Authoritarian smart cities and cultural biases – investigating the socio-legal implications of the New Administrative Capital of Egypt

• In Event: Digital Criminology: Security and Safety in Digital Environments

Abstract

The rise of smart cities raises questions regarding their impact on societies, democracy, urban planning, and surveillance. The interest in authoritarian smart cities has also increased, with multiple scholars describing new endeavors outside of liberal democratic context (Akbari, 2022; Wagner et al., 2020). Yet, the existing literature has neither (1) engaged with the conceptual framework of the specific features of such authoritarian smart cities nor (2) developed a situated knowledge-based bottom-up approach (Van Swaaningen, 2021). The two, as we argue, should be interconnected, and inform one another. This approach is needed to avoid propagating cultural biases towards ideas and concepts created in the global north about the global south.

In order to address the above-described gap, this contribution will explore the context of Egypt's New Administrative Capital (NAC) and attempt to frame characteristic features of authoritarian smart cities. Announced in 2015, the NAC is to be an answer to congestion in Cairo and to serve as Egypt's new administrative and financial hub, housing governmental departments, ministries, and foreign embassies. This development is not merely a physical transformation but also a socio-political one, reflecting the state's vision of modernization and control. This paper’s methodology relies on a socio-legal analysis of surveillance and data protection laws in Egypt and the historical context of reinventing Egypt’s administrative heart. The reinvention of the country's capital, it is argued, goes hand in hand with the attempted ‘upgrade’ of the surveillance system, emphasizing the integration of advanced technologies to monitor and control urban spaces.

By examining the NAC, I aim to provide a nuanced understanding of how authoritarian smart cities operate and the implications for societies governed by such models. This exploration highlights the need for a comprehensive approach that integrates conceptual frameworks with empirical, bottom-up analyses to fully understand the dynamics of authoritarian smart cities.

Authors

• Amr Marzouk, Erasmus University Rotterdam

• Karolina Podstawa, Maastricht University