Citizens in the 'Smart City'

Participation, Co-production, Governance

Paolo Cardullo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429798092
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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

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

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

Part 1

The neoliberal city

Reloaded

The scope of the first part of the book is to show how the ‘smart city’, as currently conceived, purports a set of propositions that are instrumental to the neoliberalisation process of cities and city life. It is argued that citizens in the ‘smart city’ are thought of as neoliberal subjects that new governance arrangements seek to control and discipline at a distance, while offering top-down technocratic solutions to urban issues affecting them. As explored more in detail in the next chapters, the ‘smart city’ represents the coming together of two rationalities, the science of software and computer studies, and the benchmark-controlled science of urban growth (neoliberal economics). This part of the book looks at the theoretical and epistemological underpinnings of these rationalities, which seek to govern cities and citizens via the power of algorithms. First, I unpack the tight relationship between urban informatics and urban science. Thereafter, I show how this technocratic rationality fits well within a broader neoliberalisation process of urban living. The explosion of big data and their almost ubiquitousness have been the connective tissues through which such a union sticks together. The ‘smart city’ complements the neoliberalisation process of urban living, offering a mix of technical and neoliberal inspired policy solutions. As such, the ‘smart city’ has been functioning within an already well-oiled mechanism of city competitions, privatisation of public functions and services, and marketisation of city life. With its baggage of science fiction scenarios and geek culture, the ‘smart city’ is ‘The Neoliberal City: Reloaded’ (Wachowski & Wachowski, 1999–2003).

The first two chapters will define the field, providing working definitions for ‘smart city’ and neoliberal urbanism. This is done by looking at the evolutions of these concepts both from an historical perspective and as contemporary working ideas on which to build new theoretical articulations. Chapter 3 suggests the close fit between urbanism, as an academic discipline and a dimension of governance, and technological development, as the means through which a certain urban future is made available. Chapter 4 presents the current landscape of smart citizenship and governance with case studies from Dublin, Ireland, while Chapter 5 will sum up the new policy landscape made of neoliberal urbanism and smart urbanism, delving into the often-times reported solution to citizen participation: Living Labs.

This set of research offers a panoramic on the ‘smart city’ as commonly conceived and imagined in public discourse and policy. In this novel space, city administrators’ ‘smartmentality’ (Vanolo, 2014) and the profit-seeking endeavours of high-tech companies merge by relegating the ‘citizen’ in the intricate, and often invisible, deployment of ‘smart city’ technologies. This operation pattern works in the background of everyday life while being played more blatantly in the foreground of public speaking and funding seeking initiatives. In this context, it is argued that claims concerning the production of ‘citizen-centric’ smart cities are largely tokenistic, with city administrations and corporations still owning and controlling urban governance and services, and ‘smart city’ initiatives being instrumental to technologically led entrepreneurial urbanism (Hollands, 2008; Kitchin, 2015; Swyngedouw, 2016).

1 Smart cities

The ‘smart city’ has become such a loaded concept in policy discourses, academic papers, and industry reports, that it is difficult to provide an agreed upon definition. The concept has gained great importance in recent years, becoming a buzzword for various interest groups from neoliberal urbanists, to computer science and information systems experts, to industry managers and city leaders. Some scholars highlight technological innovations (interconnected sensors, devices, servers, and algorithms for automated responses and data collection) and the new forms of government these innovations produce by data streams which feed dynamically into management systems and control rooms (Luque-Ayala & Marvin, 2016; Sadowski & Pasquale, 2015; Vanolo, 2014). Others consider primarily the opportunities such technologies offer as spatialised or collective intelligence, in terms of mobility and communication (Foth, 2016; Picon, 2015). Others focus on the socioeconomic environment that favours technological ‘fixes’ to urban problems and creates start-up hubs and new jobs in the ‘creative’ sectors of knowledge production (Caragliu, Del Bo, & Nijkamp, 2011). Other scholars emphasise the epistemological underpinnings that relate urbanism to computer- and software-led sciences (Foth, 2017; Kitchin, 2014a). Other critical scholars instead would favour a citizen-centric model that fosters social innovation, civic engagement, and transparent governance (de Waal, 2014; Morozov & Bria, 2018; Townsend, 2013). Clearly, one-size-fits-all is not a feasible path in the ‘smart city’ discourse.

The scope of this chapter is partly to unveil the ‘smart city’ as a cultural construction. Here, I want to consider the processes of abstraction that take place when moving, for example, from a handshake occurring between a piece of code and another algorithm (in order to connect, for instance, a smart domestic device to a remote server) to the ideological construction of the city as a ‘system of systems’, that is, an integrated and connected interface through which data and their algorithmic processing determine the city’s optimal functioning (Batty, 2017). Although technological development is also very important in determining what is ‘smart’ about smart cities, it is my contention that the ‘smart city’, as a concept, maintains a cultural dimension that goes beyond its technological affordance. The ‘smart city’ holds on to an ideal urban future which has rapidly become significant in policy and industry parlance (Kitchin, 2019b), something more than its cables, sensors, and servers, or a combination of these. This ideal, according to Vanolo (2014, p. 889), stems from and feeds into a ‘smartmentality’, where “cities are made responsible for the achievement of smartness – that is, adherence to the specific model of a technologically advanced, green and economically attractive city.” Moreover, I would contend that the shift from the techno-centric city to the ‘citizen-centric’ city highlights the cultural components that are mobilised, rather than only the technological layers. In fact, there is always an imaginary attached to technological creation, maybe a specific idea of the future or an answer to a particular problem or a generic danger. If we scale this up to the city level, and to the transnational landscape of entrepreneurial urbanism, we can perhaps see the ‘smart city’ also as a sort of cultural production, a pre-packaged narrative for the current publics.

The curious thing about computer technologies is their rapid rate of obsolescence: I am sure that every reader has experienced the speedy devaluation of their own portable electronics due to continuous upgrading, power enhancement, and size shrinking. Maybe a 2-year old iPod has already been pushed out of production, becoming an obsolete piece of electronic junk for which updates and maintenance are no longer provided (see Gabrys, 2011); or a television display has become so ‘smart’ that channels disappear without the appropriate subscription to the private provider. These are recurrent experiences of everyday technology. If we scale these up to the entire city, we would probably need to start thinking about the history of computer studies and urban science not just as new horizons of enthusiastic development and affordance, but also as a history of announced obsolescence and decay: this history is reminiscent, for me, of the Arcades in Paris described by Walter Benjamin as ‘urban ruins’ (1940). It is striking how the history of urbanism in relation to computer-led technological progress maintains that sense of unmatched desires, frustrating attempts, and dream-like status, which elevates beyond technology and infrastructure (sensors, firmware, cables, servers, or data) and becomes a cultural abstraction (e.g., the intelligence of the crowd, the cloud, the apps that ‘fix’ everything, or the anthropomorphic and caring robot).

I think a good way to disentangle this idea(l), the ‘smart city’, is thus to reverse engineer the process of its creation; that is, to deconstruct it in order to reveal its designs and architecture, and to extract knowledge from it. Reverse engineering the ‘smart city’ will allow us to improve our understanding of the underlying source codes and layers that make the ‘smart city’ of today, and maybe even to expose vulnerabilities and find alternatives, moving from the least abstract to the most abstract layer. Thus, I will take an historical perspective on the ‘smart city’ which will show the complexity but also the underpinnings, theoretical and epistemological, that sustain the concept. By paraphrasing Tung-Hui Hu’s (2015) brilliant exposition of ‘the cloud’ – the Internet – we can look at the prehistory of the ‘smart city’ following two directions. First, the ‘smart city’ becomes one of the winning discursive metaphors for the way contemporary society organises and understands itself, “a cultural fantasy, always more than its present-day technological manifestation” (p. xxiv). The ‘smart city’ discourse, in fact, has been gaining traction by hinging its rhetoric always on something beyond the sole technology: for instance, the future of the planet, or the collective intelligence of the crowd, or the global interconnectivity of communication anytime and everywhere. This cultural dimension has often allowed proposers and deployers of smart technologies to make abstraction from the infrastructural, material, and social aspects which, ultimately, these technologies foster. For Hu, that “everything is connected” – as well as its dystopian twist of ‘everyware’ (Greenfield, 2013), the absolute surveillance stage – is a product of a system of belief.

The second direction of research is the acknowledgement that developments in computational and analytical software, aided by the vast proliferation of data sets of almost everything, are consolidating a specific way in which social scientists look at the world and, particularly, at city processes. Urban informatics, urban science, and algorithmic rationality represent the fundamental epistemological changes brought in by the proliferation of big data. Moreover, by relying on data-sets and forecasts, they sustain the economic rationality of efficiency, performance, and quantitative deliverables proper of neoliberal economics. As Hu suggests with regards to ‘the cloud’ (2015, p. xxix), “the technology has produced the means of its own interpretation, the lens through which power is read, the crude map by which we understand the world.” The growing affair between computer-aided technologies and neoliberal urbanism will eventually provide us with a working definition of the ‘smart city’ as the assemblage of various socio-technological initiatives which seek to predict and control city living by way of remote, interconnected, and market-led forms of governance. It will also show how this concept has gained importance in recent years, becoming a buzzword for various interest groups, from neoliberal urbanism advocates to computer science and information systems experts to industry leaders and city managers.

At the end, we ask how the combination of these various rationalities and cultural constructions can be applied to a citizen-centric ‘smart city’. And further, in the following chapters: What role(s) is the citizen prescribed to enact in the ‘smart city’?

Pre-history

The prehistory of the ‘smart city’ starts with the early attempts to integrate digital computer technologies in the life of cities, and thus managing (that is, controlling, anticipating, and steering) the latter with the aid of the former. In the early 1950s, computers were first developed and used where solutions were needed to control equipment over long distances. SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems were introduced to monitor and control utility infrastructures – oil and gas pipelines, water distribution systems, electrical power grids, and railway transportation systems – and relied on personnel to manually operate buttons and analogue dials (Kitchin, Cardullo, & Di Feliciantonio, 2019). Cities began to centralise populations and functions, but the emphasis was more about scaling up infrastructure networks (usually, to regional or national levels). Utility users had a rather passive role, generally framed within the civic paternalism and hierarchical forms of governance proper of the Keynesian state, although also becoming the beneficiaries of massive public investments in infrastructural projects of large scale, typically owned by the state or its subsidiaries. Of course, computer systems were not portable and relied on machine-specific proprietary software to function: thus, early SCADA systems were independent mainframe systems with no connectivity to other computers (other than a backup mainframe). Counter-intuitively for today’s standards of off-grid security and renewed calls for partly siloed technologies (Kitchin & Dodge, 2019), SCADA technology was designed as a centralised control system: this has long influenced the collective imagination with possible grid failure, able to shut down an entire city or region functions (catastrophic blackouts, avoided derailments, hackers’ or secret services’ attacks from the Cold War scenario).

As a consequence, the goals of securitisation and control of ‘the system’ determined the future developments of informational models as more decentralised and distributed systems, thought to be more resilient to external attacks (during the Cold War represented by the atomic threat). The ARPAnet (as well as TOR, The Onion Router) have been notoriously developed by the US Defence research, and soon became national priorities. They eventually trickled down to civic implementations: for instance, the Internet. This assumed resilience of the distributed network, a ‘network of networks’ in fact, soon became the epitome of freedom from top-down cultural models, top-down systems of control, and top-down surveillance. For Hu (2015, pp. 6–7), “this model of rupture remains a seductive myth because it explains the dispersion of power through the formal qualities of the computer networks that supposedly enable it.” This set of ideas attached to decentralised systems has lasted till today, with some activists misunderstanding capitalism as necessarily attached to a centralised system rather than a model though which socioeconomic relations operate.

As Hu (2015) further suggests, “this seemingly distributed network is built on top of a layer that can only be centripetal in nature” (p. 14, original emphasis). His analysis looks closely at the economic geography of the Internet provision in the United States, from the data centres and the cabling systems. The privatisation of Internet provision and the fact that new infrastructures are layered on top of old ones, so that “virtually all traffic on the US Internet runs across the same routes established in the nineteenth century” (Hu, 2015, p. 7), determine an oligopoly in most countries (Dodge & Kitchin, 2003). In addition to this material layer, forces of centralisation have been working on the cultural lev...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 The neoliberal city: reloaded
• Part 2 Cities on the move: an outlook on policies, processes, and practices
• References
• Index