The smart grid as a security device: Electricity infrastructure and urban governance in Kingston and Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

This article aims to contribute to recent debates on the politics of smart grids by exploring their installation in low-income areas in Kingston (Jamaica) and Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). To date, much of this debate has focused on forms of smart city experiments, mostly in the Global North, while less attention has been given to the implementation of smart grids in cities characterised by high levels of urban insecurity and socio-spatial inequality. This article illustrates how, in both contexts, the installation of smart metering is used as a security device that embeds the promise of protecting infrastructure and revenue and navigating complex relations framed along lines of socio-economic inequalities and urban sovereignty – here linked to configurations of state and non-state (criminal) territorial control and power. By unpacking the political workings of the smart grid within changing urban security contexts, including not only the rationalities that support its use but also the forms of resistance, contestation and socio-technical failure that emerge, the article argues for the importance of examining the conjunction between urban and infrastructural governance, including the reshaping of local power relations and spatial inequalities, through globally circulating devices.

Writing the Latin American city: Trajectories of urban scholarship

“…Another facet of embracing ‘smart technologies’ revolves around the risks of using them to expand securitisation and surveillance regimes. Pilo’s (2021) research in Kingston and Rio de Janeiro focused on the use of smart electric grid metering as a security device in ‘insecure’ areas. Her findings suggest that the use of smart grids relies on globally circulating devices that embed the promise of protecting infrastructure and revenue while deepening problematic configurations of territorial control between state and non-state (criminal) actors.…”

A situated governmentality approach to energy transitions: technologies of power in German and Indian smart grid strategies

“…Bues and Gailing, 2016;Mattissek and Sturm, 2017) and especially in smart grid research (e.g. Bulkeley et al, 2016;Hargreaves, 2012;Levenda, 2016Levenda, , 2018Lovell, 2018;Pilo', 2021), the concept of governmentality has been used for some time now as a research perspective.…”

Housing Security: Placing Brazil’s Social Housing Program in a Violent Context

“…A resident of a MCMV condominium in Duque de Caxias reports that they do have a choice whether to use a connection to the formal electricity grid, or to the gato -a form of informal electricity provision known from the favelas. While in the favelas, a formalized electricity connection is oftentimes a ticket to formalize citizenship rights (Pilo' 2021), in MCMV citizenship is no longer a primarily aspired achievement given the formalized process of property titling a beneficiary enters by moving into an apartment. Yet, economic considerations might still turn residents to the informal electricity service offer, usually run by militias: the gato remains much cheaper.…”