The Right to the Smart City

Paolo Cardullo, Cesare Di Feliciantonio, Rob Kitchin, Paolo Cardullo, Cesare Di Feliciantonio, Rob Kitchin

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781787691421, 9781787691407
• eBook ISBN: 9781787691414
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Planificación urbana y paisajismo

Cities around the world are pursuing a smart cities agenda. In general, these initiatives are promoted and rolled-out by governments and corporations which enact various forms of top-down, technocratic governance and reproduce neoliberal governmentality. Despite calls for the smart city agenda to be more citizen-centric and bottom-up in nature, how this translates into policy and initiatives is still weakly articulated and practiced. Indeed, there is little meaningful engagement by key stakeholders with respect to rights, citizenship, social justice, commoning, civic participation, co-creation, and how the smart city might be productively reimagined and remade. 

This book fills this lacuna by providing critical reflection on whether another smart city is possible and what such a city might look like, exploring themes such as how citizens are framed within it, the ethical implications of smart city systems, and whether injustices are embedded in city systems, infrastructures, services and their calculative practices. Contributors question whether the need for order, and the priorities of capital and property rights, trump individual and collective liberty. Ultimately considering what kind of smart city do individuals want to create, and how we create the most sustainable smart urban landscape.

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

Introduction

Since the 1950s and the birth of digital computing, the urban has become ever-more 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 well-organized epistemic community (a knowledge and policy community) and advocacy 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).

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).

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 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-for-granted, 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 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 infras...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Chapter 1 Citizenship, Justice, and the Right to the Smart City
• Part 1: Citizenship and the Commons
• Part 2: Civic Engagement, Participation and the Right to the Smart City
• Index