Rob Kitchin - The Right to the Smart City

uh thanks very much uh for the invitation to uh talk to you um so yeah i said i'd talk about the the right to the smart uh city um i'm really i'm gonna be talking around a whole series of kind of related issues around in this kind of sorry sorry someone else talking there sorry so i'm really going to be talking about notions of kind of uh citizenship social justice rights equity democracy and so on in in relation to the in relation to the smart city uh so most of you will be familiar with the smart city i mean at a basic level it's really around kind of managing and governing cities using technologies across a whole series of different domains so there's a whole suite of different technologies that end up falling under the smart city umbrella and these are just i guess a selection of them so anything from city operating systems performance management urban dashboards uh into kind of security and emergency services so things like uh control rooms digital surveillance predictive policing coordinated emergency response into transport with intelligent transport systems bike share real-time passenger information smart parking logistics and so on into energy and smart meters smart grids across into environments and sensor networks down to the level of buildings with building management systems and into homes and into the civic domain with various kinds of apps built various kinds of civic media open data and so on so quite a broad selection of different types of technologies all being used to kind of manage government uh cities and that's led into a kind of a discursive argument about the kind of the promise of smart urbanism and cities and what these technologies can potentially uh do once they're embedded within uh governance uh structures and into the fabric of the economy and our everyday lives so this is a typical kind of slide uh setting up a kind of discursive argument as to the promise of smart city so in relation to kind of producing a smart economy around innovation productivity efficiency competitiveness and so on across into smart environments around sustainability and resilience and smart mobility around kind of intelligent transport efficiency interoperability smart government and improving the uh transparency accountability evidence informed decision making better service delivery into smart living and improving our quality of life improving safety security being able to better manage our risk and into kind of the personal level in terms of enabling people to be more informed more creative and fostering inclusivity empowerment participation and so on so that's kind of the range of discursive arguments that have been driving the smart city agenda uh on the counter side are the kind of the critiques of this uh notion of smart societies and there's a kind of a reasonably well developed literature uh setting out the kind of perils around uh some of these technologies and how they're being used and how they're being implemented and deployed some of these are kind of more conceptual some of them more kind of practical um political so the way in which it kind of frames the city as a system of systems rather than a set of places so it kind of sets out this kind of idea the city is kind of noble uh rationable rational steerable in some way that we can kind of get these data levers that we can kind of pull and steer and control how the city is run as opposed to it being a very kind of uh complex and full of kind of competing interests and it's quite a complicated system and so on and and it's very difficult to steer uh through these kind of technical technocratic levers uh there's quite a strong claim to some the tech and the ideas behind it being objective neutral non-ideological as opposed to being thoroughly political in terms of their objectives and the ways in which they work there's a critique around the ways in which these technologies kind of serve a neoliberal political economy and a kind of corporatization of governance so this is kind of a marketization privatization of city services and governance mechanisms through these kinds of technologies um some critique around the idea of this is a kind of the the city as part of the accumulation strategy so the city is no longer the place where the markets take place the city itself is a market and the and it's kind of facilitating this kind of a new form of entrepreneurial urbanism which is based around a kind of a tech driven version of that so we we kind of had that in planning back in the late 80s early 1990s then kind of led into creative cities and now we're into smart cities and they're all they're all part of a trajectory of kind of entrepreneurial urbanism which feeds obviously offer that notion of the neoliberal political economy that this sets up the ways in which we manage cities uh uh through a kind of a technocratic form so this is a very instrumental way of how we address city problems so set up a kind of technological solutionism uh where where technology is seen as the primary means to deal with a set of urban uh problems and issues as opposed to other forms of um interventions whether they're policy or political or legal or community development or whatever it whatever it might be and they set up quite rigid ways in which we we do this this is not kind of participatory it's not kind of interactive and so on um it sets up a particular notion of neoliberal citizenship and it also shifts governmentality from uh kind of discipline to control so it it reconfigures uh the kind of rights entitlements and so on on citizens and the ways in which they're governed and managed and i'll talk about that a bit more the smart city it's a concept itself has kind of been critiqued as being quite a historical and a spatial that kind of sits outside of a kind of a wider understanding and historical understanding of cities and it treats them as if they're all the same so i can take this piece of technology this control room and i can drop it into any city on the planet and it won't make any difference so it tends to ignore kind of history governance uh politics political administration uh all those kinds of things um that make cities what they what what they are as opposed to a system of systems which is quite um an abstract view of the city uh anything that you put software in network you basically make hackable uh so you potentially make them brittle and there are kind of security issues here around the data for security issues around the technology and there's kind of a you know there's a slight irony around technology that's meant to improve resilience itself has issues around resilience and there have been a number of examples of bitter city city technologies being hacked the most recent ones really has been a whole series of ransomware attacks on bits of u.s smart city infrastructure for example a whole load of cities well over 100 cities have been hit for it for that in the u.s kind of reinforced it a lot this technology reinforces power relations and inequalities a lot of it's to do with social and spatial sorting it's to do with profiling is to do i'll go through some of these as well and they basically you know there's a whole series of kind of profound social political uh ethical effects related to these technologies so on the one hand we have all of these promises on the other hand uh they come with some perils and really what we're looking for is some kind of balance between those two so how can we get the benefits while minimizing the pernicious effects is uh which often doesn't go on in the debate people you know the debates often you're on one side or the other on this and so all of those kind of things raise a whole for me raise a whole series of questions um around and these are just a sub sample of them so you know what are the ethical implications of smart city approaches and systems how are citizens expected to act and participate in the smart city how it's probably based in the open car framed and regulated what sorts of publics can be formed and what actions can they take to what extent are injustices embedded in city systems infrastructures and services and in their calculative practices what systems and structures of inequality are reproduced within smart urbanism what what models of citizenship are enacted what forms of social justice operate what are their effects and ultimately it comes down to the question of what kind of smart city do we want to create and to live in now that's a normative question and as i'll illustrate i don't think enough normative debate goes on around the smart city we tend to have a very kind of instrumental uh kind of debate uh so this kind of leads on i guess towards this kind of ethical approaches onto smart cities where where where the conversation has happened in relation to some of these issues this is where we've we've ended up as this notion of kind of uh ethical approaches to smart cities and that can come from two sides so on the one side uh it's a kind of a legal regulatory technical um approach this is really around meeting obligations and about compliance and on the other side is a kind of a more normative debate and a kind of a which is drawing on moral philosophy so this is drawing on ideas around citizenship social justice ethics of care and so on so the normative debate is really around what should be as opposed to what has to be um so this is kind of balancing this notion of principles values and ethos and some notion of vision against meeting obligations and where we put the emphasis makes a difference to how we approach how we how we think about the smart city within this kind of ethical frame and one way of thinking about this is through some of the work that katherine international and laura klein have done where they kind of contrast this kind of technical procedural versus a kind of normative ideological uh so this isn't from there i've kind of added a couple of lines to this but this is from their data feminism book and they kind of say the way in which we're approaching technology and this applies to the smart city has really been to kind of locate the source of the problem in individuals and the technical systems so if we can deal with how individuals are treated or if we can fix the individual system then we'll solve the problem and that kind of argue that we need to shift more to the right hand side and acknowledge that there's kind of structural power at work here and rather than focusing on the individual we kind of focus on on society and abound redistribution and reconfiguration what's happening so they then contrast uh down the down the table these kind of different emphases so ethics as opposed to justice bias as opposed to oppression consumer rights versus citizenship fairness versus equity regulation of infrastructure spaces versus the common the the commons and the public good accountability versus co-liberation transparency reflexivity and so on and most of the emphasis of where government and policy has looked at smart cities has been on the left-hand side of this table now they're not against that and i wouldn't be either like all those things on the left-hand side of the table are good but it would be very useful to also think through the smartphone see in terms of what's on the right hand side of this table because it brings a kind of a different sensibility a different ethos a different set of principles and ideas to how we would think through some of the some of the issues that the smart city raises and the left-hand side is very kind of technical procedural way of doing this as opposed to a kind of more more normative around what kind of smart city we actually want to live in um so kind of the technical procedural concerns are really focus on these kinds of issues so i think these are the kinds of issues that have been kind of identified as being kind of problematic so things like surveillance and surveillance issues around erosion privacy issues around ownership control of the data and data markets and how the data ends up being monetized in various different ways the ways in which the data can be used to socially sort spatially saw populations to to redline uh populations the way in which they feed into predictive uh profiling uh and into forms of anticipatory governance such as predictive policing the ways in which nudge and behavioral change is used and questions around well who what what is the nudge who gets to decide how the nudge works who is nudged and so on um in tissues around dynamic pricing and different having different opportunities around um around technologies but also how pricing structures work issues around data security what happens if the data leaks out of the system and then questions around control creep and ways in which a technology is designed for one purpose to start to be used for other purposes so uh example of that might be the congestion charge cameras in london for example were were put in on the basis that they would never be used for ordinary policing or security but now of course it routinely uh used for those uh another example would be like um the smartphone apps around covert were introduced on the basis that the data would only be used for public health uh but for example uh in singapore their app has recently the data from their app has recently been used in a murder trial and you know well beyond what he was originally uh designed to do um and the kind of the technical procedural ways of trying to address some of those issues typically kind of fall into different uh different strategies so there could be kind of a market-led approach onto this so this is kind of industry standard self-regulation uh encouraging companies to think of ethics as competitive advantage uh it could be technological so it could be things like end-to-end uh encryption access control security controls backups and so on uh all the user privacy enhancement tools uh it could be policy regulatory you could add legal onto this so things like fair information practice principles uh gdpr privacy by design security by design education and training or it could be governance solutions so these are things around kind of vision strategy advisory boards oversight and delivery compliance day-to-day management and so on these are all very instrumental kind of often kind of compliance regulatory kinds of tools there now they can be informed by kind of normative ideas but there are they they they do locate all the kind of the problems in either the individual or the technology and it's the and that's the that's the site of the solution as opposed to more kind of a more uh society uh political uh kind of reframing and reimagining around uh what we want some of this technology to do and how it delivers so just to contrast that with this kind of more normative ideological framing strategy uh the argument we kind of make in the in the opening chapter of the right to the smart city is a book is around um taking some of those kind of technical procedural practical kind of solutions and reframing them embedding them in a more kind of a holistic approach which are underpinned by moral philosophy so uh drawing on the ideas of the rights of the smart city drawing on ideas related to citizenship social justice ethics and care and kind of thinking through uh kind of principles values and ethos that we that we want and to and to frame it within this notion of what kind of smart city do we want to create and uh live in um so it is kind of taking seriously those technical procedural issues but it's fr it's framing it in a in a in a different way uh and the right to the so it's partly around this notion of the rights to the smart city which is all about rights it's about and it's about reframing the development of city in relation to the interests of citizens uh as opposed to the interests of corporations or states so it's a very much a focus on uh of serving residents and uh and so on as opposed to other other kinds of interests and so this is the the argument of the right to smart city developed by henry lefevre and then by a whole series of other other scholars afterwards is that space should be shaped according to its inhabitants needs and not pre uh not determined predominantly by political and economic elites so and it encompasses a whole series of different rights so the right of habitation and the right of participation and self-determination and then rights to kind of things like information free expression culture difference equality self-management you know access to public services free movements uh protect the commons for private ownership to to to gather and meet have political representation to vote to be able to protest and so on and so forth uh all rights that have been uh undermined to relative uh relative degrees within uh uh within all political systems whether they're authoritarian or whether they're in the western frame within a more kind of neoliberal couple of set of relations a second kind of area is a drawing on the ideas of of citizenship so citizenship kind of defines an individual member individual's membership in a polity and their kind of rights entitlements duties and responsibilities and a a very strong initial critique of smart cities was that they served the interests of states and corporations more than they do citizens and of course the response to this by corporations and states was to reframe their smart city agendas as being citizen-centric uh or citizen-focused to a large degree though that was an empty signifier it was simply a labeling process there was no actual change in the constitution of the programs themselves things were labeled as citizen-centric because citizens used them or they impacted citizens as opposed to them serving the agenda citizens or there being any meaningful participation and so on so citizens were largely framed as kind of in a general way uh or in an absent way in a general way it typically envisaged you that the that the person in the city was kind of white middle-class male blah blah blah you know and other other people within the city were largely absent or there was a very narrow group of active and by that i mean people who were who took a kind of interest in this are people the kind of people who attended hackathons or you know open data events and so on which are a very narrow group of people um and certainly not representative of the wider wider population and citizens were kind of framed as being kind of the recipients of stewardship or civic paternalism so things were done for citizens or things were decided what was best for citizens by uh by these kind of elites with very little involvement as citizens in in the debate and so on um and this masters have rarely rarely been citizen-centric beyond kind of tokenistic ways or framing citizenship in in neoliberal form which is effectively the citizen as a consumer and you basically uh you might have some individual autonomy and freedom of choice uh but ultimately your access is based on your kind of uh your kind of cultural capital your your ability to be able to pay for the service and so on uh rather than it being enshrined in rights and entitlements now this is quite a busy uh table but this is basically einstein's ladder of uh participation mapped on two smart cities and ex and extended to the right so einstein's table was originally these two columns on the left and all that we did when we were looking at at dublin so we have a whole series of smart city projects in dublin on the right hand side so this is a table done with uh paulo cardolla and then we kind of looked at the role that citizens were being asked to play what was what kind of happened to them and then kind of the discourse framing around it so really citizens were kind of data points uh they were you user they were the product they were a consumer they were they were a resident they were recipients occasionally there might be a tester or a participant or a proposer but they were very rarely a co-creator or a leader or a decision maker they were principally being steered nudged in control controlled or they were browsing consuming acting occasionally they might be in suggesting your feedback but they were very rarely in kind of leadership ownership creation production and so on so down here you've got these kind of discourses of stewardship technocracy paternalism here is the kind of capitalism market neoliberalism here we have civic engagement but very rarely towards the top of participation co-creation uh kind of deliberative democracy commons rights and so on and the vast book of smart city technology sits in this bottom part and it's really framed by stewardship and civic paternalism it's for citizens and decided on behalf of citizens uh another kind of way into thinking about this is around uh social justice social justice basically concerns uh kind of accepted and acceptable ways in which people are treated and the conditions in which they live now there's a vast literature on social justice and various different types of theories they typically fall into four domains there's a distributional which is about fair share there's procedural which is about fair treatment there's a retributive which is a fair punishment for wrongs and there's there's restorative which is the writing of wrongs now which version of this within each type is adopted makes a fundamental difference to the principles and ethos underpinning smart urbanism within a social justice framework now i often hear people say i want a just smart city so i want you know i want a cis-smart city that has some notion of justice involved but i very rarely hear what they meet what what is art what what is meant by that um so and i think that that's a problem it's taken a very common sensical kind of level uh whereas if we were to apply i don't expect you to read this table it's too it's a table for me rather than a table for you and but if we were to apply different theories of social justice onto the smart city we would have we would have very different ideas about what just is so an egyptarian who's you know uh you know would argue for equal distribution of wealth and power across all members regardless of ability inheritance would have a different notion of social justice from a utilitarian who would be the greatest good for the greatest number as opposed to a libertarian which is effectively uh that that would have a kind of survival of the fittest kind of notion of you basically get what you deserve or what you can afford and that's inherently just so if i could afford something you can't that's that's your problem that's not my problem that's an inherently just relation based on you know who who notionally deserves it over somebody else and so you could have a you could have a smart city that is inherently uh produces inequalities and argue that that is a just arrangement if you were a libertarian you wouldn't if you were egalitarian or utilitarian and you wouldn't you know if you were a marxist or a feminist or a contractarianism or a communitarianism you you would have a different notion of social justice and i really don't think that we've had a a good debate around what we actually mean by a socially just smart city and what that would actually look like in practice depending on what kind of theory of social justice you hold and how that would map on to uh what city uh or what kind of smart city uh we we would want um and then an ethics of care is a kind of a slightly different thing uh it's kind of moral action at the kind of personal collective level to aid others uh so in contrast to social justice is kind of how best to respond as opposed to what is just uh all right so it's kind of responsibilities obligations and duties rather than principles rights and entitlements and really comes out a kind of feminist kind of uh theories around reciprocal and non-reciprocal uh care in in municipalities this notion of ethics of care is probably really captured in this notion of stewardship and civic paternalism and there are big questions around whether uh whether this can really work outside of um a wider kind of social justice debates that actually enshrine rights and entitlements because there's a very uh differential on on the abilities of different communities to be able to practice an ethics of care or to or to receive an ethics of care so where we've developed this work the most is in the slow computing book uh where we kind of where we kind of develop this notion of a kind of a digital digital ethics of of care around um around how how some of this kind of technology impacts on uh temporal and kind of data extraction um through through tech okay so taking all those together like you know using those ideas of the right to smart city social justice citizenship ethics of care and so on you know can we can we envisage a kind of a genuinely humanizing uh smart urbanism and i'm kind of taking that genuinely humanizing urbanism from from david harvey's work growing right the way back to social justice in the city back in 1972 and you know so you know we kind of need to my kind of argument is we kind of need to move beyond kind of common sense called taken for granted pragmatic practical technical post-political notions of the smart city and we need to at the same time you know need we need to kind of draw on some of these kind of normative uh ideas at the same time we kind of need to avoid kind of citizenship washing or ethics washing so the kind of tactical use of some of these ideas to actually hide real agendas so so that that labeling of citizen-centric for example was a kind of a was a kind of a citizenship washing it was a it was a label designed to give an impression while actually something else was going on you know so you know can we kind of reframe reimagine remake the smart city within a more kind of emancipatory and empowering framework um and you know can we can we draw on some of these ideas to do that clearly it's not an easy task to do because of the because of the you know the interests of states and corporations and the embedded trajectory of capitalism and neoliberalism so it's difficult to you know there will always be opposing forces trying to push to do to carry on with business as usual or to do something else but they're probably necessary if we want to try and realize a different kind of smart city and you know what would that look like in practice you know and are there other places already trying to do this where we might draw some inspiration so we you know there are probably a couple of places that have tried to take an alternative path um barcelona is probably the best known one at this stage which very much is trying to draw on the ideas of the right to the with the right to this uh the right to the city in that they developed this notion of technological sovereignty which basically says that the the tech that the state uses has to be oriented to and serve local residents uh and it has to be owned as a commons so they've tried to move towards things like uh all open data open source infrastructure open source software underpinning all of their technologies used within within the municipality so moving away from proprietary software where they do work with companies they they put into procurement um that the data will go back to the state and be owned by the state and and can't be monetized uh by the company and so on so they they're starting to think through a smart city in a kind of a different type of uh of form try to get much using the technology to enable much more public participation decision making so using their platform decedium uh which is very very well used like tens of thousands of people are given their opinion on the platform as opposed to a couple of hundred in a town or meeting uh madeleine has a kind of a kind of experimented with this idea of social uh urbanism that's a kind of social inclusion a shared public realm urban commons for public services and spaces and kind of kind of trying to get some consensus between public and private actors about how the city should be organized and a commitment that any area where the technology goes in will serve existing residents and won't gentrify and push them out so that there's a commitment that technology will serve those who are already uh there um there are questions to to what extent some of this moves beyond meaningful rhetoric and the extent to which some of this stuff uh has actually happened uh on the ground as opposed to uh within within the rhetoric that the the state uh promotes and so on and there are questions as to whether they can really kind of counteract the kind of capital capitalist realism and the institutionalized neoliberalism and smart urbanism and by that i really mean that a lot of this stuff is kind of institutionally embedded and uh there's a certain kind of path dependency there's a certain there's a there's a lot of invested um kind of capital through different stakeholders in in in following a particular kind of trajectory and so it's quite difficult to to to to move so that's an open question as to whether we can actually really shift uh the idea of the smart city into a different kind of concept or a different kind of space or whether we can only ever really tink around the edges and do kind of sticking plaster solutions and so on and on that optimistic note i'll end

2021-04-17 00:28

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