Smart urbanism and smart citizenship: The neoliberal logic of ‘citizen-focused’ smart cities in Europe

Introduction

Although smart city initiatives and technologies are implemented at the urban/local scale, their circulation and diffusion are strongly shaped by institutions operating at a wider scale (regional authorities, national states, supra-national bodies). In this paper, we explore how the smart city policies, programmes and initiatives of the European Commission (EC) actively (re)produce a neoliberal conception of citizenship and participation through mechanisms of funding allocation, the application of scaling and replication techniques, and mobile policy formation (Lombardi and Vanolo, 2015). In particular, we show how under the European Innovation Partnership for Smart Cities and Communities (EIP-SCC) active forms of marketization have been taking place, with assemblages of neoliberal governance able to form and move swiftly through diverse cities across Europe and at a multiple scales, promoting a model of participation that is rooted in pragmatic, instrumental and paternalistic discourses and practices. This configuration presents neoliberalism as a more or less coherent ideology, rationality, policy agenda, and structural process that operates at the urban, neighbourhood and individual scales, and at the scale of intra-city collaboration at European and national levels (Brenner and Theodore, 2002; Brenner et al., 2010; Rossi, 2017). The multi-scalar perspective on neoliberal governance we adopt is made more relevant by the current phase of austerity politics that forces cities, deprived of autonomous spending capacity, to compete against each other in order to attract supra-national investments (Peck, 2012).

Wendy Brown (2016: 3) notes that, ‘[n]eoliberalism construes subjects as market actors everywhere, but in which roles – Entrepreneur? Investor? Consumer? Worker?’ In our recent evaluation of smart city participation in Dublin, we identified 16 ‘smart citizen’ roles, demonstrating that most of these are rooted in what Arnstein (1969) termed ‘tokenism’ and ‘non-participation’ (Cardullo and Kitchin, 2019). We noted that citizens occupy a largely passive role, with companies and city administrations performing forms of civic paternalism (deciding what’s best for citizens) and stewardship (delivering on behalf of citizens). As other scholars have started to highlight with regards to a variety of smart city contexts (e.g., Cowley et al., 2018; Datta, 2018; Foth et al., 2015; Gabrys, 2014; McLaren and Agyeman, 2015; March and Ribera-Fumaz, 2018; Vanolo, 2016; Wiig, 2016), in practice, citizen participation is often synonymous with ‘choice’ and the market, with the predominant citizen roles being: ‘consumer’ or ‘user’, selecting which services to acquire from the marketplace of providers; ‘resident’, if they can afford the exclusive access to a smart district; or ‘data product’, creating data through their use of smart city technologies that companies can then incorporate into products and extract value from (Cardullo and Kitchin, 2019). ‘Choice’ reflects an ideal of neoliberal citizenship which promotes individual autonomy and freedom within defined constraints (as dictated by a particular set of rationalities related to capital accumulation, competitiveness, productivity, safety, security, etc.) that reproduce market-led provision of services. This ideal is further embedded in the everyday practices of ‘smart citizens’ as the design and functioning of computational devices have shifted ‘users’ of personal computers to ‘consumers’ of locational, real-time, cloud- and platform-based economies on the Internet (see Fuller, 2017).

In the following sections, we examine how citizens and citizenship are framed and operationalised through the discourse and programmes of a supra-national endeavour. The EIP-SCC is an initiative of the EC, founded in 2011 with the aim of ‘bringing together cities, industry, SMEs, banks, research and other smart city actors’, ‘boosting the development of smart technologies in cities’ and ‘improving citizens quality of life’ by way of focusing on ‘the intersection of Energy, ICT and Transport’. ¹ The EIP-SCC is divided into six clusters ² and a ‘Marketplace’. Each cluster is composed of projects and commitments intended as ‘measurable and concrete smart city engagements/actions from public and private partners’. According to its reports, there were 370 Commitments with over 4000 partners from 31 countries in June 2014. The Marketplace aims at providing the platform (a ‘network of networks’) through which cities and stakeholders can collaborate. The enterprise received initial funding of €18 million, which increased exponentially to €365 million only two years later, making it central to the EC policy goals of replication, emulation and translation.

It is our contention that the EIP-SCC seeks to corral and shape cities’ ‘wider extra-local fields of policymaking’ (Peck et al., 2013: 1096; see also Brenner et al., 2010) by operating across places and scales in order to promote a technologically led neoliberal model of urban growth. Indeed, the ‘Marketplace’ aims to extend entrepreneurial urbanism and smart city policy through mimetic adaptation, scaling and replicating solutions to urban problems by funding initiatives across EU consortia that can develop working ‘models’ and ‘best practices’. Its programme of ‘Lighthouse Cities’, for example, funds public–private applied research in small consortia of cities, with the ideas and initiatives developed then transferred to ‘Follower Cities’ in order to determine their wider applicability, adoption barriers, and how these might be ameliorated.

Part of the EIP-SCC mission is to consider modes of governance and the roles and functions expected of smart citizens. In the reminder of the paper, we examine the ideological underpinnings of the delivery, replication, and participation of most EIP-SCC ‘citizen-focus’ projects – those that claim to explicitly consider citizen roles rather than simply treat them as consumers or recipients of smart city initiatives. Our research consisted of three levels of data generation and analysis. First, we undertook a discourse analysis of policy documents and project descriptions of the 61 Commitments in the EIP-SCC ‘citizen-focus’ cluster. ³ Second, we interviewed a dozen stakeholders working on citizen engagement in a small sample of EIP-SCC flagship projects, asking questions around the different institutional arrangements and scales in the delivery of their smart city projects, the time-line according to which their projects were prepared, funded, and institutionalized, and the actual existing spaces for citizen feedback and control within such projects. ⁴ Third, we conducted 20 short and targeted interviews with city officers and corporate exhibitors at the 2017 Smart City Expo and World Congress (SCEWC), held annually in Barcelona. This is a professional, institutional and social meeting point, ‘a leading platform of ideas, networking, experiences and international business deals’, which in 2017 attracted over 18,000 visitors, with 675 exhibitors, from over 700 cities. ⁵ The SCEWC is an important node in smart city policy and technology mobility, which during the year we attended also had its primary focus on the citizen.

Our different data points are set in the context of a smart city policy being mobilised at the scale of intra-city and European cooperation, but operationalised at the scale of the urban, the local, and the individual. First, following the ‘trajectory’ (Ward, 2010) that citizenship takes in these many smart city Commitments, we get a holistic picture of the symbolic and operational landscape of their conceptualisation, design, and implementation. The focus on trajectory is important as ‘neoliberalisation denotes a direction rather than a destination’ following ‘a zigzagging path of creative destruction’ (Peck and Whiteside, 2017: 181): that is, the local implementation of neoliberal policies is variegated and contradictory, whilst responding and adapting to the steering of supra-national and inter-urban policy objectives, networks, and funding regimes. Second, by following how the ‘citizen’ is operationalised in these smart city initiatives, we attend to the journey of policy from the transnational and relational context of the EC funding strategy to their interpretation, and eventual adaptation, in places. The relational approach we follow suggests that smart city policy and actions are ‘brought and held together – assembled – by actors and institutions’ across geographic scales (McCann and Ward, 2013). Neoliberal urbanism works, in fact, at a multi-scalar level creating a paradox for the neoliberal subject: as Wendy Brown (2016: 4) sums up, ‘as neoliberal citizenship sets loose the individual to take care of itself, it also discursively binds the individual to the well-being of the whole’.

Therefore, the scope of this paper is neither to evaluate nor compare Commitments or Lighthouse cities performance in relation to their funded project descriptions. Further research would be needed to follow the ‘actually existing’ implementation of such policies in detail. Rather, the paper highlights the common ground and the scalar dimension through which these initiatives are put in place. As such, it unpacks the composite intertwining of policy objectives, funding provision, and discursive positioning of citizens within the technocratic agenda of neoliberal urbanism. In the next section, we set out briefly neoliberal urbanism and discuss smart citizenship and the ‘right to the city’ as a framework for our analysis of the EIP-SCC ‘citizen focused’ initiatives.

The neoliberal smart city and smart citizenship

Neoliberal urbanism can be summarised as a model of urban growth based on marketization, that is, the further ‘subordination of place and territory to speculative strategies of profit-making at the expense of use values, social needs and public goods’ (Peck et al., 2013: 1092). In a neoliberal framework, the market arranges services, infrastructure, and resources (including housing and public space) that hither-to-fore have been provided by the state. Such a shift in the ownership of what were public assets (privatisation) and provisioning of services (marketisation) has been driven by arguments concerning efficiency, competitiveness, and value-for-money that paved the way to strong austerity policies (Peck, 2012). Indeed, whilst visiting the SCEWC and talking to many private-sector representatives, engineers, and CEOs, it appeared clear to us that private companies are ultimately, if not exclusively, relying on public money to expand their smart initiatives. Mayors and city officials were seen overwhelmingly as customers, the smart interlocutors who are willing to invest in a problem-solving technology. Two complementary processes work to enable such a shift. First, cities struggling with tight budgets become increasingly reliant on competitive funding from supra-national bodies in order to implement technologies and services. Second, austerity is driving city administrations towards outsourcing and procurement of smart solutions that are purported as necessary to a city’s own competitiveness (best practices among themselves) and as energy/labour-saving (best practices within themselves). At the same time, financial capital, increasingly central to innovation-led growth, has been strengthened through market re-regulation which protects short-term and risk-averse returns (Lazonick and Mazzucato, 2013), with cities being not just the sites of production and experimentation of technologies, but the ultimate target market (Rossi, 2017).

Smart cities, then, have emerged as the latest, tech-led phase of the entrepreneurial city (Hollands, 2008; Shelton et al., 2015), through which private interests seek to capture public assets and services by offering technological solutions to urban problems (e.g. congestion, emergency response, utility and service delivery). Dublin in Ireland illustrates this phasing, adopting ideas of entrepreneurial planning in the 1990s, the creative city discourse in the 2000s, and finally the smart city in the 2010s (Coletta et al., 2018; MacLaran and Kelly, 2014). Whilst setting appropriate goals for cities via systems of urban benchmarking, the neoliberal smart city aims to attract foreign direct investment, offering areas of the city as testbeds to pilot new technologies, fostering innovative indigenous start-up sectors or digital hubs, and attracting mobile creative elites. Intra-city competition fits well with a speculative approach to housing, privatisation of space, and attraction of more affluent buyers, all characteristics of neoliberal urbanism which conceives urban land via exchange value rather than use value (e.g. Kitchin et al., 2012).

Smart cities also extend and deepen neoliberal conceptions of citizenship. There is a vast interdisciplinary literature on citizenship per se, and urban citizenship more specifically. It is beyond the scope of the paper to extensively review the varying positions and debates and their evolution over time (see Burke Wood, 2017; Isin, 2000a; Smith and McQuarrie, 2012). Instead, we focus on the shift to neoliberal forms of urban citizenship, related arguments concerning the ‘right to the city’, and in particular on their manifestation in smart city discourses and initiatives.

In his classic text, Citizenship and Social Class (1950), Marshall denoted three sets of rights that define the citizenship status of citizens: civil/legal (e.g. right to own property, freedom of speech, liberty of the person, and the right to justice), political (e.g. right to vote and participate in the exercise of political power), and social (e.g. right to a certain level of economic welfare and security). To these rights, have been added cultural/symbolic rights that concern recognition, respect and protections with respect to identity (gender, race, sexuality, disability, faith, etc.). From this perspective, citizenship is ‘a set of practices (cultural, symbolic and economic) and a bundle of rights and duties (civil, political and social) that define an individual's membership in a polity (usually a nation-state)’ (Isin and Wood, 1999: 4).

In contrast, neoliberalism shifts citizenship away from inalienable rights and the common good towards a conception rooted in individual autonomy and freedom of ‘choice’, and personal responsibilities and obligations (e.g. Brown, 2016; Ong, 2006; Vanolo, 2016). Here, the onus is on the individual to navigate and negotiate the provision of services and levels of access, based on their personal social, political and economic capital, framed within ‘commonsensical’ constraints. As such, there is a re-orientation of citizenship towards market principles and the market acting as a ‘means of regulating and coordinating the activities of numerous actors without direction from a single controlling centre’ (Hindess, 2002: 140). As the work of city administrations are marketised, deregulated and privatised, the political and social aspects of citizenship likewise become transformed: instead of rights there are choices, with citizens framed increasingly as consumers.

In the neoliberal smart city, ‘choice’ is extended in space and time thanks to the proliferation of interconnected and location-aware devices. In practice, such devices are powered by corporate ecosystems such as Google-Android, Apple-iPhone or Amazon-Echo, made operational through contracts with private network providers, and exploited by vast transnational platform economies. Apparently free from legal interfaces and physical market boundaries, the entrepreneurial smart citizen is in constant search for affirmation and improvement (see also Brown, 2016; Ong, 2006). At the same time, critics suggest smart citizens are disciplined, nudged and controlled within new forms of governmentality – what Vanolo (2014) terms ‘smartmentality’ – enacted through technologies such as traffic management systems, control rooms, smart grids and meters, that seek to modulate behaviour and produce neoliberal subjects (Kitchin et al., 2017a). Smart technologies, in the forms of networked bodily and locational sensors and real-time big data streams, concur to the establishment of a neoliberal subject within the constraints of individual responsibility. Han (2017) calls this ‘smartpolitics’, arguing that whilst a politics of disciplining, punishing and perfecting the body was central to Foucault’s notion of biopower, now neoliberalism has tapped into, and is exploiting, the psychic realm. This chimes with the notion that software is ‘seductive’ because it promises rewards for use, but at the same time it conditions through automation and forms of control (Kitchin and Dodge, 2011). With the coupling of personal and environmental sensor data with the affordances of digital networking technologies, smartness can lead to a ‘gamification effect’ which constitutes notions of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ citizen/user through disciplinary dispositives of ordering or ranking (Vanolo, 2018; see also Gabrys, 2014).

There are concerns that increased reliance on big data analytics, city-sensing, and social-media interactions, activated within a framework of technological solutionism, might privilege real-time and all-encompassing data- and algorithm-led planning decisions over political discussion and agonistic processes of governance (e.g. Kitchin, 2014). For critics, in fact, the dominant smart city discourse has been justifying a ‘largely depoliticized ideological rubric’ (Brenner and Schmid, 2015: 158), merging techno-scientific solutionism and ecological preoccupations as ‘consensually agreed metaphors’ (Swyngedouw, 2011, 2016) or ‘stage-managed consensus’ (MacLeod, 2011). Even when smart city projects herald more effective forms of active citizenship and citizen empowerment – e.g. Living Labs, citizen-science and open source software – they often do so by co-opting citizen contribution into the wider economic landscape of efficiency, optimization, and a business-driven city (Cardullo et al., 2018; Perng et al., 2018). In other words, rather than fostering subversive ideals of experimentation, smart innovation appears more an exercise of replication via short-term and financially risk-averse projects (see also Lazonick and Mazzucato, 2013).

Such a neoliberal reframing of citizenship in the smart city jars with the emancipatory politics of the ‘right to the city’ as advocated by critics of neoliberalism. Henry Lefebvre (1996 [1967]) built his influential concept around the idea that citizens should not just have the right to occupy and use space, but that space should be shaped according to its inhabitants’ needs (Purcell, 2002). As such, Lefebvre’s ideal city is one that guarantees the right for inhabitants to participate fully in the production of urban space. For Isin (2000b: 14), the right to the city is ‘the right to wrest the use of the city from the privileged new masters and democratise its space’. More recent extensions to the idea, important in the context of the smart city and its reliance on digital, networked technologies and the production and analysis of big data, are the ‘right to the digital city’ (de Lange and de Waal, 2013) and the ‘informational right to the city’ (Shaw and Graham, 2017). As Isin and Ruppert (2015) argue, given the ubiquitous nature of digital technologies in everyday life there is a need for digital citizens to possess a suite of digital rights. Indeed, as Attoh (2011) notes, the right to the (smart) city ‘constitutes not a singular right, but a set of rights’.

It is thus both the production of neoliberal citizenship and its juxtaposition with the right to the city that we attend to in this paper. First, by questioning the way in which citizens are framed and operationalised within the neoliberal smart city agenda at European level. Second, using our critique of ‘citizen-centric’ smart city policies to recoup ‘the political’ in the sense suggested by Mouffe (1999): an agonistic struggle for hegemony where each contender recognizes the other’s right to exist. We argue that the prevalent modes of governance in the neoliberal smart city today are rather discouraging agonistic spaces of political confrontation as they promote technological solutionism, underpinned by civic paternalism and stewardship, rather than more inclusive forms of citizen engagement and participation (Cardullo and Kitchin, 2019; Shelton and Lodato, 2019).

In the reminder of the paper, we consider the formation of the neoliberal subject and citizenship by examining the ideological underpinnings of delivery, replication, and participation of ‘citizen-focus’ projects within the EIP-SCC. We ask: how are citizens being conceived within the smart city, and who is the ‘citizen-focused’ smart city being built for? In so doing, we chart both the why and the how of policy transfer (McCann and Ward, 2013); how the smart city works as a multi-scalar and heterogeneous assemblage of neoliberal governance and why it has become a broadly accepted ‘solution’.

The neoliberal smart city in the European Union

Recent policy documents that conceptualise ‘the smart city’ put a lot of emphasis on shifting power to citizens, apparently addressing the critique that smart cities are overly state- and market-centric, rather than citizen-centric (Kitchin, 2015). For instance, the H2020 ‘Call for Smart and Sustainable Cities' expects funded projects to enhance ‘citizen ownership of the solutions’ through ‘co-design, co-development and co-implementation of visionary urban planning’ (European Commission, 2016: 116). The ‘Co-Creating Smart Cities’ report recommends ‘material or non-material rewards… to show users how important their collaboration in the projects is’ (Citizen City Initiative EIP-SCC, 2016: 7). However, a closer analysis of 61 Commitments which have set their primary area as ‘citizen-focus’ reveals quite a different status of play. It would be impossible in this paper to evaluate these many projects individually, but we have reasonable room for mapping patterns in relation to two critical points, citizen participation and marketization. We divide the latter in three interrelated aspects: technological solutionism, nudging behaviour, and scaling and replication.

Towards a different kind of smart city

During our fieldwork, we met many young and enthusiast officers, developers, and community engagement advocates who supported the smart city vision and without doubt are doing their best to slot digital technologies into the everyday life of cities in ways that improve citizens’ lives. For us, a key issue is that they work forcibly within a neoliberal framework that underpins their initiatives: through the framework of the EC funding schemes and the process by which projects are conceived, evaluated and delivered, neoliberal ideals are transmitted in detail and modelled on the dogmas of efficiency (saving scarce energy), sustainability (changing policy orientation in the long term), and freedom of choice (although instrumental to market imperatives). Our analysis has highlighted the extent to which EIP-SCC works as a mechanism of adjustments of opportunities and a platform which allocates funding, displays pre-packaged solutions for various stakeholders, and favours exchanges within already determined boundaries of cooperation. We individuated three specific forms of governance through which this process of marketization takes place: technical solutionism, nudging behaviour, and scaling/replication. Ultimately, we contend the supra-national strategy for ‘citizen-focused’ smart cities acts as a smokescreen to a much more deliberate neoliberal agenda for cities whilst circumscribing a particular role for their citizens.

For us, the limited forms of citizen engagement and citizen power enacted within smart city initiatives means that we need to re-imagine what it means to be a ‘smart citizen’. This requires moving beyond neoliberal conceptions of citizenship, in which people act as consumers or users within a marketplace of services, and beyond initiatives created through stewardship and civic paternalism (in which elites decide what is best for all). Instead, an alternative vision of smart cities and citizenship needs to be adopted, one that has a number of characteristics drawn from the ‘right to the city’ debate.

First, the smart city would be orientated towards reflecting and serving the interests of citizens, rather than these continuing to be subservient to the interests of state and market. Second, there would be a more inclusive and deliberative framing of citizen participation in the smart city beyond consumerism and tokenistic civic engagement, including more extensive public consultation, collaboration and co-production, and roles such as creators, members and leaders, as well as initiatives gaining more input and oversight by elected officials. Third, there would be a shift back from citizenship grounded primarily in market principles to a framework underpinned by a set of civil, social, political, symbolic and digital rights and entitlements. Fourth, public assets would form commons to be protected and leveraged for the common good. Fifth, rather than smart city initiatives being directed principally at instrumental issues, more normative concerns such as fairness, equity, democracy, and social justice would become centre-stage. From this perspective, citizens and civility would be at the core of smart city initiatives, rather than capital and the market.

Although we could not find such a configuration in existing EIP-SCC funded projects, we have been looking with increasing interest at the political and social developments in the Barcelona’s smart city programme. Under a right-wing government, Barcelona was a blueprint for neoliberal smart urbanism, partnering with multinationals such as CISCO, and performing various smart city initiatives with aggressive self-promotion, as well as initiating the SCEWC to promote smart cities more globally (March and Ribera-Fumaz, 2016). Since May 2015, however, guided by Ada Colau – a long-time activist with respect to housing and wealth equality (see Colau and Alemany, 2012) – and by a sustained grass-root political movement (Barandiaran et al., 2017), there has been a new political and organisational approach to smart cities. This has included making smart city initiatives much more citizen-centric and participatory, adopting the concept of ‘technological sovereignty’ as a new form of citizenship, and appointing a new commissioner of Technology and Digital Innovation. Technological sovereignty is the notion that technology should be orientated to and serve local residents, and be owned as a commons, rather than applying a universal, market-orientated, proprietary technology (Galdon, 2017). As explained by the Deputy Mayor of Barcelona:

In a democratic city, technology should serve to digitally empower citizens, to protect their privacy from abuses by the public and private powers, to fight against corruption and to advance towards a more equitable and sustainable economy. That has a name: conquering technological, digital sovereignty, for the common good. (quoted in Galdon, 2017)

Barcelona has thus sought to re-politicize the smart city and to shift its creation and control away from private interests and the state towards citizens and communities, civic movements and social innovation. An important part in the organisation of this politics has been Decidim, ‘a digital infrastructure for participatory democracy, a “public-common” project mostly financed and made possible by the city, but managed and designed by an open community’ [SC7]. According to one of the main architects of this project, who we interviewed during SCEWC 2017 in Barcelona, Decidim is changing the terms of governance, making it much more transparent and participatory:

The city council decides that a topic, for instance a new regulation or a mobility plan, is going to be done with the citizens. And then it opens up a participatory process on the digital platform and beyond. And then we have ‘the result’, an agreement, maybe it is a 20 page plan or a new regulation with 80 articles. [SC7]