| Title | Programming environments: environmentality and citizen sensing in the smart city |
|---|---|
| ID_Doc | 45642 |
| Authors | Gabrys, J |
| Title | Programming environments: environmentality and citizen sensing in the smart city |
| Year | 2014 |
| Published | Environment And Planning D-Society & Space, 32, 1 |
| Abstract | A new wave of smart-city projects is underway that proposes to deploy sensor-based ubiquitous computing across urban infrastructures and mobile devices to achieve greater sustainability. But in what ways do these smart and sustainable cities give rise to distinct material-political arrangements and practices that potentially delimit urban 'citizenship' to a series of actions focused on monitoring and managing data? And what are the implications of computationally organized distributions of environmental governance that are programmed for distinct functionalities and are managed by corporate and state actors that engage with cities as datasets to be manipulated? In this paper I discuss the ways in which smart-city proposals might be understood through processes of environmentality or the distribution of governance within and through environments and environmental technologies. I do this by working through an early and formative smart-city design proposal, the Connected Sustainable Cities (CSC) project, developed by MIT and Cisco within the Connected Urban Development initiative between 2007 and 2008. Revisiting and reworking Foucault's notion of environmentality in the context of the CSC smart-city design proposal, I advance an approach to environmentality that deals not with the production of environmental subjects, but rather with the specific spatial-material distribution and relationality of power through environments, technologies, and ways of life. By updating and advancing environmentality through a discussion of computational urbanisms, I consider how practices and operations of citizenship emerge that are a critical part of the imaginings of smart and sustainable cities. This reversioning of environmentality through the smart city recasts who or what counts as a 'citizen' and attends to the ways in which citizenship is articulated environmentally through the distribution and feedback of monitoring and urban data practices, rather than through governable subjects or populations. |
Similar Articles
| ID | Score | Article |
|---|---|---|
39559
|
Tironi, M; Criado, TS Of Sensors and Sensitivities Towards a Cosmopolitics of "Smart Cities"?(2015)Tecnoscienza-Italian Journal Of Science & Technology Studies, 6, 1 | |
| 45325
|
Park, J; Yoo, S Evolution of the smart city: three extensions to governance, sustainability, and decent urbanisation from an ICT-based urban solution(2023) | |
| 36044
|
Houston, L; Gabrys, J; Pritchard, H Breakdown in the Smart City: Exploring Workarounds with Urban-sensing Practices and Technologies(2019)Science Technology & Human Values, 44, 5 | |
| 44171
|
Batty, M; Axhausen, KW; Giannotti, F; Pozdnoukhov, A; Bazzani, A; Wachowicz, M; Ouzounis, G; Portugali, Y Smart cities of the future(2012)European Physical Journal-Special Topics, 214, 1 | |
| 42588
|
Kuru, K; Ansell, D TCitySmartF: A Comprehensive Systematic Framework for Transforming Cities Into Smart Cities(2020) | |
| 43134
|
Farías, I; Widmer, S Ordinary Smart Cities How Calculated Users, Professional Citizens, Technology Companies and City Administrations Engage in a More-than-digital Politics(2017)Tecnoscienza-Italian Journal Of Science & Technology Studies, 8, 2 | |
| 42927
|
Martin, CJ; Evans, J; Karvonen, A Smart and sustainable? Five tensions in the visions and practices of the smart-sustainable city in Europe and North America(2018) | |
| 43103
|
Baji, P Smart cities and their domains - Future challenges for urban researchers?(2017)Ter Es Tarsadalom, 31, 1 | |
| 36570
|
de Waal, M; Dignum, M The citizen in the smart city. How the smart city could transform citizenship(2017)It-Information Technology, 59, 6 | |
| 36440
|
Trencher, G Towards the smart city 2.0: Empirical evidence of using smartness as a tool for tackling social challenges(2019) |