Introduction
Like much of the European South, Barcelona was hit hard by the “Great Recession” of 2009. The longer-term toll of the crisis could be measured in much the same way as elsewhere – in terms of rising joblessness, draconian cuts to public services, and so forth – but what really singled out post-crisis Barcelona and its particular experience of austerity was both the depth of its housing crisis, in particular, and the visibility, rebelliousness, and success of the anti-austerity movement it provoked. While the banking system was rescued by central government, homeowners across Spain were put under extreme duress from 2009 – a problem exacerbated by the idiosyncrasies of Spanish law. There were a shocking 93,731 court-ordered evictions in the province of Barcelona alone during the period 2008 to 2019 (Observatori DESC, 2020, p. 7), and there certainly could have been many more were it not for a popular resistance movement spearheaded by the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH) (García-Lamarca, 2017), an organisation which today claims to have prevented more than 4,000 evictions nationwide from 2009 until 2018. But what is also remarkable about this movement is how some of its key protagonists have since played a significant role in forming an entirely new citizen-led electoral platform in Barcelona and, after electoral success in 2015 and 2019, in leading the city’s municipal government in the push back against several years of elite-imposed austerity.
This platform, named Barcelona en Comú (“Barcelona in Common”, henceforth BComú), has been touted by the international left as an example for the reinvigoration of municipal feminist-socialism in times of crisis and austerity (Shea Baird, 2017). It has been heralded as a significant experiment in radical democracy, in which the smart city agenda in particular – one that critics have associated with technocratic and palliative measures to “vaccinate” citizens against the effects of “austerity urbanism”, inequality and ecological degradation (Kaika, 2017a; Pollio, 2016) – is being fundamentally re-purposed. For Cardullo and Kitchin (2019), Barcelona has today become the referent for “presently attempting to formulate and implement a different vision of a smart city and smart citizenship”, and for its attempt to “repoliticise the smart city and to shift its creation and control away from private interests and the state toward grassroots, civic movements and social innovation” (p. 11).
This chapter examines the evolution of the “Barcelona Model” of smart city transformation in the context of crisis and austerity. We trace this evolution from an especially dogmatic vision of the smart city, under a centre-right city council, to its radical repurposing under the auspices of BComú. We pay particular attention to BComú’s objectives to harness digital platform technologies to enhance participative democracy, and its agenda to secure the right to the (smart) city. While stressing the progressive intent of these aims, we also acknowledge the challenge of going beyond the repurposing of smart technologies so as to engender new and radical forms of subjectivity among citizens themselves; a necessary basis for any social-ecological revolution.
On worlding and provincialising the rebel city
[W]orlding seeks to recover and restore the vast array of global strategies that are being staged at the urban scale around the world. In some cases, these urban experiments are closely tied to elite aspirations and the making of world-class cities; in other cases, they are instances of worlding from below … as laboring bodies circulate in search of survival, livelihood and hope.
(Roy, 2011, p. 10)
Having previously drawn on the work of Henri Lefebvre in order to critique how representational models for knowledge-based urban transformation have long been cultivated and operationalised in Barcelona (Charnock & Ribera-Fumaz, 2011), we are especially interested in how Roy (2011) also draws on Lefebvre to elaborate her own appraisal of how urban planning is implicated in the production of space; a process determined (but not wholly so) by capital accumulation, and mediated in large part by “the signs and symbols deployed by experts as they seek to control and order space” (pp. 8, 9). Roy (2011) highlights how experts’ modelling increasingly relies on “referenced urbanism” (p. 10), which too often submits real places and labouring bodies to the violence of abstraction as soon as the concretisation of technocratically conceived planning models sets in motion the bulldozing and dispossessions too often associated with planned urbanisation. But Roy (2011) also explains how the circulation of models is “complex” and “disjunctured”: referencing can be both conformist and progressive in content; it can represent the results of urban transformations partially or selectively; and, consequently, it can provoke openings for debate about the questions: “who plans?” and “for whom do they plan?” (p. 12). These questions are especially pertinent to the recent experience of the repurposing of the smart city agenda in post-crisis Barcelona. Ubiquitously referenced among worlding urbanisms, and also as the paragon of how strategic planning based on stridently entrepreneurial forms of urbanism leads to “opportunities to pocket monopoly rents galore’ and lures ‘more and more homogenising multinational commodification in its wake” (Harvey, 2012, pp. 104–105), this repurposed Barcelona Model now circulates as a referent for those looking for “transformative political mobilisation to create … a humanising urbanism” (Kitchin et al., 2019, p. 17).
For Kitchin (2019) and other critical urban scholars, this new model of “smart citizenship” offers a re-envisioning “that seems more grounded in the hopes and politics of the ‘right to the city’ agenda” (p. 17); an agenda influenced by another of Lefebvre’s main ideas (Lefebvre, 1996). While the worlding literatures together recognise that “cities are rife with worlding projects, each vying to be realised and each having different chances of success” (Baker & Ruming, 2015, p. 66), the right to the city demand has become something of a rallying slogan for the new international municipalist movement (Gilmartin, 2018). This is understandable: focusing on the right to the city as an explicit “horizon” might indeed “clear a path”, to use a couple of Lefebvre’s most oft-used phrases, through the stifling and disjunctured melee of “critical thought, reformist ideology, [and] leftist opposition” (Lefebvre, 2003, p. 161) induced by vying forms of urbanism. The problem, however, is that “the right to the city is an empty signifier. Everything depends on who gets to fill it with meaning”; as such, “it can never be an end in itself” (Harvey, 2012, pp. xv, xviii). Critical urban scholars should, therefore, be attentive to how the right to the city rhetoric is endowed with meaning as it is adopted by circulating models; they should question, in particular, the opacity of the category “citizenship” as it figures in various right to the city manifestos, especially when the rights attached to citizenship – and of “smart citizenship” especially – sit all too easily with those of the productive and juridical subject upon which the reproduction of capital through production and exchange depends. In other words, it is always worth asking whether a worlding project claiming to advance the right to the city at least acknowledges the class relations between capital and labour inherent to the production of space (even if it is also recognised that there are limits to what might be done to transform these relations at the local scale), as well as the struggle for reimagined forms of citizenship; and the intimate relation between these two struggles. A city that adopted a project that went some way toward defining the right to the city in this way, and with it redefining the idea of the urban commons on the basis of the collective retention of value by those who produce it, would truly epitomise the “rebel city” (Harvey, 2012, p. 87).
The provincialisation literature (see Sheppard et al., 2013) yields a further line of questioning worth asking of particular worlding projects, and even those that purport to re-centre and, to some extent, re-signify the meaning of citizenship. This questioning is focused not on the terms of citizenship, nor on the rights of capitalists to command the production and appropriation of value in the city, but on the political subjectivity of the citizen herself; more precisely, on the “anthropological production” of that subjectivity (Dardot & Laval, 2017, p. 12) as digital technologies become so integral to everyday life and, importantly, as citizens exercise their claims to rights through the Internet (Isin & Ruppert, 2015). Here, the problem can be initially posed in terms of whether and how citizen’s digital rights are both inscribed and enacted in specific contexts. Smart citizenship projects, like those we alluded to earlier, can certainly claim to inscribe rights, but by no means guarantee enactment on a universal and inclusive basis (Lemanski, 2019, p. 10). But even in contexts where there is a palpable and widespread zeal for such projects as distributing citizen sensing kits to monitor noise pollution, or for platform-enabled participatory democracy among citizens, a further question can be posed: whether the use of digital platform technologies to “include” citizens merely cultivates a form of governmentality, or “smartmentality” (Vanolo, 2014), in which a great many citizens gain fulfilment from playing a functional role within the smart city while continuing about their erstwhile daily lives as entrepreneurial economic – and docile political – subjects (Datta, 2018, pp. 411–413). In focusing on “environmentality”, or of “governance through the milieu”, Gabrys (2016, p. 191) certainly finds this to be a defining feature of a great many smart city design proposals, wherein “participation involves computational responsiveness and is coextensive with actions of monitoring and managing one’s relations to environments” (p. 196), and to the degree that such proposals rely on citizens as “ambividuals: ambient and malleable urban operators that are expressions of computer environments” (p. 201).
In what follows, we want to pose similar questions of the Barcelona case; questions that resonate with a concern about leftist, circulating worlding projects that purport to reactivate citizens and their rights: namely, whether new techno-political imaginaries and socio-ecological practices necessarily guarantee relief from, or control over, the production of space (in which flows of capital play a determinate role); and whether they awaken among citizens a sense of their own productive and political subjectivity, as well as a more radical concern for their environment, that runs counter to the reproduction of entrepreneurial, docile, and ambividual conceptions of citizenship.
The apogee of smart urbanism in Barcelona: The ontologisation of the city
As explained in more detail elsewhere (March & Ribera-Fumaz, 2018), the smart city imaginary was fully embraced by Barcelona’s city council with the arrival of Mayor Xavier Trias, of the centre-right Convergència i Unió coalition, in 2011. This vision was characterised by a particularly insincere and vacuous notion of the citizen as a social constituent. The understanding of urbanism and planning as “worlding practice” helps us to understand the degree to which the Trias administration saw fit to convert to and preach the smart city gospel, and the particular significance of the category of “the citizen” within it. And Roy’s (2011) recourse to the critical theory of Henri Lefebvre is instructive here. Lefebvre (2003) deemed urbanism to be ideologically precise because it aspires (consciously or naively) to “control the process of urbanisation and urban practice and subject [that process] to its order” (p. 151). Lefebvre also expressed grave concern about what he termed “information ideology” and those who would conceive of “computerised daily life”: the vision of an “electronic Agora and the disturbing project of a technological extension of the ‘audit’ … capable of being extended to political and police control of spaces much vaster than the enterprise” (Lefebvre, 2008, pp. 148–149). As several other critical commentaries have argued, as a form of instrumental reason and “computational urbanism” the imaginary of the smart city is especially ideological (Cugurullo, 2018; Marvin & Luque-Ayala, 2017). As an increasingly alluring and hegemonic form of urbanism, it has come to play an active role in the worlding of cities even while “these ideologues … refuse to concede they are presenting, or representing, a tendentious political project. To them, the project seems to follow logically from the technology” (Lefebvre, 2008, p. 149). Lefebvre gave this species of ideologue – enthralled by the power of robots, by “the superiority of machines”, and by the capacity for computers to learn autonomously from their environment and therefore to program the urban – a name of their own: the cybernantrope (Lefebvre, 1972, pp. 164–165).
If there was ever a vision of smart city transformation that portrayed its ideological character it is that which came from within the Trias administration: “We imagined the city as a mobile phone: why can’t we have a city that works with an operating software based on standards that interact with the hardware (whatever it is) and software (any app)?” (Josep Ramon Ferrer, former director of Barcelona’s smart city strategy, quoted in Carrasco et al., 2017, p. 1). The mobile phone, as Arboleda (2019, pp. 243–44) argues, is perhaps the flagship technological artefact of the fourth machine age; it is, as Aschoff (2015) argues, “both a machine and a commodity. Its production is a map of global power, logistics, and exploitation. Its use shapes and reflects the perpetual confrontation between the totalising drives of capital and the resistance of the rest of us”. Aside from the unfortunate association of the smart city with this artefact, the “city as software” vision also encapsulates the somewhat “cybernantropic” notion that urban processes can – and should – be ontologised. In urban settings, ontology engineering is said to be able to assist in the reconciliation of “interoperability and cooperation issues between databases with urban information from different sources” (Martins et al., 2012, p. 507). The allure of rendering urban processes and data machine-processable is therefore enhanced once the “data inoperability barrier” is transcended. That is, once any given city can be reduced to its most generic readable attributes, and on that basis can be subjected to surveil-lance and control by means of the collection and processing of information. As Lefebvre (2003) notes, “the urbanist amasses data and information” (p. 161). The instrumental appeal of being able to read and control the city as a database is con...
