International perspectives on smart cities, smart mobilities and smart publics, 3 Jul 2019
Published: 30 June 2019
Roundtable
3 July 2019
2pm to 4.30pm
Adam Smith Building - Room 916
Smart cities, smart mobilities and smart publics are starting to materialise in urban environments, unevenly and in various forms. The placement of sensors, chargers, digital screens and Wi-Fi points in streetscapes and objects interacts with people’s relationships to the urban environment, to one another and to services accessed in daily life. These hybrids including smart benches, data points and smart vehicles are thoroughly interconnected with the city itself. Drawing on research in Germany, Australia, the US and the UK, this roundtable explores some of the key issues around smart developments such as mobilities, algorithms, governance and citizenship.
The introduction provides an overview of the Smart Publics project, a collaboration between the University of Glasgow and the University of Sydney. The project builds on preliminary research carried out by the research collaborators to investigate the social, design and governance implications of smart street furniture. Through a series of cross-institution and multidisciplinary workshops and research case studies (smart benches in London and InLinks in Glasgow), the project will scope, research and historically contextualise smart street furniture to understand whether and how these depart from and challenge values, uses and governance frameworks of pre-existing urban forms, remaking publics and cities in the process.
Papers
Citizen-centric! Smart cities in Australia, smart kiosks and cultural precedents of smart benches
Sophia Maalsen, Chris Chesher and Justine Humphry - The University of Sydney
This paper considers the move to citizen-centric smart city developments. Sophia Maalsen begins by contextualising Australian cities in these debates, where the past three years has seen many cities looking to adopt some of the diverse range of policies and technologies that come under the smart city banner. She observes that, unlike early versions of smart cities, many Australian cities are framing their smart city plans as citizen-centric, and demanding that technology providers meet their needs and develop products specific to their local contexts. Justine Humphry considers an element of smart cities – ‘smart kiosks’ – to deepen the argument that smart urban initiatives emerge in response to local agendas and contexts but also gain their meaning through global smart city discourse and imaginaries. She questions whether claims of their citizen-centrism and benefits for solving access disparities stand up to close scrutiny, linking such goals to long-standing issues of public interest in the provisioning of communication utilities in cities such as pay phones and public Wi-Fi. Further exploring these connections to past urban public infrastructures, Chris Chesher situates the smart city’s ‘smart bench’ within a longer tradition of urban social practices. He provides a historical overview of the public bench as a form of material culture and argues that benches are what we might call ‘already citizen-centric’ urban forms in that they have some interpretive flexibility to afford sitting and other forms of civic activity in a range of different social spaces and places.
Sophia Maalsen is a lecturer in urbanism at the University of Sydney, where she researches the role of technology in cities, housing and home. Prior to joining the University of Sydney, Sophia was a postdoctoral researcher on the EU funded Programmable City Project where she investigated the digital transformation of cities and urban governance. In particular, she worked on the development of the Dublin Dashboard, a city metrics indicator designed to provide Dublin City Council and the residents of Dublin with real-time and relevant data on the City’s performance. Her particular expertise is in understanding the intersection of the material, digital and the human and how this effects lived experience.
Chris Chesher is Senior Lecturer in Digital Cultures in the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. His research analyses the cultural practices and technological affordances of technologies, particularly those based on computing. His recent research has been on smart home technologies, digital real estate advertising and social robotics.
Justine Humphry is Lecturer in Digital Cultures in the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. Her research is on the cultural and political implications of mobile and digital technologies in everyday life with a focus on digital inequalities, marginalised media use and smart technology transformation. She has studied mobile communication and homelessness extensively, most recently in her study of LinkNYC and digital inclusion in New York City.
Smart Governance for Sustainable Cities: Findings from the SmartGov Project
Elaine Robinson - The University of Stirling
The presentation will give a brief overview of the SmartGov project and its findings thus far. The SmartGov project aims to investigate the use of ICT in cities and whether this stimulates or hinders sustainability governance. The project takes a critical look at the use of ICT in cities, and in particular focuses on the dynamics, outcomes and the critical factors of co-creation between citizens and governments in various policy domains (infrastructure, economy and social issues) and in three different countries (Brazil, UK and the Netherlands). This cross-country comparison allows for deeper insights into smart governance. The presentation is given by a member of the project who has only recently joined, so will be an overview of their early impressions so far.
Elaine Robinson is based at the Management School at the University of Stirling. She has recently joined The Centre for Research into Information, Surveillance and Privacy (CRISP) as a researcher on the ESRC funded SmartGov project. The SmartGov project involves research conducted by three research institutes: Utrecht University (Netherlands), Stirling University (UK) and Fundação Getulio Vargas (Brazil) and looks at the use of ICT in sustainable governance. Prior to this Elaine completed her PhD in Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Strathclyde. Her thesis explored public library computer acceptable use policies and how they communicate surveillance, filtering software, and the ethical principles of the profession.
Amazon and the Logistical City
Armin Beverungen - The University of Siegen
Amazon, now one of the largest logistical companies of the world, has developed a large network of fulfilment centres around the world, is extending its logistical networks to include delivery services, and is experimenting with its own retail shops. In doing so, it is developing and transforming protocols for the software and infrastructure of logistics, and thereby shaping the topology of the logistical city. Drawing on field research from the Ruhr area in Germany, in this talk I want to outline some key features of these protocols and topologies as they involve the management of flows of labour and goods in the city.
Armin Beverungen is a senior lecturer in media studies at the University of Siegen, working at the interstices of media and organization studies. During the summer of 2019 Armin will be based at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies in Bochum, working as a research fellow on a project entitled ‘Algorithmic Management in Logistics Centres: Automation, Labour, Capture’.
Making Mobility: Practices of ordering, navigating and routing among software developers
Paula Bialski - Leuphana University of Lüneburg.
How is my car seeing the road? How is it processing what is happening around it? Who is also helping me drive? Today’s car ride entails a multitude of computer-mediated maneuvers and routing procedures, with a car processing probe data such as road traffic and car speed. Behind the software that helps navigate the car, sit a team of software engineers who attempt to optimize a route – helping reduce the number of factors that can affect how a car gets from point A to B. Oftentimes, these engineers and other stakeholders involved in building such systems, understand only a fragment of its complexity. How do they hold it together? How do they avoid failure? Based on 2 years of situated ethnography in a large mapping and navigation software company in Berlin, this paper zooms in the multiple layers of understanding, misunderstanding, and ignorance in building a technical system. Where does ‘knowing’ a system begin and end? How much can we understand within the complexity of a computational system? In what moments do developers leave things up to chance? How do these barriers of understanding challenge hierarchical structures of power (such as power between a worker and a manager), or an older developer and a younger? This presentation will uncover the human-machine complexity of a navigation system, the various layers of understanding, misunderstanding, and ignorance among engineers, their managers, and their machines.
Paula Bialski is Professor of Digital Sociality Digital Cultures Research Lab at Leuphana University of Lüneburg. Paula published a book entitled “Becoming Intimately Mobile,” which draws on her ethnographic research on hospitality networks (Couchsurfing.com), and ride-sharing websites (Mitfahrgelegenheit.de) and explores the relationship between new media, mobility and intimacy, trust, and strangerhood. Prior to joining Leuphana, Paula conducted fieldwork at the HafenCity University in Hamburg, (within Prof. Alexa Faerber’s “Low Budget Urbanity” research project situated in the Faculty for Metropolitan Culture), for two sub-projects: “Money Saving in Inter-City Transport: Ride-Sharing Practices, Materialities and Imaginaries,” as well as “Sharing the City: Understanding the new social economy of online hospitality networkers.”
First published: 30 June 2019