Breakdown in the Smart City: Exploring Workarounds with Urban-sensing Practices and Technologies

Abstract

Smart cities are now an established area of technological development and theoretical inquiry. Research on smart cities spans from investigations into its technological infrastructures and design scenarios, to critiques of its proposals for citizenship and sustainability. This article builds on this growing field, while at the same time accounting for expanded urban-sensing practices that take hold through citizen-sensing technologies. Detailing practice-based and participatory research that developed urban-sensing technologies for use in Southeast London, this article considers how the smart city as a large-scale and monolithic version of urban systems breaks down in practice to reveal much different concretizations of sensors, cities, and people. By working through the specific instances where sensor technologies required inventive workarounds to be setup and continue to operate, as well as moments of breakdown and maintenance where sensors required fixes or adjustments, this article argues that urban sensing can produce much different encounters with urban technologies through lived experiences. Rather than propose a “grassroots” approach to the smart city, however, this article instead suggests that the smart city as a figure for urban development be contested and even surpassed by attending to workarounds that account more fully for digital urban practices and technologies as they are formed and situated within urban projects and community initiatives.

Planetary health in practice: sensing air pollution and transforming urban environments

“…It was within this context that the Citizen Sense group began its research in the spring of 2016 as part of a longer 6-year project funded by the European Research Council by identifying existing community projects involved in monitoring environments. We found that groups were undertaking traffic counting in order to calm busy streets, they were setting up diffusion tubes to capture levels of nitrogen oxide pollutants, and they were using maps and related data to establish how much green space was available in the area (see also Houston et al, 2019). While many people were concerned about the health effects of pollution, whether in relation to their own health or the health of friends, family, and neighbours, they were even more oriented toward shaping and remaking urban environments as a key way in which to address the problem of urban change and health in ways that assembled as a problem of planetary health.…”

The three modes of existence of the pandemic smart city

“…Finally, there is a third more subterranean form to the smart city, created by the myriads of data-and technology-based activities developed by citizens and civil society organizations, which have an impact on how we self-govern ourselves in cities. It manifests itself for instance, as a network of sensors to measure air quality put in place by residents in a London neighborhood exposed to pollutants (Houston et al, 2019) or as NGOs organizing the mapping of households and their access to services (electricity, toilets, water) in informal neighborhoods in Cape Town or Delhi. In these examples, but not in all cases obviously, the third smart city is driven by data activism which produces and uses data -not produced or undisclosed by the State -to enable rights claims in the context of social or environmental injustice and public inaction (Beraldo & Milan, 2019).…”

Planet of fixers? Mapping the middle grounds of independent and do‐it‐yourself information and communication technology maintenance and repair

“…Edwards's argument can certainly be extended conceptually to grasp other, more nuanced uneven geographies of infrastructure (e.g., Graham & Marvin, ) relating to, for example, intersections of gender, class, race, and location (among other factors). In practice, operability of ICT, as with other technology, can be flickering, stuttering, faltering‐but‐not‐yet‐failed, even if things ever worked smoothly at all (Akrich, ; Beisel & Schneider, ; De Laet & Mol, ; Houston et al, ).…”