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Smart Cities as Democratic Ecologies
Daniel Araya
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Smart Cities as Democratic Ecologies
Daniel Araya
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About This Book
The concept of the 'smart city' as the confluence of urban planning and technological innovation has become a predominant feature of public policy discourse. Despite its expanding influence, however, there is little consensus on the precise meaning of a 'smart city'. One reason for this ambiguity is that the term means different things to different disciplines. For some, the concept of the 'smart city' refers to advances in sustainability and green technologies. For others, it refers to the deployment of information and communication technologies as next generation infrastructure. This volume focuses on a third strand in this discourse, specifically technology driven changes in democracy and civic engagement. In conjunction with issues related to power grids, transportation networks and urban sustainability, there is a growing need to examine the potential of 'smart cities' as 'democratic ecologies' for citizen empowerment and user-driven innovation. What is the potential of 'smart cities' to become platforms for bottom-up civic engagement in the context of next generation communication, data sharing, and application development? What are the consequences of layering public spaces with computationally mediated technologies? Foucault's notion of the panopticon, a metaphor for a surveillance society, suggests that smart technologies deployed in the design of 'smart cities' should be evaluated in terms of the ways in which they enable, or curtail, new urban literacies and emergent social practices.
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Gestión medioambiental1
Smart Cities and the Network Society: Toward Commons-Driven Governance
Since the launch of technology-driven infrastructure projects like IBM’s Smart Planet and Cisco’s Smart Communities, interest in smart city planning has grown substantially. Spanning a wide range of discussions on urbanization, the concept of the smart city overlaps a wide-ranging discussion on contemporary socioeconomic development. Despite its expanding influence, however, there is little consensus on the precise meaning of a smart city. While for some, the smart city refers to advances in sustainability and green technologies, for others, it denotes the deployment of information and communication technologies (ICTs) as next-generation infrastructure. One reason for the ambiguity is that the concept of the smart city means different things to different disciplines. Indeed, the push for smart cities has introduced a host of social policy concerns linked to neoliberal urban planning. Advancing on a corporate discourse that reimagines ICT platforms as cybernetic management systems, smart cities are now advertised as the future of globalization. Building on a critique of this discourse, this chapter focuses on a third strand in the discussion on smart cities. Linking rising demands for participatory democracy to ongoing discussions on smart cities, I explore the political ramifications of network technologies for reshaping democratic government.
Beyond smart cities
Given the unprecedented migration of much of the world’s population into cities, it only stands to reason that cities have become central to public policy discussions across a host of social, economic, and political challenges. Global urbanization has swelled from 746 million in 1950 to 3.9 billion in 2014. By 2050, 66 percent of the world’s population are expected to live in cities (United Nations, 2014) with most of this explosive growth occurring in developing countries.
Perhaps the central feature of the discourse on smart urbanization is the desirability of technologies to monitor and guide human behavior. Indeed, the “smartness” of the smart city lies in the circulation of data through vast webs of hardware and software. This includes feedback systems rooted in an “increasingly effective combination of digital telecommunication networks (the nerves), ubiquitously embedded intelligence (the brains), sensors and tags (the sensory organs), and software (the knowledge and cognitive competence)” (Chourabi et al., 2012: 2290).
Smart cities and the digital networks that link them together are best understood as emergent automation systems supported by interdependent subsystems of scaled technological and human intelligence. Where industrial cities were simply “skeleton and skin,” the smart city is envisioned as a living organism containing “an artificial nervous system” (Chourabi et al., 2012: 2290). Building on layers of fixed Internet protocol networks and wireless satellite and mobile networks, smart cities are designed to leverage massive amounts of data generated by billions of Internet and mobiles devices and services. This includes:
1Machine-to-machine (M2M) communication across mobile devices
2Large-scale data processing via “Cloud Computing” in the processing and display of data
3Data analytics and “Big Data” that correlate and interpret flows of knowledge and information
One of the key challenges confronting the ideology and theory of the smart city, however, is its top-down design. This includes a long-standing critique of the outsized influence of multinational corporations on contemporary urbanization. Indeed, the very idea of smart cities has been criticized for putting an excessive weight on economic values as the sole driver of urban development. Sassen (1996: 210), for example, calls attention to the ways in which neoliberal policies have used cities to concentrate and manage capital accumulation. As she observes, cities have become focused expressions of extreme inequality, marginality, and discrimination. Moreover, Harvey (1973) makes the point that neoliberal urbanization has only exacerbated social hierarchies of race and class in the structuring of urban spaces.
Emerging in response to smart urbanization is a counternarrative in favor of open and loosely coupled coordination systems. Indeed, in the face of expanding digital surveillance systems (both public and private), questions have surfaced about the ethics of smart cities. This includes a growing interest in shifting the discussion on smart cities “from the promotion and administration of services to the liberal democratic governance of their applications” (Allwinkle and Cruickshank, 2011: 9). Greenfield (2013), for example, suggests that smart cities should be redesigned to leverage open and free data sharing in the context of a new and broader calculus on civic technologies.
Contradictions of the network society
When examining the contours of smart cities, one needs to consider questions related to citizen empowerment vis-à-vis a network society. Alongside questions of open data and increased transparency, for example, are new possibilities for strengthening the capacities of communities and stakeholders to have increased political agency. Beyond the era of patriarchal power structures fixed to command-and-control leadership, network systems now challenge us to rethink the institutions and practices that underlie older notions of representative democracy. What is becoming obvious is that the laterally scaling practices that emerge from distributed networks are forcing a change in the constitution and meaning of “government.” This is important because cities are increasingly becoming embedded in post-Westphalian era in which city-to-city cooperation can often supersede state-to-state cooperation (Campbell, 2012).
As Castells (2000: 500) notes, networked social structures now constitute the social morphology of our time. Linked to an expanded notion of government accountability is an argument for the use of digital tools and technologies that can enhance participatory democracy (Obama, 2009; Osimo, 2008). When considering the shifting architecture of democracy through the medium of ICTs, we see that networks provide an important means to understand both changes in the practice of democracy and an expansion in the notion of participation. This allows for a deeper understanding of the possible convergence between the distributive logic of ICT networks and the bottom-up logic of democratic self-governance.
In truth this is about more than smart cities; it is about the democratic ecologies that engage social capital in the delicate building of community. In addition to smart technologies, we should add the growing importance of social capital as a key feature of smart cities in providing the connective tissue through which knowledge can be accessed, adapted, and shared (Putnam, 2002). Most important, this bridges discussions on transparency in policy making with the web of smart technologies that are now beginning to reshape the fabric of our cities. Put differently, the value of smart cities exists beyond globalized business models or university campus environments. The value of smart cities is found in their capacity to leverage scaled collaboration between citizens as agents of creativity and civic participation.
The real basis for smart cities, in other words, should begin with peoples and communities. Beyond questions of infrastructure and technology, the key to truly smart cities is an enhanced capacity to support social capital and social agency. This implies a kind of development and growth that is supported by engaged citizens, civic institutions, and a wide range of policy actors across a digitally mediated networked commons.
Building smart cities from the bottom up
Building on affordances in sensor technologies, data analysis, and urban design, new policies and planning have the potential to leverage newer and richer forms of democratic engagement. Indeed, the growth of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks that augment next-generation communication, data sharing, and value creation have in fact opened a wide array of new opportunities for bottom-up civic engagement across a range of public services. The obvious question is: What is the potential of smart cities with emerging economies to become platforms for bottom-up civic engagement in the context of next-generation communication, data sharing, and application development? In conjunction with issues related to power grids, transportation networks, and water distribution systems, there is an acute need to examine the potential of smart cities as “networked ecologies” for citizen empowerment. Neo-Schumpeterian theories on techno-economic transformation (Perez, 2002), for example, suggest that an ongoing evolution in the relationship between innovation and social practice is fomenting a paradigm shift in the design and management of cities (Table 1.1).
Many now argue that the affordances of digital technologies are remaking the very notion of democracy. As Castells (2009) observes, the rise of socially mediated ICTs has sparked new social movements that have the capacity to build multiscale networks across a wide spectrum of sociopolitical environments Indeed, O’Reilly (2013) makes the case that automation is preferable to government incompetence. Using sensor technologies and ICT networks to reinforce government oversight, he argues that smart technologies could begin to “reduce the amount of regulation while actually increasing the amount of oversight and production of desirable outcomes” (p. 293). In his view,
Table 1.1Techno-economic paradigm shifts.
| Technological Revolution | Paradigm | Year | Core Country | Initiating Revolution |
| First | The Industrial Revolution | 1771 | Britain | Arkwright’s mill in Cromford |
| Second | Age of Steam and Railway | 1829 | Britain (spreading to Europe and U.S.) | The steam engine in the Liverpool-Manchester railway |
| Third | Age of Steel, Electricity and Heavy Engineering | 1875 | U.S. and Germany | The Carnegie Bessemer steel plant in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania |
| Fourth | Age of Oil, the Automobile and Mass Production | 1908 | U.S. and later Europe | Ford Model-T in Detroit, Michigan |
| Fifth | The Information Revolution | 1971 | U.S. (spreading to Europe and Asia) | The Intel microprocessor in Santa Clara, California |
Source: Based on Perez (2002).
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