Smart Festivals? Security and Freedom for Well-Being in Urban Smart Spaces

Abstract

Introduction: the problem for smart cities Smart City innovations promise much in the way of improved efficiency, reliability and real-time optimization of resources (Townsend 2013). City governments will spend an estimated $135 billion on smart city innovations by 2021 (International Data Corporation 2018). An essential selling point of the Smart City is surveillance of both citizens and the environment (including the workplace and smart homes) to promote well-being, a sense of security, real-time governance and citizen-centricity (Cardullo and Kitchin 2018, Kitchin 2014). To this end, a smart city resident may be subject to mass surveillance via CCTV, automatic facial recognition at smart border crossings (e.g., Ireland-Northern Ireland, US-Mexico), and corporate collection of personal data such as geolocational tracking.The touted benefits of surveillance may bring unintended consequences. In this paper we examine "surveillance anxiety", a purported reaction to these measures. Is there evidence to suggest that increased presence of surveillance measures are unwelcome? To address this, we focused on the dynamic community of the summer festival. We report a survey conducted on

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