We can see this most easily by considering just who it is the smart city is intended for – by seeking to discover what model of urban subjectivity is inscribed in the scenarios offered by the multinational IT vendors that developed the smart city concept in the first place, and who are heavily involved in sites like Palava. When you examine their internal documentation, marketing materials and extant interventions, it becomes evident there is a pronounced way of thinking about the civic that is bound up in all of them, with rather grim implications for the politics of participation. A close reading leaves little room for doubt that vendors like Microsoft, IBM, Siemens, Cisco and Hitachi construct the resident of the smart city as someone without agency; merely a passive consumer of municipal services – at best, perhaps, a generator of data that can later be aggregated, mined for relevant inference, and acted upon. Should he or she attempt to practise democracy in any form that spills on to the public way, the smart city has no way of accounting for this activity other than interpreting it as an untoward disruption to the orderly flow of circulation. (This is explicit in Palava’s marketing materials, as well.) All in all, it’s a brutally reductive conception of civic life, and one with little to offer those of us whose notions of citizenhood are more robust. This is precisely my criticism of the corporate smart city concept, and the reason why I hope to hijack it and turn smart cities into smart communities. The corporations are designing a smart city where all the data from the city is tracked by their big data centers and sold to other corporations and governments. Imagine facebook, but on a thousand scale. All our information would be fed into these data centers for the benefit and control of the large corporations that control them. But what if we hijack that concept? What if we, instead, have smart communities that where: a) each citizen own and control its own cloud in their living room, so that corporations and governments have no access to their data? b) rather than corporations owning all the information and networks, we owned our own information and, collectively, our communitys network. Then rather than the corporations selling products to us, we would sell services to them and ultimately gain control of them? c) rather than we being treated as passive consumers, we used the networks to develop systems that facilitated grassroots democracy through collaborative decision-making systems and mass coordination of all civic services directly from the people?
Posted on: Wed, 24 Dec 2014 09:57:02 +0000
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