CfP: ISA-RC21 Conference (Research Committee 21 on Sociology of Urban and Regional Development)
in Antwerp, 6-8 July, 2020
Smart city backlash: resistances, insistences and divergence (Session 22)
Session organizers: Carina Listerborn ([log in to unmask]) and Lorena Melgaço ([log in to unmask]). Institute for Urban Research, Malmö University
Deadline for abstracts is 15 March 2020.
Abstract of max 250 words are submitted on the conference website through this link:
https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/conferences/rc21-sensing-the-city/call-for-papers/submit-your-abstract/.
Stimulated by the challenges the smart city poses on imagining the future (rather than imagining the future of the smart city), we invite artists, researchers, practitioners to engage in a dialogue around views, practices, approaches and critical perspective regarding smart urbanism.
During the last two decades, Smarter Cities Campaigns have been promoted by tech companies, nation states and supranational organizations like EU. In 2009 IBM set their mission to create smart cities as a “comprehensive approach to helping cities run more efficiently, save money and resources, and improve the quality of life for citizens” (Better World 2016). Since the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, a more hesitant approach to the digital solutions has emerged, with Amnesty international (2019) also warning about the threats of harvesting of data by giants like Facebook and Google to human rights, for example.
Beyond data gathering, the critique of smart cities interrogates the growing interest of tech companies in the urban. When Torontonians organized themselves in the #BlockSidewalk campaign, the spokeswomen Bianca Wylie argued that “The biggest issue with the Sidewalk Toronto [sister company to Google] deal is the threat it poses to democracy. This is about power and control writ large — corporate capture of governance.” Similar critiques and protests have been raised in Berlin “Against Google, Displacement and Tech Dominance”. Datta and Odendaal (2019) urge us to understand how the smart city produces and engages power, unveiling structural and social violence that underlies urban transformation worldwide.
For this session, we take inspiration from Flusser (198X) and Lefebvre (1989), who already in the 1980’s exposed the biases of technological development in the alienation of the citizens. While Lefebvre argued that advances in information technology grant the citizen the right to consume, rather than to produce information; Flusser argued that creativity and labour, necessary for envisioning the future, are now on the hands of technicians, who focus on the ‘how’, rather than on the ‘what fors’ or ‘whys’ technology should be produced. For him, every technology we produce has an inevitable backlash which dimensions need to be considered: “when designing the intelligent tools for the future, we will have to know how we want them to beat back upon us, and this implies that we will have to know how we want to change the future”, and this requires, the philosopher argues, some sort of vision of what this future should be.
Nevertheless, to even glimpse the future, such a vision needs to be built through the creative and ample exercise of dissensus, as a political way to challenge such heteronomous form of thinking and producing space. Different forms of tactics, with different levels of formal organisation and geographical and social scopes may be used in order to achieve that. This session invites papers that address the following tactics and beyond from different geographical locations, socio-spatial contexts and with different scales:
• Resistances: Organised groups who are actively disengaged from decision processes through technocratic decisions are openly resisting the less than transparent ways smart strategies are being implemented in cities around the world such as San Francisco, Queens, San Jose, Rennes, Guadalajara, Stockholm.
• Insistences: Other less confrontational approaches are also in the making, ones that reflect what Castelfranchi and Fernandes (2015) call insistence practices, by using tactics that aim at a rupture on the political order from the inside, by insisting and existing as a concrete social action and assuming that technology is not extrinsic from it. As such, they may invent, from within the system, actions that may reformat it.
• Divergences: Lastly, either from a resistant or insistent position, technologies may swerve toward unintended goals, through disruptive actions, such as hacking or repurposing, as temporary responses to threats to citizenship in the context of the smart.
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