Contesting Digital Futures: Urban Politics, Alternative Economies, and the Movement for Technological Sovereignty in Barcelona

Scholars have offered important critiques of the socio‐spatial processes of contemporary technological development, including the rise of “smart city” urban development models. While these critiques have been essential for understanding contemporary forms of techno‐capitalism and their reach into new areas, this paper calls for a consideration of alternative modes of digital development in urban life beyond the logics of securitisation and capital accumulation. In particular, I examine the critical discourses and experimental practices of a grassroots movement focused on claiming “technological sovereignty” (TS) in Barcelona. The TS movement is a broad, de‐centralised network of cooperatives, associations, and community initiatives experimenting with alternative practices of locally rooted, open‐source digital development. These groups explore democratic and cooperative practices of work, property, production, and consumption in relation to digital technology, based around an ethics of care and a commitment to working through and within local communities. In examining the values, beliefs, and practices of the TS movement, I bring ongoing discussions around digitalisation and the “smart city” into critical conversation with the extensive literature on prefigurative urban politics and postcapitalist economies.This research received funding from the Wenner‐Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Social Science Research Council DPDF Program, and a Fulbright US Student Award.12 month embargo; first published: 12 March 2019This item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]

Demand response within the energy-for-water-nexus - A review. ESRI WP637, October 2019

A promising tool to achieve more flexibility within power systems is demand re-sponse (DR). End-users in many strands of industry have been subject to research up to now regarding the opportunities for implementing DR programmes. One sector that has received little attention from the literature so far, is wastewater treatment. However, case studies indicate that the potential for wastewater treatment plants to provide DR services might be significant. This review presents and categorises recent modelling approaches for industrial demand response as well as for the wastewater treatment plant operation. Furthermore, the main sources of flexibility from wastewater treatment plants are presented: a potential for variable electricity use in aeration, the time-shifting operation of pumps, the exploitation of built-in redundan-cy in the system and flexibility in the sludge processing. Although case studies con-note the potential for DR from individual WWTPs, no study acknowledges the en-dogeneity of energy prices which arises from a large-scale utilisation of DR. There-fore, an integrated energy systems approach is required to quantify system and market effects effectively

Evolving spatialities of digital life: troubling the boundaries of the smart city/home divides

Blunt and Sheringham (2019) call for home-city geographies but do not consider the role of digital technologies in mediating these relations (Koch and Miles, 2021). Digital geographers have largely examined manifestations of the digital city (smart city, platform urbanism, etc.) and the digital home separately. This paper explores the question of the smart home/city by reading it through a series of established analytical frames for reflecting on the relationship between domestic and urban space, namely: governance, domestication, thresholds, and dwelling. The first two call attention to the movement of certain activities, relations, or processes across traditionally understood boundaries between domestic and urban spaces. The third lens, thresholds, considers the ways boundaries between domestic and urban space are not simply transgressed but are actively re-negotiated through the new digital mediations. The fourth lens, dwelling, moves beyond a focus on such boundaries or divisions to instead highlight the ambiguity and indeterminacy of everyday life. Each lens opens a distinct set of questions about the evolving spatialities of digital life and the ways they are enacted, negotiated, and potentially contested

Techno-Social Entanglements and Contested Urban Futures: Producing Space, Subjectivities, and Economies in the Digital City

With the rapid development of new digital technologies, cities are increasingly critical sites of techno-social experimentation and transformation. Through ‘smart city’ initiatives, city governments around the world are partnering with transnational technology firms to deeply integrate digital technologies—including extensive Internet of Things (IoT) sensing networks and increasingly complex infrastructures for data analytics—into everyday urban spaces. At the same time, emerging forms of digitally-mediated “platform capitalism,” represented by companies such as Airbnb and Uber, are dramatically disrupting existing economic, political and socio-spatial relations across urban contexts. In opposition to these trends, citizens’ initiatives in Barcelona, Spain are organizing around calls for “technological sovereignty,” radically rethinking existing models of urban development by claiming community control over emerging digital technologies. My ethnographic dissertation asks: Are emerging digital technologies inherently tools of technocratic governance, surveillance, and capital accumulation? Or how might they become loci for imagining and building alternative digital urban futures? I operationalize this question through three sub-questions focused on the production of alternative economies, urban space, and digital subjectivities, respectively, within the movement for technological sovereignty in Barcelona. These three sub-questions are the basis of the three articles attached as appendices. The first paper (Appendix A) explores the concept of technological sovereignty employed by activists in Barcelona, describing its basis in experiments with alternative arrangements of work and property, an ethics of care, and an engagement with municipal institutions. Reviewing existing literature on the politics of digital development in geography, I argue for the need to think beyond critiques of techno-capitalist development—and beyond binaries of techno-optimism and techno-pessimism. Analyses of ongoing processes of technological change in general, and smart cities in particular, too often present emerging digital technologies as silver-bullet solutions to a multitude of existing societal problems—making the world more connected, efficient, and sustainable, holding the promise to improve quality of life for millions of people. In contrast, more critical approaches highlight the ways such processes facilitate increased state and corporate surveillance, new forms of power and control, and new forms of exploitation and exclusion. Beyond such binaries, this paper argues for the need to imagine a multiplicity of possible social futures emergent in the entangled processes of urban and technological change. It explores the practices and discourses of the TS movement as a way to demonstrate how such alternatives might be brought about through grassroots organizing and collective experimentation. The second article (Appendix B) engages geographic literature on the automatic production of space—the way evolving assemblages of hardware, code, and data produce space with little to no direct human intervention—viewing it through the lens of philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s notion of proletarianization as the loss of knowledge. In contrast to this view of digital infrastructure, I describe the practices of Guifinet—neighborhood-based associations that build and maintain their own broadband internet infrastructure—focusing on the multiple forms of knowledge production and circulation on which the project is based. I present Guifinet as an example of amateur practices of de-proletarianization—as participants re-claim critical forms of knowledge about the processes (re)producing urban space. In doing so, I demonstrate the possibilities for digital infrastructures to create new spaces for democratic power based on alternative logics of techno-social organization. The third article (Appendix C) explores the question of digital subjectivity in the movement for technological sovereignty in Barcelona. I approach digital subjectivity as the way people understand their relationship to digital technology and processes of technological change, structured by discursively produced hierarchies of technological expertise that are intimately entangled in the reproduction of gender, race, class, age, and other axes of difference. The paper employs the work of Stiegler (1998) and Barad (2007) to explore the co-constitution of humanity and technics, and recognize the way material practices involving an array of human and nonhuman actors iteratively reproduce hierarchies of difference. Against the hegemonic subject positions of techno-capitalism, I explore the practices of technological sovereignty activists that challenge the discursive privileging and separation of “technical” knowledge from its social entanglements and produce a diversity of subjects enacting a being-toward alternative techno-social futures

Raising the carbonized forest: Science and technologies of singularization

Recognizing the potential of forests to store carbon, various policies and programs have emerged to enhance this potential as a climate mitigation strategy. While the effectiveness of these policies is highly debated, there can be no doubt that they have profoundly affected how forests are conceptualized, valued, and governed. In this article, we discuss how science supports this increasing carbonization of forests not just by focusing knowledge production processes on carbon, but also by supporting policies and programs that aim to efficiently manage forests to optimize their carbon value. We situate this process in a longer history to show how science operates as technology of singularization that, guided by principles of optimization and efficiency, contributes to the depoliticization and normalization of specific versions of the forest that foreground singular priority values, while subsuming and marginalizing of other ways of knowing, valuing, and living with forests. Although emerging practices in techno-science, including the adoption of smart technologies and automated forms of data generation and analysis, can potentially enhance understanding of multiple forest values, we argue that they are likely to intensify singularization and create ever tighter relationships between knowledge production and forest management. We conclude by discussing the need to counter and refuse singularization

Evolving spatialities of digital life: Troubling the smart city/home divide

While feminist geographers have long aimed to trouble conceptions of the city/home (and, by extension, public/private) divides, the digital city and the digital home are still often theorized as separate phenomena within much digital geography literature. Drawing on previous work on feminist home-city geographies, this paper proposes four analytical frames for reflecting on the relationship between urban and domestic space in digital geographies: governance, domestication, thresholds, and dwelling. The paper explores each lens through a critical review of recent literature in digital geographies and related fields. It weaves this review through a speculative reading of the Eco Delta Smart City, an experimental development building the smart city from the home up in Busan, South Korea. We show how each lens calls attention to distinct sets of questions, actors, agendas, and relations–thus refusing any single reading of the project or of the broader trends around digitalization of which it is a part. In the process, we trace how digitalization does not simply trouble existing spatial categories, but rather makes them manifest in new ways for differently situated subjects

Blockchain urbanism: Evolving geographies of libertarian exit and technopolitical failure

Libertarian “exit” imaginaries project new social, political, and economic structures separate from existing institutions in which “sovereign individuals” can opt-in to the governing system that fits their ideals. This paper traces libertarian exit imaginaries through a variety of territorial and technological projects. Demonstrating how these imaginaries evolve, it describes a recent proposal to build a semi-autonomous, blockchain-based smart city in Nevada. Reflecting on these projects, the paper highlights (1) their inevitable failure as they confront reality, (2) their role as spectacle, spreading libertarian ideology, and (3) their real-life impacts on distinct places and communities even when they fail or never materialize

Robotics in place and the places of robotics: productive tensions across human geography and human–robot interaction

Bringing human–robot interaction (HRI) into conversation with scholarship from human geography, this paper considers how socially interactive robots become important agents in the production of social space and explores the utility of core geographic concepts of scale and place to critically examine evolving robotic spatialities. The paper grounds this discussion through reflections on a collaborative, interdisciplinary research project studying the development and deployment of interactive museum tour-guiding robots on a North American university campus. The project is a collaboration among geographers, roboticists, a digital artist, and the directors/curators of two museums, and involves experimentation in the development of a tour-guiding robot with a “socially aware navigation system” alongside ongoing critical reflection into the socio-spatial context of human–robot interactions and their future possibilities. The paper reflects on the tensions between logics of control and contingency in robotic spatiality and argues that concepts of scale and place can help reflect on this tension in a productive way while calling attention to a broader range of stakeholders who should be included in robotic design and deployment

Models of demand response and an application for wastewater treatment plants1. ESRI Research Bulletin February 2020/04

Demand response can be defined as any change of the usual electricity demand pattern in response to a price signal from the electricity supplier. It is widely seen as a promising tool to increase energy system flexibility: electricity demand can increase when there is a surplus of electricity available, such as when wind levels are high, and can reduce when there is a shortage of electricity. In the industrial sector in particular, the potential for demand response can be significant. This is because electricity costs can be a big share of total costs and therefore there is a strong incentive to reduce electricity expenditures in order to be competitive. However, to date, the demand response from industrial electricity users has only been examined in a generic way, without taking account of their specific characteristics. Any results arising from these examinations are therefore of limited use for policy makers and industry participants