Page 21 - Kaleidoscope Academic Conference Proceedings 2021

THE ADOPTION GAP: ETHICS, CITIZENSHIP, INSTITUTIONAL
FACTORS, AND STANDARDS FOR SMART CITIES

Rob Kitchin

Maynooth University, Ireland

Over the past decade, many cities have adopted policies and rolled out programs and projects
designed to transform them into a smart city. This has been accompanied by the formation of
active smart city epistemic communities and advocacy coalitions, the insertion of a new cadre
of smart city professionals into city administrations, an extensive apparatus of social learning,
and numerous funding mechanisms to facilitate uptake. It is clear from the plethora of
initiatives underway globally that the idea and ideals of smart cities is quite broadly conceived.
Critically, in all cases, digital technologies are front-and-center as a vital ingredient for
addressing the major issues facing city managers, businesses, and citizens. Core technologies
include city operating systems, performance management systems, centralized control rooms,
digitally mediated surveillance, intelligent transport systems, smart grids, predictive policing,
sensor networks, building management systems, and civic apps. While these technologies offer
solutions to urban problems, they also raise a number of concerns relating to surveillance,
dataveillance and privacy, predictive profiling, social sorting and redlining, anticipatory
governance and nudging, and control creep and security. Along with three other key issues,
these concerns mean that while smart cities are in the process of being created their formation
has been slow and piecemeal, and in most cases a smart city vision has only partially been
embedded within city administrations or been greeted with apathy or resistance. In other words,
an adoption gap has developed with city administrations proceeding cautiously with smart city
initiatives. This gap is significant enough that some enthusiastic, early corporate promoters of
smart cities have pivoted their endeavors into other related markets. This paper explores this
adoption gap examining four sets of factors that have stymied their rollout and considering
whether smart city standards might be a means of narrowing the gap.

The first key issue is ethics and political and normative concerns related to smart city
technologies. Many such technologies are designed to manage and control city infrastructure
and services and to govern and regulate populations. A key aspect of their operation is that they
produce, process, extract value and act upon streams of big data that are highly granular and
indexical (directly linked to people, households, objects, territories, and transactions).
Consequently, they raise questions and ethical concerns regarding how citizens are conceived
and treated, and how they reproduce and reinforce inequalities leading to caution and resistance
to adoption. Where there have been attempts to address some of these issues, the response has
been framed within a regulation and compliance agenda rather than rights, social justice, and
transformation.

The second key issue is the framing of citizens and citizenship. A general critique of smart
cities is that the systems are designed to serve the interests of states and companies rather than
citizens. The dominant ways in which the citizens are framed include a data point, a targeted
consumer, a user, a sorted individual, and a surveilled, controlled, and policed subject. As such,
citizens most often occupy non-participatory, consumer, or tokenistic positions in relation to
systems; framed within political discourses of stewardship, technocracy, paternalism, and the

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