Europe is witnessing the establishment of a new regional order, built on territories such as Scotland, Catalonia and the Basque Country

This year has seen an independence referendum in Scotland, a contested debate over a proposed independence consultation in Catalonia and growing momentum behind independence movements elsewhere in Europe. Igor Calzada writes that the debates taking place within countries like Spain and the UK offer an example of what he terms ‘post-independence’. He argues that political devolution, economic development and nation-state re-scaling processes have become intertwined, thereby establishing a new European regional order characterised by the presence of city-regional small nations as new key players beyond their referential nation-states

The right to have digital rights in smart cities

This book is a reprint of the Special Issue Social Innovation in Sustainable Urban Development that was published in Sustainabilit

Postpandemic technopolitical democracy: Algorithmic nations, data sovereignty, digital rights, and data cooperatives

COVID-19 has hit citizens dramatically during 2020, not only creating a general risk-driven environment encompassing a wide array of economic vulnerabilities but also exposing them to pervasive digital risks, such as biosurveillance, misinformation, and e-democracy algorithmic threats. Over the course of the pandemic, a debate has emerged about the appropriate democratic and technopolitical response when governments use disease surveillance technologies to tackle the spread of COVID-19, pointing out the dichotomy between state-Leviathan cybercontrol and civil liberties. The COVID-19 pandemic has inevitably raised the need to resiliently and technopolitically respond to democratic threats that hyperconnected and highly virialised societies produce. In order to shed light on this debate, amidst this volume on “democratic deepening”, this chapter introduces the new term “postpandemic technopolitical democracy” as a way to figure out emerging forms and scales for developing democracy and citizen participation in hyperconnected and highly virialised postpandemic societies. Insofar as the digital layer cannot be detached from the current democratic challenges of the twenty-first century including neoliberalism, scales, civic engagement, and action research-driven co-production methodologies; this chapter suggests a democratic toolbox encompassing four intertwined factors including (i) the context characterised by the algorithmic nations, (ii) challenges stemming from data sovereignty, (iii) mobilisation seen from the digital rights perspective, and (iv) grassroots innovation embodied through data cooperatives. This chapter elucidates that in the absence of coordinated and interdependent strategies to claim digital rights and data sovereignty by algorithmic nations, on the one hand, big tech data-opolies and, on the other hand, the GDPR led by the European Commission might bound (negatively) and expand (positively) respectively, algorithmic nations’ capacity to mitigate the negative side effects of the algorithmic disruption in Western democracies

Blockchain-driven digital nomadism in the Basque e-Diaspora

E-diasporas are communities of diaspora members utilizing digital technologies and data platforms to establish connections among themselves and with their homelands. In response to the pandemic, governments worldwide have intensified efforts to reinforce e-diasporas. However, these endeavours often rely on social media extractivist Big Tech platforms, which are referred to as ‘hyperconnected diasporas’ in this article. This trend potentially poses a threat to institutional trust and data privacy. This article introduces HanHemen (ThereHere in Basque language, Euskera), an ongoing action research-driven e-diaspora platform facilitated by the Basque Government. HanHemen aims to ensure data privacy through experimentation with blockchain technologies and co-production with end-users via DAOs. This article reveals findings from an online survey completed by 419 Basque diasporic citizens (N = 1,385), who demonstrated support for digital nomadism (62%) and expressed concerns about data privacy (84%). These findings highlight the need to overcome the mainstream ‘hyperconnected diaspora’ trend through HanHemen

Emancipatory urban citizenship regimes in post-pandemic Catalonia, Scotland, and Wales

Wide tensions regarding the organization of nation-state power have been triggered over the last years in the UK and Spain. By contrast, in the UK, (i) the plebiscite on Scottish Independence has been characterized since 2014 so far by a regular hegemony of the SNP in Scotland, and (ii) more recently, distinct resilient responses to tackle COVID-19 have dramatically shifted perceptions about the potential constitutional arrangements in Wales partially opposing a state-centric vision of the UK. By contrast, the role played by the constitutionally illegal but socially constitutive referendum in Catalonia on 1 October 2017, remarkably provoked the re-emergence of the Spanish far-right narrative through the surge of the new political party called Vox. In both cases, the urban in Glasgow, Cardiff, and Barcelona has been shaping various oppositions to state-centric agendas, and such oppositions have shaped elections in the UK and Spain. This article sheds light on the distinct, emerging, and emancipatory urban citizenship regimes in Catalonia, Scotland, and Wales, particularly illustrating the roles that Barcelona, Glasgow, and Cardiff, respectively, are playing in articulating a counter-reaction by rescaling a state-centric vision. This article employs past elections’ evidence to illustrate such regimes amid postpandemic times in datafied states

Diagnose the stakeholders’ network behaviour: report on conclusions of the interviews and the focus groups of the follower/fellow cities

To cite this report: Calzada, I. (2019), Diagnose the Stakeholders’ Network Behaviour: Report on Conclusions of the Interviews and the Focus Groups of the Follower/Fellow Cities (Horizon 2020: REPLICATE Project Reports No. 8.4.). Oxford: University of Oxford

Emerging digital citizenship regimes: Pandemic, algorithmic, liquid, metropolitan, and stateless citizenships

This article develops a conceptual taxonomy of five emerging digital citizenship regimes: (i) the globalised and generalisable regime called pandemic citizenship that clarifies how post-COVID-19 datafication processes have amplified the emergence of four intertwined, non-mutually exclusive, and non-generalisable new techno-politicalised and city-regionalised digital citizenship regimes in certain European nation-states’ urban areas; (ii) algorithmic citizenship, which is driven by blockchain and has allowed the implementation of an e-Residency programme in Tallinn; (iii) liquid citizenship, driven by dataism – the deterministic ideology of Big Data – and contested through claims for digital rights in Barcelona and Amsterdam; (iv) metropolitan citizenship, as revindicated in reaction to Brexit and reshuffled through data co-operatives in Cardiff; and (v) stateless citizenship, driven by devolution and reinvigorated through data sovereignty in Barcelona, Glasgow, and Bilbao. This article challenges the existing interpretation of how these emerging digital citizenship regimes together are ubiquitously rescaling the associated spaces/practices of European nation-states

Pandemic citizenship amidst stateless algorithmic nations: digital rights and technological sovereignty at stake

COVID-19 has hit citizens dramatically during 2020, not only creating a general risk-driven environment encompassing a wide array of economic vulnerabilities but also exposing them to pervasive digital risks, such as biosurveillance, misinformation, and e-democracy algorithmic threats. Over the course of the pandemic, a debate has emerged about the appropriate techno-political response when governments use disease surveillance technologies to tackle the spread of COVID-19, pointing out the dichotomy between state-Leviathan cybercontrol and civil liberties. In order to shed light on this debate, this article introduces the term ‘pandemic citizenship’ to better understand extreme circumstances in which citizens have been surviving. Particularly, this article attempts to provide an overview by focusing on stateless nations and the need to conduct further research and gather policy evidence to articulate counter political strategies as ‘algorithmic nations’. The COVID-19 pandemic has inevitably raised the need to resiliently and techno-politically respond to threats that hyper-connected and highly virialised societies produce. Amidst the increasingly AI-driven governance systems in several nation-states in Europe, this article spotted the need to devolve data power to citizens through data ecosystems in European stateless algorithmic nations. This article argues that in the absence of a coordinated and inter-dependent strategy to claim digital rights and technological sovereignty by a set of stateless algorithmic nations in Europe, on the one hand, Big Tech data-opolies, and on the other hand, the GDPR led by the European Commission, might bound and expand respectively, stateless nations’ capacity to mitigate the negative side effects of the algorithmic disruption. Individually, we already observed subtle reactions in several nations, including Catalonia and Scotland, that are unlikely to be consistent unless a joint strategy takes place at the European level by stakeholders operating in these nations’ techno-political spheres