Hackathons, entrepreneurship and the passionate making of smart cities

Perng, Sung-Yueh; Kitchin, Rob; Donncha, Darach Mac

doi:10.31219/osf.io/nu3ec

Cited by 8 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…There have been a number of such hackathons sponsored by the Dublin local authorities, along with corporate partners such as IBM and Intel, with respect to using the city's open data and producing smart city applications. While citizens who attend are free to produce whatever application they desire, the event is very much owned and run by the sponsors, who frame the event aims and provide space, mentors and guidance (Perng, Kitchin, and Mac Donncha 2017). In the Dublin case, a number of prototypes have been further developed post-event into commercial enterprises, such as Building Eye 11 and Parkya.…”

Section: Citizen Powermentioning

confidence: 99%

Being a ‘citizen’ in the smart city: up and down the scaffold of smart citizen participation in Dublin, Ireland

2018

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Reacting to critiques that the smart city is overly technocratic and instrumental, companies and cities have reframed their initiatives as 'citizencentric'. However, what 'citizen-centric' means in practice is rarely articulated. We draw on and extend Sherry Arnstein's seminal work on participation in planning and renewal programmes to create the 'Scaffold of Smart Citizen Participation'-a conceptual tool to unpack the diverse ways in which the smart city frames citizens. We use this scaffold to measure smart citizen inclusion, participation, and empowerment in smart city initiatives in Dublin, Ireland. Our analysis illustrates how most 'citizen-centric' smart city initiatives are rooted in stewardship, civic paternalism, and a neoliberal conception of citizenship that prioritizes consumption choice and individual autonomy within a framework of state and corporate defined constraints that prioritize market-led solutions to urban issues, rather than being grounded in civil, social and political rights and the common good. We conclude that significant normative work is required to rethink 'smart citizens' and 'smart citizenship' and to remake smart cities if they are to truly become 'citizen-centric'.

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Section: Citizen Powermentioning

confidence: 99%

Being a ‘citizen’ in the smart city: up and down the scaffold of smart citizen participation in Dublin, Ireland

2018

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“…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).…”

Section: The Neoliberal Smart City and Smart Citizenshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Cardullo

Kitchin

2018

Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

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This paper examines the neoliberal ideals that underpin participation and citizenship in the smart city and their replication mechanisms at European level. We examine self-proclaimed 'citizen-focus' projects funded by or aligned to the European Innovation Partnership for Smart Cities and Communities (EIP-SCC) by way of analysing policy documents and interviews with key stakeholders of smart city initiatives at European level and the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona (SCEWC 2017). We suggest that smart cities as currently conceived enact a blueprint of neoliberal urbanism and promote a form of neoliberal citizenship. Supranational institutions like the EIP-SCC act at a multi-scalar level, connecting diverse forms of neoliberal urbanism while promoting policy agendas and projects that perform neoliberal citizenship in the spaces of the everyday. Despite attempts to recast the smart city as 'citizenfocused', smart urbanism remains rooted in pragmatic, instrumental and paternalistic discourses and practices rather than those of social rights, political citizenship, and the common good. In our view, if smart cities are to become truly 'citizen-focused' an alternative conception of smart citizenship needs to be deployed, one that enables an effective shift of power and is rooted in rights, entitlements, community, participation, commons, and ideals beyond the market.

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“…In any reasonable sense of the terms, these claims to transparency and accountability invoke a subject who will participate in the various tasks imagined in the open data movement. In related research, this imagined subject has been characterized as a quintessentially neoliberal subject, insofar as the purposes of hackathons, entrepreneurial governance, and open government initiatives is to responsibilize and governmentalize (Ho, 2016; Irani, 2015; Perng et al., 2017). This subject does not exist a priori the smart city, but is instead invoked by it in promotional materials, policy documents, new/s media, images of control centers, and social networks.…”

Section: The “Who” Of Smart Citiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Smart cities: Who cares?

Burns

Andrucki

2020

Environ Plan A

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The growing critical research agenda on smart cities and open data programs has largely overlooked the body-subjects that enable its (re)production. The “ideal” subject of the smart city is prefigured as tech-savvy, independent, and uber-modern, able to produce digital data and analyze it to hold city government “accountable.” In this subject production, however, we argue that smart cities continue to rely on forms of reproductive labor that are invisibilized in current research and public discourse: We focus here on unpaid domestic labor, low-paid caring and reproductive labor, and volunteer work. We introduce the term “digital care worker” to capture a new category of reproductive worker in the smart city—voluntary and low-paid data producers and analyzers such as those who undertake “hackathons,” usually expected to do so out of love for their cities and communities. Drawing on geographies of care and Eve Sedgwick’s notion of the “closet.” we argue that the invisibility of digital caring laborers exists in dialectic relation to the spectacularization of particular body-subjects charged with caring for the smart city. Drawing on a discourse analysis of promotional materials and mission statements of key open data advocacy organizations, we propose the idea of “marginalized coder incubators,” who deploy assimilationist rhetoric to spectacularize the voluntary labor of women, people of color, and LGBTQ communities that is ultimately performed for the benefit of elites in the neoliberalizing city.

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Hackathons, entrepreneurship and the passionate making of smart cities

Cited by 8 publications

References 47 publications

Being a ‘citizen’ in the smart city: up and down the scaffold of smart citizen participation in Dublin, Ireland

Being a ‘citizen’ in the smart city: up and down the scaffold of smart citizen participation in Dublin, Ireland

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

Smart cities: Who cares?

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