Can we negotiate? Trust and the rule of law in the smart city paradigm

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the smart city as a political place. It analyses how both the technologies and the ideas smart cities are built on, oust trust and the rule of law as two important conditions for the city as a thriving political community. In particular, three challenges to the city as a political place are identified: de-subjectivation, invisibility, and a neo-liberal value shift. In order to address these challenges, we introduce the term ‘negotiation’ as a new guiding principle to the use of smart technologies in cities. Through negotiation, we underline some necessary steps to re-subjectify citizens and to put the acceptance of vulnerability and transparency at the centre of our thinking and evaluation of the smart city. This article concludes that the current focus on participation and citizen-centric smart city projects is not sufficient to build and contribute to a genuine political community and that a re-evaluation of active citizenship in the smart city context is therefore needed.

KEYWORDS:

• Smart city
• trust
• control

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The use of the term ‘smart’ with the associated paradigm of ‘smartness’ is widely discussed in literature and criticised, among others, for its inherent positive connotation stemming from the corporate marketing discourse that coined it, as well as for being both imprecise in theory and inaccurate in practice, lumping together disparate realities with different goals and implementations. However, for readability, this article will not use quotation marks around the term ‘smart’.

2 Open-government advocate Bianca Wylie is following the development of Sidewalk Toronto closely and comments regularly through her Medium page, available at: https://medium.com/@biancawylie. She is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation and founder of Open Data Institute Toronto.