Smart Citizenship
Discussion
Adrian Smith & Pedro Prieto Martín:
"The smart city framing of technology and urbanism is well known (Allwinkle and Cruickshank, 2011; Caragliu et al., 2011; Marvin et al., 2015; Rabari and Storper, 2015). By inserting sensors across city infrastructures and creating digital platforms that interlink these data sources—including citizens via their mobile devices—smart city managers can use analytical techniques like Big Data to monitor and visualize urban phenomena in new ways and in real time and, so the argument goes (Caragliu et al., 2011), efficiently intervene in urban activity for the benefit of responsive smart citizens. Governance is presented largely as a managerial matter: digital tools provide neutral means for meeting apparently universal, calculable, and legitimate measures of efficiency for healthy, sustainable, and competitive cities. The smart city challenge is technical—articulating messy urban processes with platform functionality (Marvin and Luque-Ayala, 2017). Things have to become legible to the monitors; urban flows and states have to be amenable to data analysis; idiosyncratic neighborhoods have to adapt to the visualizations that characterize them; and social groups must become responsive to platform-derived interventions (Tironi and Sánchez Criado, 2015).
One of the sharpest criticisms of smart city discourse concerns the way governance is effectively ceded to public-private partnerships dominated by the corporate technology interests who install, own, and run urban platforms, and whose authoritative presence imposes a particular computational logic upon the city (Greenfield, 2013; Thrift, 2014; Vanolo, 2016; Marvin and Luque-Ayala, 2017). Criticism of platform technocracy delves into the assumptions coded into digital platforms, and it challenges the values privileged in so-called “technical” decisions that obfuscate the real politics of those decisions (Gillespie, 2010). The smart city is seen as the latest brand for neoliberal urban political economy, using digital technologies to realize competitiveness, inward investment, economic productivity, and efficiency (March and Ribera-Fumaz, 2014). Smart services are criticized for advancing corporate technology priorities, urban entrepreneurship, and imperatives in capital accumulation, at the expense of democracy and citizenship rights to the city (Kitchin et al., 2019).
Smart citizenship advocacy can be seen, in part, as legitimacy-seeking responses to smart city criticism. Citizen e-participation platforms become an alluring prospect for smart-city managers seeking to cultivate inclusion. A commercial market exists in online citizen participation services, involving start-ups and multinationals. These commercial providers offer participation as a circumscribed, time-bounded service: running citizen deliberation and voting services for clients, who receive data analysis and reports (Ghere and Rismiller, 2001; Graeff, 2018). Consistent with the smart city, vendors of these services are contracted to provide a uniform technological template for citizen participation.
Existing research, however, indicates the democratic quality of these platforms needs careful scrutiny in terms of their capacity to actively challenge power (Cardullo and Kitchin, 2019). Studies of smart citizen policies and projects find citizen inclusion to be a shallow invitation (Vanolo, 2016; Kitchin et al., 2019). Initiatives envisage citizens as either passive, compliant participants in a given process, or, at best, entrepreneurial contributors to smart services (Cardullo and Kitchin, 2018). Active, autonomous citizenship is largely absent (Joss et al., 2017).
Citizens are to be steered, nudged, controlled; they can browse, consume, and act. If there is civic engagement, it is in the form of a participant, tester, or player who provides feedback or suggestions, rather than being a proposer, co-creator, decision-maker, or leader. (Kitchin et al., 2019: 11)
It suggests the motivation is not so much citizenship, let alone democracy, but rather self-interested acknowledgement from developers of the benefits of user-centered design in the successful implementation of digital technology projects. Questions about control, representation, participation, and democracy remain unaddressed (de Hoop et al., 2019)." (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10630732.2020.1786337)