Abstract
This article provides empirical research about the perspectives of citizens of Rotterdam, the Netherlands, on the emergent phenomenon of ‘smart urban safety’, which advocates advanced uses of digital technologies and data for urban safety management, and is gaining currency in thinking about urban futures. While smart cities affect many dimensions of city management, applications to safety management belong to the most controversial, revealing important tensions between disparate perspectives on technology and society in the context of urban living environments. Despite their influence, the concepts of smart cities and smart urban safety are largely unknown to the public. To gain insights into citizens’ perspectives, this study uses smart urban safety vignettes to which participants are invited to respond. Using discourse analytical techniques, their interpretations of safety in the smart city are described, which center on functional designs, express lacking influence over technological developments, and reflect on benefits and risks and on their civic roles vis-à-vis technologically mediated urban safety management. Our article concludes by arguing how these findings complement, but also show limitations to traditional technology acceptance models that are as of yet dominant in research of smart urban safety specifically, and smart cities more generally.
Highlights
In ongoing debates about the future of cities in an urbanizing world, urban safety is considered a key challenge, demanding innovative approaches by city planners, administrators and safety organizations
Wonder and skepticism about smart city technologies and information systems often combine in system design repertoires; accounts that revolve around the functionality of the presented vignettes, where participants ask and deliberate about how urban phenomena to which smart city systems are applied are defined, measured and analyzed, and who decides on such matters
We found that participants’ reactions can be organized into repertoires concerning smart city setups, generalized and more safety-specific reasons for acceptance, and citizens’ roles in relation to ‘smart’ urban safety management
Summary
In ongoing debates about the future of cities in an urbanizing world, urban safety is considered a key challenge, demanding innovative approaches by city planners, administrators and safety organizations While there is great enthusiasm about the potentials of smart cities, one of the main reasons for criticizing the concept is that its use in discourse and practice often excludes citizens’ desires, aspirations and concerns. Excluding these ‘citizen perspectives’ problematizes the legitimacy of resource intensive smart city projects that may pull attention away from the priorities of citizens themselves (Shelton and Lodato, 2019). By closely analyzing the discursive resources participants use in their reactions, we describe a variety of citizen perspectives, which have implications for the politics of smart urban safety and challenge the appropriateness of trade-off models to explain citizens’ acceptance of individual smart city technologies. The paper ends with the discussion and conclusions of the main findings in light of theoretical and practical implications of our research
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