Commoning the smart city: A case for a public Internet provision

As cities become more involved in data-driven processes of growth and governance, critical scholarship has highlighted the formidable issues around ownership, uses and the ethics of collecting, storing, and circulating such data. However, there has been less focus on the physical infrastructure as the ‘last mile’ problem for Internet access, between a revanchist perspective on the ‘broken Internet’ delivered by digital capitalism and the liberal rhetoric of the Internet as a human right. Through two case studies, the paper plots a pragmatic trajectory in the adoption of the Internet for people and ‘things’, in which city and users take different roles and responsibilities. It highlights benefits and challenges around the long-term sustainability and maintenance of the Internet as an infrastructure of the commons. An attention to ‘commoning’, instead, reveals the exclusionary or enabling practices the smart city might foster. Thus, the paper advocates for the direct involvement of the city and its citizens in maintaining and reproducing connectivity networks in the smart city

Commoning the smart city: A case for a public Internet provision

As cities become more involved in data-driven processes of growth and governance, critical scholarship has highlighted the formidable issues around ownership, uses and the ethics of collecting, storing, and circulating such data. However, there has been less focus on the physical infrastructure as the ‘last mile’ problem for Internet access, between a revanchist perspective on the ‘broken Internet’ delivered by digital capitalism and the liberal rhetoric of the Internet as a human right. Through two case studies, the paper plots a pragmatic trajectory in the adoption of the Internet for people and ‘things’, in which city and users take different roles and responsibilities. It highlights benefits and challenges around the long-term sustainability and maintenance of the Internet as an infrastructure of the commons. An attention to ‘commoning’, instead, reveals the exclusionary or enabling practices the smart city might foster. Thus, the paper advocates for the direct involvement of the city and its citizens in maintaining and reproducing connectivity networks in the smart city

Commoning the smart city: A case for a public Internet provision

As cities become more involved in data-driven processes of growth and governance, critical scholarship has highlighted the formidable issues around ownership, uses and the ethics of collecting, storing, and circulating such data. However, there has been less focus on the physical infrastructure as the ‘last mile’ problem for Internet access, between a revanchist perspective on the ‘broken Internet’ delivered by digital capitalism and the liberal rhetoric of the Internet as a human right. Through two case studies, the paper plots a pragmatic trajectory in the adoption of the Internet for people and ‘things’, in which city and users take different roles and responsibilities. It highlights benefits and challenges around the long-term sustainability and maintenance of the Internet as an infrastructure of the commons. An attention to ‘commoning’, instead, reveals the exclusionary or enabling practices the smart city might foster. Thus, the paper advocates for the direct involvement of the city and its citizens in maintaining and reproducing connectivity networks in the smart city

Commoning the smart city: A case for a public Internet provision

As cities become more involved in data-driven processes of growth and governance, critical scholarship has highlighted the formidable issues around ownership, uses and the ethics of collecting, storing, and circulating such data. However, there has been less focus on the physical infrastructure as the ‘last mile’ problem for Internet access, between a revanchist perspective on the ‘broken Internet’ delivered by digital capitalism and the liberal rhetoric of the Internet as a human right. Through two case studies, the paper plots a pragmatic trajectory in the adoption of the Internet for people and ‘things’, in which city and users take different roles and responsibilities. It highlights benefits and challenges around the long-term sustainability and maintenance of the Internet as an infrastructure of the commons. An attention to ‘commoning’, instead, reveals the exclusionary or enabling practices the smart city might foster. Thus, the paper advocates for the direct involvement of the city and its citizens in maintaining and reproducing connectivity networks in the smart city

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 European level. We examine self-proclaimed ‘citizen-focus’ projects funded by or aligned to the European Innovation Partnership for Smart Cities and Communities (EIP-SCC) by way of analysing policy documents and interviews with key stakeholders of smart city initiatives at European level and the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona (SCEWC 2017). We suggest that smart cities as currently conceived enact a blueprint of neoliberal urbanism and promote a form of neoliberal citizenship. Supra-national institutions like the EIP-SCC act at a multi-scalar level, connecting diverse forms of neoliberal urbanism while 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 rights, entitlements, community, participation, commons, and ideals beyond the market

Gentrification in the mesh: ethnography of Open Wireless Network (OWN)

The paper offers a critical perspective on practices of construction and consumption of wireless mesh networks in urban environments. It narrates Open Wireless Network (OWN) in Deptford, at the moment in which this inner borough of London undergoes an intense gentrification process. Drawing on critical urban theory, the ethnography frames OWN as a socio-technical assemblage deeply entangled with everyday city life. It argues that gentrification poses challenges to grassroot wireless network like OWN, because it risks to reduce it to an individualised utility. This is because the process of neoliberal re-organisation of urban space displaces working-class disposition towards others, as well as their ethos for sharing—which are essential to the development of OWN. The initial findings suggest that the communitarian construction of this wireless network has so far helped to maintain a commitment to reciprocity, potentially offering—for its users and developers—pockets of resistance against their cultural displacement. The research operates on a multidisciplinary level evoking, at the same time, production of urban space, hackers, and technology. It wants to stitch back together some literature on socio-technical assemblage and the 'right to the city'. The final part of the paper suggests a Lefebvrian oeuvre for the 'rights claims' of OWN users, as a space in which digital rights and material needs might come together in playful, engaging and innovative ways

CCTV Oddity: Archeology and Aesthetics of Video Surveillance

The paper reflects on two hackivist projects, an art installation and a performance, which sought to exploit opportunities offered by ubiquitous CCTV cameras in streets and academic campuses in London. Through experimenting with misuse/hacking of surveillance system we start unpacking video surveillance(s) and the surveillance space it creates

Walking on the rim: towards a geography of resentment

My research seeks to understand the complexity of East Greenwich residents' affective reactions at the moment when this landscape was undergoing a dramatic and rapid change. I walked its riverside to the Dome while this was turned from a mostly dismissed and derelict industrial land to a residential area ready to host parts of the Olympic Games. My starting point is that a process of gentrification with symbolic and material displacement of working-class people and their social practices has been occurring. Throughout my fieldwork, I constantly seek to understand the emotional reactions to this pervasive urban change from local residents, workers, and occasional passers-by who I met during the last five years. I have done this with the aid of my always obsolete digital camera and my walking boots, and applying photo elicitation technique whenever it was possible. The unique combination of photographs, walks, and interviews helped me to unpack, from the lower ground perspective of local working-class residents, their affective reactions to this peculiar change. Such an emplaced and class-based struggle opens to what I call the 'geography of resentment'. My hypothesis is that this resentment is a form of reaction against the symbolic violence that gentrification brings. The vehicle through which resentment is expressed is a form of remembering very close to nostalgia, which I decouple from both 'imperial melancholia' and 'hierarchical belonging'. Rather, I contend that this is a form of affective class struggle fought at the level of the symbolic. A debate remains open about the extent to which such controversial form of affection maintains distance from political instrumentalisation and mainstream discourses of communitarian cohesion, while at the same time reflecting the paradoxes of urban change

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