Smart city applications are increasingly deployed in urban spaces around the world. We contend that they only merit the attribute "smart" if they embody what we term "substantial smartness". To develop this concept, we draw on both political and legal theories to show that citizen participation and activation, as well as respect for human and fundamental rights, are two essential dimensions of substantial smartness. Both dimensions, however, need to accommodate temporality, i.e., rapid changes in deployed technologies, their purposes and citizens' use of public infrastructure. By highlighting three examples and discussing smart city challenges to the GDPR, non-discrimination law and the proposed EU AI Act, we demonstrate that politics needs the lawand vice versa -to unlock the potential of substantively smart cities.
Issue 1This paper is part of Future-proofing the city: A human rights-based approach to governing algorithmic, biometric and smart city technologies, a special issue of Internet Policy Review guest-edited by Alina Wernick and Anna Artyushina.
Introduction: Interdisciplinary dynamics of smart environmentsLaw and politics relate to, and seek to govern, a world of change. Therefore, they are confronted with the challenge of adapting their content and effects over time, and mitigating risks not contemplated at the moment when decisions were made. This disconnect infuses an unavoidable element of temporality into the politico-legal realm. Such dynamics are particularly present in digital information technology, where advances in computer science and novel connections between different technical tools create a protean landscape of ever-changing and increasingly integrated data sets, models and applications. Yet, similarly, political action occurs in this space and may harness digital technology to adapt to, and contest, new practices and risks to human rights. Such dynamic, politico-legal spaces are epitomised by the so-called "smart city", marked by a constant change in technology and its purpose, and simultaneously by frequent alterations to the use of public infrastructure. The street conceived as a way of transport may suddenly become an avenue of protest. Public space in the city, instrumentally used for commerce, recreation, or movement, may thus be rapidly converted into a space of contestation (Colomb & Novy, 2016). Political protest, after all, typically converges toward cities, where political elites are located, who are often the ultimate audience of protest movements. Conversely, data collected in public spaces is prone to function creep, i.e., fast shifts in the exploitation and purpose of processing (cf. Graham & Wood, 2003;Koops, 2021). The growing deployment of data-collecting sensors in cities, coupled with analytics frameworks, thus has potentially far-reaching consequences. Public infrastructure is unavoidable for city dwellers who need to participate in many essential activities, from shopping to transport (Eckhoff & Wagner, 2017; Kroll, 2022, p. 2). That necessity highlights the need t...