Book Review: Smart City Citizenship

Igor Calzada

doi:10.25034/ijcua.2021.v5n1-7

Abstract

Against the backdrop of the current hyperconnected and highly virialised post-COVID-19 societies, we, ‘pandemic citizens’, wherever we are located now, have already become tiny chips inside an algorithmic giant system that nobody really understands. Furthermore, over the last decade, the increasing propagation of sensors and data collections machines and data collections machines in the so-called Smart Cities by both the public and the private sector has created democratic challenges around AI, surveillance capitalism, and protecting citizens’ digital rights to privacy and ownership. Consequently, the demise of democracy is clearly already one of the biggest policy challenges of our time, and the undermining of citizens’ digital rights is part of this issue, particularly when many ‘pandemic citizens’ will likely be unemployed during the COVID-19 crisis. Amidst the AI-driven algorithmic disruption and surveillance capitalism, this book review sheds light on the way citizens take control of the Smart City, and not viceversa, by revolving around the new book entitled Smart City Citizenship recently published by Elsevier. The book review introduces nine key ideas including how to (1) deconstruct, (2) unplug, (3) decipher, (4) democratise, (5) replicate, (6) devolve, (7) commonise, (8) protect, and (9) reset Smart City Citizenship.

Highlights

Citizens in Europe have likely been pervasively surveilled during and probably as a result of the COVID-19 crisis (Aho & Duffield, 2020; Hintz, Dencik, & Wahl-Jorgensen, 2017; Kitchin, 2020; How to cite this article: Calzada, I. (2021)
How can e-democracy be ensured for all citizens while creating further democratic citizenship to avert the algorithmic and dataopolitic (Hand, 2020; Stucke & Grunes, 2017) extractivist hegemonic paradigm as well as Orwellian cybercontrol through massive contact-tracing apps that serve as a digital panopticon of the Leviathan (Kostka, 2019)? To examine new emerging citizenship regimes is always important but perhaps never more urgent than in fragile post-COVID-19 hyperconnected societies
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, and further requesting in-depth debates

Summary

Introduction

Citizens in Europe have likely been pervasively surveilled during and probably as a result of the COVID-19 crisis Smart City policy implementations have reduced the interdependencies among stakeholders to technocratic Public-PrivatePartnership (PPP) models and have failed to question the identities of strategic stakeholders and how they uniquely prioritise their business/social models. The book suggests democratising the Smart City by rethinking multistakeholder helix strategies by ensuring the complete democratic representation of diverse voices from each helix It proposes explicitly moving from the Triple and Quadruple Helix models towards Penta Helix, where social entrepreneurs, activists, bricoleurs, brokers, and assemblers play an important role as transformative intermediators resulting in a wide range of business and social models The book is clearly analysing the following questions: (i) How can digital technologies transform the relationships between governments, business, and civil society? (ii) Which techno-political (power) relations and dynamics exist between these agents, and how do they change? (iii) Which roles do innovative applications of digital technologies and the use of newly emerging technologies play in the post COVID-19 society? (iv) How do helix frameworks intersect with contact tracing and tracking apps? (v) What role do the public authorities and civic bottom-up initiatives play in addressing the power imbalances of the current data-driven smart cities’ landscape (between data providers, data platforms, and decision makers)? Critical or Radical Social Innovation may provide the lenses to better steer changing power-relationships among stakeholders

Conclusion

Acknowledgement and Funding