Actually existing smart citizens

Shelton, Taylor; Lodato, Thomas

doi:10.1080/13604813.2019.1575115

Cited by 148 publications

(84 citation statements)

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“…What kinds of publics do their creators presume will use them, and how do those assumptions proscribe a certain type of citizen? Several authors have asked these same questions out of concern that visions of the smart city limit practices of citizenship, reducing it to technocratic acts of data management and tinkering (Currie, 2018;Gabrys, 2014;Irani, 2015;Mattern, 2015;Ruppert, 2015;Shelton and Lodato, 2019). Here I add to this literature by looking at how the maps constitute particular citizen subjects; my concern is less with the actions the maps might enable than with the kinds of knowledge relations they propose between city and citizen.…”

Section: Audiences In the Data-driven Citymentioning

confidence: 99%

Data as performance – Showcasing cities through open data maps

Currie

2020

Big Data & Society

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This article describes how the City of Los Angeles is showcasing data-driven services to the public through dynamic visualisations of open data. I frame an analysis of this aspect of datafication in local government through linguistics and cultural theory; drawing on this set of literature I theorise the use of public data as both a performative tool and a performance of data-driven city services. I then discuss examples of interactive maps on the City of Los Angeles' open data websites, produced by the Bureau of Sanitation, the Controller's Office, and the Department of Transportation. The article concludes with some general thoughts on how open data maps are a new form of impression management; they set up a relationship in which government and citizens are in alignment, sharing an orientation towards administrative problems that begins at the same point, framed by an administration's datasets.

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Section: Audiences In the Data-driven Citymentioning

confidence: 99%

Data as performance – Showcasing cities through open data maps

Currie

2020

Big Data & Society

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“…Beyond critical standpoints on how to collectively resist 'platform capitalism' (Rossi, 2019, p. 13), this paper has suggested that the taxi service in Barcelona might benefit from the 'data commons' policy scheme and establish an experimental solution among stakeholders based on 'platform co-operatives' such as Som Energia (Senabre & Espelt, 2016;Fuster & Espelt, 2018). The taxi service conflict depicts, in conclusion, that another metropolis in Barcelona is not only possible but already exists, waiting to be experimented with and recast as a common and cooperative good for the (smart) city itself, and, ultimately, more fundamentally, for its citizens (Shelton & Lodato, 2019;Vesnic-Alujevic et al, 2019).…”

Section: Concluding Remarks: Platforms At Stakementioning

confidence: 99%

Barcelona’s Grassroots-led Urban Experimentation: Deciphering the ‘Data Commons’ Policy Scheme

Calzada

Almirall²

2019

SSRN Journal

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Smart city policy approaches have been gradually transitioning in parallel with data policy regulations. This is the case for Barcelona, which has been executing its policy framework called 'data commons' with the goal of further grassroots-led urban experimentations. This paper examines to what extent the new paradigm of 'data commons' will remain and even be reinforced, given the ongoing local elections and the volatile political and regional context of the upcoming May 2019 elections. In doing so, this paper elaborates on the steps Barcelona has been taking, given the new 'Declaration of Cities Coalition for Digital Rights' signed by Barcelona, Amsterdam, and New York. Nonetheless, as a result and continuation of previous published fieldwork research, by applying the Penta Helix framework from a social innovation perspective, this paper questions why several implementations are being consolidated while others actually show a tension between two different models: 'platform capitalism' vs 'platform co-operativism'. In regard to the former model, permanent strikes provoked by the Elite Taxi BCN association in August 2018 in response to the aftermath of big tech companies Cabify and Uber initially cleared to operate in Barcelona by the regional government, have demonstrated the negative side-effects of 'platform capitalism'. By contrast, Som Energia is a successful case study based on the latter innovative business model, 'platform co-operativism', stemming from grassroots-led urban experimentation. This paper concludes by suggesting a synthesis regarding the ongoing platform revolution at stake, in light of the need for democratic accountability.

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“…The return of the social is present in smart city debates: in particular, Verrest and Pfeffer (2018) present a new call for critical smart urbanism, arguing that the scholarly field deconstructing the "smart city" as a policy concept would benefit from re-engaging with the literature on critical urbanism. Relevant issues include how publics are constructed in urban policy (Cowley, Joss, & Dayot, 2018), and how the "smart citizen" may be discursively deployed to justify policy (Shelton & Lodato, 2019), in ways that fail to address inequality, given that cities still face "how to deal with the widening problem of social inequalities in part caused by their own processes" (Hollands, 2008). Another possibility is to find a framing that includes the non-citizen as well as the citizen, in order to explore a variety of experiences.…”

Section: Critical Perspectives On Smart City Surveillancementioning

confidence: 99%

People’s strategies for perceived surveillance in Amsterdam Smart City

2019

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In this paper, we investigate people's perception of datafication and surveillance in Amsterdam Smart City. Based on a series of focus groups, we show how people understand new forms of hypervisbility, what strategies they use to navigate these experiences, and what the limitations of these strategies are. We show how people tried to discern between public and private sector actors, to differentiate who they trusted by building on the existing social contract. People also trusted the objectivity of data in relation to prior experiences of social contexts and discrimination. Lastly, we show how the experiences of some of the inhabitants in our study who were most vulnerable to hypervisibility highlight the limits to strategies based on the neutrality of data. By asking about perceived surveillance rather than emphasising actual practices of surveilling, we show differentiated contexts and strategies, providing empirical grounds to question the dominant technical framing of smart cities.

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Actually existing smart citizens

Cited by 148 publications

References 50 publications

Data as performance – Showcasing cities through open data maps

Data as performance – Showcasing cities through open data maps

Barcelona’s Grassroots-led Urban Experimentation: Deciphering the ‘Data Commons’ Policy Scheme

People’s strategies for perceived surveillance in Amsterdam Smart City

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