Abstract
Distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) such as blockchain have in recent years been presented as a new general-purpose technology that could underlie many aspects of social and economic life, including civics and urban governance. In an urban context, over the past few years, a number of actors have started to explore the application of distributed ledgers in amongst others smart city services as well as in blockchain for good and urban commons-projects. DLTs could become the administrative backbones of such projects, as the technology can be set-up as an administration, management and allocation tool for urban resources. With the addition of smart contracts, DLTs can further automate the processing of data and execution of decisions in urban resource management through algorithmic governance. This means that the technological set-up and design of such DLT based systems could have large implications for the ways urban resources are governed. Positive contributions are expected to be made toward (local) democracy, transparent governance, decentralization, and citizen empowerment. We argue that to fully scrutinize the implications for urban governance, a critical analysis of distributed ledger technologies is necessary. In this contribution, we explore the lens of “the city as a license” for such a critical analysis. Through this lens, the city is framed as a “rights-management-system,” operated through DLT technology. Building upon Lefebvrian a right to the city-discourses, such an approach allows to ask important questions about the implications of DLTs for the democratic governance of cities in an open, inclusive urban culture. Through a technological exploration combined with a speculative approach, and guided by our interest in the rights management and agency that blockchains have been claimed to provide to their users, we trace six important issues: quantification; blockchain as a normative apparatus; the complicated relationship between transparency and accountability; the centralizing forces that act on blockchains; the degrees to which algorithmic rules can embed democratic law-making and enforcing; and finally, the limits of blockchain's trustlessness.
Highlights
Discussions have emerged around the application of blockchain in the domains of civics, urban governance and urban management
Distributed ledgers such as blockchain have started to be seen as a new general-purpose technology that could underlie many aspects of social and economic life (Lipsey et al, 2005; Davidson et al, 2016; Kane, 2017), with important implications for urban governance
A number of authors have expressed the aptitude of blockchain to become the administrative backbone of civic economy, peer-topeer and urban commons projects (Pitt and Diaconescu, 2014; Bollier, 2015; Pazaitis et al, 2017; Antoniadis and Martignoni, 2018; Rozas et al, 2018; Bauwens and Pazaitis, 2019)
Summary
Discussions have emerged around the application of blockchain in the domains of civics, urban governance and urban management. Distributed ledgers such as blockchain have started to be seen as a new general-purpose technology that could underlie many aspects of social and economic life (Lipsey et al, 2005; Davidson et al, 2016; Kane, 2017), with important implications for urban governance. In civil society, this shift is exemplified by various “blockchain for good” projects that have sprung up in recent years. The tech industry sees a lot of opportunity to implement blockchain as a new infrastructure for various smart city technologies, providing a decentralized database and transaction infrastructure to keep track of services as varied as ad-hoc vehicle networks for the organization of autonomous cars and other forms of transport to energy communities (Sun et al, 2016; Shen and Pena-Mora, 2018; Bhushan et al, 2020)
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