Equality in the City

Imaginaries of the Smart Future

Susan Flynn, Graham Cairns

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781789387612, 9781789384642
• eBook ISBN: 9781789384666
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

This collection considers the city of the future and its relationship to its citizens. It responds to the foregrounding of digital technologies in the management of urban spaces, and addresses some of the ways in which technologies are changing the places in which we live and the way we live in them.

A broad range of interdisciplinary contributors reflect on the global agenda of smart cities, the ruptures in smart discourse and the spaces where we might envisage a more user-friendly and bottom-up version of the smart future. The authors adopt an equality studies lens to assess how we might conceive of a future smart city and what fissures need to be addressed to ensure the smart future is equitable. In the project of envisaging this, they consider various approaches and arguments for equality in the imagined future city, putting people at the forefront of our discussions, rather than technologies.

In the smart discourse, hard data, technological solutions, global and national policy and macro issues tend to dominate. Here, the authors include ethnographic evidence, rather than rely on the perspective of the smart technologies' experts, so that the arena for meaningful social development of the smart future can develop.

The international contributors respond purposefully to the smart imperative, to the disruptive potential of smart technologies in our cities: issues of change, design, austerity, ownership, citizenship and equality. The collection examines the pull between equality and engagement in smart futures. To date, the topic of smart cities has been approached from the perspective of digital media, human geography and information communications technology. This collection, however, presents a different angle. It seeks to open new discussions about what a smart future could do to bridge divides, to look at governmentality in the context of (in)equality in the city. The collection is an approachable discussion of the issues that surround smart digital futures and the imagined digital cities of the future. It is aspirational in that it seeks to imagine a truly egalitarian city of the future and to ponder how that might come about.

Primary readership will be academics and students in social science, architecture, urban planning, government employees, and those working or studying in social justice and equality studies

Section 1

Urban Crisis

1

Locked Down in the Neo-Liberal
Smart City
A-Systemic Technologies in Crisis

Eleanor Dare, University of Cambridge

Pre the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the intended premise of this chapter was that it would analyse the relationship between the overdetermination of virtual reality (VR) and neo-liberal smart city rhetoric, outlining the limitations and potential of these spatial ideologies and their supporting epistemic foundations; in particular, critiquing the entrepreneurial solutionism enmeshed with technocratic rationality, namely the abstracted information-processing paradigms of both a priori and machine-learnt modelling, which are present in both the overdetermination of VR technology and the neo-liberal smart city. These paradigms are irreconcilable with equality or social justice, they are entangled with a narrow, normative, a-systemic, uncritically entrepreneurial construct of subjectivity and agency. The COVID-19 pandemic has made the connection between information-processing paradigms, technological overdetermination and smart city rhetoric increasingly clear, not least, in the failure of the smart city and its mechanisms (a-systemic modelling, the internet of things, pervasive surveillance and a bedrock of entrepreneurial hackathon culture) to provide equality of access to health care and key resources within (and without) the pandemic. In light of these failings, how might we formulate alternative imaginaries for technology and its relationship to wealth and resource distribution, to support a lasting reimagination of cities and of ‘smartness’? Taking the example of the Morecambe Bay Poverty Truth Commission, the Design Justice Network, Data for Black Lives and Our Data Bodies (ODB), the chapter explores both the failings of the smart city project while highlighting alternative constructions of smartness and smart subjectivity.

Introduction

This chapter was written before and during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. It was largely written while ‘locked down’ in London, between 24 March and May 2020. A lockdown or mass quarantine, in this context and at this point (late April 2020) means that the state has enforced an emergency protocol to prevent the spread of disease, in which citizens cannot leave their homes except to exercise once a day, shop for essentials or travel to seek urgent medical treatment. Universities, schools (except for key workers), non-essential shops, pubs, restaurants and other spaces have closed or moved their services and communities online. How then do the technologies and ideological constructs that form the smart city play out in the day-to-day lived experience of a pandemic and UK (and indeed worldwide) lockdown?

While it is also important to write and research significant events with a ‘long view’ and with the benefit of hindsight, there is an urgency to this situation that has surfaced many key aspects and failings of the smart city concept, as well as surfacing different forms of ‘smartness’, which this chapter will discuss. It is arguably both contrived and impossible for me to focus on anything else whilst in the midst of such a crisis, in which a-systemic technologies have largely failed to support equality of access to key resources.

This chapter analyses the failure of the neo-liberal smart city, which, under the crisis of a pandemic, has become viscerally prescient. However, as Tyler (2020: 2704) reminds us, since 2010, the austerity state has been characterized by

the inability of increasingly large swathes of people to access the basic resources of shelter, food, heating and healthcare which they require to adequately sustain the lives of themselves, their children, and disabled and elderly relatives. What this state-crafted, government-planned and-managed programme of ‘disaster capitalism’ has left in its wake is an immense crisis of social reproduction.

The COVID-19 crisis is exacerbated by both austerity and the privatization of infrastructure that was tethered to it. The rise of hackathons and competitions to address the pandemic, in the midst of the crisis, as well as the escalation of virtual spatiality and an upturn in the VR hype cycle, are analysed and connected here, while alternative ideas and practices of ‘smartness’ are proposed. The chapter evaluates the hyperbole and abstracted framings of what constitutes a city by the likes of Intel, Cisco, IBM, Siemens, Amazon and Google, who have benefited from the privatization of services that was key to the austerity agenda. The urbanism modelled by the smart city as supported by big-tech corporations and neo-liberal states, is contrasted here with the city as it is lived, the city of AbdouMaliq Simone, Sun Ra, Design Justice, Data for Black Lives, ODB and the Morecambe Bay Poverty Truth Commission; in other words, the city from the ground up, far from the neo-platonic idealizations of technocratic ideology. The data science that underpins the smart city can be understood

as an echo of the neo-platonism that informed early modern science in the work of Copernicus and Galileo. That is, it resonates with a belief in a hidden mathematical order that is ontologically superior to the one available to our everyday senses.

(McQuillan 2017: 4)

Given this ‘view from nowhere’, how can the redaction of situated, lived experience implicit in neo-platonic data science hope to deliver equality in the city? Furthermore, it is appropriate to question whether that was ever the intention of the smart city initiative.

Unprecedented efficiency, connectivity and social harmony?

Back in 2017, in the paper ‘A City Is Not a Computer’, Mattern (2017: n.pag.) wrote that if we believe in the marketing hype,

we’re on the cusp of an urban future in which embedded sensors, ubiquitous cameras and beacons, networked smartphones, and the operating systems that link them all together, will produce unprecedented efficiency, connectivity, and social harmony. We’re transforming the idealized topology of the open web and internet of things into urban form.

At the time of writing in 2020, in lockdown because of the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of us are living in circumstances in which infrastructure becomes visible because it is broken (Star and Bowker 2000: 35); equality, or rather, inequality in the city, becomes, if not more important than ever before, more exposed. In lockdown, a series of systemic interdependencies, from food access, to employment conditions, health care, childcare and transport are now highly visible; likewise, wealth distribution, in terms of access to basic care and services, even to open space and sunlight, make the issue of resource and access inequality salient in more minds and bodies than ever before. Some of us with elderly parents find them making connections between the scarcity of the pandemic and their childhood memories of war-time rationing and disruption, while others, such as Roy (2020: n.pag.), point out that the impact of the pandemic on the affluent is the norm for millions of poor people, that the pandemic ‘is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years’.

Tufecki (2020: n.pag.), has highlighted the ‘inability to think about complex systems and their dynamics’ as a key failing of neo-liberal policies during the COVID-19 pandemic, the failure to ‘understand that complex systems defy simplistic reductionism’. The accusation that smart cities are simplistic and abstracted, or rather, idealized, is one of Greenfield’s (2013) main criticisms. According to Greenfield (2013: 273), developers of smart cities ‘think of the urban environment primarily as an abstract terrain for business operations’. Greenfield (2013: 281) uses the term ‘pure background’ to describe the abstracted way ‘designers of informatic systems have historically treated the environment in which their products and services are used’. Mattern (2017: n.pag.) points out the long historical trajectory of the city as an informational site, but also highlights how ‘the idea of the city as an information-processing machine has in recent years manifested as a cultural obsession with urban sites of data storage and transmission’.

There are a number of competing definitions of the smart city, ranging from Deakin and Al Waer (2011) to Caragliu et al. (2009), with varying degrees of emphasis for human and cultural factors, but as Shelton et al. (2014: 14) state, the smart city is ‘a somewhat nebulous idea which seeks to apply the massive amounts of digital data collected about society as a means to rationalise the planning and management of cities’. The concept is not new. Jeremy Bentham’s early nineteenth-century vision of technologically mediated colonies or ‘industry houses’, inspired by slavery, envisaged the ‘enserfment of the entirety of England’s poor in a system which would combine the panoptical prison factory with the colonial plantation system’ to form what Bentham termed ‘a domestic colony’ (Tyler 2020: 1113). The connection to the smart city of today is evident in his plans for ‘introducing a system of what he termed “identity washing” (using chemical dyes to mark the faces of inmates) as a surveillance technology for managing the pauper labour force in his proposed domestic colony of industry houses’ (Tyler 2020: 1128).

Today’s smart cities are essentially sites of computational and ideological optimization, premised on the idea that its locations, flows and subjects can be understood via the information-processing paradigm that underpins big data and artificial intelligence, ‘as if they could reduce urban planning to algorithms’ (Mattern 2017: n.pag.). The COVID-19 pandemic viscerally reveals the wilfully ‘unseeing’ smart city imperatives of Western, industrialized nations. ‘Unseeing’ (Roy 2014: 33) is Roy’s term for what dominant discourse chooses to omit; for example, the systematic erasure of cast and racist determinism from Indian textbooks. Tyler (2020) uses Roy’s construct of unseeing to articulate the normalization of austerity in the United Kingdom, which is systematically disavowed by a government committed to austerity, to tax breaks and privatization of the welfare state.

States and corporations that have financed smart city initiatives are, above all, free-market states, keen to deploy an array of technologies within an entrepreneurial teleology that has benefited from austerity and the decimation of the welfare state, from the privatization of services and infrastructure. Kitchin et al. (2018: 1) identify a strong relationship between the smart city and hackathons, manifest in the ‘belief that urban issues are solvable through technological fixes, with hackathons leveraging the innovation capacity of a crowd of talented, technically literate citizens to practice what Morozov (2013) terms “solutionism” ’. The COVID-19 pandemic, far from being a time for revaluation and reflection on the failings of technology to provide actionable insights and functioning supply chains for citizens in the United States and the United Kingdom, is instead another business or promotion opportunity, evidenced by the myriad hackathons, such as the COVID-19 global hackathon, advertised as follows:

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said yesterday that his company, Microsoft and other tech companies, including Slack, Pinterest and Twitter, are lending their support to the COVID-19 global hackathon. The hackathon invites software engineers to build software solutions that drive social impact, with the aim of tackling some of the challenges related to the current coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

(Mott 2020: n.pag.)

The very corporations that have actively supported climate change denial lobbies (such as Google; see Cuthbertson 2019), and have been slow to act on the dissemination of neo-Nazi hate (Facebook, Google, Twitter), while also supporting Cambridge Analytica to subvert democratic processes in favour of far-right populist politics (Facebook; see Cadwalladr 2018), are at the same time positioning themselves as the providers of ‘solutions’ that will bring positive social impact. The expectation is that the putative ‘solutions’ produced via such hackathons are then ‘commercialised and scaled up into marketable products and implemented through the sale/licensing to, or public-private partnerships (PPPs) with, city administrations’ (Kitchin et al. 2018: 1). But smart cities, as conceived of by big-tech firms, above all, optimize individuals to ‘reproduce neoliberal and entrepreneurial labour’ (Kitchin et al. 2018: 1) and technocratic rationality, characterized by employment precarity and deregulation. This chimes with Irani’s (2015: 3) analysis of hackathons as sites of rehearsal for ‘an entrepreneurial citizenship celebrated in transnational cultures that orient toward Silicon Valley for models of social change’. But, as Irani also points out, the prototypes developed during hackathons rarely go beyond the hackathon, they a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Epigraph
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Section 1 Urban Crisis
• Section 2 City Design
• Section 3 Spatial Humanism
• Contributors
• Back Cover