Contesting the decision: living in (and living with) the smart city

ABSTRACT

This paper proposes that ‘smart city’ initiatives provide a timely and pragmatic site of inquiry for legal scholarship to address the type of concerns being raised of ubiquitous computing, advances in machine decision-making and other so-called smart technologies. Delivered in two parts, I first describe the current state of smart city scholarship and explore how adopting a ‘place-sensitive’ approach might encourage legal scholarship to ground itself in the challenges faced by people situated in such an environment. Second, accepting the smart city as a site where regulation is increasingly designed into our environments and one in which there will inevitably be unresolved conflicts and tension, I continue to map this work to the body of scholarship exploring automated decision-making, data-driven policy and the algorithm by stimulating a discussion of what it might mean to protect the ability to ‘contest’ machine decision-making provided for in Article 22(3) of the EU General Data Protection Regulation 2016. Accordingly, I question whether we must also be cautious not to erode the ability to counter or exist outside of authority and tentatively provide two areas of behaviour where such a practice may prove valuable in supporting the city as a site of contestation and dissensus.

KEYWORDS:

• Smart city
• contestability
• resistance

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank those who participated in the Google Award workshop at BILETA 2017 during which an earlier version of this paper was presented.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Emphasis in original.

2. See for example smart cities as part of the EU Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme (https://ec.europa.eu/inea/en/horizon-2020), $80 million in investment as part of the White House Smart Cities Initiative (https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/09/26/fact-sheet-announcing-over-80-million-new-federal-investment-and) and the development of ISO standards (https://www.bsigroup.com/en-GB/smart-cities/).

3. ‘It sounds utopian, until she mentions that her every move is tracked and outside the city live swathes of discontents, the ultimate depiction of a society split in two’ (Parker 2016).

4. https://newsroom.cisco.com/songdo.

5. Articles commonly focus on a small sample of known cases, for example, those involving Google Pagerank, contextual advertising, algorithmic trading and Microsoft’s ‘Tay’ Twitter bot.

6. Levy provides an analysis of the potential of the smart contract, drawing on socio-legal scholars such as Merry and her study of American urban neighbourhoods to provide a critical account of the smart contract.

7. My emphasis.

8. My emphasis.

9. Outside of legal scholarship, see for example, interactions between the city and the citizen through tools such as counterfactual maps (Crivellaro et al. 2015) and in influential works on design and political theory such as DiSalvo’s Adversarial Design.

10. Crawford, building on the work of Mouffe’s theory of agonism raises this question specifically about algorithms, suggesting that we need to examine the kind of politics they instantiate (Crawford 2016).

11. https://www.eng.ed.ac.uk/about/events/20160324-1830/data-and-future-city.