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- Convenors:
-
Lorenzo D'Orsi
(University of Foggia)
Pietro Meloni (University of Perugia)
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- Discussant:
-
Luca Rimoldi
(Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Urban Studies
- Sessions:
- Thursday 24 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
This panel interrogates the role of smart cities in defining new urban imaginaries at a global level, focusing on the concrete, uneven narratives and practices that social actors use to transgress, break or reinterpret smart city logics in their daily life.
Long Abstract:
In the last decade, local, national and transnational actors (urban planners, ITC communities, politicians) have increasingly implemented "smart city" policies at global level. These new smart city rhetoric and politics mould seductive imaginaries based on keywords like innovation, sustainability, creativity, connectivity, promising to improve quality of life for the urban population. Critical analysis on smart cities highlights how this new paradigm is yet another expression of a city model imposed from above. The smart city manifests itself as the last incarnation of neoliberalism in urban spatial politics: it is market-oriented and enacts a depoliticization of social life. Moreover, this new "smart urbanism" exacerbates socio-economic inequalities rather than reducing them, since it is mainly targeted to educated people. However, critical literature declines the smart city in the singular form, and risks providing universal analyses distant from the concrete ways smart city policies interact with existing urban realities.
This panel is interested in ethnographic contributions that problematise local concretizations of the smart city and, contrastively, the implications of breaking their rules. How and why are smart cities conveyed in urban contexts and how, why and by whom are they re-appropriated and contested? Which is the meaning of transgressing smart city rules? Are these transgressions part of explicit struggles? Do they reflect class-conflicts, youth sub-cultures, local demands? Or rather are they individually enacted? Eluding a strict dichotomy between subversion and resistance, the panel intends to create a deeper understanding of what is at stake in contesting and transgressing new smart imaginaries and politics.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 24 June, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
This paper looks at the shared dockless e- scooters as a case of urban digitalization where questions of mobility, transformed use of the city, as well as questions of spatial (in-) justice are explored.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on perspectives from urban anthropology and technology and science studies (STS), the main aim of this paper is to trace the social relationships behind digitalization of urban mobility. Sociotechnical innovations change the interaction and experience of urban life, and shape new borders and conflicts, as not everyone accepts the new form of mobility in the same way. The digitalization of everyday life raises questions about use of space, trajectories of movement, time and surveillance. What and whose imaginaries influence urban planning? How is the landscape of the city and consequently, our lived everyday life, changing?
Without doubt, electric scooters add to digitization of urbanity and mobility. The moving is embodied and emplaced practice. Pierre Bourdieu (1977) placed the bodily dispositions on the habitus, Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst (2008) argued that walking is not only a way of social life, but that walking, in fact, enables it. What changes if we choose electric scooter instead of walking or instead of a bicycle?
Another aspect to consider are protests towards e - scooters and their consequent destruction, as an answer to their taking up of the common space. The question of whose space and who can (and can’t) use it, arise and I propose to look at it through the lens of spatial justice. Edward Soja wrote that “the spatiality of (in)justice […] affects society and social life just as much as social processes shape the spatiality or specific geography of (in)justice (Soja 2010a: 5).
Paper short abstract:
In this presentation, I want to address how discourses about data collection, data proceeding and the digitalisation of services for urban residents problematise smart city policies. I focus on so-called model cities of the contest ‘Smart Cities made in Germany’ in my discussion.
Paper long abstract:
The German federal government has raised the digital modernisation of German municipalities to a national level with the ‘Smart Cities made in Germany’ contest. Launched in 2019, the contest invites cities of all sizes to either apply with a smart city strategy or concrete smart city projects to be implemented. Cities focus their smart city strategies and projects on different areas such as health, mobility, and/or housing – depending on the city’s specific characteristics. Thus, the contest already demands an engagement with specific urban realities for cities to be successful applicants and become so-called model cities.
One important area, however, are the urban administration and the work in the city hall itself. In this presentation, I want to focus on the administrative level to show how mayors and other city employees problematise smart city policies due to the realties they experience in the city halls. These problematisations concern especially data. Data are the basis for all projects associated with a smart city and city employees engage critically in discourses about data collection, data processing and the digitalisation of services for residents. I suggest that these discourses bring to the fore a complex interplay of ethical questions, demands of residents and the everyday work and possibilities in the city hall. Drawing on examples of so-called model cities, I want to engage in these discourses and bring my practical experiences as project assistant in a smart city project in dialogue with research.
Paper short abstract:
I pay particular attention to the pursuit of aspiring tech innovators in Kinshasa who invent digital solutions in order to make urban life more efficient and less cumbersome - two pillars of the imagination of "smart cities". Their inventions propose to "thin", even "short-cut" urban relationships.
Paper long abstract:
In this presentation, I will pay particular attention to the pursuit of aspiring tech innovators in Kinshasa who invent digital solutions in order to make life in Kinshasa more efficient and less cumbersome - two pillars of the imagination of "the smart city". Rather than attending to the local adoption or appropriation of smart designs from abroad, I zoom in on "Kinois" digital products. The tech world attracts many Kinshasa’s young adults, because it formulates novel vocabularies, proposes new scripts for a livable, “better life” (vivre mieux), and claims particular understandings of precarity, vulnerability and interdependence. Their technological innovations need to be understood as a direct dialogue with a particular experience of the everyday, one in which (Kinois) daily life is understood to be in need of remedy, and technology can provide a solution. In particular, as I will show, Kinois tech developers assess their lifeworld as “socially precarious”, and formulate tech-based “solutions” in order to find a way out. Relationships and ethics in the city are reflected upon; new tools for navigating the urban social space are proposed; and new modalities of becoming and relating to urban others are imagined. All in all, these innovations are expressions of fraught, even excessive sociality. While imagining new solutions, tech entrepreneurs become mindful of their relationships, some of which appear as ambivalent and in need of “thinning” and even “short-cutting”.
Paper short abstract:
The paper explores two visions of smart city in Cambodia: one is imposed from above by the state who aims to expand its power over the city, while the other one is engineered by some local people who aim to improve the environment. I show how citizenship is contested around the making of smart city.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores how the seductive image of ‘smart city’ is perceived by some locals as the key to solve environmental problems and the growing waste generation in Cambodia. The post-war Cambodia has witnessed a rapid but turbulent economic development fuelled by the expansion of private sector. Luxury hotels and skyscrapers are burgeoning across cities, making inroads into the natural reserve of the country, and generating an increasing amount of construction waste. Yet, the urban development does not just go ‘vertically’ but it also expands ‘horizontally’ (Jensen 2017). Recently, the Cambodia government, in partnership with private investors, aims to remake key urban areas into smart cities by building a network of electronic Internet of Things (IoT) where sensors are created to collect personal data in an attempt to improve traffic conditions and control crime rates. This move is widely viewed as the expansion of state control and the creation of ‘financialized infrastructure’ (Bear 2017). However, ‘smart city’ is not just imposed by the state. A growing number of community-based organisations founded by young Cambodian intellectuals have sought to develop smart technology to improve environmental situation in particular the poorly-managed waste situation. This paper thus examines how another version of ‘smart city’ is emerged and engineered on the ground by Cambodian young adults. Tracing various graphic visual representations and reports of the alternative ‘smart city’ that stresses environmental care and conservation, I consider how young Cambodians seek to (re)-claim citizenship through the promise of ‘smart city’.