Programming Environments: Environmentality and Citizen Sensing in the Smart City

Abstract

A new wave of smart-city projects is underway that proposes to deploy sensor-based ubiquitous computing across urban infrastructures and mobile devices to achieve greater sustainability. But in what ways do these smart and sustainable cities give rise to distinct material-political arrangements and practices that potentially delimit urban 'citizenship' to a Revisiting and reworking Foucault's notion of environmentality in the context of the CSC smart-city design proposal, I advance an approach to environmentality that deals not with the production of environmental subjects, but rather with the specific spatial-material distribution and relationality of power through environments, technologies, and ways of life. By updating and advancing environmentality through a discussion of computational urbanisms, I consider how practices and operations of citizenship emerge that are a critical part of the imaginings of smart and sustainable cities. This reversioning of environmentality through the smart city recasts who or what counts as a 'citizen' and attends to the ways in which citizenship is articulated environmentally through the distribution and feedback of monitoring and urban data practices, rather than through governable subjects or populations.

Die Verschränkung von Umwelt und Wohnwelt – Grüne <i>smart homes</i> aus der Perspektive der pluralen Sphärologie

“…Domosh, 1998;Blunt, 2005und zuletzt Brickell, 2012. Während prominente Vertreter des scale-Denkens den Haushalt -und damit auch alle Fragen nach Lebensprozessen im Wohnraum -nach wie vor häufig als "no more than relatively stable background structures" (Brenner, 2001:598) für gesellschaftliche Transformationen abqualifizieren, heben feministische Geograph_innen die "multiscalar embeddedness of constructions of the household scale" (Marston und Smith, 2001:618) und den "pluralen" Charakter dieser Konstruktion (ebd., siehe auch Massey, 2004;Gibson-Graham, 2002) hervor.…”

Species of (Code) Spaces

“…However, some scholars warn that this effortlessness is not entirely benign. There is a considerable risk of reducing citizenship to a passive behavior pattern (Gabrys, 2014) and thus diminishing the citizens' agency in the decision-making process.…”

Éticas en el cuidado de los recursos urbanos: mantención y reparación en un sistema de bicicletas públicas

“…This scenario has become automatizados capaces de procesar la información en tiempo real, retroalimentando el metabolismo de la ciudad en forma constante (Aurigi & Fiorella, 2008 En continuidad con perspectivas críticas de las smart city (Thrift, 2014;Green eld, 2013;Picon, 2014;Gabrys 2014 Diversos trabajos recientes han buscado extender estos postulados para la comprensión de los objetos (Orr, 1996;Henke, 2000;Dant, 2004;Graham & Thrift, 2007;Denis & Pontille, 2010). Al igual que en el caso del orden social, Continuing with the critical perspectives of the smart city (Thrift, 2014;Green eld, 2013;Picon, 2014; Gabrys 2014) we propose to examine the materiality of smart urbanism, i.e., the concrete operations that Several recent studies have sought to extend these principles to the understanding of objects (Orr, 1996;Henke, 2000;Dant, 2004;Graham & Thrift, 2007;Denis & Pontille, 2010).…”