Data-Driven Citizenship Regimes in Contemporary Urban Scenarios: An Introduction

ABSTRACT

This Special Issue presents new perspectives on the idea of digital citizenship by delving into the nexus between its emerging concepts, the consequences of the global pandemic crisis, and the urban environment. It does so by addressing a wide range of case studies from three continents and developing two main hypotheses. First, the COVID-19 outbreak has expanded the impact of digital technologies on citizens’ everyday life. Second, the urban realm is the environment where new citizenship regimes are emerging through platformization, datafication, and the rescaling of the state. To introduce the Special Issue, this article: (i) examines recent scholarship about the effects of the pandemic on digital citizenship; (ii) discusses and expands concepts of digital citizenship through case studies; and (iii) assesses how emerging forms of digital citizenship are fostered by uneven ‘pandemic citizenship’ regimes worldwide.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital citizenship
• pandemic citizenship
• nation-state rescaling
• datafication
• platform urbanization
• techno-politics
• inequalities
• urban citizenship

This Special Issue aims to rethink the concept of digital citizenship by connecting it to the increasing digitalization of the urban scenario as a corollary of the pandemic crisis. This aim is based on two leading assumptions. First, the COVID-19 outbreak has generally expanded the impact of digital technologies on our everyday life and experience as citizens. Second, the urban realm is the environment where new standards for digital development are set and deployed: it therefore provides the focus for exploring the evolution of digital citizenship. Based on these assumptions, the Special Issue delves into the manifestations and transformations of digital citizenship in a world shaped by processes of ‘planetary urbanization’ and rescaling of nation-states as well as by the new strategies and practices of digital governance fostered by the pandemic crisis.

Along the fault lines of citizenship that are manifested in the identities of religion, class, gender, and geographies, and on questions of techno-political and city-regional rights, this Special Issue opens up a debate on the growing digitization of our urban environment, citizenship and related implications of the global pandemic crisis. The latter has altered the way citizens learn, work, and live. It has reconfigured existing inequalities and social divisions. This Special Issue looks at instances in which the pandemic has exacerbated hyperconnected dependency, digital divides, and techno-political practices. It further inquires ramifications beyond the pandemic to set out new research avenues aimed at exploring the possibilities of techno-political and city-regional implications allowing citizens to actively engage in social and political activities that define the conditions of digital citizenship around the globe.

These notions and processes are examined through a wide geographic range of case studies which underline their planetary and city-regional extent. The Special Issue includes studies on Tallinn, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Cardiff, Glasgow, Bilbao as well as on Singapore, India, China, Northern Ireland, and South Africa. Thus, it aims to provide a global perspective on the way in which the institutions and practices of citizenship have been reshaped by processes of digitalization and urbanization in an exceptional moment such as the global pandemic outbreak. The six articles investigate the role of digital citizenship in the political and social aftermath of COVID-19, focusing on the urban realm and how rescaling through planetary urbanization might occur (Schmid et al., 2017). They create a intertwined set of cases exploring how the connection between the three elements (digital, urban, and pandemic) is reflected in peculiar dimensions of citizenship.

On the one hand, this Special Issue delves into the manifestations and shifts of digital citizenship and the uneven implications of the pandemic through several case studies addressing the planetary reach of both, digitization as well as the pandemic. On the other hand, it scrutinizes an emergent, new techno-political arena and the expanding field of challenges for citizenship practice. It explores how digitization processes are redefining citizenship through the incorporation of new digital rights and forms of deliberation and techno-political empowerment (Calzada 2022a). In this process, the urban is challenged as a primary social and political space for participation, exchange, and action (Tomasello 2017, 2020; Hanakata and Bignami 2021). In this introduction, we first address the effects of the pandemic crisis on citizenship governance. Then, we link the Special Issue to recent scholarship on digital citizenship and subsequently elaborate on the aim of rethinking digital citizenship by focusing on the urban landscape and its accelerated processes of digitization and platformization (Brenner 2018; Calzada 2020b). Hence, we assess how an emerging form of ‘urban-digital citizenship’ is affected and fostered by uneven ‘pandemic citizenship’ regimes by interrogating whether nation-states’ are rescaled accordingly (Calzada 2015).

1. Pandemic Citizenship

In general terms, we can assume that the pandemic crisis has increased the impact of digital technologies in political and social life (Bignami 2021). It has magnified the role of digital platforms in the reorganisation of urban territories in the context of the health emergency. Contact tracing applications have raised vibrant debates around ‘pandemic citizenship’ and epitomised the magnitude of contemporary trends to incorporate digital computation into the governance of urban areas and border controls among nation-states (Calzada 2022a). Hence, the pandemic has also furthered growing concerns regarding ‘platform extractivism’ and algorithmic ‘surveillance’ pursued by means of digitalization (Barassi 2017; Cheney-Lippold 2017; Couldry and Mejias 2019; Zuboff 2019; Tomasello 2022). As such, flagship Big Tech firms of surveillance capitalism – e.g. Google and Facebook/Metaverse – have already assumed many functions previously associated with nation-states by rescaling them (Calzada 2022b; Arrighi and Stjepanović 2019; Linklater et al. 1998b). Therefore, rescaling have deterritorialized and/or liquified citizenship (Calzada 2020a, 2022a; Orgad and Baübock, 2018) and thus posed the question around the need for a better definition of post-pandemic techno-political democracies in Europe (Calzada and Ahedo 2021). As a result, we are also confronted with an increasing need to understand the potentials and challenges of ‘technopolitics’ in the governing practices of smart cities and city-regional case studies (Calzada 2017, 2021a; Ruppert, Isin, and Bigo 2017).

Early evidence shows that various smart technologies have been repurposed in urban areas to inform response measures, minimise human-to-human contact, identify infected individuals, predict diffusion patterns, and facilitate quarantine measures (Florida, Rodriguez-Pose, and Storper 2021) among others. These are short- and long-term changes that address structural social and political urban inequalities.

Although COVID-19 affected the entire globe, its impact was felt directly but not equally by all city-regions – as it is shown by the case studies analysed in this issue (OECD 2020). One of the initial observations regarding the pandemic was the divergence among national capacities to use technology to effectively administer urban governance. This divergence is emerging as a prominent marker of citizenship and of a particular type of territoriality in the context of digital and non-digital conditions that fuse the algorithmic with the national (Calzada 2018b). This aspect is particularly addressed in the article by Calzada and Bustard (2022) in this Special Issue and examined through the case of Northern Ireland in the post-Brexit context. Contextually, the urban scale is fast emerging as a site in which algorithmic transparency, data sovereignty, and democratic accountability is demanded, leading to the conceptualisation of ‘jus algorithmi’ gaining momentum in increasing of city-regional case-studies as this Special Issue depicts (Calzada 2022a; Cheney-Lippold 2011).

‘Pandemic Citizenship’ may have already shifted the mainstream notion of the so-called ‘Global Citizenship’ (Calzada 2020b). In this sense, pandemic citizenship goes beyond a legal and socio-economic definition (Calzada 2020c). It captures an arena for political questions concerning legitimate and contextually grounded responses and means to both, a public health problem and its long-haul societal, political, and economic aftermaths. The benefit of such a definition is that it allows to exploit the multifaceted relationships between citizenship, digital/platforms, (in)equality, and inclusion/exclusion in ways that can shed new light on how the pandemic has engendered different impacts on city-regional areas, as the articles of this Special Issue corroborate.

Under such conditions, borders are making a comeback in the post-pandemic scenario (Calzada 2020c). As they are being reinforced externally and are liquifying and deterritorializing the lives of citizens internally, borders have come to matter as much as nation-states, although the current significance of both might be shifting rapidly and the latter being rescaled accordingly (Calzada 2022b). Since borders are changing their relevance (Sassen 2017), and the influence of digital forms of ‘being’ is expanding, the concept of citizenship is in flux (Bignami 2021; Ennaji and Bignami 2019; Calzada and Cobo 2015; Isin and Ruppert 2020; Hintz, Dencik, and Wahl-Jorgensen 2019; Isin and Nielsen Greg 2008; Falk 1994; Faulks 2000; Ong 2006). Further, in the light of the inrush of pandemic, the urban is the quintessential environment to investigate a global swing towards ‘pandemic citizenship’ regimes and forms (Calzada 2022a).

The pandemic has also boosted the demand for digital platforms and it is likely for this trend to continue and intensify. Unfolding amid these rapid advances, COVID-19 has provided many digital market actors the opportunity to justify and test the ability of smart solutions to solve societal issues. It has also provided additional momentum for administering and governing urban areas following the narrative of smart cities by increasing the reliance on teleworking, telemedicine, surveillance systems, online commerce, and education. This argument is discussed in the article of Reijers, Orgad and De Filippi, who investigate the emerging form of cybernetic citizenship taking place in Chinese urban areas as illustrated by the Social Credit System. This argument is also elaborated by Hanakata and Bignami in this Special Issue. They introduce the concept of platform urbanization as a planetary process, which captures the scope and growing influence of platforms on the urban realm, illustrated with the case study of Singapore.

As a result of these processes, the global pandemic has epitomised and amplified the need for developing and reframing the idea of ‘digital citizenship’ as a crucial tool to exercise digital rights and citizen acts in the context of an increased digitalization and platformization of our daily citizen experience. As such, citizens’ practices have evolved towards the right to have digital rights in smart cities (Calzada 2021c), which in itself have emerged in several city-regional locations worldwide. A taxonomy of these emerging forms of digital citizenship is provided by Calzada’s article that triggers the aim of this Special Issue (Calzada 2022a), which is to offer a contribution in this direction by rethinking digital citizenship along the lines described in the next two sections.

2. Digital Citizenship

Many scholars have theorised the impact of digital transformation on the notion and institutions of citizenship through the lens of the evolutionary character of its classical concept or by drawing upon the narratives of the democratising risk and potential of the internet (Buente 2015; Dumbrava 2017; Goode 2010; Mathiason 2008; McCosker, Vivienne, and Johns 2016). The early literature conceptualized ‘digital citizenship’ merely as ‘the ability to participate in society online’ by using the internet effectively. It focused on how technology facilitates or reduces citizen participation on digital education and on the ‘digital divide’, framing the access to the internet as a pivotal digital right (Mossberger, Tolbert, and McNeal 2008, 1; Hill and Hughes 1998; Howard 2006; Coleman & Bluimer 2009; Ohler 2010; Papacharissi 2010). Mossberger, Tolbert, and McNeal (2008) used a participatory notion of citizenship to discuss digital citizenship as an informed and knowledge-driven set of citizen practices involving the access to and use of digital assets to enhance political participation. These uses of the concept of citizenship, based on its mere translation into the digital environment, reflected the spread of forms of digital optimism that characterized the first decade of this century. Yet, the increasing societal and political relevance of digital technologies – along with major scandals such as the Snowden or Cambridge Analytica cases – progressively fostered growing concerns on digital surveillance and the advent of a homogenized society based on ‘dataism’ (Harari 2016). Hence, the evolution of the digital realm from something we ‘use’ to an environment in which we live, has generated broader conceptualizations of digital citizenship, which nonetheless still remains a vague, ill-defined and contested notion (Hintz and Brown 2017; Isin and Ruppert 2017).

Several authors have theorised about these matters. Orgad and Bauböck (2018) have described the rise of global dimensions of citizenship emerging from the activities of ‘cloud’ communities in cyberspace. Following recent trends in critical citizenship studies, other scholars have applied to the digital sphere a conception of citizenship as expression of agency: Isin and Ruppert (2015) have described a ‘new ontology of the citizen’ brought into being by performing digital acts (Moraes and Andrade 2015; Mc Cosker et a. 2016). Hintz, Dencik, and Wahl-Jorgensen (2019) and others have stressed that the tools used to enact digital citizenship are owned by commercial platforms that commodify digital acts and reduce users to customers with very little agency––or subjects of a ‘datafied citizenship’ based on profiling and sorting populations (Couldry et al. 2014; Hintz and Brown 2017; Barassi 2017). Cheney-Lippold has referred to a ‘jus algoritmi’ and ‘algorithmic citizenship’ to describe how citizen identities can be assigned through data analysis (2011). The concept of ‘algorithmic nation’ (Calzada 2018b) has been used to expand the notion of ‘algorithmic citizenship’ – also developed by Bridle (2016), – by including city-regional dynamics and to argue that the citizen realm should be entirely sovereign to exercise the right to decide the nation’s techno-political future as an outcome of deliberative democratic discussions – rather than of agendas imposed by politicians.

Against the backdrop of the above sketched literature, this Special Issue tries to reframe the notion and institution of citizenship in connection with the ‘digital-urban realm’. It explores new conceptual tools to further advance the idea of digital citizenship by connecting it, on the one hand, to the processes of urban digitalisation and, on the other, to the new tools of digital governance fostered by the pandemic. An assumption we want to put forward is that – as Antenucci and Tomasello (2022) argue in their contribution to this Special Issue – a grounded notion of digital citizenship should take into account the growing interplay between urban environment and technological transformations. This is because the urban space is the quintessential environment in which digitalisation, platformization, and datafication practices become real and material, meaning that they substantially transform our daily life experience. Hence, we suggest that exploring the intersections between digital citizenship and the idea of ‘urban citizenship’ offers a promising perspective for further theoretical and empirical developments of this notion. To do so, this Special Issue critically scrutinises digital citizenship based on the concept of a new, emerging ‘techno-political’ arena, in which (smart) citizens are at risk to be considered passive data providers without digital rights rather than decision-makers and digital citizens, clearly illustrated through cases such as Barcelona (Calzada 2018a). This is a contested arena that is claimed by nation-states and big tech corporations and strained by post-pandemic surveillance (Bauböck and Orgad 2019; Calzada 2021a), which is confronted with demands around digital rights (Calzada, Pérez-Batlle, and Batlle-Montserrat 2021; Tomasello 2022) and its protection eminently through data ecosystems in the European context (Calzada and Almirall 2020). The Special Issue therefore depicts how digital-urban citizenship emerges through varying regimes amid the planetary realm by resulting in distinct city-regional manifestations that might lead us to rethink the role of nation-states in the digital era.

3. Urban Citizenship and its Digitalisation: Platform Urbanization

This Special Issue focuses on the urban realm as the centre of production and negotiation of new digital citizenship regimes. This realm serves as both a planning scenario and a testing ground for the development of platform applications. It is therefore in the urban realm that the process of platformization produces its most visible consequences, since it is increasingly governed and administered by deploying platform technologies. Hence, we argue that the urban scale is the most suitable to investigate the various aspects of digital citizenship including citizens’ resistance to the ubiquitous presence of platforms (Huws 2017).

Urban space, depicted through unique city-regional configurations, is the product of exchange and encounter, and a manifestation of differences (Brenner 1999; Calzada 2015, 2021a; Lefebvre 1991; Hanakata 2020). The physical dimension of this space is increasingly challenged by many modes of interaction and production, of urban governance, and socio-political identity shifting to a virtual space. While urban space remains the physical terrain where the implications of this shift become reified – e.g. through physical infrastructures – it has also become bereaved of many of its primary functions including spaces for protest, encounter, and collective action. With that it has reached a planetary scale (Brenner 2018) which has been propelled by converging global platform networks based on similar structures and operation logics.

While platform implications have reached a planetary scale, affecting all territories (and city-regions in particular), regardless of their geographies or settlement structures, they have done so in an uneven way, creating new or amplifying existing socio-spatial discrepancies. This includes an uneven distribution of skills necessary to navigate through the ecosystem of digital platforms that confine or enrich urban living and it concerns the ability of users to do so in a self-determined manner opposed to being defined by the intent and structure of these platforms in everyday life through data ecosystems (Calzada and Almirall 2020; Cheney-Lippold 2016; Cohen and Ghosh 2019; Antenucci and Tomasello 2022). A productive deployment of digital technologies preempts specialised knowledge and access to resources which are commonly bound to concentrated forms of urban territories for reasons of economic efficiency and gain. With that correlation, the increasing digitalisation of our urban environment is also aggravating an existing urban and digital divide at a planetary scale manifested in city-regions (Calzada, Pérez-Batlle, and Batlle-Montserrat 2021). This is creating socio-economic disparities between concentrated and extended city-regions whereby the former function as centres of decision-making and power and the latter are burdened by the resulting consequences (Schmid 2014; Calzada and Cobo 2015; Ennaji and Bignami 2019). It therefore requires us to rethink digital citizenship through the urban realm in order to grasp the width of implications of digitisation and the process itself as a critical transformation for citizenship practice in relation to their respective nation-states. This practice allows democratic and participatory experiments at the planetary scale putting the ‘right to the city’ into practice, and helping to create impacts on the city-regional level allowing citizens to be empowered through their own digital rights (Calzada 2021c) while connected with other emerging planetary experiments (Calzada, Pérez-Battle, & Batlle-Montserrat, 2021).

As the capacity to actually instigate and direct the way the digital realm is intertwined with the urban is still limited to a relatively restricted and exclusive group of stakeholders and platform providers, means, such as platform and data co-operatives (Calzada 2020b) have to be developed to co-opt existing infrastructures and subvert the structures of top-down corporative and datafied states’ directions. To do so, digital co-operativism and activism (Calzada 2021b), for example, has begun to leverage on the speed, reach, and scale of platform ecosystems to hold, manage and disseminate protest (Gerbaudo 2014), and take advantage of existing platforms, subverting their original, gain-oriented intention. These implications also include the ‘right to have digital rights’ and duties of citizens (Calzada 2021c; Tomasello 2022) which largely depend on the modes of urban governance and the extent to which digitalisation is embedded in locally specific forms of urban governance as well as instrumentalized in the way citizens are considered subjects or co-producers of the urban condition. Due to the growing presence of platforms and their further hegemonic organisational structures as reply to the outbreak of the pandemic, it has become extremely difficult and to some extent a privilege to remove oneself from being affected and/or dependent on platforms (Emergency-Governance-Initiative 2021; Ceccarini, 2021; Hanakata and Bignami 2021; Cardullo 2021).

The underlying paradigm conceives the urban as a product to be quantified, compartmentalised, and evaluated based on its yielding capacities. This is also the grounding colour of smart city ambitions which aim to prosper via ICT applications in their management efficiency and urban development (Kitchin 2014). We recognize, however, that platforms are more than mere facilitators (Leszczynski 2020) and that the growing digitalisation of our urban environment is propelled by specific interests that shape the structure and operational modes of platforms. In fact, platforms present themselves as an environment where issues of social justice, political participation, and democratic governance are to be addressed, by city-regions and citizens, at each step of development and carefully evaluated in each urban scenario (Linklater 1998a). Publicly available data and a bottom-up definition of platforms are not going to challenge the many faces of surveillance capitalism, but they might provide one possible gateway in the life-cycle of data for more democratic accountability and socio-political responsibility of platform providers and digital market actors.

4. Exploring Digital Citizenships Towards Techno-Political Dynamics

The concept of ‘digital-urban citizenship’ provides a techno-political opportunity to resignify (smart) citizens as techno-political subjects through alternative datafication processes in order to subvert the surveillance capitalistic form of the mainstream platformization characterised by Big Tech corporations and datafied nation-states (Calzada 2018a, 2022c; Isin and Ruppert 2020, 2017; Tomasello 2022). Techno-political subjects in the context of this Special Issue are actually digital citizens able to claim their right to act and cooperate through their own emerging agency in relation to Big Tech corporations and by contributing with their actions in one way or another to rescale datafied nation-states.

Digital citizens are inescapably merged and imbued in a digital environment. Our daily experience as digital citizens is fully immersed in techno-political dynamics (Calzada 2021a) that indicates the need of revisiting the very concept of citizenship. The idea of a techno-political environment is particularly cogent in the contexts of the city-region, where platformization processes and technology in a wider sense constitute, substantiate and/or enact political aims which open a discussion about urban techno-politics. Correlating a digital scenario featuring platforms and urban politics uncovers relationships that are often hidden within complex arrangements of platform infrastructures and economic production, forging together a truly invasive platform capitalism (Srnicek 2017) and datafied nation-states, as well as the data subjects that are shaping it and are shaped by it. Such a convergence and amalgamation of digital and political activism is exacerbated in a concentrated urban setting; it influences political and social actions which suggest the need to revisit the concept of citizenship.

Defining citizenship in the context of data-driven societies requires a timely standpoint connecting the growing research on digital, urban, and political transformations (Hintz at al. 2019; Gorwa 2019; Srnicek 2017). Framing citizenship at the intersection between platform and polity paves the way to resignify (smart) citizens as techno-political subjects related to (but not equivalent to) citizens as political subjects of a polity (Isin 2007; Isin and Ruppert 2020), multiplying stakeholders and ‘creating a new topology of inclusion/exclusion, negotiation, participation and control’ (Hanakata and Bignami 2021, 763), i.e. of citizenship (Calzada and Almirall 2020; Antenucci and Tomasello 2022). Such a facet of techno-political subjectivity is particularly observed in this Special Issue by Francis Kuriakose and Deepa Kylasam Iyer. Their article scrutinises the online citizens’ acts of calling, closing, and opening through the lens of Indian urban citizenship regimes impacted by pandemic, with a specific attention to social rights alterations.

In this transforming urban condition, the citizen is merged and imbued in a given platform environment, even without the direct use of technology. This allows us to describe contemporary urban spaces as a techno-political environment where technology in a wider sense constitutes, substantiates or enacts political aims encapsulated by nation-states’ apparatus (Agnew 2017). The new and more widespread use of identification techniques (facial recognition and other types of biometrics) raises fundamental concerns by portraying the nation-state power as expanding through the widening net of surveillance and the use of tools of automated detection and enforcement, particularly amid deep borders. Some contributions in this Special Issue will therefore use the idea of urban techno-politics (Foley and Miller 2020) to designate and explore the links that are often hidden within manifold arrays of platform infrastructure, stakeholders, and organizations that shape it and are shaped by it. Platforms produce standards and protocols, through algorithms, influencing behaviours, multiplying layers of political and social rationality. This techno-political framework has clear implications on how we understand and use the notion of citizenship (Cohen and Ghosh 2019).

In the urban setting, such techno-political framework is manifested through the participatory practices of citizenship. There is never a one-fits-all solution for how to incorporate digital means into participatory practices but rather a varied ensemble of projects, decisions, initiatives, proposals, protests, responsibilities, deliberations and implementations is necessary and all vary depending on the specific city-regional scenario. Thus, we argue that digital citizenship is, firstly, a techno-political construction based on choices and consensus. These define in turn the priorities of a meaningful participation and democratic urban governance. Digital citizenship can then be understood as techno-political dynamics, rather than just technical ones, that call into question the democratic functioning of urban regimes. A meaningful example of such a hybridization of digital and politics, with implications on online and offline components of citizenship can be the Facebook Oversight Board (https://www.oversightboard.com/). This could be seen as a first attempt towards a novel articulation of platform governance, influencing online actions for an offline political arena consisting of billions of users. Conceived as a public institution, but created and set up in a private regime, it is necessary to understand what this Board is, what it means for future implications for global freedom of political action, and for citizens and governments. This highlights the importance of contextual concerns regarding procedural and practical components of citizenship. Also, it illustrates how citizenship is continually re-formed in relation to datafication processes that operate within particular geographical and temporal contexts. From the viewpoint of citizenship, platforms might offer or hamper opportunities for ‘acts of citizenship’, as they enable and disable individuals to make ‘digital rights claims’, or what is the same as to claim their own rights enabling agency to ‘have digital rights’ (Calzada 2021c; Isin and Ruppert 2020). Therefore the tensions between citizenship and the digital are not just inherent but even derived from the arenas, circumstances and places in which platforms are adopted, the purposes in which they are used, and the ongoing political struggles over citizenship they are situated within (Ratto 2014; Nyers and Rygiel 2012).

Even if traditional conceptions of citizenship are universal and still elemental in the different fields of citizenship studies, these perspectives do not include many socio-politically, linguistically, religiously, technologically, and culturally different forms of interaction, often experienced by marginalized and oppressed peoples who are sometimes denied formal rights of citizenship (Kochenov 2019). The conception of citizenship is further complicated by increasing mobility across national boundaries, leading to heterogeneous populations and shifting borders (Shachar 2020) within and across nation-states (Calzada 2022b), particularly entangled in city-regional areas and framed in a cosmopolitan direction. This perspective challenges the ‘scalar thought’ as a historical way in which the emergence of the modern nation-state has framed and organised a vision of the world (Isin 2007). The idea of a hierarchical scale (global, national, city-regional, and urban) has been a powerful tool to govern political dynamics for centuries. Even if it is possible to sustain that processes of globalisation of the last decades have had re-scaling implications (Brenner 1999; Calzada 2022c; Keating 2013), at the same time their very output has been a trend towards a world that is no longer organised around a specific scale.

Consequently, these intertwined sets of diverse city-regional and planetary scales show digitalization and datafication processes, interconnections, global flows, transnational networks, and migration dynamics. They are constantly reshaping the ways in which the globalised world is structured in a city-regional and planetary pattern, where urban areas are the strategic engines of this emerging configuration (Sassen 2005a, 2005b; Khanna 2017), which in fact transforms the configurations of nation-state (Agnew 2017; Calzada 2015). As a result, the urban seems then the suitable locus where new forms of citizenship are established to complement those hinging on the concept of nation-states and able to enclose a digital shift of political and social rights and entitlements on data privacy, ownership, and ethics (Calzada 2021c; Tomasello 2022).

5. Special Issue: Summary

The Special Issue is opened with Calzada’s introductory taxonomy consisting of five emerging digital citizenship regimes (Pandemic, Algorithmic, Liquid, Metropolitan, and Stateless) that depicts how European nation-states are being rescaled by these regimes identified in six city-regions: Tallinn, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Cardiff, Glasgow, and Bilbao (Calzada 2022a). This new taxonomy provides a framework to better understand techno-political and city-regional dynamics and challenges the interpretation around the brittle political authority of the European nation-states in the face of rapid datafication processes. The flagship Big Tech platforms of surveillance capitalism, such as Google and Facebook, have already assumed many functions previously associated with the nation-state, from cartography to citizen surveillance, which has datafied citizenship and thus posed the question around the nation-state heretofore privileged position as the only natural platform for the monopoly of techno-political and sensory power (Calzada 2022c).

The article by Hanakata and Bignami starts with a global perspective and captures ongoing processes of urbanization impacted by platform practices with the introduction of the concept of platform urbanization. Taking a closer look at the case of Singapore, the contribution discusses how citizens are merged and imbued in a platform environment, with or without direct use of technology. The authors argue that an expanded concept of citizenship is urgently required to reposition the role and rights of citizens within a new techno-political landscape and realign the realm of an extended, virtual and physical urban condition actuates citizenship today.

The third article looks at Covid-19 implications and the authors Reijers, Orgad and De Filippi develop the concept of cybernetic citizenship, with reference to the Social Credit System implemented in the main Chinese urban areas. Reijers, Orgad and De Filippi (2022) show how it challenges equality by turning rights into ends in a ‘new’ model of citizenship that is not yet fully applicable but which exists as a loose conglomeration of sociotechnical projects.

The fourth contribution delves into differential and mutating urban regimes in India. Kylasam Iyer and Kuriakose (2022) explore citizenship regimes in India’s ‘smart’ cities through the framework of ‘digital acts’. While acts of calling to participate in digital platforms create regimes of exclusion by digital and democratic divide, acts of closing by pervasive surveillance mechanisms create regimes of control by monitoring and tracking data of citizens in Indian cities. In the absence of a written law, enacting digital citizenship rights through opening digital political and social acts by means of petitions, campaigns, digital story-telling, archiving, mobilizing collectives, and citizen journalism is becoming the means to claim these rights.

In the fifth article, Antenucci and Tomasello (2022) focus on the urban landscape of Cape Town to develop three theses aimed at defining the notion of ‘urban-digital citizenship’. To do so, they explore the intersection between urban citizenship and digital citizenship in the contemporary scenario marked by processes of ‘planetary urbanization’ and ubiquitous datafication and platformization. By developing both a theoretical framework and an analysis of its application to the case of Cape Town, the article assesses how urbanization and digitalisation processes have affected the modern notion and institution of citizenship. Hence, the authors argue that the notion of ‘urban-digital citizenship’ is defined by: a) intra-urban borders developed through digital means, b) algorithmic infrastructures aimed at deploying new forms of urban governance based on logics of speculation and preemption, and c) logistic operations that allow ‘smart cities’ to operate as nodes of a planetary techno-political network.

The sixth article, by Calzada and Bustard (2022), elaborates on the case of Northern Ireland as a city-regional framework crisscrossed by manifold tensions such as Brexit, post-pandemic and socio-political stirs. Around these tensions, people have started to question aspects of their own citizenship, and this article applies the innovative approach called ‘Algorithmic Nation’ (Calzada 2018b) resulting in three dilemmas: Post-Brexit, post-conflict, and post-pandemic dilemmas. Northern Ireland currently shows an interesting scenario of how to cope with challenges around digital citizenship and socio-political tensions. This scenario increasingly depicts a clear process of rescaling in the UK and Ireland and thus may offer inclusive manners to rethink state-geographies through complementary ways of being a digital citizen that the article encapsulates by applying the novel term called ‘Algorithmic Nations’.

Authors’ note

The authors are listed in alphabetical order. They have equally contributed to the final version of this introduction.

Acknowledgments

We warmly thank the other authors that contributed to this special issue of Citizenship Studies: Deepa Kylasam Iyer, Francis Kuriakose, Ilia Antenucci, John Bustard, Liav Orgad, Primavera de Filippi, Wessel Reijers. We also thank the NYC New School for Social Research, and especially Achilles Kallergis, for the opportunity to discuss this Special Issue in an international seminar.

Disclosure statement

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by: (i) Fulbright Scholar-In-Residence (S-I-R) Award 2022, Grant Number PS00334379 by the US-UK Fulbright Commission, IIE, and US Department of State; (ii) Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) in the UK, Grant Number ES/S012435/1 WISERD Civil Society: Changing Perspective on Civic Stratification and Civil Repair; (iii) the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (Starting Grant Agreement No 716350); (iv) the National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR), On the Move funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation; (v) the Supporting Principal Investigators grant (SPIN) of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice; (vi) Project ‘TOT City - Tokyo Olympics 2020: Transformations, City and Citizenship in a Case Study’, n. OG 05-122017, coordinated by SUPSI, funded by ETH Zürich and SERI.