Reimagining smart city collaboration in Colombo, Sri Lanka after Gilbert Simondon

Abstract

ABSTRACT Most cities across the globe are embarking on various ‘smart’-based initiatives that seek to use technological developments to enhance people’s lives and make society more productive. Within such smart cities, citizens are often expected to become active ‘collaborators’ in producing smartness. Such technocratic forms of collaboration maintain entrenched forms of hierarchical power, with citizens usually figured as passive ‘consumers’ or ‘users’ of smart technologies rather than as real transformative participants. In this paper, I explore how ‘collaboration’ in the smart city might be thought of differently in ways that challenge the more utilitarian senses that dominate much political and academic discussion. I do this through an engagement with Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation and technology. In particular, I explore the distinction he draws between ‘interindividual’ and ‘transindividual’ modes of relation and how they entail different political senses of what collaboration between humans and technologies might entail. I flesh this out by drawing on interview research with stakeholders and citizens in Colombo, Sri Lanka. I highlight how stakeholders and citizens imagine collaboration and how these imaginaries explore alternate ways of living in and relating to smart urbanism and smart mobilities today.