Binding the Smart City Human-Digital System with Communicative Processes

This chapter will explore the dynamics of power underpinning ethical issues within smart cities via a new paradigm derived from Systems Theory. The smart city is an expression of technology as a socio-technical system. The vision of the smart city contains a deep fusion of many different technical systems into a single integrated “ambient intelligence”. ETICA Project, 2010, p. 102). Citizens of the smart city will not experience a succession of different technologies, but a single intelligent and responsive environment through which they move. Analysis of such an environment requires a framework which transcends traditional ontologically-based models in order to accommodate this deep fusion. This chapter will outline a framework based on Latour’s Actor-Network Theory and Luhmann’s treatment of society as an autopoetic system. We shall use this framework to map the influence of relevant factors on ethical issues, irrespective of their composition or type. For example, under this treatment, both human praxis and technical design can be viewed as comparable tools of domination. This chapter will provide a framework for the analysis of relations between any elements of the smart city, ranging from top-level urban management processes down to individual device operations. While we will illustrate the use of this schema through examination of ethical issues arising from power dynamics within the smart city, it is intended that this example will demonstrate the wider utility of the model in general

Governing the complexity of smart data cities: Setting a research agenda

This chapter develops a research agenda for big and open data in smart cities based on a thorough literature discussion of Actor Network Theory and the key concepts of urban governance and complexity. We argue that much of the smart city data discourse is highly modernist and restores an ideal of control and central steering that is thoroughly at odds with the complex multi-actor environment of smart cities. Against this background, we propose new research directions for the policy aspects of smart cities, asking in particular about the possible contradictory interests of city governments and the ICT sector on the one hand, and of city governments and hyperinformed citizens on the other; the data and analytic aspects of smart cities, raising the question of the quality and implicit values in big data, as well as the analytic challenges to collect, analyze and apply them, including the issue of data literacy for the citizenry of the smart city; the legal and social aspects of smart cities, which concern particularly issues of data ownership and privacy, and the new inequalities that may emerge as a result of smart city and big data developments; and the spatial aspects of smart cities, in particular the material and spatial repercussions of the movement to online, digital public and private services, and the reworking of spatial boundaries

Gender and Inequality in the Workplace: Lessons from Institutional and Marxist-Feminist Perspectives

Gender discrimination and inequality in the workplace are pertinent issues in the contemporary labor markets across the developed and developing world. The aim of this chapter is to outline two frameworks, namely, Williamson’s New Institutional Economics (NIE) framework and the Marxist-Feminist framework of social reproduction as well as their historical roots, which allow the conceptualization of gender discrimination and inequality in the workplace from a structural perspective. The root causes of these forms of discrimination and inequality are allocated to the wider social context of either (i) different formal and informal institutional settings in the case of the NIE framework or (ii) the exploitation and alienation within the capitalist mode of production. The chapter outlines the relevant methodological principles inherent in these two frameworks to illustrate, with reference to relevant literature, how these can help the interested reader in guiding and conceptualizing his or her research. Where relevant, the chapter supports the theoretical assertions with empirical research and practical examples of gender discrimination in the workplace, which helps us to formulate preliminary policy implications. The chapter closes with a summary of the distinct advantages of the two frameworks and, in the light of these different advantages, a call for methodological pluralism