Citizenship, Justice and the Right to the Smart City

This paper provides an introduction to the smart city and engages with its idea and ideals from a critical social science perspective. After setting out in brief the emergence of smart cities and current key debates, we note a number of practical, political and normative questions relating to citizenship, justice, and the public good that warrant examination. The remainder of the paper provides an initial framing for engaging with these questions. The first section details the dominant neoliberal conception and enactment of smart cities and how this works to promote the interests of capital and state power and reshape governmentality. We then detail some of the ethical issues associated with smart city technologies and initiatives. Having set out some of the more troubling aspects of how social relations are produced within smart cities, we then examine how citizens and citizenship have been conceived and operationalised in the smart city to date. We then follow this with a discussion of social justice and the smart city. In the final section, we explore the notion of the ‘right to the smart city’ and how this might be used to recast the smart city in emancipatory and empowering ways

Citizenship, Justice and the Right to the Smart City

This paper provides an introduction to the smart city and engages with its idea and ideals from a critical social science perspective. After setting out in brief the emergence of smart cities and current key debates, we note a number of practical, political and normative questions relating to citizenship, justice, and the public good that warrant examination. The remainder of the paper provides an initial framing for engaging with these questions. The first section details the dominant neoliberal conception and enactment of smart cities and how this works to promote the interests of capital and state power and reshape governmentality. We then detail some of the ethical issues associated with smart city technologies and initiatives. Having set out some of the more troubling aspects of how social relations are produced within smart cities, we then examine how citizens and citizenship have been conceived and operationalised in the smart city to date. We then follow this with a discussion of social justice and the smart city. In the final section, we explore the notion of the ‘right to the smart city’ and how this might be used to recast the smart city in emancipatory and empowering ways

What Privacy Is For

Privacy has an image problem. Over and over again, regardless of the forum in which it is debated, it is cast as old-fashioned at best and downright harmful at worst — anti-progressive, overly costly, and inimical to the welfare of the body politic. Yet the perception of privacy as antiquated and socially retrograde is wrong. It is the result of a conceptual inversion that relates to the way in which the purpose of privacy has been conceived. Like the broader tradition of liberal political theory within which it is situated, legal scholarship has conceptualized privacy as a form of protection for the liberal self. Its function is principally a defensive one; it offers shelter from the pressures of societal and technological change. So characterized, however, privacy is reactive and ultimately inessential. In fact, the liberal self who is the subject of privacy theory and privacy policymaking does not exist. The self who is the real subject of privacy law- and policy-making is socially constructed, emerging gradually from a preexisting cultural and relational substrate. For this self, the purpose of privacy is quite different. Privacy shelters dynamic, emergent subjectivity from the efforts of commercial and government actors to render individuals and communities fixed, transparent, and predictable. It protects the situated practices of boundary management through which self-definition and the capacity for self-reflection develop. So described, privacy is anything but old-fashioned, and trading it away creates two kinds of large systemic risk. First, privacy is an indispensable structural feature of liberal democratic political systems. Freedom from surveillance, whether public or private, is foundational to the capacity for critical self-reflection and informed citizenship. A society that permits the unchecked ascendancy of surveillance infrastructures cannot hope to remain a liberal democracy. Under such conditions, liberal democracy as a form of government is replaced, gradually but surely, by a form of government that I will call modulated democracy because it relies on a form of surveillance that operates by modulation: a set of processes in which the quality and content of surveillant attention is continually modified according to the subject’s own behavior, sometimes in response to inputs from the subject but according to logics that ultimately are outside the subject’s control. Second, privacy is also foundational to the capacity for innovation, and so the perception of privacy as anti-innovation is a non sequitur. A society that values innovation ignores privacy at its peril, for privacy also shelters the processes of play and experimentation from which innovation emerges. Efforts to repackage pervasive surveillance as innovation — under the moniker “Big Data” — are better understood as efforts to enshrine the methods and values of the modulated society at the heart of our system of knowledge production. In short, privacy incursions harm individuals, but not only individuals. Privacy incursions in the name of progress, innovation, and ordered liberty jeopardize the continuing vitality of the political and intellectual culture that we say we value

Smart urbanism and smart citizenship: The neoliberal logic of ‘citizen-focused’ smart cities in Europe

This paper examines the neoliberal ideals that underpin participation and citizenship in the smart city and their replication mechanisms at the European level, particularly focusing on the work of the European Innovation Partnership for Smart Cities and Communities. The research consisted of three levels of data generation and analysis: a discourse analysis of policy documents and project descriptions of the 61 Commitments in the European Innovation Partnership for Smart Cities and Communities ‘citizen-focus’ cluster; interviews with a dozen stakeholders working on citizen engagement in a small sample of European Innovation Partnership for Smart Cities and Communities flagship projects; and twenty interviews with city officers and corporate exhibitors at the 2017 Smart City Expo and World Congress. We contend that smart cities as currently conceived enact a blueprint of neoliberal urbanism and promote a form of neoliberal citizenship. Supra-national institutions like the European Innovation Partnership for Smart Cities and Communities act at a multi-scalar level, connecting diverse forms of neoliberal urbanism whilst promoting policy agendas and projects that perform neoliberal citizenship in the spaces of the everyday. Despite attempts to recast the smart city as ‘citizen-focused’, smart urbanism remains rooted in pragmatic, instrumental and paternalistic discourses and practices rather than those of social rights, political citizenship, and the common good. In our view, if smart cities are to become truly ‘citizen-focused’, an alternative conception of smart citizenship needs to be deployed, one that enables an effective shift of power and is rooted in the right to the city, entitlements, community, participation, commons, and ideals beyond the market

Computational Transformation of the Public Sphere : Theories and Case Studies

This book is an edited collection of MA research paper on the digital revolution of the public and governance. It covers cyber governance in Finland, and the securitization of cyber security in Finland. It investigates the cases of Brexit, the 2016 US presidental election of Donald Trump, the 2017 presidential election of Volodymyr Zelensky, and Brexit. It examines the environmental concerns of climate change and greenwashing, and the impact of digital communication giving rise to the #MeToo and Incel movements. It considers how digitilization can serve to emancipate women through ride-sharing, and how it leads to the question of robot rights. It considers fake news and algorithmic governance with respect to case studies of the Chinese social credit system, the US FICO credit score, along with Facebook, Twitter, Cambridge Analytica and the European effort to regulate and protect data usage.Non peer reviewe

Computational Transformation of the Public Sphere: Theories and Cases

This book is an edited collection of original research papers on the digital revolution of the public and governance. It covers cyber governance in Finland, and the securitization of cyber security in Finland. It investigates the cases of Brexit, the 2016 US presidential election of Donald Trump, the 2017 presidential election of Volodymyr Zelensky, and Brexit. It examines the environmental concerns of climate change and greenwashing, and the impact of digital communication giving rise to the #MeToo and Incel movements. It considers how digitilization can serve to emancipate women through ride-sharing, and how it leads to the question of robot rights. It considers fake news and algorithmic governance with respect to case studies of the Chinese social credit system, the US FICO credit score, along with Facebook, Twitter, Cambridge Analytica and the European effort to regulate and protect data usage

Computational transformation of the public sphere : theories and case studies

Computational Transformation of the Public Sphere is the organic product of what turned out to be an effective collaboration between MA students and their professor in the Global Politics and Communication program in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Helsinki, in the Fall of 2019. The course, Philosophy of Politics and Communication, is a gateway course into this MA program. As I had been eager to conduct research on the impact of new digital technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) on democratic governance, I saw this course as an opportunity to not only share, but also further develop my knowledge of this topic

Regulation as Respect

The so-called “meme stock” phenomenon of early 2021 was an unexpected, riveting, short-lived, and ultimately tragicomic (or maybe just tragic) event. It was the product of many things but, on some level and for some investors, it was political protest: grassroots “voice” in the form of online stock purchases.The modern regulatory state does not have effective mechanisms for absorbing public perspectives in all their variety and nuance. Public input mechanisms (including but not limited to notice and comment rulemaking) are embedded within what Julie Cohen and Ari Waldman have called the “regulatory managerialist” model. Within this paradigm, non-expert knowledges and instincts have tended to be marginalized, discredited, and ignored; or else pulled into the gravitational field of managerialism, to be absorbed and digested into something tamed, tidy, and therefore false and incomplete.The failings of regulatory managerialism reflect a fundamental sociopolitical problem of our age, which is the wide and expanding distance between the ways we (expertised, “elite” actors) have designed public and regulatory systems, and the lives and views of the (“regular”) people on whose behalves those systems were meant to have been built.Meme stock investors will not be the most vulnerable and marginalized people we need to be concerned with. Their experience does not need to be most central in confronting the disconnect between the state and its people. At the same time, this paper asks what we can learn from peoples’ alienation and anger that can help us transcend the managerialist paradigm that constrains regulation. It argues that the usual reform recommendations, ranging from better communication to tripartism to deliberative and agonistic theories, are inadequate if not even bankrupt in justice and equity-seeking terms. It then reaches out to consider human centered design, design justice, and some of the restorative and reconciliatory ways in which societies have tried to beyond historic injustice. Together, these trace a path forward for a more human-regarding, socially competent regulatory approach. I propose that it is time to think of regulation as respect