Public participation in really existing smart cities
Ocasio-Cortez’ and Markey’s Green New Deal calls in several places and in several ways for participatory approaches to a rapid and fair transition.
a Green New Deal must be developed through transparent and inclusive consultation, collaboration, and partnership with frontline and vulnerable communities, labor unions, worker cooperatives, civil society groups, academia, and businesses; (10)
building resiliency against climate change-related disasters, such as extreme weather, including by leveraging funding and providing investments for community-defined projects and strategies (6)
So, let’s say we want to makes cities more sustainable by making them smarter. What signs do we have that smart allows “inclusive consultation” and “community defined projects”? For there has been some cause for doubt. Hollands (2015), introduced last issue, saw the spectre of corporate enterprise haunting all things smart and wondered if there could be any space for, er, public space. Smart cities appeared to him to be just the next step in a decades-long “corporate influence on urban planning”:
Why are we seeing a trend whereby our cities are increasing becoming a backdrop to corporate advertising and the privatisation of public space? (68)
Similarly, Lange & Waal (2013) have argued that smart (urban) tech leads to the personalization (and thus, a different kind of privatization) of city space, through (algorithmic) ‘social sorting’, pervasive tracking, and personal smart devices that take attention away from our shared public space.
That would mean, then, that this whole ‘smart sustainable cities’ business isn’t doing very well, neither in terms of a rapid, nor in terms of fair transition! Proponents haven’t seriously incorporated sustainability and now it seems as if the concept isn’t doing very well on inclusivity and openness either. However, on that last score we have yet to review the empirical literature, so let’s do that now.
Case 1: Sydney and Newcastle
The Sydney and Newcastle Metropolitan Area won the bid for a Commonwealth funded Smart Grid Smart City project. It was a major project, with stakeholders across all levels of government, business and research sectors. The idea was – as indeed one would expect, following Hollands – to prove a viable business case for smart grids in Australia. It sought to address the challenge of meeting peak demand, of incorporating the rapidly growing amount of domestic solar panels, and reducing the need for and cost of network reinforcement. Because of the variety in infrastructure and users, a city was thought to be the best place to test this solution of “the future”.
Ausgrid Smart Grid Smart City Information Centre, designed by SHAC
The case study comes from Bulkeley et al (2016). The focus on testing business cases would suggest the case study would supply neat confirmation of Hollands’ fear that the corporate spirit would determine what smart cities are. However, that’s not the turn that Bulkeley et al. take. Instead, what they show is that even a project like this, with its varied and powerful coalition of actors, remains a “fragile endeavour”. Its wave broke on the “insistent socio-materiality of the urban” (1713).
Thus, the authors recount how the dumb smart meters whose antennae just wouldn’t penetrate the thick layers of concrete in tenement housing complexes, and for which new, costly and time-consuming workarounds needed to be devised. They also point to the socially organized resistance of the built environment – i.e., regulations – such as the treacherously detailed conditions wind turbines need to fulfil before they can be placed. Significantly, these kinds of frictions have second-order effects in the social and political relations of the project: residents who get tired of ‘all this trouble’ and leave the project, endless rounds of development application reviews, etc.
Six UK cities
Smart city projects, then, have to ‘negotiate with the spatiality and the geography of place’, as David Harvey put it. Cowley et al 2018 use this quote (54) to open up their investigation into precisely the fragility of human enterprise: sure, we have the grand smart city mission statement, and yes, we have been duly warned by the “critical scholarship” (March 2018: 1694), but what actually happens when the smart rubber meets the road?
You thought I was just being cute with words, didn’t you? Smart rubber is actually a thing, I’ll have you know, courtesy of CNRS. And there’s more!
You may be surprised to find that things look a little more nuanced on the ground! The authors start by noting that all the policy documents they collected from their six UK case studies abound with references to citizenship and enhancing public participation. Unless you are very jaded, you’d have to take that seriously. The second thing they notice though is that it’s often not the municipal councils themselves, but other bodies such as “strategy boards” or “economic development boards” that initiate the smart city pilot projects (60). That will prove a critical little detail.
But what do we mean by citizens’ participation, really? Cowley et al. are very helpful here and came up with four different modalities through which citizens are ‘involved’ in smart city initiatives.
Based on Cowley et al 2018: 63-67. Illustrations from unDraw.co.
(Remember how at the end of last issue, I asked what if efficiency isn’t the main goal of a smart sustainable city? If you’re interested in following-up on that question, these modalities can get you going. Only the first of them defines the stake of “smart” as making things more ‘efficient’.)
So, how do our UK cities deal with each modality? The service user modality is, perhaps unsurprisingly, knowing what we know, slightly overrepresented. Still, it’s a fairly even distribution between service user, entrepreneurial and civic. However, political participation could hardly be found, whereas that was precisely the sort of participation the authors of the GND were primarily getting at.
Cowley et al. do a nice job of explaining the variation among the different cities (see 67). Whether cities emphasize the citizen as service-user or address the entrepreneur in us depends a lot on local economic strengths and local histories and cultures of governance, but also on what funding was available, and which institutions got to wield those funds. That last point is important. The authors hypothesize that political participation is this underrepresented because municipal councils are often not the bodies conceiving of and executing the smart city program (65).
Conclusions and lessons
Just as smart city apologists painted pretty but vague rosy pictures of the smart city’s benefits to mankind, critical scholars have been similarly speculative about the smart city’s dark underworld. As it turns out, our corporate overlords are human, all too human. More significantly: existing democratic institutions and frameworks matter.
Still: all their “people-centred” brouhaha notwithstanding, so far smart city initiatives do not actually tend towards, let alone promote, democratic participation – and so we should stop pretending that they do. Ensuring that they do requires real work.
The same goes for “sustainable cities”, by the way. Ahvenniemi et al 2017 noted that “the most well-known sustainable neighborhood rating schemes […] assign very low weight to direct economic and social measures” (235). The authors think it’s because it’s more difficult to measure. Again: democratic participation requires real work.
That work is important. You see, the dominant modality of the citizen-centric smart city – infrastructural services – is also the most enduring. Projects that target civic and political forms of participation, meanwhile, are also the most temporary forms of participation. (See Cowley et al, 69.) That is a doubly skewed balance.
In this light, the following lesson seems especially significant: who you are putting in charge of smart city initiatives, will matter for what kind of participation you get.
The fact that civic and political participation is underprivileged does not automatically imply that smart technology should be applied to those ends (Cowley et al, 70). Still, several authors have attempted to sketch the contours of what such an application would look like, if you’re interested. See for example Lange & de Waal (2013) on citizen’s sense of “ownership”, or Baccarne’s (2014) discussion of participatory design approaches. Particularly relevant for this newsletter is March (2018), who encourages advocates of “Degrowth” to explore the potential of smart city technology to help shape a different economy.
Even if we don’t do “smart” political participation, given the disproportionate attention to, and staying power of, urban services, we should beef up our existing (digitally dumb but otherwise pretty nifty) democratic interfaces to accompany the rapid rollout of all sorts of digitally connected infrastructures and dig data governance tools. That’d be pretty smart.
I went a bit long today, my apologies. Thanks for making it to the end, you’re a star! Next week, I’ll be more brief. Till then!
Sources
Ahvenniemi, Hannele, Aapo Huovila, Isabel Pinto-Seppä, and Miimu Airaksinen. 2017. "What are the differences between sustainable and smart cities?" Cities. 60: 234-245. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2016.09.009
Baccarne, B., Mechant, P. , Schuurman, D. Colpaert, P. & De Marez, L. (2014). Urban socio-technical innovations with and by citizens. Interdisciplinary Studies Journal. 3 (4): 143-156. http://hdl.handle.net/1854/LU-4365378 (Open Access)
Bulkeley, Harriet, Pauline M McGuirk, and Robyn Dowling. 2016. "Making a smart city for the smart grid? The urban material politics of actualising smart electricity networks". Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space. 48 (9): 1709-1726. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X16648152
Cowley, Robert, Simon Joss, and Youri Dayot. 2018. "The smart city and its publics: insights from across six UK cities". Urban Research & Practice. 11 (1): 53-77. https://doi.org/10.1080/17535069.2017.1293150 (Open Access)
Hollands R.G. 2015. "Critical interventions into the corporate smart city". Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society. 8 (1): 61-77. https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsu011 (Open Access)
Lange, de, M., and de, M. Waal. 2013. "Owning the city: New media and citizen engagement in urban design". First Monday. 18 (11). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v18i11.4954 (Open Access)
March, Hug. 2018. "The Smart City and other ICT-led techno-imaginaries: Any room for dialogue with Degrowth?" Journal of Cleaner Production: Part 2. 197: 1694-1703. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.09.154
If you do not have the appropriate credentials to cross the paywall to these articles, maybe you can check out sci-hub.tw (just type in the doi number), or if you are uncomfortable with that, send me a message and I’ll lend you a copy.