Customers, Users or Citizens? Inclusion, Spatial Data and Governance in the Smart City

Abstract

Executive Summary IntroductionThis report is based on a year of research into how citizens in Amsterdam are becoming producers of digital data through their use of technology, and the ways in which that data is becoming -or will likely become in the future -part of the way the city is governed. We focused primarily on spatial data (geo-information), defined as any digital data that indicates a person's location or movements. Today, we produce spatial data with everything we do, and in the future, it is likely that these data generated by city infrastructure and registration systems will become merged and linked with data generated directly by city residents such as social media postings, data from self-tracking devices and smart homes, maps generated by crowdsourcing, drones, and feedback of all kinds.We have a specific focus on the citizen's perspective. What kind of governance of digital data creates an equal playing field for the elderly, the young, the vulnerable or marginalised? For non-users of smart technologies, non-citizens, speakers of other languages? With this in mind, we conducted 20 expert interviews and 8 focus groups in Amsterdam over the course of 2015, aiming to include participants who were currently missing from, or marginalised by, current discussions and practices of smart city development, and also those whose lives might be changed most by an increase in urban datafication. Our discussions highlighted several groups: nonnatives; ethnic or religious minorities; children and the elderly; those who opted out of using the technologies currently seen as necessary for citizen involvement in the smart city (i.e. smartphones); those who operate in highly regulated professions, and freelancers who are responsible for their own working environment. Future scenariosBased on our expert interviews we constructed four possible future scenarios which then informed the focus group discussions. The first, data utopia/dystopia, combines a situation where individuals are highly traceable with strong city control over data, monitoring both public and private spaces in real time. This means the city can profile people in great detail and to target policies and services to a neighbourhood or even household level, leading to efficient service provision and control over public safety -but it also leads to social engineering by policymakers and researchers, and tension that ultimately decreases social cohesion. The second scenario, 'Anonydam', involves greater individual anonymity combined with city-led control over data. In this scenario activist pressure makes the city take leadership in ensuring privacy, creating its own urban apps and minimising the extent to which its partners can share data. The tradeoff is that people must be more involved and active to get the services they need, and that criminal networks take advantage of the possibility of anonymity to flourish.

Actually existing smart citizens: expertise and (non)participation in the making of the smart city

“…In this way, Atlanta's smart city planning efforts instantiate a kind of 'business class citizenship' (Sparke 2006) or what Varsanyi (2006, paraphrasing Isin 1997 describes as "the new professional class-as-transnational citizen", wherein citizenship -at least in the substantive sense -is not conferred through either inhabitance in a given territory or through ownership of landed property, but rather through ownership of cultural capital or expertise. A similar dynamic has been identified by Taylor et al (2016) in Amsterdam, where in spite of the discourse around citizen participation in smart city efforts, they were unable to identify citizens not already engaged in this work professionally who were even aware of these efforts or how they might be able to get involved in them, a trend that was particularly evident within a variety of marginalized groups. Unsurprisingly, drawing from such a group of citizens-qua-experts, as in both Atlanta and in Amsterdam, does not yield a representative sample of the city's population, either demographically or spatially, and thus works to further engrain particular kinds of bias into the planning and policymaking process from the start.…”

“…This section uses these observations as a way of addressing the continued gap in empirical evidence with regards to how citizens are integrated into smart city planning and implementation exercises, both discursively and materially. Ultimately, this section of the paper attempts to push forward the critical examination of the smart citizen initiated by the likes of Gabrys (2014), Vanolo (2016), Taylor et al (2016), Joss et al (2017) and Cardullo and Kitchin (Forthcoming) by elucidating two ideal types for how citizens are (or aren't) being integrated into the making of the smart city: the general and absent citizen. While the disparate settings for our observations make it clear that "there is no one 'smart city' even within a city" (Goh 2015: 183, emphasis in the original), our research points to these trends as being generally characteristic of smart city planning in Atlanta, and likely applicable to other urban contexts as well, even if in a somewhat modified form.…”

Elaborating the urbanism in smart urbanism: distilling relevant dimensions for a comprehensive analysis of Smart City approaches

“…Moreover, despite its managerial and early-warning capacities in case of infrastructure-related problems or environmental hazards, surveillance, social sorting, predictive profiling and neglect of privacy are frequently mentioned undesired effects of this development. These effects may in particular harm weaker and marginalized groups who are neither aware that they are passive data producers through their Internet activities and location-enabled devices (Taylor, Richter, Jameson, & Perez de Pulgar, 2016), nor have the power and right to act against formal procedures and made decisions. The outcome of technocratic governance and reductionism may be highly unequal urban societies, characterized by unequal power relations, large gaps between those with access to information services or opportunities and those without, social exclusion and unequal distributions of costs and benefits (Datta, 2016;.…”

Citizenship, Justice, and the Right to the Smart City

“…A key aspect of their operation is that they produce, process, and extract value and act upon streams of big data that are highly granular and indexical (directly linked to people, households, objects, territories, transactions) (Kitchin, 2014). Thus, smart city technologies raise a number of ethical issues concerning privacy, datafication, dataveillance and geosurveillance, profiling, social sorting, anticipatory governance, and nudging, that have significant consequence for how citizens are conceived and treated (e.g., as data points; subjects to be actively managed and policed; as consumers), and can work to reproduce and reinforce inequalities (Kitchin, 2016;Taylor et al, 2016).…”