The Right to Have Digital Rights in Smart Cities

Abstract

New data-driven technologies in global cities have yielded potential but also have intensified techno-political concerns. Consequently, in recent years, several declarations/manifestos have emerged across the world claiming to protect citizens’ digital rights. In 2018, Barcelona, Amsterdam, and NYC city councils formed the Cities’ Coalition for Digital Rights (CCDR), an international alliance of global People-Centered Smart Cities—currently encompassing 49 cities worldwide—to promote citizens’ digital rights on a global scale. People-centered smart cities programme is the strategic flagship programme by UN-Habitat that explicitly advocates the CCDR as an institutionally innovative and strategic city-network to attain policy experimentation and sustainable urban development. Against this backdrop and being inspired by the popular quote by Hannah Arendt on “the right to have rights”, this article aims to explore what “digital rights” may currently mean within a sample consisting of 13 CCDR global people-centered smart cities: Barcelona, Amsterdam, NYC, Long Beach, Toronto, Porto, London, Vienna, Milan, Los Angeles, Portland, San Antonio, and Glasgow. Particularly, this article examines the (i) understanding and the (ii) prioritisation of digital rights in 13 cities through a semi-structured questionnaire by gathering 13 CCDR city representatives/strategists’ responses. These preliminary findings reveal not only distinct strategies but also common policy patterns.

Social Innovation in Sustainable Urban Development

“…(2) Innovation forms and discourses on social vs. technological innovation in SUD: There is a discussion of forms of innovation in the context of people-centered smart city approaches. Calzada [12] sees social and technological innovation as a means of policy experimentation to implement digital rights for citizens (in the sense of institutional innovation). In the context of urban planning, Grafe and Mieg [18] argue that financial innovation is used as a means to both circumvent and achieve SUD.…”

“…South America remains a blind spot in our Special Issue. The themes range from smart cities [11][12][13] and heritage [4,14] to policy options for regions in transition [13,[15][16][17]. In my call for papers, I raised five specific questions to which the submitted papers made valuable contributions:…”

The Polyopticon: a diagram for urban artificial intelligences

“…The testing of urban AI technologies disproportionately is deployed with low income and minority groups, without existing governance regulations, or checks and balances systems for overriding or refuting technological decisions (O'Neil 2016;Noble 2018;Buolamwini 1970). These fair concerns over the process of developing and implementing AI technologies lead some to conclude that Urban AI itself undermines "the right to the city," (Lefebvre 1996; Harvey 2003) inevitably giving states or corporations inordinate power over marginal populations (Tomer 2019;Calzada 2021). These critical concerns conclude that Urban AI's capacity to surveil inhabitants engaged in acts of resistance or critique, or to source information from the most vulnerable populations, can only be leveraged to exacerbate and advance a society that benefits a powerful few.…”

Future-proofing the city: A human rights-based approach to governing algorithmic, biometric and smart city technologies

“…Coined in the early 2000s, the notion of the smart city never became a fully-developed academic concept, yet its presence is pervasive across academic research and policy frameworks (Government of India, 2015;European Commission, 2020;Sadowski & Bendor, 2019;Lorinc, 2020;Micheli, 2022;Sengupta & Sengupta, 2022). While some researchers expect that the study of digital platforms will render smart city scholarship obsolete (Wood & Monahan, 2019;Sadowski, 2020;Zwick & Spicer, 2021), others see heuristic value in the smart city concept, with all its versatility and contextual richness (Shelton et al, 2015;Kitchin, 2015Kitchin, , 2022Voorwinden, 2021;Calzada, 2021;Frischmann et al, 2023). This special issue shows that the smart city notion can be productively employed as a point of connection for interdisciplinary research on the data-driven solutions deployed in cities, harms brought on by these technologies and policy responses to them.…”