A digital right to the city: who defines democracy in smart cities?

Digitization of the city is heralded as the bottom-up empowerment of its citizens. But who defines citizenship as digital technology infiltrating everything from personalized experience to the unimagined potential of networked urban space? Mark Dean unpacks recent academic literature that questions citizens’ rights in the hyper-connected city. 

Improving the smart city for everyone begins with ensuring technology enhances democracy.

The smart city concept is now something policymakers, and urban communities regularly engage with. Technologies like free public Wi-Fi, public transport GPS tracking, high-speed internet for entrepreneurs, vehicles that can speak to traffic lights, urban bike-share systems, and smart garbage bins feature among a broad range of smart city innovations that policymakers have supported to better connect citizens to their urban environment in the digital age.

But when the policy focuses on these technological aspects and their efficacy in creating more connected cities, policymakers can overlook more critical issues: the unavoidable collection and use of big data by governments and companies implementing these technologies. As smart cities develop, collecting extensive data becomes an issue because it brings privacy, security, and access to the fore. Joe Shaw and Mark Graham stress:

As more people live in digital, digitally mediated, and digitally augmented places, further developing the concept of an informational right to the city is imperative to understand precisely how power is reproduced through code, content, control, and urbanization of information.

Previous research identifies the genuine potential of data collection to fall far short of guaranteeing the privacy and security of citizens. These technologies are most often owned or developed – or both – by private companies, meaning proprietary rights exclude the public from accessing the data they generate. The benefits of smart city strategies can be outweighed by risks and stifle positive change if not implemented effectively. In these ways, the use of data in processes of intelligent city innovation raises severe concerns about how and by whom citizenship and participation in the digital age are defined.

Society’s rush to utilize smart city solutions to urban problems means the risks can be neglected. With such risk in mind, recent academic literature squarely faces these issues, providing key concepts that can help to encourage data transparency, access, and security, thereby producing intelligent city innovations that benefit everyone – governments, businesses, and citizens.

Mark Dean, bangthetable

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