Contesting Digital Futures: Urban Politics, Alternative Economies, and the Movement for Technological Sovereignty in Barcelona

Abstract

Scholars have offered important critiques of the socio‐spatial processes of contemporary technological development, including the rise of “smart city” urban development models. While these critiques have been essential for understanding contemporary forms of techno‐capitalism and their reach into new areas, this paper calls for a consideration of alternative modes of digital development in urban life beyond the logics of securitisation and capital accumulation. In particular, I examine the critical discourses and experimental practices of a grassroots movement focused on claiming “technological sovereignty” (TS) in Barcelona. The TS movement is a broad, de‐centralised network of cooperatives, associations, and community initiatives experimenting with alternative practices of locally rooted, open‐source digital development. These groups explore democratic and cooperative practices of work, property, production, and consumption in relation to digital technology, based around an ethics of care and a commitment to working through and within local communities. In examining the values, beliefs, and practices of the TS movement, I bring ongoing discussions around digitalisation and the “smart city” into critical conversation with the extensive literature on prefigurative urban politics and postcapitalist economies.

The Social Life of Robots: The Politics of Algorithms, Governance, and Sovereignty

“…Paradoxically, the focus on the military and police has tended to mask the wider robotic revolution in security: the banal and everyday deployment of robots by state and non‐state actors employed to track, analyse, and store all sorts of information on people, and the counter use of robots and robotics to circumvent these efforts, construct new networks of technological solidarity and sovereignty, or repurpose them for criminal purposes (see Lynch ). When considering these ubiquitous and far reaching changes, geographers will need to ask how the spaces and architectures of policing, surveillance, and securitisation will be transformed and what potentials exist, or newly emerge, for resistance and subversion?…”

“…There are myriad examples of this kind of peer‐to‐peer (P2P) production and the crowdsourcing and sharing of data, from Wikipedia and Apache software to OpenStreetMap, as the best geographical example (McConchie ; Sieber et al ). Together this impetus is leading to the growth of technological sovereignty movements in cities, such as Barcelona (see Lynch ).…”

“…Lynch’s () paper moves beyond the standard critique of the smart city as an expression of techno‐capitalism by considering how locally rooted, open sourced digital technology may enable “alternative”, counter‐capitalist forms of organisation of urban life. One of these emergent forms is the technology sovereignty (TS) movement in Barcelona, a decentralised, grassroots network that seeks local, democratic control over the “vital systems and infrastructure of everyday life”.…”

What’s so new about New Municipalism?

“…In Berlin and Barcelona are notable examples of attempts to curtail the power of urban-based platform corporations such as Uber and Airbnb by banning or restricting their practices within jurisdictions (Carson, 2017). Barcelona's ecosystem of digital platform cooperatives and movement for technological sovereignty represents a counter-hegemonic recoding of the global smart city complex (Charnock and Ribera-Fumaz, 2019;Lynch, 2019). The boosterist-entrepreneurial Barcelona Model of the 1990s morphed into a smart city agenda by the 2010s for which governing elites pursued a post-political techno-solutionist project to remodel the 'city as software' through partnerships with multinationals like Cisco and Microsoft, repositioning Barcelona as the world's leading referent for smart urbanism and digital transformation (Charnock and Ribera-Fumaz, 2019).…”

Towards more inclusive smart cities: Reconciling the divergent realities of data and discourse at the margins

“…The assemblage of advocacy, grassroots movements against urban gentrification and smart technologies results in a true ‘participatory democracy’ that is aligned with the notion of ‘right to the city’, equality and justice. More recently, there has been a call to search for ‘alternative modes’ of digital development based on a study in Barcelona's grassroots smart cities whereby informal and organically developed networks of corporations, communities, and associations work towards forming a technological sovereignty movement which formed new arrangements of urban life and democratic decision making in the city (Lynch, 2019). Looking into such ongoing processes of alternative modes of digitalization goes beyond the well‐established critique of smart cities.…”