Practices and politics of collaborative urban infrastructuring: Traffic Light Box Artworks in Dublin Streets

Abstract

Cities are transformed into sites of experimentation through large-scale smart city initiatives, but the visions and practices of establishing public, private and civic partnerships are often overshadowed by corporate interests, governance convenience and efficiency, with an overemphasis on technological innovations. Instead of relying on these partnerships, civic hacking initiatives seek to develop collaboration between programmers and community members, on the one hand, and government officials and organisations, on the other, for experimenting prototyping processes that foreground community needs. These initiatives are considered as pursuing open, inclusive and collaborative governance and is analysed through the lens of collaborative urban infrastructuring to attend to the dynamics, consequences and implications emerging from the prototyping processes.The analysis of the collaboration between Code for Ireland and Dublin City Council Beta suggests that the spatio-temporal scaling of prototypes lead to the continual and contested scaling of skills, knowledges, capabilities, organisational procedures and socio-technical arrangements. These heterogeneous scaling engenders desirable futures and future problems. The articulation and enactment of the values that attract diverse visions, viewpoints and practices into collaborative experimentation can be challenged by agonistic relationships arising from exploring practical arrangements for the mutual shaping of desirable governance procedures and the organisational expectations, obligations and constraints that are already in place. Furthermore, in the processes of scaling, there are constant dangers of enacting patriarchal stewardships and taking an all-knowing position for caring and evaluating impacts, which makes it critical to also experiment with ways of disclosing urban techno-politics that emerges continuously and in unanticipated ways.

Charting the design and implementation of the smart city: the case of citizen-centric bikeshare in Hamilton, Ontario

“…Innovative dialogue and participatory design offer the potential of both creative and inclusive solutions to the conflict between lay and professional actors. The participatory design community uses the concept of "agonistic" engagements between a variety of stakeholders to capture the notion of disparate and sometimes conflicting interests, coming together to democratize innovation and produce technologies which incorporate the goals and values of multiple interests (Bjögvinsson et al, 2012;Le Dantec & DiSalvo, 2013;Perng, 2019). In addition to technical artifacts and systems, this process may also deliver a principle, an idea, a social movement or an intervention (Bjögvinsson et al, 2012).…”

“…Using instrumentalization theory, we trace the contextual history of SobiHamilton, highlighting how the scheme unfolded in contingent and relational ways that sought to co-opt citizen views rather than tracking a purely top-down, teleological path. As such, we make a contribution not only to debates in critical urban geography, but also to previous scholarship in critical design (see for example, Le Dantec & DiSalvo, 2013;Kitchin et al, 2016;Liegl et al, 2016;Perng, 2019;Schliwa, 2019).…”

“…Such technological neutrality can be seen as a strategic attempt by vested interests to depoliticize the design and deployment of smart technologies and position them beyond the scope of political action (Haklay, 2013). From this perspective, articulations of democracy and citizen participation in the smart city have been largely rhetorical, mobilized to add legitimacy to technical praxes concerned with supporting private interests and entrepreneurial modes of governance Perng, 2019). This has also been referred to asengagement theater or "co-optation" where institutional actors create, then strategically undermine, collaborative relationships to ensure certain outcomes (Teli et al, 2020).…”

“…Such action has tended to produce technologies which are functional in nature, but which are resistant to social influence and the interests, concerns and needs of people and communities (Feenberg, 2010(Feenberg, , 2017Hollands, 2008). Even in cases of more citizen-engaged endeavors, such as hackathons, the evidence is that such events are framed and co-opted within neoliberal and corporatist agendas (Perng, 2019).…”

Living labs and vacancy in the neoliberal city

“…An example of a pop-up LL is the Fostering Digital Participation Project, which in 2015 set up mobile containers units that travelled across Australia. 5 A Dublin City Council initiative, Dublin Beta has run a number of street-based pop-up initiatives working with citizens, though most are low-or no-digital tech in nature (such as pop-up parks and secure bike sheds in parking bays, new gutter run-off systems, painting street infrastructure to discourage vandalism) (Perng, 2017). Also in the city, a diverse range of pop-ups are being facilitated through a web platform, 'fillit', that aims to match vacancies and pop-up events: "for people looking for the perfect temporary venue for events, pop-ups, retail, promotions and everything in-between".…”