Intelligence is Open: Smart City versus Open City

Abstract

In this paper we explore the impacts, current and potential, that new technologies have on city planning and management, comparing the different ways in which those impacts can be harnessed for either the public good, for private profit or for a mixture of both. We argue that smart technologies do not necessarily yield a positive social product, and that the openness of information (in its different levels) plays an important part in maximizing the social product of new technologies applied to urban space. In the first part, we briefly discuss urban complexity and how technology can be used to make cities readable and actionable upon. In the second part, we analyse three technological ("smart") initiatives related to urban planning; Waze, Uber and OpenStreetMap, analysing the different processes by which information can be turned into use-value (and from there into exchange value). In the third part, we try to understand the economic process by which information is turned into capital through its restriction. We conclude by analysing the potential conflicts between the common good and the turning of information into capital, exploring some of the ways in which open data might be important in the process of making better cities.

Latin American smart cities: Between worlding infatuation and crawling provincialising

“…For Shelton et al (2015: 22), ‘the problem is less with data, per se, and more with the uncritical, ahistorical and aspatial understandings of data often promoted within smart city imaginaries, themselves recycled from earlier attempts to make urban studies and planning “more scientific”’. These frameworks include proposals from organisational theory (Pierce et al, 2017), ecological wisdom (Young and Lieberknecht, 2018), collaboration or urban sharing (Gil-Garcia et al, 2019; Zyoska et al, 2019), open data (Pinheiro, 2017) and living indicators (Kaika, 2017). They have in common the notion that technology should be subservient to particular places and communities (Kitchin, 2014; McFarlane and Söderström, 2017), and emphasise the need to look at both grounded experiences and the materiality of interventions (Schindler and Marvin, 2018; Shelton et al, 2015; Wiig, 2015).…”