10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17371
The "smart city" is likely one of the most unbearable current policy discourses and frameworks not just due to its technological determinism. Hence we are interested in exploring alternative narratives on "smart cities" by proposing two main "moves" from conventional perspectives. The first one involves considering a wider range of actors and logics than those usually considered in descriptions of smart cities. This does not just imply paying attention to grassroots organizations and private tech companies that develop datadriven urban services outside the conventional smart city programs run by municipalities, but also taking seriously the various non-digital logics and concerns that articulate or collide with smart city projects. The second move directly derives from the first one, as it proposes to go from a narrow focus on smart governmentality to a broader understanding on the (cosmo)-politics of smart urbanism. We examine these moves in the light of two quite different instances of smart urbanism: a service for urban exploration offered by the tech company Foursquare and a smart city project implemented by the municipality of Munich. Following the political trajectories of these two cases of smart urbanism, we underline the more-than-governmental and more-than digital logics that intervene in the making of ‘ordinary’ smart cities.
application/pdf
2038-3460
17371
2
en
Ignacio Farías
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/
Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
citizens
Ordinary Smart Cities. How Calculated Users, Professional Citizens, Technology Companies and City Administrations Engage in a More-than-digital Politics
Text.Serial.Journal
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/
8
Essays
2018-01-29
2023-06-24
2018-01-29
2023-08-24
43-60
TS
Ignacio Farías
2017
10.6092/issn.2038-3460/17371
43
University of Munich
2038-3460
2
citizens
en
60
Ordinary Smart Cities. How Calculated Users, Professional Citizens, Technology Companies and City Administrations Engage in a More-than-digital Politics
https://tecnoscienza.unibo.it/article/download/17371/16227
8
                                                                                     Essay

Ordinary Smart Cities
How Calculated Users, Professional Citizens,
Technology Companies and City Administrations
Engage in a More-than-digital Politics

             Ignacio Farías                              Sarah Widmer
            University of Munich (DE)                    University of Munich (DE)



  Abstract: The ‘smart city’ is likely one of the most unbearable current poli-
  cy discourses and frameworks not just due to its technological determinism.
  Hence we are interested in exploring alternative narratives on ‘smart cities’
  by proposing two main ‘moves’ from conventional perspectives. The first one
  involves considering a wider range of actors and logics than those usually con-
  sidered in descriptions of smart cities. This does not just imply paying atten-
  tion to grassroots organizations and private tech companies that develop data-
  driven urban services outside the conventional smart city programs run by
  municipalities, but also taking seriously the various non-digital logics and con-
  cerns that articulate or collide with smart city projects. The second move
  directly derives from the first one, as it proposes to go from a narrow focus
  on smart governmentality to a broader understanding on the (cosmo)-politics
  of smart urbanism. We examine these moves in the light of two quite different
  instances of smart urbanism: a service for urban exploration offered by the
  tech company Foursquare and a smart city project implemented by the mu-
  nicipality of Munich. Following the political trajectories of these two cases of
  smart urbanism, we underline the more-than-governmental and more-than
  digital logics that intervene in the making of ‘ordinary’ smart cities.

  Keywords: smart urbanism; (cosmo)politics; users; post-demographics;
  citizens.

  Submitted: September 17, 2017 – Accepted: November 11, 2017

  Corresponding author: Ignacio Farías, Department of Architecture & Mu-
  nich Center for Technology in Society, Technical University of Munich, Ger-
  many. Email: ignacio.farias@tum.de




TECNOSCIENZA
Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies
8 (2) pp. 43-60- ISSN 2038-3460
www.tecnoscienza.net                              2017
44                                                             Tecnoscienza – 8 (2)

1. Decentering the Smart City

     For both science and technology studies (STS) and urban studies
scholars the ‘smart city’ is likely one of the most unbearable current policy
discourses and frameworks. The technological determinism infusing the
celebration and critique of ‘smart’ device infrastructures is almost as naïve
and problematic as the knowledge claims of the so called ‘new urban sci-
ence’. What makes these issues unbearable is a combination of their ubiq-
uity (the fact that we are constantly forced to relate to them) and their sim-
plicity (the fact that these are not very good problems to think with). It
seems that we could continue to write many articles and books taking apart
the idea of the smart city without arriving at new and interesting proposi-
tions. So it cannot be overstated that there is an imperative need to turn
our attention to what Shelton and colleagues have suitably called “the ac-
tually existing smart cities” (2015). As these authors argue, “the assemblage
of actors, ideologies and technologies associated with smart city interven-
tions bears little resemblance to the marketing rhetoric and planning doc-
uments of emblematic, greenfield smart cities, such as Masdar in the
United Arab Emirates, Songdo in South Korea, and Living PlanIT Valley
in Portugal” (2015, 14). The challenge then is to ground the smart city in
the historical and geographical context in which it is being implemented
and thereby to provincialize it (Datta, 2015), to counteract the figure of the
“smart city as a kind of universal, rational and depoliticized project that
largely plays out according to the terms of profit-maximizing, multinational
technology companies.” (Shelton et al. 2015, 14).
     But how to do this? In this lecture, we would like to propose two ana-
lytical moves for rendering the smart city into a more generative research
problem: firstly, decoupling the problem of smart city from the problem of
data-driven cities and, secondly, expanding the focus from governmental-
ity issues to a broader exploration of the (cosmo)-politics of the smart city.
Let us briefly explain these two moves.
     Firstly, uncoupling the analysis of the smart city urban development
from the capacity of big data analytics to govern urban life is crucial, for
some of the most interesting data-related developments and reconfigura-
tions are not occurring under the smart city projects and strategies run by
cities. Shelton et al. observe that “it is important to note that the smart city
as it has largely been envisioned and critiqued bears little resemblance to
the reality of how urban planning and governance is changing in the era of
big data” (2015, 15). Accordingly, in order to understand what the smart
city of the future might look like, we might need to look at actors, collec-
tives and companies that are not necessarily part of the “new inter-organi-
zational partnerships and alliances, built around the development and im-
plementation of data-driven governance projects” (Shelton et al. 2015, 16).
Tironi and Sánchez Criado (2016, 97) point for example to the importance
of looking at “digitally ­mediated sensing practices developed in grassroots
projects that have emerged alongside, but also intersecting and opposing,
Farías & Widmer                                                           45
smart city projects” and the extent to which “‘alternative’ projects may pro-
vide concerned parties with instruments to slow down, avoid the pitfalls of
either praise or criticism, and learn how to build more interesting relations
to what the ongoing digitalization of the urban might bring” (2016, 98). By
the same token, we need to also consider corporate products and services
such as Pokemon Go and Foursquare, a case we will discuss in detail, as
they enable new ways of relating to and discovering the built environment,
albeit by no means integrated in any smart city initiative whatsoever.
    By the same coin we need to challenge the idea that the data-driven city
would be a good descriptor of the new modes of urbanization that are cur-
rently being unfolded around the notion of the smart city. As Shelton et al.
have pointed out: “while data is both the driving force behind smart city
initiatives, as well as the means by which these initiatives are implemented,
the ultimate goal of the policies is fostering economic development, with
success judged accordingly. Thus, […] the smart city idea largely coalesces
around strategies for economic growth in an era of austerity” (2015, 16). A
good example of this is the Horizon 2020 Program for Smart Cities and
Communities, whose explicit aim is not just to facilitate the implementa-
tion of smart technologies that lead to the reduction of carbon emissions
but to invest in the development of business models for global smart city
markets, thus attracting money and jobs to Europe. Discussing a current
project funded under this scheme, it will become apparent that smart city
projects are rarely shaping the strategies of urban development and they
are pursued alongside many other urban development programs. Cities are
indeed multiple objects, where different forms of governing, knowing, val-
uing and practicing the city interact and enter in conflict with each other.
In that sense, it seems crucial to go beyond the figure of a data-driven city
which would not reflect upon the ways in which smart city assemblages
interact with other incommensurable ways of enacting and living the city,
to a broader understanding of the politics of smart urbanization in order
to encompass both the data-driven government of urban life and, perhaps
most importantly, conflicts about the very production of data.
    Secondly, we need to go from a focus on the power of smart technolo-
gies and on the smart city as a governmental data-driven apparatus to a
broader understanding of the politics of the smart city. Most of the litera-
ture has been concerned with the types of urban citizens and populations
constituted through data-driven and smart technologies. Contributions of
leading authors have notably discussed the smart city along the lines of dis-
ciplinary and security technologies, rationalities and power formations.
Whereas Vanolo (2013) reads smart urbanism as a disciplinary urban de-
velopment paradigm, Klauser et al. (2014) discuss, under the notion of
“governing through code”, how smart electricity projects seek to optimize
a “relationally composed whole” (p. 873) not based on an a priori norm
with which singular elements have to comply, but letting things happen
within the limits of the acceptable. Klauser et al. thus address the flexible
46                                                            Tecnoscienza – 8 (2)

and adaptive logics of data-driven and automated governmental securitiza-
tion. The recent work of Gabrys (2016) places the smart city in a larger
power formation involving what she calls planetary computerization and
involving new forms of governmental action “performed through environ-
ments that are computationally programmed” (2016, 187). Drawing on
Foucault’s late reflections on biopolitics and his interest in milieus and en-
vironments as objects of government, she frames the power logics of urban
participatory sensing around the notions of ‘environmentality’ and ‘biopol-
itics 2.0’.
    Despite the incontestable value of these works, we think that it is nec-
essary to broaden the analytical scope to explore the cosmo-politics of
smart cities, and not just to their governmentalities. As Rancière, Latour
and Foucault would agree, the notion of politics describes a different rela-
tion to power than government. The latter, as Foucault has brilliantly ar-
gued, is about the conduct of conducts and relates to the historic formation
of power concerned with the securitization of populations and the prac-
tices of the state. In Rancière’s terms (2009), government corresponds ra-
ther with the policing of institutionalized distributions of the sensible. Be
that as it may, the important point here is that studying the smart city in
terms of its governmental arrangement is at odds with an exploration of its
politics in the Rancierian sense, namely the conflicts, controversies and dis-
ruptions entailing the possibility of a redistribution of the sensible or, as
Bruno Latour would have it: a (cosmo)political practice aimed at the pro-
gressive composition of the cosmos we live by. Such redistributions and
recompositions do not just occur through the sudden irruption of the ‘part
that has no part’, but are actually unfolded in spatio-temporal trajectories
enacting different ‘political modalities’ (Latour 2007), of which govern-
mentality corresponds to only one.
    Indeed, Latour proposes the redefinition of politics as cosmopolitics in
order to grasp the (contested) composition of common worlds. Drawing
on De Vries’s study of the history of maternal blood screening in the Neth-
erlands, Latour charts the various meanings that the adjective ‘political’ can
take in such contested processes, redefining who we are and how we live.
He identifies five key stages and meanings of the political. Political-1 stands
for the stage in which new associations between humans and nonhumans
are made; a political moment typically detected by STS scholars studying
technoscientific innovations. Political-2 stands for the moment in which
the new association (or issue) formed in stage-1 has consequences that en-
tangle a public of unanticipated actors around it (a moment that pragma-
tists, and Dewey in particular, have detected with their focus on the public
and its problems). Political-3 corresponds to the moment in which the ma-
chinery of government tries to turn the issue into a clearly articulated ques-
tion of common good (the political as framed by political scientists study-
ing the question of sovereignty). The next interval on the trajectory of an
issue is political-4, defined by Latour as the Habermasian moment, in
Farías & Widmer                                                                47
which the issue is debated in a deliberative assemblies. The final stage, po-
litical-5, is labelled as ‘governmentality’ and corresponds to the moment in
which the issue has become naturalized to the point that it is taken for
granted and appears as completely apolitical1.
     Latour’s (cosmo)political framework is helpful to empirically follow the
different types of issues unfolding around the smart/data-driven city and
thus expand the narratives and stories we tell about it by including the var-
ious actors and non-digital logics with which smart and data-driven urban
projects articulate or collide. In what follows, we will refer to Latour’s
framework when considering the political trajectories of two rather distinct
case studies which are representative of actually existing smart cities. First,
we will tell the story of the smartphone application Foursquare and reflect
about its post-demographic mode of constituting individual users as
crowds, where the power formation is not governmental but aims at the
capitalization of user data. Secondly, we will look at the implementation of
the project Smarter Together in Munich and, by focusing on the various
negotiations surrounding the instalment of data infrastructures, we will
demonstrate how such high-tech, computational projects are to a great ex-
tent shaped by and plagued by sovereignty concerns. We will conclude
with a short summary and a final reflection about how these stories allow
us to go beyond the analysis of data as a driving force of smart urbanism.


2. Foursquare: The Subtle Politics of Post-Demographic
Data-Intensive Urban Services

    The first case we examine in order to address the political trajectories
of the ‘data-driven city’ is the case of Foursquare, a local search-and-dis-
covery mobile application providing personalized recommendations on
places to go to (bars, cafés, restaurants, etc.). By showing how a private
tech company orchestrates the consumption of urban amenities, we depart
from the common emphasis on the smart city as an urban development
strategy led by city administrations and stress how cities are being trans-
formed today in uncoordinated ways by multiple private corporations of-
fering very specific smart urban services.
    Launched in 2009, Foursquare began as a location-based game and so-
cial network but morphed, from 2011 on, into a local search application


    1
      It is certainly rather strange that Latour equates governmentality with that
which remains uncontested and appears as apolitical in a certain time and that he
makes no reference whatsoever to populations, security, biopolitics or neoliberal-
ism, the key conceptual markers of what Foucault describes as governmentality.
Indeed, what Latour frames as political-5 corresponds rather to what Foucault
more generally describes as a historical formation of power, be it based on sover-
eignty, discipline or governmentality.
48                                                             Tecnoscienza – 8 (2)

allowing users to find bars, coffee shops and restaurants in their surround-
ings. The functioning of this search-and-discovery engine relies on the pro-
duction of data by users. This data (mostly locational data) is used to profile
users and make targeted recommendations. Until the big revision of the
app in 2014, users generated locational data by ‘checking-in’ to places, i.e.
by indicating on the app their presence in a specific venue. Since the 2014
revision, people are not required to check-in any more, as their presence is
automatically detected by ‘Pilgrim’, a technology running in the back-
ground of the app, sensing where the user goes and stops and finding the
corresponding venue in the huge database of places constituted through-
out the years by the company. The changes which occurred in 2011 and
2014 are critical to understand the app’s main service (to provide users
with personalized recommendations on nearby places) as well as to grasp
the way in which it constitutes, knows, and eventually exploits its users.
Certainly, Foursquare and its functioning through profiling are not
‘overtly’ political. Its political dimension lies with the ways in which it as-
sembles different actors (users, data, software developers, algorithms, ur-
ban places) and constitutes ‘users’ through data and algorithmic calcula-
tions in data-driven and calculated ways. It involves the kind of new asso-
ciations of humans and nonhumans that Latour describes as politics-1.
    Notably, when Foursquare’s engineers first developed their recommen-
dation tool in 2011, they interpreted locational data as a reflection of what
the user liked in terms of food, ambiances, neighborhoods and types of
places. In other words, the history of check-ins of a user was used to create
a knowable ‘subject of tastes’, for whom targeted recommendations could
be formulated. Although check-ins had not been conceived in the first
place as indicators of tastes (they initially served the gaming purpose of
collecting badges and mayorships), Foursquare’s engineers favored this
specific understanding of the data; an understanding that assumed the ex-
istence of a univocal user whose production of locational data reflected her
elective affinities. Check-ins were in reality equivocal, entailing fundamen-
tally different types of attachments to places, practices of producing data
and curating a ‘locational self’ on the platform. The digital histories of users
were sometimes composed of fake check-ins, check-ins to bus stops and to
other places hardly indicative of their tastes. It is reasonable to believe that
the new version of Foursquare, launched in 2014, involved an attempt to
fix the messiness and polysemy of check-ins by automatizing the produc-
tion of location data through Pilgrim. At this point, users come to be con-
stituted through the association between their own check-in practices, the
decision of the developers to use check-ins as proxies for tastes but also by
the types of amenities offered by the city or the neighborhoods in which
the user spends her time. Foursquare is also ‘calculating’ each user by find-
ing similar patterns between their digital history and those of other users.
More precisely, Explore (Foursquare’s recommendation engine prior to
the 2014 revision) operated by finding patterns in two types of networks:
what the developers called the ‘place graph’ and the ‘social graph’.
Farías & Widmer                                                               49
     The ‘place graph’ is about the ways in which places are connected to-
gether through the data produced by users. Patterns of locational data re-
veal different types of connections between places. For instance, by identi-
fying the sequence in which users checked-in from one place to another, it
is possible to spot ‘flow relations’ i.e. the tendency of one place to be visited
after another. Relations of ‘co-visitation’ exist among places that are visited
by the same sets of users. Relations of ‘category’ refer to the relations be-
tween places of same function or activity e.g. sushi restaurants or hair stu-
dios. The so-called ‘social graph’ (based on the origins of Foursquare as a
social network) consists in analyzing how users are connected on the app
via different kinds of interactions. At the time of Explore, they could
‘friend’ each other, ‘follow’ the accounts of specific brands or save or like
the tips and comments left by other users on a certain venue. Another very
powerful ‘social signal’ was the ‘co-location’ of users, or to put it differ-
ently, their tendency to visit the same physical places (Shaw 2013).
     Calculating relations of ‘flow’, ‘co-visitation’, ‘category’, ‘friendship’
and ‘co-location’ are fundamental operations for Foursquare to provide
relevant recommendations to each user. Importantly, a series of assump-
tions underpinned such calculations: ‘the places that your friends like are
good predictions about the places you might like as well’, ‘the places visited
by people with similar check-ins habits than you might also interest you’,
‘you went to a lot of sushi restaurants, you probably want to discover some
new ones’ etc. The assumptions of the app developers on what constituted
relevant recommendations were translated into specific calculations and
shaping a ‘calculated user’. Based on these assumptions and calculations,
Explore was creating highly personalized and dynamic maps. Personalized,
because they were drawing on each user’s own digital history and were cal-
culating those connections for each one of these ‘calculated users’. Dy-
namic, because Explore was not only adapting its recommendations to
changing contexts of use (i.e. locations, time of the day) but also taking into
consideration the ever-evolving nature of these calculated users, who were
constantly posting new check-ins, writing new comments and ‘friending’
new users thereby creating or consolidating new relations in the place and
social graphs (Klauser and Widmer, 2017).
     The question we would like to pose here, in reference to Latour’s po-
litical-5, is: if Foursquare wields a certain form of power capable of consti-
tuting users and shaping their spatial and social relationships, to what kind
of power formation does it amount?
     Interestingly, neither disciplinary normalization nor governmental se-
curitization, as they have been discussed for smart/data-driven cities, are
useful to understand the power formation articulated by Foursquare. In-
deed, even though individual subjects are the ones whose actions are tar-
geted here, Foursquare is not a disciplinary device. It does not “regulate
[...] everything and allow […] nothing to escape” (Foucault 2007, 67) but
builds upon a power of suggestion, sparking the desires and attachments
of users by affording rewards and incentives as well as a personal service.
50                                                              Tecnoscienza – 8 (2)

Foursquare works as an ‘attachment device’ (Cochoy 2017), whose action
on the ‘field of possibilities’ of users (Foucault 1982, 790) cannot be de-
scribed as ‘subjugation’ or ‘normalization’. On Foursquare there is no pre-
given norm to which subjects are expected to conform, as in the case with
its main competitor, the application Yelp, which is based on a calculation
of users’ reliability and then defines these reliable users as the norm to fol-
low. On Foursquare, recommendations are aimed to fit the user’s calcu-
lated tastes. Thus, not only has every user the opportunity to be a norm of
their own, but the norm itself is constantly fluctuating as newly volunteered
data is added to the system.
    Notably, even though Klauser et al. (2015) rightly point to these fluid
and flexible norms adapting to the ‘reality’ of data as characteristic of a
governmental form of power, the case of Foursquare is different, for the
app does not aim at governing a population or securing the conditions of
its reproduction. This is not to say that populations are irrelevant. The
functioning of the app is based on the crowd-sourcing of data and the cal-
culation of similarities among ‘populations’ of users. In order for Four-
square to target the individual user it has to find statistically significant re-
lations of co-location, co-visitation, flow, etc. in the mass of user-generated
data. Indeed, when a user could not be algorithmically connected to a sub-
population of like-minded people it became more complicated for Four-
square to govern this user as a ‘unique’ subject, bearer of her own norm.
In that case, the user would receive less targeted content and more one-
size-fits-all recommendations for places considered popular.
    So what type of power formation does Foursquare articulate? Is it se-
curity in disguise, as the fluid, centrifugal and open aspects of these data-
driven regulations seem to indicate? Or are these specific modes of shaping
individuals and populations delineating a new apparatus of power? Rather
than delineating a brand-new power apparatus, we would like to stress two
key aspects of the data-driven power formations of services like Four-
square.
    The first aspect to stress is the post-demographic form of such data-
driven power formation; a feature that has been discussed in recent litera-
ture. As Ruppert observes, in data-intensive environments subjects are in-
creasingly known “not so much in relation to pre-defined categories of
identity [such as age, gender, place of residence, education etc.] but in re-
lation to what people do, their interactions, transactions, performance, ac-
tivities and movements” (2012, 119). Notably, her study of the governmen-
tal practices of child welfare agencies, as well as Mackenzie’s (2016) analy-
sis of the individual targeting of electors during Obama’s re-election cam-
paign, describe a new type of relationship between subject and population.
In Ruppert’s example children potentially at risk are targeted through the
joining-up of different databases. In the case studied by Mackenzie, every
voter in the country was assigned a score, recalculated every week accord-
ing to new events (such as Sarah Palin’s vice-presidential nomination or the
Farías & Widmer                                                               51
collapse of Lehman Brothers) and targeted accordingly by Obama’s cam-
paign crew (Issenberg 2012). In both examples, the fine-grained data ob-
tained on people allow for the targeting of singularities (individuals identi-
fied as potential swing-voters or children at risk) instead of multiplicities
(socio-demographic groups). Interestingly, both authors propose under-
standing the subjects constituted and targeted in such data environments
as ‘monads’. Ruppert (2012, 127) writes that joined up databases material-
ize the subject as “a monad made up of complex, unique, dynamic and
always varying metrics”, while Mackenzie (2016, 116) describes how elec-
tors are “distributed across varied populations of different kinds that in-
tersect through them” and how, by attracting probability distributions,
these individuals themselves become populations or crowds.
     Such a description of a post-demographic form of power fits very well
the case of Foursquare as a recommendation service not based on socio-
demographic characteristics of individuals and groups, but on dynamic
patterns, relations and regularities in the data. Foursquare performs each
of its users as the relational effect of an ego-centric population but, as we
have described above, the main difference is that it is not the government
of a specific population, voters or children at risk, that is primarily at stake.
     Thus we come to the second key aspect we would like to stress here. If
it is not about governing users by post-demographic means, then what is
what Foursquare does to its users? To approach this question, it is helpful
to understand the business model of Foursquare. Notably, although the
services offered by Foursquare have been around for some years now, the
app never encountered the outstanding success of a Twitter, a Facebook
or a Snapchat. The services provided by the company have always re-
mained a niche and, facing competitors such as Yelp or Google Maps,
Foursquare never became the ‘killer app’. The difficulties encountered by
the company became obvious when, during the funding round of 2016, its
financial value was cut by half in comparison to what investors thought it
was worth in 2014. Despite these difficulties, the company is still standing,
and its survival is certainly due to the immense amount of data it has gath-
ered throughout the years. By collecting location data from its users, Four-
square has constituted a huge geo-referenced database of places which has
enabled it to become a “pillar of the mobile app ecosystem” (Barouch
2013) by providing its API to other developers. Recently, the executive
committee of Foursquare decided more explicitly to exploit the financial
value of this data, by monetizing access to the API and by creating the
platform ‘enterprise.foursquare.com’, on which different services based on
Foursquare’s ‘locational intelligence’ are proposed to other companies.
     If ‘data is the new oil’ it is, without a doubt, the oil of Foursquare. Data
thus becomes not just the driver of urban life, or of people’s engagement
with urban amenities, but it constitutes the most important asset for secur-
ing the very existence and economic success of the company. The power
formation that Foursquare articulates is one in which what needs to be de-
fended and secured is not a collective concern that requires a governmental
52                                                            Tecnoscienza – 8 (2)

form of action but the profitability of the company. The economic value of
data sheds new light on the key subject constituted by Foursquare: the pro-
ducer of this data, the ‘user’. The story we have told demonstrates the com-
plex arrangements developed to constitute this subject but we would miss
the point if we conceived the user solely as a consumer of the company’s
smart service for urban exploration. The user as the producer of data is
indeed the main resource exploited in its business model.


3. Smarter Together: On Sovereignty, Berufbürger and the
Politics of Translation

     How else does the politics of smart cities unfold in the contemporary
context? The second story we would like to present concerns the imple-
mentation of the project Smarter Together in the area of Neuaubing-
Westkreuz in the city of Munich; a project funded by the EU-Horizon 2020
program Smart Communities and Cities aimed at funding consortiums of
cities with a common smart city CO2-reduction agenda. Together with Vi-
enna and Lyon, Munich is a lead city of the consortium Smarter Together,
which includes over 30 partners from administration, industry and re-
search, as well as three further so-called follower cities. Although the pro-
ject revolves around the implementation of smart, data-driven infrastruc-
tures (the grand vision planned for the city involves the implementation of
an app through which citizens will have secured access to smart services
concerning transport, environment, etc.), what distinguishes the smart city
agenda of Smarter Together in Munich is the targeting of a residential area
and the implementation of a co-creation participatory approach. In its
scope, the case of Smarter Together resonates with what we can observe in
many European cities, where urban projects and interventions that go by
the name ‘smart city’ do not (yet) involve systems or services based on real-
time data analytics but rather encompass urban development projects. In-
deed, investments in data infrastructures aimed at energy-consumption re-
duction and modal mobility split are only a small part of smart city invest-
ments which, in cities like Munich, opt for the building of multi-modal
mobility stations, the energetic retrofitting of buildings or the renewal of
street lighting systems. Accordingly, the notion of a data-driven city de-
scribes only a possible result, one possible framing of interventions in the
built environment, but does not offer a key angle from which to look at
these projects.
     So how are we to trace the political trajectory of this smart city project
in Munich, if the political-1, that is, the introduction of new socio-technical
arrangements that subtly but effectively change the way humans and non-
humans are articulated, is not the starting point of the story? That was the
case with Foursquare which took us from the data-driven city as a subpo-
litical invention of a new way of constituting users by means of big data
Farías & Widmer                                                              53
(politics-1) to an exploration of broader power formations (politics-5). The
smart city project in Neuaubing-Westkreuz has followed a quite different
political trajectory, one that actually begins with a sovereign decision of the
city administrations to pursue and implement the project (politics-3), ef-
forts for sparking publics into being (politics-2) and for achieving consen-
sus through co-creation (politics 4).
    Let us then begin this story by considering the city area chosen for
Smarter Together in Munich taking into account the broader city-wide ur-
ban development master plan called ‘Perspektive München’, where Neu-
aubing-Westkreuz features as the first of the 10 urban areas to be inter-
vened in before 2040. From this perspective, Smarter Together is an urban
development instrument useful for this wider master plan, which ultimately
relies on the capacity of the city administration to make collectively-bind-
ing decisions about the urban environment. Smarter Together thus in-
volves an exercise and a reminder of the city administration’s sovereignty
upon the urban body under its jurisdiction. At stake is a modality of the
political shaped by the juridical arrangements and institutional checks and
balances of a city administration which corresponds to what Latour calls
political-3. Starting from this observation, the political trajectory of
Smarter Together that we would like to discuss here unfolds around the
efforts of different actors, notably city officials, co-creation experts and lo-
cal actors, to define what participation in this project should involve. We
would like to dwell on this process, which we know especially well, given
that one of the authors, Ignacio Farías, together with two colleagues from
MCTS, Claudia Mendes and Hannah Varga, played the role of the co-cre-
ation experts in this process.
    Interestingly, the expectations on co-creation held by city administra-
tion officials were based on their interest in design thinking methods that
could foster creativity, lead to the proposition of ‘cool’ and ‘crazy’ ideas for
smart technologies and services, as well as create a space where experts
could learn about their prospective users. A good example of the latter was
the encounter between mobility experts and local residents in the collabo-
rative space called ‘design collective: mobility’, where the former were
mostly concerned with achieving a reliable knowledge of user profiles and
preferences. Co-creation thus was not imagined as a speculative exercise
for developing new ideas, where the involved citizens could act as designers
or planners, but rather as a technique to generate knowledge about pro-
spective users so that mobility stations could be adapted to such user needs.
Co-creation was imagined and practiced by city officials as a key technique
for a consensual mode of the political (politics-4). Consensus was to be
found through co-creation rather than through deliberation among ra-
tional actors, expressed in the design of the mobility station rather than in
shared propositions and achieved through the common sense of creative
citizens rather than through their argumentative capacities.
    Such consensual politics was, however, significantly limited by the fact
that there were in practice only few elements of the planned infrastructures
54                                                             Tecnoscienza – 8 (2)

that could be modified. In the case of the mobility stations, not only their
location or number were out of the scope of co-creation but also the con-
cerns brought up by participants, such as the improvement of cycling in-
frastructures, were outside of the scope of the project. A more promising
opportunity for a co-creation process was carved out in the conversations
between the co-creation team (Farías, Mendes, Varga) and the city's IT
department in charge of the development of lampposts endowed with sen-
sors. Apart from adaptive lighting and W-Lan connection, these lampposts
are equipped with empty slots for sensors to be provided by private com-
panies by means of a call for bids. Accordingly, the co-creation team con-
ceived a whole process of hands-on activities aimed at bringing together
public servants, technical experts and concerned residents to collectively
shape the call for bids. The process would not involve the physical proto-
typing of sensors but it would require tinkering with the technical, legal
and social parameters for sensors, as well as assessing the potential benefit
of smart services enabled by them.
    Even if this process was aimed at finding a consensus concerning the
types of sensors and services to be provided, the co-creation team under-
stood this as an opportunity to foster the formation of an issue-public con-
cerned with sensor infrastructures and data issues in a collaborative space
called ‘design collective: data’. Indeed, the main aim of this co-creation
process was not just to acknowledge the residents expertise in the matters
at stake or to find a consensus about what the call for bids should include,
but also to put experts in a situation in which their technical knowledge,
value certainties and plans could be contested by a public (Farías 2017). In
that sense, inspired by John Dewey's political philosophy, the aim was to
create conditions for the emergence of an issue public that would explore
existing uncertainties, produce and share knowledge and eventually con-
front the city with demands not yet considered in their smart city designs.
    Both readings of the co-creation process as a consensual form of user
engagement (political-4) and as the sparking of issue publics (political-2)
are surely justified. There were moments in which the co-creation process
functioned as a consensus-oriented device and moments in which resi-
dents, neighbours and interested and affected individuals and groups came
together and acted as an issue public concerned with key issues that were
not on the agenda, such as data privacy. Yet these two readings do not
capture the mode of the political that most significantly shaped these par-
ticipatory spaces and which was articulated around a different type of sub-
ject that is often called the Berufsbürger or professional citizen.
    By Berufsbürger we generally refer to members of the organized civil
society, often retired seniors, who have actively engaged with the project
Smarter Together, voiced their concerns about its aims and foreseen inter-
ventions and, in some cases, also criticized the modes of public engagement
characteristic of co-creation. Their qualification as Berufsbürger seemed
appropriate considering their almost exclusive dedication to local affairs
and their participation in all sort of activities irrespective of their thematic
Farías & Widmer                                                                   55
focus. In Germany the role played by Berufsbürger in participatory pro-
cesses is mostly problematized as a representativity issue, given their spe-
cific demographics and the attached underrepresentation of younger peo-
ple, less educated individuals, women and non-white citizens. Without un-
derscoring the importance of these issues, we would like to highlight that
the political challenge posed by the Berufsbürger was a completely differ-
ent one.
    To begin with, Berufsbürger were strongly against playful, hands-on
and symmetrical modes of public engagement and participation. The first
workshop of the ‘design collective: data’ involved playing a sensor game
invented by the co-creation team. Each participant would get cards with
information on specific sensors and come up with an application or service
that run based on the data collected by these sensors. Each group would
then build a mock-up of the sensor, as well as sketch out the kind of situa-
tions in which it would be useful. The skepticism with which this activity
was received by some of the Berufsbürger was well captured in an email
we received some weeks afterwards:

Whereas on January 16, 2017 [date of the first workshop], many participants were
there, during the event on January 26, 2017, I was the only one from the civic bodies
[bürgerschaftliche Gremien] of the city district who attended. Something must
have gone wrong, so that the interest of citizens and civic bodies in this project
decreased so strongly. Was it the presentation with toilet brushes and clothes pegs
at the level of a kindergarten or the insufficient information about the possible im-
plementation of the project that made the interests of the citizens disappear? The
Technical University should have been required to inform on what is technically
possible, its meaningfulness and its costs (Email Communication, Date).

    The email advanced two key propositions that radically challenged the
way co-creation was being pursued. Firstly, the email implicitly suggested
that what matters the most is the participation of representatives and mem-
bers of local civic bodies and not whether or not the co-creation process
was capable of reaching out and activating other residents concerned about
the potential benefits and costs of installing sensor infrastructures. Sec-
ondly, the email quite strongly pleaded for a clear division of labour be-
tween experts and citizens. Experts should inform citizens about the tech-
nical feasibility, meaningfulness and costs of different technical options,
citizens could then set priorities and make recommendations based on
their knowledge of local needs.
    Needless to say, this understanding of how public engagement should
occur radically undermined the participatory agendas of the co-creation
team (issue-public formation) and the city administration (user engage-
ment). Indeed, Berufsbürger came to these meetings with a clear political
agenda that involved pushing issues they have personally been concerned
about for many years. Such issues would involve the installation of a me-
chanical escalator at an overground station, the building of a cycling lane
in a traffic underpass or the allocation of municipal resources to a cultural
56                                                                 Tecnoscienza – 8 (2)

center. By making demands that went well beyond the limits of the planned
intervention, Berufsbürger were forcing all those involved to at least con-
sider the ways in which the planned smart infrastructures are embedded in
the local context. Most significantly, they often managed to steer a conver-
sation about smart infrastructures into a larger conversation about local
development ambitions, plans and agendas.
    So how are we to consider the political modality enacted by these ac-
tors? It seems fair to say that Berufsbürger know very well where power to
act in the local environment ultimately resides, namely, in the sovereign
power of the city administration. Rather than a concern with the capacity
of data to govern the city, Berufsbürger understand that the capacity to
make binding decisions has been delegated to the city administration and
aim at, if not influencing, at least making their cases in front of city admin-
istration officials. Politics here is not understood as ultimately involving a
challenge to the existing institutional order but about finding the right mo-
ment to get the ear and eventually favour of the sovereign. The kind of
sovereignty at stake here differs only partially from the one described by
Foucault. Instead of open displays of the power to punish, it is based rather
in highly formalised mechanisms of representation and delegation of
power. The city is not run by absolutist kings but by an elected government
who need to be re-elected and for whom a project such as Smarter To-
gether will not prove to be a disaster. In a similar sense, Foucault (2007,
271) would point out, with reference to Machiavelli, that the Prince’s main
concern is not how to govern the people or the population but rather how
to make sure that the most distinguished citizens, that is, the nobles,
wouldn’t plot against him.
    Similarly, knowing that Berufsbürger are key political actors, multipli-
ers in the language of city officials, the political challenge for the city con-
sists in how to enroll them in the smart city project or, more precisely, how
to let them use the smart city project as a resource for their own agendas
and projects. The politics of the smart city appears here to be about the
capacity of different actors to make compromises and build a network of
allies, and the forging of such political alliances seem to involve a process
of translation, as theorized by the thoroughly Machiavellian early actor-
network theorists2. Translation, they argue, involves “all the negotiations,
intrigues, calculations, acts of persuasion and violence, thanks to which an
actor or force takes, or causes to be conferred on itself, authority to speak
or act on behalf of another actor or force” (Callon and Latour 1981, 279).


    2
      Machiavelli is indeed the model of early ANT regarding translation, with the
only objection that Machiavelli doesn’t sufficiently take into account the role of
non-humans: “...how [much cleverer] it is to bind together men [...] by-wires, me-
ters, copper, and filament lamps. Instead of a tiny list that includes love and fear,
the modem Prince has a long-mixed list that includes many other elements in addi-
tion to love and fear” (Latour 1998, 9).
Farías & Widmer                                                            57
    The enrolment of Berufsbürger is based on a political alliance that, at
one moment, requires Berufsbürger to show interest in the smart city and
allow the city to speak in their name, while assuming that at a different
moment the city will need to show interest in their own problems and con-
cerns.
    Berufsbürger thus played a key role in the smart city project, also prov-
ing capable of redirecting project discussions towards local concerns
hardly connected to smart and data-driven infrastructures. As a result,
data, sensors and algorithms were becoming secondary (if not absent) ele-
ments in the political trajectory of Smarter Together. Indeed, the quest for
a data-based urban politics – a quest pursued by both the city administra-
tion in charge of the project, as well as by the co-creation team in its ambi-
tion to form an issue-public around data infrastructures – was continually
interrupted by these other matters of concern. This brings us back to the
(cosmo)-political perspective with its emphasis on the contested composi-
tion of our common worlds. From this perspective the non-digital concerns
of the Berufsbürger appear as a powerful grain of sand in the gears of a
world-making machinery that often reduce cities to datafiable and comput-
able problems. As such, the examples raised here remind us of the im-
portance of looking at the ways in which smart and data-driven urban as-
semblages interact and collide with other ways of envisioning, valuing and
practicing the city.

4. Thinking with and beyond the Data Driven City
    In 1997, Amin and Graham advocated for a better consideration of “or-
dinary cities” against the tendency of urban studies at that time to take the
cases of a few paradigmatic cities, or to consider only one aspect of city
development, as totalizing descriptors for what the urban is or should be.
These authors mentioned a “problem of synecdoche” (1997, 416) – a figure
of speech where a part is used to describe the whole – to account for the
ways in which expressions such as ‘global cities’ or ‘creative cities’ were
used to characterize whole urban realities, regardless of the actually more
complex, diverse and multi-layered nature of these realities. Turning to the
ordinary city has not just involved paying attention to the multiplicity of
urban assemblages that enact the city in diverse and often contradictory
ways (e.g. Farías and Bock 2016), but also, following Robinson (2013), de-
parting from the ‘new’ as a key heuristics to understand cities and moving
towards a more complex analysis of the ‘urban now’.
    Exploring ‘ordinary smart cities’ is then crucial to avoid the potential
totalizing-effect entailed by a description of cities as ‘smart’, while paying
detailed attention to how smart city projects are fully embedded in a com-
plex urban now, where pasts and futures are articulated in different ways.
Notably, this involves, firstly, crafting an empirically-grounded and agnos-
58                                                             Tecnoscienza – 8 (2)

tic account of how smart cities are actually assembled and, secondly, em-
phasizing how – beyond a vision of the digital as the main driver of urban
life – various actors and non-necessarily digital logics articulate and collide
with smart and data-driven urban projects. In this article, we have done so
by following the trajectories of two existing instances of smart urbanism: a
smart service for urban exploration proposed by a private company (Four-
square); and a smart city project implemented by a municipality (Smarter
Together). The two cases are rather unlike in their aims, in their rationales
as well as in the type of actors they entangle, but together they entail a
double decentering of the conventional understandings of the smart city.
     Firstly, the juxtaposition of these two cases makes apparent that, in or-
der to understand the fashioning of cities as data-driven assemblages, it is
crucial not only to look at smart city projects run by city administrations
but to consider the services offered by other non-governmental actors (no-
tably, private tech companies). Our cases even suggest that the most ad-
vanced data-driven urban services are not necessarily occurring under the
umbrella of smart city projects run by municipalities. Further, the case of
Foursquare not only shows how such tech companies leverage the data
produced by their users but also makes apparent the profit-oriented ra-
tionale for the constant re-invention, upgrading and expansion of the ser-
vices offered. In this context, users are the essential basis of the company’s
business model. These need to be enrolled through the creation of attach-
ments to the service in order for locational data to be farmed, aggregated
and eventually capitalized upon – a mode of user engagement that radically
contrasts with the participative and clientelist approach presented by
Smarter Together.
     Secondly, both cases required us to look beyond the digital, paying at-
tention to how smart and data-driven cities are always entangled in, or ar-
ticulating with, other non-data-centered urban development projects,
logics or practices. Whilst the example of Foursquare illustrated the cen-
trality of data – ‘the new oil’ – in market-based arrangements, the case of
Smarter Together, to the contrary, evidenced how data and digital infra-
structures were sometimes disappearing from the smart city agenda. Such
non-digital logic was notably apparent in the role played by Berufsbürger
and their local concerns in the implementation of this smart city project.
This example allowed us to stress that the formulation ‘data-driven cities’
was not always a good descriptor of the new modes of urbanization cur-
rently coalescing around the construction of digital infrastructures. This
also leads us to reiterate the importance of ‘defetishizing’ data and algo-
rithms as central and powerful actors orchestrating urban life and allows
us to look at the case of Foursquare from a different perspective, empha-
sizing how this apparently perfect case of data-driven urbanism is also ar-
ticulating with non-datafiable attachments to and experiences of urban
places.
     The analytical consequence of this double decentering concerns how
we study the politics of the smart city or, to put it differently, it raises the
Farías & Widmer                                                                    59
question of the conceptual repertoires that we can mobilize in order to
grasp the multiplicity of ordinary smart cities and their politics. What has
become clear is that we need to significantly widen the focus from a con-
cern with what smart digital technologies do, or are supposed to do, to-
wards the empirical study of the contested stories and trajectories of smart
city projects, where functioning digital systems are nothing but one instan-
tiation. Accordingly, studying these two cases, we were forced to go beyond
a critical perspective that would exclusively focus on the ways in which
digital technologies discipline or govern us, to a broader perspective on the
(cosmo)politics of these human and nonhuman arrangements.
    Empirically following the cosmo-political trajectories of smart city pro-
jects, such as Foursquare and Smarter Together, has also made apparent
the incommensurability among the political modalities at stake. This in-
commensurability does not just imply that collectively binding decisions
are made in radically different sites, but it also points to the absence of a
common political language and instruments to articulate these various
forms of smart urbanism. Here lies indeed one of the major political chal-
lenge for ordinary smart cities.


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