 2017. The second site occupation is in Woodstock, a vacant hospital in close proximity to the galleries, restaurants, and design quarter that define the neighborhood’s gentrification. The choice of sites is strategic but also indicative of the value of focusing light on the spatial paradoxes that have come to define Cape Town. This is evident in the choice of infographics and mapping shared on social media, the visual depiction of glamor of the city in contradiction to the hardships of those on the edges, and the personal stories. More recently, the focus has been on AirBnB’s expansion into the city and the location of short-term rentals. Here, appropriation of the capacity of data is most obvious. In addition to the spikes in activity that identified the milestones as well as entry points of connection to the campaign, the various actors engaged an ongoing mobilization process that formed a “slow burn” of diverse activities. The most significant, politically, was the legal campaign to stop the sale of the Tafelberg site. Later, there was an on- and offline campaign to object to zoning proposals for the Somerset Precinct near the Waterfront (and containing the property that was occupied by activists) to allow for more social housing. The latter is indicative of the contest of numbers that has played itself out as occupancy ratios and floor space allocations are debated. Selective representation of data is evident in both camps; however. RtC is as astute as the CoCT in ensuring that the numbers “dance” in ways that support their arguments. A significant part of the campaign is to raise the consciousness of the public. This includes information sharing in public spaces, regular op-eds by activists and supporters, and targeted alliances with stakeholder groups such as the Sea Point Jewish community (an established interest group in the neighborhood), the Western Cape Property Development Forum, academics at the local universities, and National Department of Treasury. Canvassing the latter three to support the viability of social housing in the inner city was a significant “win” for the campaign (Evans, 2017; Levy, 2017). As an alternative to the usual economic discourse that favors an unfettered property market, the message that welllocated social housing makes economic sense for households and the city represents a significant shift in the public consciousness.

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Perhaps the most momentous moment in public policy discourse has been the CoCT announcing its plans for inner city housing in July 2017. The plan designates a number of well-located sites within the city core for social housing. This is not the first time such intentions were vocalized, but the plan contains sufficient delivery detail to convey commitment from the CoCT (Maragele, 2017). An indirectly related initiative is a commitment from the Mayor that the city’s transportation plan will include free bus trips for the jobless a meaningful initiative given the proportion of household incomes spent on travel by those living in informal settlements on the city’s edges (Pather, 2017). While the RtC campaign cannot be portrayed as a model for smart city appropriation (I would argue no such thing exists) and a deeper interrogation will no doubt reveal some inconsistencies and inaccuracies, it nevertheless represents an impressive intervention that has achieved a significant shift in public awareness in its short time span. The scaffoldings of its organizational structure and its activism reveal an array of on- and offline strategies that range from populist representation of information to a technically astute interrogation of commonplace “truths” regarding property markets and the space economy of the city. A significant part of the campaign is the foregrounding of the “everyday” experiences of city dwellers in the face of gentrification and what some would argue, state inaction. The enrollment of emotional, technical, and political “stories” into the campaign’s narrative, together with the ongoing labor of legal, media, and policy engagement, represents a fascinating entry point into what cyborg activism may look like and what its potential is for affecting change.

Conclusion The use of data to support what “makes sense” in terms of the market, how numbers reflect “progress” in the name of economic performance, is not an unfamiliar game in urban development. In South African cities, there has been an ongoing tension between intervening in the market, in order to enable spatial integration, and attracting investment. The normative and political work that numbers do, the decontextualized representation of market “truths” and the benchmarking that often accompanies it, is symptomatic of the confluence between technology innovation and governance frames. In South Africa, dashboard urbanism coincides with a managerial local government system, conveniently poised to use the language of indicators to support market-led urbanism, despite policy discourses that claim otherwise. The significance of the RtC example is that it illustrates the hybridity of digitally augmented activism and its inherent flexibility in responding to urban trends. The experiential dimensions of urban poverty are portrayed together with the quantitative work required to lend further legitimacy to the campaign’s claims. The flexibility of these cyborg hybrids speaks to the emergent and embodied nature of contemporary urbanism. Enrolling the experiential dimensions of urban life into the knowledge domain does not only provide an alternative to data-driven, dashboard urbanism, it expands and deepens the discourse

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terrain of urban policy. In ways it is not that different from the city itself: a little messy, sometimes misguided, but real and probably closer to the truth than the numbers claim.

Acknowledgments The initial version of this chapter was presented, upon invitation, at the workshop on “The right to the smart city: Citizenship, civic participation, urban commons and co-creation,” in Maynooth, September 2017. Funding and editorial assistance in enabling this interaction and subsequent refinements of this chapter are highlight appreciated.

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Kitchin, R., & McArdle, G. (2016). What makes big data, big data? Exploring the ontological characteristics of 26 datasets. Big Data & Society, 3(1), doi:10.1177/ 2053951716631130 Leszczynski, A. (2016). Speculative futures: Cities, data, and governance beyond smart urbanism. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 48(9), 1691 1708. Levy, M. (2017, August 8). Sea point Jewish residents and domestic workers meet over Tafelberg. Retrieved August 28, 2017 from www.dailymaverick.co.za (First published in GroundUp, 25 July 2017). Maragele, B. (2017, August 8). City announces u-turn on social housing. Retrieved August 28, 2017 from www.bizommunity.com McCann, E., Roy, A., & Ward, K. (2013). Assembling/worlding cities. Urban Geography, 34(5), 581 589. McFarlane, C., & Söderström, O. (2017). On alternative smart cities: From a technology-intensive to a knowledge-intensive smart urbanism. City, 21(3 4), 312 328. McLaughlin, K., Osborne, S. P., & Ferlie, E. (Eds.). (2002). New public management: Current trends and future prospects. London: Routledge. Mitchell, H., & Odendaal, N. (2015). From the fringes: South Africa’s smart township citizens. In M. Foth, M. Brynskova, & T. Ojala (Eds.), Citizen’s right to the digital city (pp. 137 159). Berlin: Springer. Odendaal, N. (2003). Information and communication technology and local governance: Understanding the difference between cities in developed and emerging economies. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 2(6), 585 607. Odendaal, N. (2015). Getting smart about smart cities in Cape Town. In S. Marvin, C. McFarlane, & A. Luque-Ayala (Eds.), Smart urbanism: Utopian vision or false dawn? (pp. 71 87). Abingdon: Routledge. Odendaal, N., & McCann, A. (2016). Spatial planning in the global South: Reflections on the Cape Town spatial development framework. International Development Planning Review, 38(4), 405 423. Pather, R. (2017, August 8). Jobless Capetonians to get free MyCiti bus trips, says De Lille. Retrieved August 28, 2017 from www.mg.co.za Robins, S. (2014a). The 2011 toilet wars in South Africa: Justice and transition between the exceptional and the everyday after apartheid. Development and Change, 45(3), 479 501. Robins, S. (2014b). Slow activism in fast times: Reflections on the politics of media spectacles after apartheid. Journal of Southern African Studies, 40(1), 91 110. Turok, I., & Watson, V. (2001). Divergent development in South African cities: Strategic challenges facing Cape Town. Urban Forum, 12(2),119 138. Watson, V. (2014). African urban fantasies: Dreams or nightmares? Environment and Urbanization, 26(1), 215 231.

Chapter 13

Moving from Smart Citizens to Technological Sovereignty? Ramon Ribera-Fumaz

Abstract This chapter explores if alternative participatory co-creation approaches have the potential for deploying an emancipatory urbanism that is able to contest the urban dynamics of (digital) capitalism. It does so by focusing on the Barcelona case. Barcelona fully embraced a “smart citizen” approach in 2011 to become a European referent in smart urban strategies. However, in 2015, with the arrival of a new municipal government, Barcelona has situated itself contesting the “smart city” and at the forefront of alternative possibilities with its “technological sovereignty” strategy. This shift aims to remake the smart city agenda for citizens through the advancement of the right to information and guarantees to open, transparent, and participatory decision-making through new digital and platform technologies. The chapter argues, first, that “technological sovereignty” has been instrumental in re-politicizing the notions of (smart) citizenship and technology, deploying initiatives aimed at regaining public control on data and citizens participating in policy-making. Second, Barcelona’s technological sovereignty strategy, though framed as locally and bottom-up, is based on a global comprehension and diagnosis of the global dynamics of digital capitalism. However, sometimes, there still remains an over-optimistic stance concerning digital technology. Thus, for any alternative to the neoliberal smart city, it is necessary to decenter the debate from the technologies themselves or the local, and recognize that any emancipatory strategy is also about acknowledging that technology-led solutions are not autonomous of broader relations of production and complex political economy geographies. Keywords: Smart citizen; technological sovereignty; urban governance; right to the smart city; Barcelona; alternative urban policies

The Right to the Smart City, 177 191 Copyright r 2019 by Emerald Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved DOI: 10.1108/978-1-78769-139-120191013

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Introduction As the smart city strategies have spread and consolidated across the globe, there has been a growing academic consensus on understanding the core logics of the smart city as rooted in neoliberal urban restructuring strategies: favoring the private economic interests of major technological corporations and consultancies rather than citizens and de-politicizing urban governance through the reduction of social problems to technical challenges that can be solved with the right use of technology and market friendly solutions. In a nutshell, driven by technooptimistic and techno-deterministic views of society and urban governance, the smart city reproduces the neoliberal city for the few rather than the many (Datta, 2015; Greenfield, 2013; Hollands, 2008; March & Ribera-Fumaz, 2016). Yet, as Cardullo and Kitchin (2018) note, the last generation of smart city strategies has shifted their focus toward rethinking and redesigning smart initiatives toward citizen or community-led projects that want to be more inclusive and have greater involvement of citizens. This new logic is summarized by Carlo Ratti (in Almirall et al, 2016, pp. 142 143), director of the SENSEable City Lab at MIT: I think municipalities are starting to understand the importance of this approach. Most urban transformations are the result of a joint effort between different actors (government, industry, etc.). We think that citizens in particular should have a key role through “bottom-up” dynamics. So, rather than focusing too much on the installation and control of hardware fixed, static “sensing systems” it is important for governments to get people excited about reading apps and using data themselves. If we can develop the right platforms, people can be the ones to address urban issues. In this regard, the archetypical expensive smart city projects related to the deployment of monitoring infrastructure and centralized software are increasingly complemented with small-scale, bottom-up projects. These approaches depart from a vision in which the city is seen as a laboratory for corporate social innovation, where citizens are components of these experimentations, to a situation where citizens are co-producers of innovations, shifting the focus from the smart city to smart citizens. Possibly, this “living lab”’ vision is best exemplified by the civic engagement approach of Fablabs: Spaces in which software and hardware can be used by citizens to “make (almost) everything,” as the Fablab motto claims.1 Thus, towns

1 Fablabs are possibly the most popular form of co-creation living labs today. Fablabs originated within the Center for Bits and Atoms in MIT in early 2000s. In 2002, it opened the first Fablab outside MIT in Pabal, India (Bosqué, 2017). Today, the Fablab network is composed by more than 1,300 labs across the world (http:// www.fablabs.io).

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can be redesigned relying “on the power of giving back to the cities the ability to produce through micro factories [i.e., Fablabs] inserted in the urban fabric and connected to the citizens” (Diez, 2012, p. 465). In these spaces, citizens can solve local challenges, while being at the same time inter-connected to globally distributed knowledge. This celebratory take on the empowerment of the citizen and bottom-up initiatives within the frame of the Smart City has been vocally advocated not only by cities across the world but also international organizations such as the United Nations (UN-Habitat, 2016, 2017), the World Bank (Eskelinen, Garcia Robles, Lindy, Marsh, & Muente-Kunigami, 2015), or the EU through its European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities; think tanks such as NESTA or the World Economic Forum and as well corporation and consultancy firms (CISCO, IBM, PwC, etc.). Though welcoming this active incorporation of the citizen in co-producing the smart city, these strategies do not contest but rather complement the already existing smart city discourse. In other words, they do not challenge the neoliberal approach beneath the smart city and co-creation approaches they mobilize (Kitchin, 2015; Smith, 2012). In contrast to that, new visions and initiatives are emerging that rather than trying to remake the smart city, they turn it upside down. This includes approaches and initiatives set under concepts such as open source urbanism (Corsin, 2014), sharing cities (Agyeman & McLaren, 2015), degrowth (March, 2018), the commons (Cardullo, this volume), grassroots innovations (Smith, Fressoli, Abrol, Arond, & Ely, 2017), or technological sovereignty (Morozov & Bria, 2018). This set of approaches differs from the “smart citizen” take in advancing, in new ways, how technology and data are produced, managed, shared, and used. In this regard, they all share a vision based on developing more democratic urban technologies and governance models. Yet, all these visions share with those late smart citizen developments to be bottom-up, participatory and co-creation-centric, and in many cases, these initiatives are very similar to those under the “smart citizen” vision though taken from a different political economy frame. In this sense, there is a growing body of literature that critically explores the political economy conditions in which these alternatives can be sustained and transform the smart city for the many and not the few, or rather they might be co-opted in a neoliberal logic (e.g., Agyeman & McLaren, 2015; Arboleda, 2017; Cardullo, 2018). In this context, this chapter interrogates, following Kitchin, Cardullo, and di Feliciantonio (2019; this volume), if alternative participatory co-creation approaches have the potential for deploying an emancipatory urbanism that is able to contest the urban dynamics of (digital) capitalism. It does so by focusing on the Barcelona case. Barcelona fully embraced a “smart citizen” approach in 2011 to become a European referent in smart urban strategies. Indeed, in 2014, the European Union awarded the city the first European Capital of Innovation Award, iCApital precisely “for introducing the use of new technologies to bring the city closer to citizens” (EC, 2014; online). However, since 2015, with the arrival of a new municipal government, Barcelona has situated itself contesting the smart city and at the forefront of alternative possibilities with its

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technological sovereignty strategy that seeks to reframe and use smart city technologies to enact radical democracy (Gessen, 2018). This shift aims to remake the smart city agenda for citizens through the advancement of the right to information and guarantees to open, transparent, and participatory decision-making through new digital and platform technologies (Postill, 2016). The chapter will first explain how Barcelona aimed to implement a smart citizen vision. Paradoxically, as the city council moved toward “failed" citizen-centric policies under the Barcelona Smart City strategy, there started to grow a plethora of grassroots social digital innovation initiatives that laid the basis for repurposing the smart citizen vision. Then, the chapter focuses on the shift toward a technological sovereignty strategy, ending with some reflections on the potentialities and limits of technological sovereignty. In particular, it is argued that for any alternative to the neoliberal smart city, it is necessary to decenter the debate from the technologies themselves or the local, and recognize that any emancipatory strategy is also about acknowledging that technology-led solutions are not autonomous from broader relations of production and complex political economy geographies.

From Smart City to Smart Citizens The deployment of a smart city strategy in Barcelona dates back to the end of the 2000s and to the local government led by the left coalition of the Socialist Party (PSC in its Catalan acronym) and Inicitativa per Catalunya-els verds (ICV). However, it was with the right-wing nationalist government of Mayor Trias in 2011 that Barcelona fully embraced the smart city gospel. In this context, the smart city strategy was framed within a broader discursive re-imagining of relational and organizational arrangements between flows, objects, and citizens following an Internet topology under the master vision of the Chief Architect of the City, Vicente Guallart (March & Ribera-Fumaz, 2016) and Deputy Mayor, Antoni Vives (2017).2 In sum, the self-sufficient project marketed by the city council as the smart strategy envisioned integrating ICT and Internet topologies as the key ordering principles of the city that would empower citizens, while improving efficiency and opening new urban economic paradigms and bottom-up social innovations. In fact, against this theoretical understanding of the city of tomorrow, there was an exact roadmap for the city of Barcelona: it should mutate toward an informational city using digital technologies, first with pilot projects and then by applying them to the whole city. This model was designed to lead to a self-sufficient city (in energy terms), endowed with an economy based on local material production and global exchange of immaterial services, solutions, and designs for material re-application in other localities. The chief architect pleaded for “a new model of networked cities, with self-sufficient

2

Previously, Guallart was the Director of the Institute of Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC), research center that host one of the most active Fablab in the world, and home of one of its most famous projects: the Smart Citizen Kit (https:// smartcitizen.me). Antoni Vives was also founder and patron of IAAC.

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and productive neighbourhoods at a human speed, within a hyper-connected, zero emissions city” (Guallart, 2012, p. 31). Or, in the new mantra of the city council, “many slow cities within a smart city.” Central to the mantra, it was the vision of empowering citizens through technological improvements, or in other words, technological solutionism as a means to empowerment (Morozov, 2014). Accordingly, new experimental projects were launched that aimed at putting citizens in the middle of the smart city. Flagship projects included Fabcity, Digital Fabrication Athenaeums (DFA), Vincles, and Sentilo (see Table 13.1). Table 13.1. Barcelona’s Smart Citizen Flagship projects. Project

Description

FabCity

Project to develop locally produced and globally connected self-sufficient cities via a circular economy and empowering citizens and cities (12 cities, one region, and two countries all over the world). Initially launched in 2014 by Mayor Trias and lead by Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, the MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms and the Fab Foundation. In 2016, Barcelona abandons the project but funds and supports Poblenou Makers’ district where the FabCity project develops at the neighborhood scale. Source: http://fab.city

Digital Fabrication Athenaeums

Municipal makerspaces are aiming at empowering citizens by engaging with digital fabrication. In July and August 2013 opened the first three Athenaeums. August 2013, neighbors occupied the one in Ciutat Meridiana and convert it to a community food bank. 2014 DFAs were redefined. There are currently two more under planning. Source: http://ateneusdefabricacio.barcelona. cat

Vincles

App (for tablet) enabling people over 65 years old living alone to get in touch and strengthening their ties, as well as creating new ones both online and face-to-face. Winner of 2014 Bloomberg Mayors’ Challenge. Pilots in 5 neighborhoods January May 2017; Since June 2017 has been applied to all neighborhoods in the city districts. Source: http://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/ vinclesbcn/en

Sentilo

Open source platform that gathers city and citizens environmental sensors data. Created in 2012 by Barcelona, it is now a metropolitan project involving other cities. Source: http://www.sentilo.io/xwiki/bin/ view/Sentilo.About.Product/Whatis

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Discursively, Barcelona put citizens in the middle of the smart city. However, the above projects either treated citizens as users (Vincles), did not start to develop citizens’ involvement (FabCity), citizens’ participation was low (Sentilo), or they created conflict and opposition (DFA). In sum, this was a case of moving on paper from smart cities to smart citizens, yet “citizen-centric” initiatives remained underdeveloped in practice: these initiatives were designed as citizen-centric but they were actually deployed at best as some form of tokenist and, at worst, consumerist participation (Cardullo & Kitchin, 2018). Also, these developments became only a small part of a broader public private urban management operation. This involved “standard” smart city contracts with tech providers such as Cisco, Schneider, Suez, or Endesa. For instance, central to the self-sufficient strategy was the creation of a City Operating System (City OS) to control the smart city. In April 2015, the contract to develop a City OS was given to a joint venture between Accenture, Tradia Telecom, Sinovia (Suez), and Cofely España (Suez) (El Periódico, 2017). Yet, despite this apparent contradiction, alternative digital grassroots social innovations outside of city hall leadership and many times as a response to their policies mushroomed across the city under the Trias administration. Often, and despite their alternative character, the city council was able to accommodate and subsume these into their Smart City brand. Illustrative of this was the inclusion of Barcelona local government into the EU-H2020-funded project D-CENT. A project where the city council works alongside technopolitical activists coming from the 15M-indignados movement with the goal of subverting the smart city discourse. This project developed the platform Decidim Barcelona, which later became one of the technological cornerstones of the new municipal government’s radical democratic program.

From Smart Citizens toward Technological Sovereignty Against this backdrop and somewhat unexpectedly, in May 2015, the new leftwing political platform, Barcelona en Comú, won the local elections.3 The new (minority) government was committed to radically rethinking Barcelona and the city council policies and politics (Charnock & Ribera-Fumaz, 2017). This process implied that a decision needed to be made about the future of the inherited smart city strategy from the previous liberal administration. During the first year of government, there was a certain ambiguity or lack of action concerning the smart city as most attention was put on other cornerstones of the city model, such as the impacts of mass tourism or the housing crisis in the city. Not much was done beyond having a very generic, critical position toward the liberal smart city strategy. The strategy was neither further promoted nor totally rejected; it was mostly frozen, and eventually, some smart initiatives were maintained either

3

The candidature of Barcelona en Comú, which included ICV, won 11 City Council seats out of 41. From 2016 to 2017, it governed in coalition with PSC.

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for their potential social impact or for legal reasons (contracts were already signed) while others were abandoned. Furthermore, the new city government dismantled the Trias smart city structure and split the different departments in charge between different areas led by various factions of Barcelona and Comú and their government partners. It was not until June 2016 that the City Council appointed Francesca Bria, an independent expert from NESTA (UK) as a Chief Technology Officer. Moving from the previous non-conflictual vision of the informational city that drove Barcelona Smart City, the new City Technology team is taking another perspective that of technological sovereignty: “That means taking back control of data and information generated by digital technologies, and promoting public digital infrastructures based on free and open source software, open standards and open formats” (Bria, 2017). This view acknowledges that within what Dan Schiller (2014) calls “digital capitalism,” local politics should take a broader political and geopolitical agenda to “contest a privatised smart city constructed from the top down and favouring foreign corporations, oppose monopolised ownership of intellectual property, and reverse the private appropriation of collectively produced value by rent-seeking digital platforms” (Morozov & Bria, 2018, p. 27). From this view, the technological policy of a city should aim to “an end to the oligarchy of technology providers,” a “review of contract frameworks to ensure data sovereignty,” the “creation of crucial new capabilities in the public sector to regain control of digital services,” “increased efficiency in terms of output and costs since 70 percent of investment in new software development will be free and open source with open licenses,” “enhanced local collaboration with networks between cities and public administrations,” and “enhanced access to data held by the Administration and guarantees for citizens’ basic [data] rights” (Bria, 2017). Thus, as Deputy Mayor, Gerard Pisarello (2016; translated in Galdón, 2017) stated: in a democratic city, technology should serve to digitally empower citizens, to protect their privacy from abuses by the public and private powers, to fight against corruption and to advance towards a more equitable and sustainable economy. That has a name: conquering technological, digital sovereignty, for the common good. This vision led to the elaboration of a new strategy launched in October 2016: “Barcelona Ciutat Digital, A Road Map Towards Technological Sovereignty.” It argued that control over city and citizens data by citizens or fighting against corporate power is critical but not enough. It is also necessary to involve them in decision-making, but also in changing the actual political economies of digital capitalism in the city. In other words, while the focus on citizens and the necessity of continuous (social) innovations are kept from the smart citizens/city ethos including smart vocabulary and discourse artefacts, this is framed and developed under a very different aim (see Table 13.2).

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Table 13.2. Barcelona’s Technological Sovereignty Areas of Intervention. Area Digital transformation

Fields of Intervention Technologies for a better government Urban technologies City data commons

Digital innovation

Digital economy “Make in Barcelona” Urban i-lab

Digital empowerment

Education and digital capacitation Digital inclusion Democracy and digital rights

The city council may not be able to turn down existing contracts and commitments in many top-down smart city projects (e.g., City OS, T-mobility). But, under this strategic plan, the city council aims to re-appropriate a public private program of urban management instigated under the former right-wing municipal government, which aimed to make the city a world-leading smart city (see Table 13.3). For instance, projects like DFA or Fabcity (now makers’ district) were readapted, changing focus to fit with this new philosophy. In this sense, as Jordi Reynés, director of the DFAs, pointed out: “politics are not outside [DFA] but inside, in the making.”4 Furthermore, the city council has been using its role in the organization committees of global events, such as the Smart City World Congress and Mobile World Congress, to bring forward alternative debates. For instance, they have promoted debates on the commons collaborative economy or inviting critical voices such as David Harvey or Evgeny Morozov as plenary speakers at the Smart City World Congress. In this context, the potentially transformative power of Barcelona strategy relies on the new projects designed within the framework of technological sovereignty. Here, I focus on a number of exemplary projects. The flagship project of the technological sovereignty strategy is Decidim. Barcelona, the city digital participation platform. Paradoxically, the design and prototyping of the platform were developed prior to Comú gaining power. It was born out from an EU project, D-CENT (2013 2015), that explored open source tools for direct democracy in four cities (Barcelona, Madrid, Helsinki, and Reykjavik). The platform is based on open source software which is uploaded to GitHub and can be improved or re-used by anybody. In addition, it also incorporates privacy by design to keep the data produced by users in their

4

Jordi Reynes in Jornada de Fabricació digital sostenible, Fabrica del Sol, Barcelona, March 7, 2016.

Table 13.3. Remaking the Smart City Agenda toward Technological Sovereignty. Area Digital transformation

Continuitiesa − Bicing (bikes rental)

Re-appropriation of Previous Projects − DECODE (H2020-funded project)

New − Open budget

− T-mobility (integrated transport card)

− Ethics mailbox (anonymous corruption complaints)

− Superblocks

− Open apps & software

− Sentilo

− Internet4all (digital bridge programs)

− City OS

− City dash board − Open data portal

Digital empowerment area

− Mobile congress and smart city world congress

− Digital fabrication athenaeums

− DSI4BCN (H2020-funded project)

− Poblenou makers district (formerly FabCity)

− e-procurement

− La Comunificadora

− Digital fabrication athenaeums − Educational program − Decidim.Barcelona (based on H2020-funded project)

Note: aExternalized programs are coming from the previous administration with pre-established contractual commitments.

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own hands, with transparency and accountability and the blocking of the appropriation of data for commercial use. It was first used for the participatory construction of the municipal action plan for neighborhood initiatives, with almost 40,000 people proposing, deliberating, and voting on what the city council should do in each neighborhood. As of March, 1, 2018, the platform had more than 28,000 registered participants, 19 participatory processes, and had facilitated 821 public meetings. This had resulted in 12,173 proposals of which 8,923 had been incorporated into public policy (Barandiaran, 2018). One notable result was the participative drafting of the 2013 2018 Urban Mobility Plan to reduce air and noise pollution, and the volume of city traffic by 21%, through the construction of urban superblocks (superilles) that limit passage and accessibility to motor vehicles and which prioritize instead pedestrians right to enjoy open, shared, green, and safe public space.5 There is a continuous upgrading of the platform, but also open public discussions on how the platform can help to improve direct democracy through the sessions Metadecidim Lab. Importantly, the platform is not conceived only as the City Council participation portal but as a means of “empowering social processes as a platform for massive social coordination for collective action independently of public administrations” (Barandiaran, 2018; emphasis in original). For instance, the platform is set to be used by any social movement and citizen collectives that want to organize themselves and their deliberative process democratically.6 In this regard, the architects of Decidim.Barcelona understand that the platform is “a reflexive infrastructure that uses the very infrastructure to democratise itself” (Barandiaran, 2018; see also Barandiaran & Calleja-López, 2016). In other words, there is an implicit optimistic view that the mere use and upgrading of the right participatory digital technologies will improve democracy. Thus, for instance, the use of Decidim.Barcelona in the recent polemic deployment of the superblock project (pacification of streets in city areas taking out cars and gaining public space) could not either prevent contestation and the necessity of faceto-face negotiation or the imposition of a solution based on a top-down design and understanding of urban social relations. Let alone to connect it with wider social movements and struggles (e.g., metropolitan mobility, gentrification, etc.) that challenge the current dynamics of urbanization in Barcelona beyond technology (cf. Smith et al., 2017). A second imitative has been La Comunificadora. An incubator located within Barcelona Activa, the municipal economic development agency which also hosts IT as with other incubators sites but run by Goteo (the first social economy crowdsourcing platform in Spain), Platoniq (collaborative economy lab), and the Free Knowledge Institute. It follows the same structure as a classic ICT incubator: it aims to boost ICT-driven innovation processes, it hosts “start-ups,”

5

Retrieved from http://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/superilles/es At the time of wirting some social movements are contemplating its use for several campaigns and struggles (Personal communication from the Barcelona Decidim developers team). 6

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and it provides training courses on how to create a collaborative economy company and a mentoring program. Yet, the focus is on companies in the fields of open design and software, digital fabrication, open data, and circular economy. But in contrast to other incubators, here the “start-ups” are cooperatives and small projects for the commons collaborative economy and the goal is not profit but socially economy business in the fields of open design and software, digital fabrication, open data, and circular economy. In parallel, in order to promote social innovation and collaborative economy projects, the city council has created DSI4BCN (DSI standing for Digital Social Innovation), based on the H2020 DSI4EU project. DSI4BCN is a support digital platform accompanied by an investment of 300,000 euros in 2018 for social innovation programs and digital fabrication spaces with the generative potential to boost the local digital manufacturing economy on participatory and ecologically sustainable basis in Poblenou, the technological district of the city. Last, the city council launched a new public procurement process. This public procurement process aims to purchase technological services produced by cooperatives and collaborative economy-based SMEs that work with open source, privacy by design and circular economy philosophies. This has meant terminating a contract with Microsoft in the process. This new public procurement process has committed 10 million euros to the initiative, with the intention that SMEs and cooperatives become technological providers and reduce the commanding position of big tech corporations and consultancy firms in municipal procurement processes. The launching of la Comunificadora and the new public procurement process are based on an understanding of city possibilities under global digital capitalism and, in particular, the increasing control and power of big corporations and the neoliberal restructuring of nation-states (Morozov & Bria, 2018). In front of that, conscious that Barcelona is a “small” player in global developments, the City Council is experimenting with small-scale pilots that my produce alternative tech economies with alter-starts-ups and substitutes to corporate technological providers. In this line, it is worth noting that in July 2017 the city council announced it was working on the creation of its own local platform to compete with Airbnb and Uber (Cuesta & Solanas, 2017). In other words, all these initiatives are taking the socio-technologies and methodologies developed under digital capitalism and the configuration of new international divisions of labor. And, by reframing them in a different logic (i.e., not for the sake of profit), to produce and compete within digital capitalism. Regardless of the potentialities and limits of these partials forms of re-appropriation of production, it rightly moves local initiatives to recognize that technology-led solutions are not autonomous of broader relations of production (Arboleda, 2017).

Potentialities and Limits of Technological Sovereignty Barcelona has become an experimental laboratory for testing new approaches to technology and urbanism, not only through the shift in the local government but

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also by a plethora of bottom-up initiatives, which were already flourishing before this change.7 To go more in depth on these initiatives is beyond the scope of this chapter. It is also too early to evaluate technological sovereignty results since its main actions have only been in motion for a couple of years. However, the shift from a “smart citizens” perspective to the current one opens the space for thinking about the potentials and limits that cities face to build technological strategies that can actually challenge smart city/citizens top-down initiatives. First, it is interesting to note that the narrative and actions of Barcelona strategic plan are built partly using the same concepts as those promoted by orthodox smart city proponents: digital and (disruptive) social innovation, fourth industrial revolution, citizens’ empowerment, etc. Furthermore, many of the initiatives have been funded by H2020 programs that precisely aimed to reproduce the smart citizens’ narrative and living lab visions. In this regard, Barcelona has been able to build alliances and capture funding to aim to turn upside down the smart city logic. In doing so, it has kept many of the previous “smart” initiatives and reframed. In particular, it has moved citizens from the role of mere consumers, or prosumers, to create the conditions aimed at not only participating in urban governance but also controlling their own data and generating the collaborative economies that might help to develop more just forms of urbanization. In doing so, technology is not used to depoliticize urban governance but to engage with social movements and communities (as in Decidim.Barcelona or la Comunificadora) and to re-politicize the notion of citizenship. Technology is not the solution but constructing and using technology are the means to repoliticize. However, many times, there still remains an over-optimistic stance concerning digital technology often based on a rather technologically deterministic view of politics. So, the issue is neither only remaking a politicized citizen controlling their own data or participating in policy-making, nor about gaining efficiency, competitiveness, or problems of social reproduction at the urban scale nor what can do technological solutions for the “right to the smart city.” Indeed, they are important subjects to deal with. Yet, it is necessary to decenter the debate from the technologies themselves or the local and recognize that technological sovereignty is also about acknowledging that technology-led solutions are not autonomous of broader relations of production. In fact, as shown in the initiatives reviewed here, Barcelona’s technological sovereignty strategy is based on a global comprehension and diagnosis of the global dynamics of digital capitalism. In this frame, two substantial issues are (1) to connect with wider movements that challenge current political economy settings to build up alternatives beyond technology and (2) to create new economies where citizens can be empowered. Moreover, and as acknowledged by city officials and collaborators in

A study by Castells and Hlebik attests to how, by 2011, Barcelona was already “one of the most socially innovative urban environments in the world” (2017, p. 162). 7

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technological projects in the city, many of the key factors for success escape the control of actors at the urban scale. How can a city council retain control over data in the epoch of Google, Facebook, and other global corporations? Will local alternative platforms actually successfully compete with global actors such as Airbnb and Uber? Until what point to develop alternative socio-technological strategies through “smart as usual” policy frames and instruments such as EU’s H2020 funding schemes and rationales open or limit the emancipatory character of technological sovereignty? To answer these questions is fundamental to build a right to the (smart) city for the many and not the few. And to do so, it will need to take into the account the complex geographies of technology-led urbanism in and beyond the city.

References Agyeman, J., & McLaren, D. (2015). Sharing cities: A case for truly smart and sustainable cities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Almirall, E., Wareham, J. Ratti, C., Conesa, P., Bria, F., Gaviria, A., & Edmonson, A. (2016). Smart cities at the crossroads: New tensions in city transformation. California Management Review, 59(1), 141 152. Arboleda, M. (2017). Revitalizing science and technology studies: A Marxian critique of more-than-human geographies. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 35(2), 360 378. Barandiaran, X. E. (2018). What is decidim? Retrieved from https://xabier.barandiaran.net/2018/04/24/what-is-decidim/ Barandiaran, X. E., & Calleja-López, A. (2016). Plan estratégico para la Direció de Recerca, Desenvolupament i Innovació de Participació. Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona. Bosqué, C. (2017). History of Fablabs. Origins, purposes, development and new directions. In M. Menichinelli (Ed.), Fab lab revolution field manual (pp. 12 31). Salenstein: Niggli. Bria, F. (2017). Barcelona digital government: Open, agile and participatory. Ajuntament de Barcelona. Retrieved from https://ajuntament.barcelona.cat/digital/ en/blog/barcelona-digital-government-open-agile-and-participatory Cardullo, P. (2018). ‘Smart approach’ to the commons? A case for a public Internet infrastructure. The Programmable City working Paper 40. Retrieved from https:// osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/u8dk2/ Cardullo, P., & Kitchin, R. (2018). Being a ‘citizen’ in the smart city: Up and down the scaffold of smart citizen participation. Geojournal (online first). doi:10.1007/ s10708-018-9845-8 Castells, M., & Hlebik, S. (2017). Alternative economic practices in Barcelona: Surviving the crisis, reinventing life. In M. Castells (Ed.) Another economy is possible: Culture and economy in a time of crisis (pp. 160 186). Cambridge: Polity. Charnock, G., & Ribera-Fumaz, R. (2017). Barcelona en Comú: Urban democracy and the ‘common good’. In L. Panitch & G. Albo (Eds.), Socialist register 2018: Rethinking democracy (pp. 188 201). London: Merlin Press. Corsín Jiménez, A. (2014). The right to infrastructure: A prototype for open urbanism. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32(2), 342 362.

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Cuesta, A., & Solanas, P. (2017). L’Ajuntament promou una Airbnb i una Uber nascudes a Barcelona. Diari Ara, July 10, 2017. Retrieved from https://www.ara.cat/ economia/LAjuntament-Airbnb-Uber-nascudes-Barcelona_0_1829817019.html Datta, A. (2015). New urban utopias of postcolonial India: Entrepreneurial urbanization in Dholera smart city, Gujarat. Dialogues in Human Geography, 51(1), 3 22. Diez, T. (2012). Personal fabrication: Fablabs as platforms for citizen-based innovation, from microcontrollers to cities. Nexus Network Journal, 14(3), 457 468. El Periódico. (2017). Barcelona adjudica City OS el sistema operativo de la ciudad. El Periódico, first published on April 26, 2015, updated on January 18, 2017. Retrieved from https://www.elperiodico.com/es/tecnologia/20150426/barcelonaadjudica-city-os-el-sistema-operativo-de-ciudad-5691473 Eskelinen, J., Garcia Robles, A., Lindy, I., Marsh, J., & Muente-Kunigami, A. (2015). Citizen-driven innovation: A guidebook for city mayors and public administrators. Washington, DC: World Bank and European Network of Living Labs. European Comission. (2014). Barcelona is “iCapital” of Europe press release. Brussels: European Commission. Retrieved from http://europa.eu/rapid/pressrelease_IP-14 239_en.htm Galdón, G. (2017). Technological sovereignty? Democracy, data and governance in the digital era. Barcelona: Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona. Retrieved from http://lab.cccb.org/en/technological-sovereignty-democracy-dataand-governance-in-the-digital-era Gessen, M. (2018). Barcelona’s experiment in radical democracy. The New Yorker, August 6. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/barcelonas-experiment-in-radical-democracy Greenfield, A. (2013). Against the smart city: A pamphlet. New York, NY: Verso. Guallart, V. (2012). La ciudad autosuficiente: Habitar en la sociedad de la información. Barcelona: RBA. Hollands, R. G. (2008). Will the real smart city please stand up? City, 12(3), 303 320. Kitchin, R. (2015). Making sense of smart cities: Addressing present shortcomings. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 8(1), 131 136. Kitchin, R., Cardullo, P., & di Feliciantonio, C. (2019). Citizenship, social justice, and the right to the Smart City. In P. Cardullo, C. di Feliciantonio, & R. Kitchin (Eds.), The right to the smart city. Bingley: Emerald Publishing. March, H. (2018). The smart city and other ICT-led techno imaginaries: Any room for dialogue with Degrowth? Journal of Cleaner Production, 197(Part 2), 1694 1703. March, H., & Ribera-Fumaz, R. (2016). Smart contradictions: The politics of making Barcelona a self-sufficient city. European Urban and Regional Studies, 23(4), 816 830. Morozov, E. (2014). To save everything, click here: The folly of technological solutionism. New York, NY: Public Affairs. Morozov, E., & Bria, F. (2018). Rethinking the smart city: Democratizing urban technology. New York, NY: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. Pisarello, G. (2016). Ciutats amb sobirania tecnològica. El Periódico, 22 June 2016. Retrieved from https://www.elperiodico.cat/ca/opinio/20160621/ciutats-amb-sobirania-tecnologica-5220081

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Postill, J. (2016). Freedom technologists and the future of global justice. In N. Buxton & D. Eade (Eds.), State of power 2016: Democracy, sovereignty and resistance (pp. 147 163). Amsterdam: Transnational Institute. Schiller, D. (2014). Digital depression: Information technology and economic crisis. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Smith, A., Fressoli, M., Abrol, D., Arond, E., & Ely, A. (2017). Grassroots innovation movements. Abingdon: Routledge. Smith, T. (2012). Is Socialism relevant in the “networked information age”? A critical assessment of the wealth of networks. In A. Anton & R. Schmitt (Eds.), Taking socialism seriously (pp. 157 186). Lanham, MD: Lexington books. UN-Habitat. (2016). World cities report 2016: Urbanization and development, emerging futures. Nairobi: United Nations Human Settlements Programme. UN-Habitat. (2017). New urban agenda. Nairobi: United Nations Human Settlements Programme. Vives, A. (2017). Smart: Las ideas que convirtieron a Barcelona en una ciudad líder en el mundo. Barcelona: Arpa.

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Chapter 14

Toward a Genuinely Humanizing Smart Urbanism Rob Kitchin

Abstract This chapter considers how to, following David Harvey (1973), produce a genuinely humanizing smart urbanism. It does so through utilizing a futureorientated 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; ethics

Introduction The analysis presented in the chapters in this book posits that smart cities are presently underpinned by instrumental, commonsensical, pragmatic, neoliberal conceptions of citizenship and social justice that are framed in post-political terms. Citizens even in so-called citizen-centric visions of smart cities are largely positioned as data points, consumers, users, players, testers, or people to be corralled, nudged, disciplined, and controlled (Cardullo & Kitchin, 2018a). Occasionally, they act as participants that provide feedback and suggestions, but

The Right to the Smart City, 193 204 Copyright r 2019 by Emerald Publishing Limited All rights of reproduction in any form reserved DOI: 10.1108/978-1-78769-139-120191014

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rarely occupy roles of decision-makers, co-creators, or leaders. Smart city policy and programs are mostly conceived within a framework of stewardship and civic paternalism, devised by “experts” and implemented on behalf of and in the best interests of citizens, or are driven by the interests of capital seeking new modes of accumulation (Shelton & Lodato, in press). In the latter case, the city is no longer the place where the market operates, but the city itself and its infrastructure and services that were once operated by the state for the public good become markets and laboratories for social and technological experimentation. Here, any right to the smart city is the right to act as a consumer, if one has sufficient capital (financial, social, and cultural) to do so. It is the right to gain the benefits of smart city technologies under the logics of neoliberal governmentality and accumulation by data-driven dispossession (Hollands, 2008; Shelton, Zook, & Wiig, 2015). The central questions at the heart of the book have been: Is another smart city possible? Can we envisage and enact a smart city that takes seriously Lefebvre’s (1996) notion of the “right to the city”? Can we harness the power of smart technologies to create an emancipatory and empowering city, or what Harvey (1973, p. 314) terms “a genuinely humanizing urbanism”? Can we reframe, reimagine, and remake the smart city so it really is “citizen-focused,” rather than predominately driven by profit and the needs of states? The chapters in the book have started to explore these questions, though they also make clear the challenges in realizing such a city. Nonetheless, it is vital to map out paths to a future smart city. Indeed, as Marcuse (2012) notes, Lefebvre was clear on insisting that “it is not the right to the existing city that is demanded, but the right to a future city”; the city in the making; a city transformed with respect to its socio-spatial relations. As I have argued elsewhere (Kitchin, 2018), the future is a critical element in discursive regime and operations of the smart city (see also Datta & Shaban, 2016; Söderström, Paasche, & Klauser, 2014; White, 2016). Adams and Groves (2007) note that the future is evoked through two temporal modalities: the “present future” and the “future present.” The “present future” is the future from the standpoint of the present. It is the future to be created, which unfolds from past and present trends, the result of given and embedded structures and path dependencies, though these can be redirected (Poli, 2015). The present future positions the future as ours “to shape and create,” extrapolating forward from the present situation (Adams, 2008). Thus, forecasts are made, strategies and plans are formulated, and direct action enacted to try and realize particular futures. Smart city technologies are future orientated with respect to creating plausible and preferable scenarios, dispositions, and outcomes. They seek to produce “contingency futures,”, that is, being prepared for anticipated surprises, or “optimization futures,” imposing patterns and trends from the past onto the future to ensure continuity (Miller, 2007). Of particular importance in producing such futures are the practices of experimental urbanism. Here, innovators are enabled to prototype and trial new technologies in real-world settings in order to test, learn about, and promote possible and desirable urban futures (Evans, Karvonen, & Raven, 2016). Smart city testbeds and living labs thus work to try and produce what Adam and

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Groves (2007) term “latent futures” futures in the making that are “on the way”. The constant and incomplete process of smart city prototyping, Halpern and Günel (2017, p. 2) argue, produces “preemptive hope”; a sense that an uncertain social, economic, and environmental future is being proactively tackled, yet does so by creating a transition pathway to a particular vision of a neoliberal city (Marvin & Silver, 2016). Smartness thus becomes the commonsensical means to imagine and respond to our future. Whereas the present future extends the present into the future, the future present uses possible futures to consider and plan alternative trajectories (Adam & Groves, 2007). For example, the practice of backcasting imagines a normative future some state that we might wish to achieve then works back to the present to try and define the steps or pathway needed to make such a future a reality (which might require a radical break with present future strategies). The future present thus acknowledges that our present actions potentially impact on future generations and we can act morally and ethically to create a different world (Adam, 2008). In this sense, Anderson (2010) argues that a normative future is evoked in order to pre-empt, prepare for, or prevent threats from being realized, and to redirect present future paths onto a new trajectory. As White (2016) details, smart city advocates have developed a discursive rationale that seeks to colonize the future and draws extensively on potential scenarios to both rationalize technological intervention in the present and to pre-empt and plan new urban trajectories. Three crises in particular act as a motivator for imagining alternative futures: widespread changes in patterns of population, particularly rural to urban migration, and subsequent resources pressures; global climate change and the need to produce more resilient cities; and fiscal austerity and the desire to create leaner governments and attract mobile capital (White, 2016; also see Datta, 2016). By evoking alternative future imaginaries and contrasting them to a present future that fails to take a path of smart city investment, advocates seek to pre-empt and prepare the ground for smart urbanism and pre-figure the future city. However, as argued in Chapter 1 and the other chapters, the anticipatory logics of smart city are predominately framed in neoliberal terms. Creating a more humanizing smart city then requires more than exposing, proposing, and politicizing (Marcuse, 2012) the present structures, processes, and injustices of smart cities: though this work is vital in providing the groundwork and justification for productive interventions and alternative paths. It necessitates shifting the thinking and practices of the present future and reconfiguring the future present narrative in order to reframe and remake smart cities. 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.

Future Present of Smart Cities If we are to transform the present future of smart cities into one orientated around the mission of creating a “genuinely humanizing smart urbanism,” then it is productive to start with imagining an alternative future present, as this

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provides the context and framing for reconfiguring the present future of smart cities. Of course, in terms of imagining those alternative futures, one needs to examine what is troubling about the present smart city rhetoric and implementation and its associated future vision. Chapter 1, in particular, and the other chapters document the perils and pitfalls of smart cities, so there is little need to re-rehearse these here again in detail. In short, what the previous chapters make clear is that the neoliberal smart city advances a tech-led form of entrepreneurial urbanism that is market-orientated, takes an instrumental approach to addressing urban issues that provide sticking plaster solutions rather than addressing their root causes, and reproduces rather than ameliorates disadvantage. While the anticipatory logics of smart cities population change, climate change, and fiscal austerity are issues that most certainly merit action, they require holistic and structural solutions, not simply technical fixes, and these need to be accompanied by a logic of addressing systemic social and spatial divides and creating a fairer, more equitable and ethical society. This can only be achieved by (1) tackling and limiting the worst excesses of capitalism through redistributing resources across society, creating equitable levels of access to key resources and a generous welfare state, and; (2) reversing the trend towards neoliberal governmentality and governance to embrace the more socially democratic ideals of the public good and shared public assets, as well as ensuring institutional processes are fair, transparent, and accountable. In other words, there is a need to imagine another kind of smart city, one underpinned by non-libertarian forms of citizenship and social justice, one that assures the right to the city in a Lefebvrian sense. At a basic level, such a smart city would have a number of characteristics drawn from the “right to the city” ideals (Cardullo & Kitchin, 2018b). First, the smart city would be orientated toward reflecting and serving the interests of citizens, rather than these continuing to be subservient to the interests of state and market. Second, there would be a more inclusive and deliberative framing of citizen participation in the smart city beyond consumerism and tokenistic civic engagement, including more extensive public consultation, collaboration and coproduction, and citizens occupying roles such as creators, members, and leaders. Third, there would be a shift back from citizenship grounded primarily in market principles to a framework underpinned by a set of civil, social, political, symbolic, and digital rights and entitlements. Fourth, this would be accompanied by alternative form of governmentality that respected rights and self-determination, treated people fairly and transparently, and placed checks and balances on forms of algorithmic governance and practices, such as social sorting and anticipatory nudge, discipline, and punish. Fifth, key public assets such as core urban infrastructure and public services would form commons to be protected and leveraged for the common good, including remunicipalization where they have been privatized. Sixth, the excesses of platform capitalism would be checked, labor would be fairly recompensed and be less precarious, and resources would be redistributed more equitably. Moreover, rather than producing new political concepts such as smart citizens, smart citizenship, smart justice, or smart commons, where these notions are necessarily mediated in relation to and through

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technology, the future smart city will be orientated to citizens, citizenship, justice, and the commons broadly conceived. I appreciate that this vision is decidedly thin on specifics in terms of what each of these ambitions would look like in practice and on the tactics necessary to create such a vision. This is for two reasons. First, while there has been some thinking directed to reconceiving the smart cities along these lines (see Coletta, Evans, Heaphy, & Kitchin, 2019; McLaren & Agyeman, 2015; Morozov & Bria, 2018), it is clear that mapping out the particularities of an alternative future present of smart cities requires much work, requiring deep reflection, and would take far more space to explicate than afforded in this chapter. Second, this work cannot be simply undertaken by academics, city administrators and policy-makers, and corporate consultants and R&D staff, but rather needs to involve ordinary people who can articulate their hopes and aspirations for future city life. Here, employing utopia as a method (Büscher, 2017; Levitas, 2013) has some merit. Such an approach seeks to create the imaginary reconstitution of society, a speculative sociology of what is desirable and possible: in this case, an ideal future city. Levitas (2013) contends that such a method provides the means to think through “the connections between economic, social and political processes, our ways of life, and what is necessary for human flourishing,” where that flourishing relates to everyone and not just a privileged few. In Levitas’ formulation, utopia as method consists of three aspects: an archaeological mode (excavating and assembling the elements of what would constitute a utopian society), an ontological mode (defining the subjects, agents and roles interpellated in such a society), and an architectural mode (the institutional design and delineation of that society). Once the utopia is envisioned, then a process of backcasting can be undertaken to think through how the whole vision, or elements of it might be realized, and the challenges of implementation. Such an exercise in utopian thinking is not a futile gesture doomed to failure, as utopian thinking is often criticized, but rather opens up the possibility for imagining and making other futures: it creates hope and new desire lines, makes it clear that the future is contingent rather than a teleological inevitability, suggests alternative pathways for exploration, and creates alternative anticipatory logics. Inherent in this process, I believe, should be a thorough consideration of identity politics, which to date has been little addressed in the smart cities’ literature (though see Bousquet, 2018; Cockrayne & Richardson, 2017; Datta, 2015, 2018; Elwood & Leszczynski, 2018; Jefferson, 2018a/b; Leszczynski & Elwood, 2015; Rose, 2017; Shwayri, 2018; Trencher & Karvonen, 2018). Here, there is a recognition that if there is to be a genuinely humanized smart city, then it has to accommodate in inclusive ways diversity and difference. Reading the smart city through the lens of gender, postcolonial, queer, race, class, and disability theories is a sobering experience. While smart city technologies can provide some liberatory effects, such as apps designed to improve women’s safety or facilitate disabled peoples’ wayfinding, in general much of the technology either ignores and inherently reproduces, or actively deepens, social divides, especially those that involve profiling, sorting, nudging, and other forms of social control

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(Elwood & Leszczynski, 2018; Jefferson, 2018a, 2018b). This raises the critical question: what would a smart city designed to be inclusive and nondiscriminatory for women, the LGBT community, people of color, ethnic minorities, poor people, disabled people and older people be like? Not just in terms of the configuration and workings of the technologies, infrastructure, and services but in the policy, practices and vision of the smart city? Answering these questions requires sustained interrogation of the discursive and material manifestations of the smart city as presently conceived and deep normative thinking concerning how these might be transformed in emancipatory ways. Such speculative future making needs to be grounded in local context: there can be no one size fits all utopian future smart city, as work considering smart cities around the globe makes clear (Coletta et al., 2019; Datta & Shaban, 2016; Karvonen, Cugurullo, & Caprotti, 2018). Indeed, what the smart city means for states and low income and slum dwellers in sub-Saharan Africa (Watson, 2014), Colombia (Talvard, 2019), and India (Datta, 2015, 2018; Janu, 2017; Rangaswamy & Nair, 2012), and how future smart cities should, could and will unfold in the Global South is undoubtedly different to that of the Global North for all kinds of reasons (not least because they are starting from very different places and hold different values and customs). Which brings us to transforming the present future of smart cities.

Present Future of Smart Cities In the absence of a well-articulated future present of smart cities, a number of stakeholders and city administrations have tried to shift the present future of how smart cities are currently being formulated and implemented to one that is more inclusive and less market-orientated. This involves devising a set of tactics designed to enact more bottom-up, citizen-centric versions of the smart city. Often these are formulated in quite pragmatic, commonsensical ways, produced by civic society organizations and promoting community-led/civic tech and sharing initiatives (see McLaren & Agyeman, 2015; Schrock, 2018, this volume; D’Ignazio et al, this volume). These can be quite diverse in ethos and practice; for example, McLaren and Agyeman (2015) note four broad types of sharing initiatives, three of which take a different tack to commercial, monetized platforms (e.g., Uber and Airbnb): non-for-profit, peer-to-peer, and communal platforms (e.g., Streetbank and Freecycle); commercial, social-cultural (rather than an exclusive platform-mediated) exchanges (e.g., Enspiral and Bitcoin); and communal, social-cultural exchanges, such as sharing within families and communities. Similarly, Perng (this volume) identifies a number of different forms and ethos of hackathons. These counter-hegemonic initiatives often lack an overarching strategic vision, or a wider ideological framing, and enact politics with a small p. They can have a profound effect in shifting local approaches to particular smart city developments (e.g., adopting ideas of play, hacking, and community planning in how systems are conceived and deployed locally; see de Waal, de Lange, &

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Bouw, 2018), but are usually either co-opted into the neoliberal project or limited to reshaping some aspects of a city’s smart city program, but no real change to the underlying governmentality and political economy occurs. Nonetheless, they are important in the sense that they enact what Macgilchrist and Bohmig (2012, p. 97) term “minimal politics,” creating “tiny fissures” in what can otherwise appear to be the hegemonic discursive regime and material politics of smart cities. This constant refrain of tiny rips means that the smart city vision is dislocated and “ensures that democracy understood as practices of conflict and disagreement is enacted on a daily basis” (Macgilchrist & Bohmig, 2012, p. 97). In other words, while individually they might not usher in seismic shifts in the formulation of smart city, in combination with those other counterhegemonic initiatives, counter and resistive acts open up small rips through which change can be effected. It was such minimal politics that led to smart cities being re-cast as “citizen-focused,” even though such rebranding little altered their actual formulation and practices (Cardullo & Kitchin, 2018a, 2018b; Kitchin, 2015). Other initiatives have a more strategic, ideological vision that seeks to radically reconfigure the smart cities vision, enacted at the level of the state. In the case of Medellin in Colombia, the city has sought to enact what it terms “social urbanism” (urbanismo social), promoting the idea of social inclusion in a shared public realm (McLaren & Agyeman, 2015). From the mid-1990s, the Medellín city government has focused on empowering citizens, beginning in the poorest neighborhoods, through a series of initiatives relating to access to ICT, education, cultural activities, infrastructure, and economic development, as well as using participatory budgeting and community planning, to create a urban commons of public services and spaces (McLaren & Agyeman, 2015). In recent years, this has extended to its smart city initiatives, seeking to enroll public and private actors to build consensus on how the city should be organized politically and economically (Talvard, 2019). While the city has a designated smart district, Medellinnovation, that acts as a site of urban experimentation and seeks to attract transnational investment, this area does not seek to control who lives there, but rather has the stated aim of serving existing local residents and preventing gentrification that would displace them. However, while Medellín has sought to become what city administration terms an “inclusive and competitive smart city,” Talvard (2019) details it still delivers a “rather paternalistic and market-oriented notion of smartness” and follows a path of development that favors the interests of commercial actors. He thus concludes that despite the emphasis on social inclusion, it appears that there has been a “corporate capture of the public interest masquerading as local development.” Nonetheless, the interests of capital are curtailed and there is a stronger emphasis on inclusion and commoning than in other smart cities. The case of Barcelona is noted in Chapters 1 and 13, but it is worth here expanding on the notion of technological sovereignty as it is perhaps the clearest example of a concerted attempt to rethink the politics and principles of the smart city that challenges its underlying political economy (March & RiberaFumaz, 2018). Morozov and Bria (2018) set out a vision of technological

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sovereignty and nine political actions designed to help cities to take control of their digital policies and public assets, reverse the damage wrought by neoliberalism, and produce a city that serves, first-and-foremost, citizens: • promote alternative data ownership regimes, including creating an open data commons and regulations to limit aggressive data harvesting; • move information services to open source, open standards, and adopt agile delivery; • transform procurement to make it ethical, sustainable, and innovative; • control digital platforms, including oversight and regulation of the sharing economy; • build and grow alternative digital infrastructures based on open and decentralized technologies that preserve net neutrality; • develop cooperative models of service provision; • maximize innovation with public value, including grassroots social entrepreneurship; • rethink welfare schemes and complementary currency systems at the local level; and • promote digital democracy and digital sovereignty through digital participation and engagement tools and new rights. For them, and the Barcelona city administration, these actions work to ensure cities can implement independent, effective politics and decide their own fate, and that citizens “have a say and participate in how the technological infrastructure around them operates and what ends it serves” (p. 22). They argue that without technological sovereignty, “the fight for the right to the city loses much of its power” (p. 23) because how the city is managed is bound up into the interests of private capital and power. They also note that the battle for a different kind of smart city “cannot succeed without strong connections to the ongoing fights of urban social movements and a new generation of politicians” (p. 25) rejecting all forms of entrepreneurial urbanism. Indeed, creating an alternative smart city needs to be part of a project to create a non-neoliberal city that has a suite of related political actions: • establish the city of the commons and collaborative production as global points of reference; • end privatization and the transfer of public assets into private hands, while promoting remunicipalization of critical infrastructures and services; • massively reduce the cost of basic services like housing, transportation, education, and health care in order to help society’s most precarious strata; • build data-driven economic models with real inputs (using real-time data analytics), enabling participatory democracy to model complex decisions; • prefer and promote collaborative organizations over both the centralized state as well as market solutions;

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• institute a universal basic income focused on targeting poverty and social exclusion; and • build city data commons: Decree that the population’s networked data generated in the context of public services cannot be owned by service operators. (Morozov & Bria, 2018, pp. 29 30, summarizing Mason, 2016). Clearly, creating a non-neoliberal, post-capitalist smart city is no easy task given the present embedded structures and path dependencies, but the Barcelona experiment with technological sovereignty offers both some hope and a strategy and tactics for pursuing the right to the smart city that can be used to scale up the minimal politics being enacted elsewhere.

Conclusion Thinking through, envisioning, and enacting, the right to the smart city is far from a simple task. It is one fraught with ideological and normative questions and conundrums, and political, social, and cultural work and praxes. This chapter has sought to sketch out the kinds of future-orientated work required to reimagine, reframe, and remake smart cities in ways that produce a genuinely humanizing smart urbanism. On the one hand, I have argued that this necessitates producing 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, I contended that the work to disrupt the present future of neoliberal smart urbanism and to enact alternative more-inclusive smart city initiatives needs to continue apace, diversify, and shift from enacting “minimal politics” to more sustained strategic, ideological, public-led vision that seeks to radically reconfigure the smart city. In my view, this future present and present future work needs to become thoroughly entwined to produce a coherent vision and set of policies and initiatives for smart cities in the making. This book has sought to provide ideas, analysis, and case material for continuing this work, reflecting on issues of citizenship, social justice, commoning, and the public good. The challenge to readers is to engage and reflect on the arguments made by the contributors and to take-on Marcuse’s call to expose, propose, and politicize the politics and praxes of smart cities, while complementing this with normative, futureoriented work that recasts the possibilities of the smart city. To enact the right to the smart city, we have to have a clear sense of what that right is and what kind of city is to be produced.

Acknowledgments The research for this chapter was funded by an ERC Advanced Investigator award, “The Programmable City” (ERC-2012-AdG 323636-SOFTCITY).

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Index Absent citizen, 10 Accumulation by dispossession, 3 4, 5 Active citizen, 10, 11 12, 102 103 Against the Romance of Community (Joseph), 101 102 Agonistic relations, 146 147 Air quality, 113 114, 116, 118, 155 156 Airbnb, 90, 188 189 Aircraft noise, 78 79 Algorithmic democracy, 80 81 Alternative participatory co-creation approaches, 179 180 Ambient commons, 72 73 Ambividuals, 64 Anonymity, 170 171 Antagonism, 146 147 Anticipatory logics of smart cities, 196 Apartheid state, 166 API-assisted data collection, 136 137 Arab Spring, 168 Archaeological mode, 197 Archetypical expensive smart city projects, 178 179 Archistars, 104 Architectural mode, 197 Assemblages, 167 heterogeneous, 170 171 homeostatic, 170

Backcasting process, 197 Barcelona, 179 180, 187 case, 199 200 Smart Citizen Flagship projects, 181 Smart City strategy, 179 180 technological sovereignty, 183, 184 Benchmarking, 166 167 Big data, 76 77 data vs. knowledge, 166 169 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, 153 Binaries of nature, 170 171 Bottom-up dynamics, 178 Brickstarter (crowdfunding/ sourcing platform), 45 46 Bricolage, 170 Bristol Approach, 119 Californian Ideology, 154 Cape Town, 171 172 Capital, 5 7 Capitalism, 101 103, 196 Capitalist enclosure, 5 Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP), 116 Centralized remote control, 72 73 Chattanooga (the Gig City), 91 92 municipal extra-large broadband, 86 87

206

Index

Chennai, smart city, 32 38 excerpts from, 36 exclusion from center, 37 38 key components, 35 urban efficiency paradigm, 33 37 Choice architectures, 61 Citizen (dis-)empowerment, 155 160 Citizen participation, 160 161 contextualizing design thinking for, 153 155 design thinking approaches, 152 implementation, 160 161 Citizen-centric initiatives, 10 11, 44, 46, 135 136, 182 Citizen-centric visions of smart cities, 193 194 Citizen-focused initiatives, 10 11, 198 199 Citizen-oriented initiatives, 44 Citizen(ship), 12 13, 160 161, 178, 193 194, 195 data-driven urbanism, 15 16 empowerment, 188 sensing, 114 and smart city, 9 12 technology, 127 City commons, 119 120 City Council participation portal, 186 City Operating System (City OS), 182 City services corporatization and privatization, 3 efficiency paradigm, 30 31 marketization and privatization, 2 3 tech-led, 5 6 City-as-exchange-value, 50 51 City-as-resource, 74

Civic Consumer and Action group (CAG), 32 33 Civic tech, 72 73, 125 126 between social movement and government reformers, 128 130 bucket and umbrella definition, 126 127 as technical pluralism, 129 130 Civic Tech Field Guide, 126 127 Civic technologies. See Civic tech Civic(s) community-centered smart city, 119 122 data, 113 116 engagement, 60 62, 121, 128 gaming, 58 hackathon, 156 157 media, 72 73 paternalism, 193 194 quantified community, 116 119 Civil/legal rights of citizens, 11 Classical metaphor of pasture, 74 Climate change, 146, 152, 196 Climathon, 152, 156 157 Closed-behind-doors phenomenon, 79 Cloud computing, 91 Co-creation, 154 Co-creators, 193 194 Co-design, 154 Co-production, 154 Code for America (CfA), 144 145 Collaboration, 154 Collective intelligence, 90 91 Collectivization, 75 76, 79 Command and control system, 72 73 Commercial platforms, 198 Common pool resources (CPOs), 73 74

Index

Commoning, 87 89, 93 Commons, 73 74, 87 89, 179 ambient, 72 73 city, 119 120 data, 72 75 digital, 72 73, 88, 90 91 informational, 72 73 knowledge, 72 73 maintaining and defending in smart city, 89 94 networked, 72 73 notion of, 72 73 smart city in, 86 system, 78 79 urban, 73 75, 88, 89 90, 93 Commons-as-interface, 73, 75 77 Commons-based peer production, 72 73 Communitarian values of sharing, 89 Communitarianism, 14 Community, 101 103 community-centered smart city, 119 122 community-led projects, 178 Community Dampbusters team, 120 121 Computation processes, 167 Confront marginalization, 63 64 Connection to urban core, 106 Consumption, 101 103, 105 106 Contact Theatre, Manchester (UK), 158 Contingency, 168 169 futures, 194 195 Contractarianism, 14 Convergence, 159 of technologies, 126 127 Counter-hegemonic initiatives, 198 199 Critical scholars, 87 88

207

Critical smart city scholarship, 43 44 Critical urban theory, 5, 18 Cultural fantasy, 91 Cut and paste urbanism, 167 Cybernetic thinking, 2 Cyborg activism and inner city politics, 171 174 motif, 170 171 Dampbusters project, 120 Dashboards, 166 167 urbanism, 18 19 Data, 166 169 appropriation, 169 171 capitalism, 91 commons, 72 75 deserts, 79 determinism, 9 proliferation, 71 72 refugee, 145 rescue, 145 Data-driven to data-enabled right to the city, 80 81 Data-driven urbanist, 166 Data-mediated policy perspectives, 169 170 Datafication, 77 78 Datafied city interfacing, 77 79 right to, 71 73 Datastudio Eindhoven project, 77, 79 De facto transfers, 36 37 De-politicizing urban governance, 178 Decidim Barcelona, 182, 184, 186, 188 Decision-makers, 193 194 Decision-making, 166 167 Degrowth, 179

208

Index

Democratic engagement, 61 62 social engineering, 160 Demographic information, 8 Design thinking, 18 19 approaches, 152 between Stinky Fish and Double Diamonds, 159 160 citizen participation, 153 155 facilitation, 157 159 processes, 152 spaces, 155 157 tools, 159 160 Design-led mode of governing, 152 Digital capitalism, 183 CCTV cameras, 8 commons, 72 73, 88, 90 91 computing, 2 and (disruptive) social innovation, 188 media, 71 72 policies, 199 200 revolution, 166 social justice and digital city, 58 60 technologies, 2 4, 30, 63 64, 103 104 Digital Fabrication Athenaeums (DFA), 180 181 Digital-era governance (DEG), 166 167 Discursive practices, 47 reification of neoliberal smart city, 46 49 Distributional theory, 13 Divergence, 159 Double Diamonds, 159 160 DSI4BCN, 186 187

Efficiency paradigm for city services, 30 31 Egalitarianism, 14 E-governance, 2 See also Governance E-government, 2 Electric Power Board (EPB), 91, 92 Embodied testimonies, 168 169 Empathy, 154 Encroachments, 38 Entrepreneurial citizenship, 129, 140 machines, 140 urbanism, 195 196 Ethical hackers, 93 Ethics and smart city, 7 9 EU-H2020-funded project DCENT, 182 European Capital of Innovation Award, 179 180 European Innovation Partnership for Smart Cities and Communities (EIP-SCC), 6, 10 11, 178 179 Event description, 137 Eventbrite dataset, 137, 138, 139 140 Evidence-based policy-making, 166 Fab Labs, 47 48 FabCity, 180 181 Fablabs, 178 Face Your World, 45 46 Facebook, 188 189 Failed citizen-centric policies, 179 180 Fairclough, Norman (critical discourse analyst), 47 Fascist regime, 104 Feminism, 14

Index

209

Feminist cultural studies scholarship, 50 Fiscal austerity, 196 Flagship projects, 180 181 Focus-centric hackathon, 138 Foursquare app, 62 Fourth industrial revolution, 188 Free Knowledge Institute (incubators sites), 186 187 Funding programs, 10 11 Future citizens, 102 103 Future present of smart cities, 194 198 Future ready (Designathon), 152

Governance, 154 155 de-politicizing urban, 178 digital-era, 166 167 governance-beyond-the-state, 154 155 technocratic forms of, 85 86 urban, 48, 153, 178 urban collaborative, 72 73 Government reformers, 128 130 civic tech as technical pluralism, 129 130 Governmentality, 7, 11 12 Grassroots innovations, 179 project, 87 88 smart citizen initiatives, 45 46

Galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM), 144 Games, 61 62 mechanics, 58, 64 Gamification, 58, 60 65 of civic life, 58 effect, 11 12 Geluidsnet, 78 79 General citizen, 10 Genuinely humanizing smart urbanism, 19, 195 196 future present of smart cities, 195 198 present future of smart cities, 198 201 Genuinely humanizing urbanism, 16, 194 Gig economy, 90 Global exchange, 180 181 Global GovJam, 152 Google, 188 189 Google-Waze, 90 91 Goteo (incubators sites), 186 187

H2020 DSI4EU project, 186 187 “Hackable city”, 154 Hackathons business-centric, 138 data-centric, 138 Deutsche Bahn hackathon (DB hackathon), 143 local and multinational corporations, 146 methodological consideration, 136 137 typology and practices of participation, 137 145 Hacking, Eating, Tracking (HET), 144 Harvey’s theory of social justice, 13 15 Heidegger, Martin conception, 114 Homo ludens (Huizinga), 60 61 Horizon 2020, 121 122, 154 155, 188 Housing, 99 How might we (HMW), 159 160

210

Index

Hudson Yards in New York, 6 7, 100, 116, 117 119 Human smart city, 154 Human-centered design, 160 161 Hyper Island, Manchester (UK), 157, 158, 159 Hyper Island Toolbox, 159 IBM Design Thinking process, 153 Identity, 170 171 IDEO design agency, 153 IDEO U, Online, 158 In-depth personal interview, 105 Incheon Free Economic Zone (IFEZ), 6 7 Inclusion, 104 Inclusive and competitive smart city, 199 Inclusive approach, 125 126 India (national-level smart city project), 28 India Smart Cities Mission, 28 Indicators, 166 167 Industry-led participatory initiatives, 152 Information and communication technology (ICT), 152 ICT providers, 30 ICT-based commoning strategies, 74 75 ICT-driven innovation processes, 186 187 Informational commons, 72 73 monopolies, 30 right to the city, 75 76 Inhabitation, 88 89 Inicitativa per Catalunya-els verds (ICV), 180 181 Innovate UK, 157

Innovation processes, 135 136 workshops, 155 157 Institute of Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC), 180 Institutional right, 29 Instrumental approach, 195 196 Intellectual property, 183 Interface, 115 Internet, 2, 89 90 boomtown, 92 topology, 180 181 Justice and the Politics of Difference (Young), 59 60 Key public assets, 196 197 Knight Foundation, 126 127 Knowle West Media Centre (KWMC), 119 Knowledge, 166 169 commons, 72 73 intensive urbanism, 169 La Comunificadora, 186 187 “Latent futures”, 194 195 Learning by making, 154 Lefebvre, “right to the city”, 44 45, 60 Lefebvrian sense, 29, 30, 31 32, 37, 196 LGBT community, 197 198 Libertarianism, 14 Literacies, 50 51 Living indicators, 169 Living Labs, 6 7, 178 179 London-based Heatherwick Studio, 173 15M-indignados movement, 182 MAC addresses, 8 Managerialism, 166 167 Market principles, 196 197

Index

Market-based methods, 45 Marxism, 14 Medellinnovation, 199 Media, 172 Milano 4 You project, 99 community, capitalism, and consumption, 101 103 dialectical understanding of “smart community”, 106 107 smart community, 100 101, 104 106 smart Milan, 103 104 Milano Due project, 105 106 Minimal politics, 198 199 Mobile World Congress, 184 Monetized platforms, 198 Moral consensus, 170 171 Multi-instrumented surveillance, 9 Municipal open data platforms, 74 75 procurement processes, 187 Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA), 173 National Hawkers Federation, 37 National Security Administration (NSA), 114 Ndifuna Ukwazi (NU), 171 172 Neoliberal smart city, 6, 48 discursive reification of, 46 49 glimpses of possibilities in, 45 46 radical potential of everyday meaning-making, 49 51 Neoliberal(ism), 11, 199 200 approach, 13 15 governmentality, 196 political economy, 2 3, 5 rationalities, 62 urban restructuring strategies, 178 urbanism, 103

211

Neoliberalization, 135 136 of housing, 105 of urban space, 106 Nesta, 157, 178 179 Net neutrality, 92 Networked commons, 72 73 publics, 15 16 New managerialism, 80 New Military Urbanism (Graham), 157 159 New public management (NPM), 166 167, 187 New Urban Agenda (NUA), 167 168 NOMOS system, 78 79 Non-governmental organization (NGO), 171 172 Non-libertarian forms of citizenship and social justice, 196 Non-neoliberal city, 200 201 One-size-fits-all model, 74 75 Ontological mode, 197 Open innovation instruments, 143 Open source urbanism, 179 Open Wireless Network (OWN), 86 87, 93 94 Optimization futures, 194 195 Organizational data, 138 Ownership, 71 72 sedentary metaphysics of, 74 of urban issues, 76 77 Participants, 193 194 Participatory/participation, 11 12, 29, 30, 58, 104, 126, 135 136 budgeting process, 121 122 methods, 47 48 organizations, 138 139 sensing, 114

212

Index

“People-led” smart city initiative, 119 Performative and emancipatory work of data appropriation, 169 171 Personal computers, 2 Personalization, 172 Philanthrocapitalists, 153 Platform cooperativism, 72 73 Platoniq (incubators sites), 186 187 Playable urban citizenship gamification and civic engagement, 60 62 part of game, 62 65 social justice and digital city, 58 60 Traffic Agent app, 57 58 Playful cities, 62 Pokemon Go!, 58 Political/politics, 129 economy, 5 rights of citizens, 11 Politically meaningful agency of citizens, 44 45, 46 Poo-protests in Cape Town, 169 170 Popular sensing, 114 Population change, 196 Post-capitalist smart city, 201 Post-crisis austerity policies, 45 Post-deployment, 116 processes, 121 Power, 5 7 Pre-deployment, 115 Predictive privacy harms, 8 9 Preemptive hope, 194 195 Present future of smart cities, 194 195, 198 201 Procedural theory, 13 Process commodity, 160 161 Promotional discourse practices, 47

Proto-publics, 135 136 Prototyping, 154 Public assets, 199 200 deliberations, 50 51 Internet provision, 86 87 services, 152 space usage, 113 114 Publicness, 10 Quality of life, 104 Quantified community (QC), 116 119 Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK), 144 145 Real estate company, 99 smart district, 100 urban development in Milan, 104 Reclaim the City (RtC), 171 174 Recursive engagement, 77 78 public, 130 Reducing barriers to cycling (CycleHack Global Movement), 152 Regeneration programs, 6 7 projects, 29 30 Remote sensing platforms, 114 Remunicipalization, 196 197 Res publica, 47 Research and innovation appropriations, 143 144 Residents, smart community of, 104 106 Restorative theory, 13 Retributive theory, 13 RFID chips, 36 37 Right to center, 29 30

Index

Right to centrality, 31 32 Right to the city, 3, 13 15, 44 45, 60, 71 72, 88 89, 107, 194 data-driven to data-enabled, 80 81 Right to the datafied city, 71 73 Right to the smart city, 9, 15 17, 28 32, 188 189 right to centrality, 31 32 right to participate, 30 31 Rockefeller Foundatio, 153 Roomsel Noord project, 79 RSA, London (UK), 158 Safer life, 103 104 Sedentary metaphysics of ownership, 74 Seduction, 3 4 Self-generated data entries, 77 78 Sensing systems, 178 Sensors, 113 114 community-centered smart city, 119 122 data, 113 116 networks, 8 quantified community, 116 119 Sentilo, 180 181 Service user, 10 Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI), 169 Sharing, 87 cities, 179 of data trails, 8 9 information, 173 platforms, 104 resource, 12, 87 88 Situationist movement (1957 1972), 62 63 Slow activism, 168 169, 170

213

Small-to-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), 44 Smart approach, 86 87 Smart citizen(ship), 31, 72 73, 102 103, 154, 178 179, 196 197 approach, 179 180 potentialities and limits of technological sovereignty, 187 189 from smart citizens toward technological sovereignty, 182 187 from smart city to smart citizens, 180 182 vision, 179 Smart city, 2 3, 28, 31, 43 44, 85 86, 100, 113 114, 166 169, 178 179, 193 194 anticipatory logics, 196 capital, power and, 5 7 citizen-centric visions, 193 194 citizenship and, 9 12 in commons, 86 community-centered, 119 122 critical urban studies, 18 datafication of, 79 discursive reification of neoliberal, 46 49 ethics and, 7 9 future present of, 194 198 inclusive and competitive, 199 initiatives, 135 136 maintaining and defending commons in, 89 94 at margins, 31 32 notion, 3 paradigm, 125 126 post-capitalist, 201 present future of, 194 195, 198 201

214

Index

project development, 122 rhetoric, 31 32 right to, 15 17 to smart citizens, 180 182 smart urbanism, 18 social justice and, 12 15 strategies, 160 161, 178 technologies, 3, 160 161 See also Neoliberal smart city; Right to smart city Smart City Mission (SCM), 32 Smart City World Congress, 184 Smart commons, 86, 196 197 commons and commoning, 87 89 maintaining and defending commons in smart city, 89 94 Smart community, 100 101 dialectical understanding of, 106 107 of residents, 104 106 Smart district, 100, 103, 106 107, 116 Smart justice, 196 197 Smart meter, 48 Smart technologies, 11 12 Smart urbanism, 18 Smartmentality, 7 Smartness, 11 12 Smartphones, 8, 11 12 Social factory 4.0, 90 91 formations, 101 102 housing, 104 inclusion, 199 media, 169 movement, 128 130 online platforms, 172 reproduction, 87 rights of citizens, 11 segregation, 105 106

social-cultural exchanges, 198 system, 125 126 urbanism, 199 Social justice, 64, 166, 193 194, 195 and digital city, 58 60 and smart city, 12 15 theory of, 13 15 Social Justice and the City (Harvey), 58 59 Social Justice Coalition in Cape Town, 170 171 Socialist Party, 180 181 Social practices, 47 Societal appropriations, 144 hackathons, 146 Sound-bite formats, 167 South African context, 166 Southern Urbanism, 167 168 Special economic zone (SEZ), 100 Specialist dives, 143 Stakeholder engagement, 117 Standing reserve process, 114 State economic machines, 140 143 Stewardship, 193 194 Stinky Fish, 159 160 Subjectification, 7 Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition systems (SCADA systems), 2 Surveillance cameras, 2 Sustainable development goals (SDGs), 167 168 Sustainable modernization, 65 Systemic urban processes, 167 Tafelberg, 171 172 Tech-centric hackathon, 138 Technical pluralism, 126 civic tech as, 129 130 Techno-deterministic view, 178

Index

Techno-optimistic view, 178 Technocratic forms of governance, 85 86 Technological sovereignty, 16 17, 179, 201 potentialities and limits of, 187 189 smart citizens toward, 182 187 strategy, 179 180 Technology, 170 171 appropriation, 169 170 citizens, 127 determinism, 167 development, 31 32 See also Civic tech; Information and communication technology (ICT) Technology Strategy Board, 157 TerraCycle, 65 Track phone identifiers, 8 Traffic Agent (mobile app), 57 58 Translation, 75 76 Trash Tycoon (Facebook game), 65 Trickle-down technocracy, 130 Trojan Horse, 155 Uber, 90, 188 189 UK-based FixMyStreet project, 77 78 Umbrella definitions of civic tech, 126 127 Unconventional approaches, 157 159 Understanding Group and Leader (UGL), 157 159 Urban citizens, 102 103 collaborative governance, 72 73 commons, 73 75, 88, 89 90, 93

215

creativity, 44 efficiency paradigm, 33 37 governance, 48, 153, 178 interaction designer, 155 Living Labs, 47 48 management, 184 migration, 195 Mobility Plan, 184 186 planning, 29 30 planning platforms, 45 46 scholarship, 152 sensor data, 113 114 space, 15, 88, 135 136 system, 125 126 transformations, 178 urban-focused economic development, 6 7 Urban data commons commons-as-interface, 75 77 data-driven to data-enabled right to the city, 80 81 interfacing datafied city, 77 79 right to datafied city, 71 73 urban commons, data commons, 73 75 Urbanism, 187 188 Urbanismo social. See Social— urbanism US Digital Services (USDS), 129 User-oriented design, 127 Utilitarianism, 14 Vendors, 122 Verbeterdebuurt, 77 78 Vincles, 181 Waag Society, Amsterdam (NL), 158 Water supply, 34 Waze (Google-owned app), 86 87, 90 91 Web searches, 137

216

Index

Western Cape Property Development Forum, 173 Wireless network development, 93 Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), 36 37 Woodstock, 171 172

Workshops, 32 33 innovation, 155 157 World Bank, 178 179 World Economic Forum, 178 179 Zero cost city, 103 104, 105