Smart Cities, Smart Borders: Sensing Networks and Security in the Urban Space

• In Event: Sensing Security: Sensing and the Making of Transnational Security Infrastructures - II

Abstract

In this presentation, I investigate the ways in which sensing infrastructures are increasingly disseminating and performing across the urban space techniques that are specific to borders, and especially to “smart” borders, such as algorithmic profiling, biometrics recognition, scanning, and screening. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in New Town Kolkata (India) and Cape Town (South Africa), I explore how, in contrast with popular narratives of smart cities as seamless inter-connected spaces, the processes of urban digitalisation entail bordering practices that work through the sensing networks and devices that are becoming more and more embedded in everyday life - bus shelters, water and electricity meters, garbage bins, home automation, apps etc.
The chapter also considers three theoretical perspectives that illuminate some political effects of ubiquitous sensing and data-driven infrastructures. First, I suggest these introduce what can be described, with Jacques Rancière (2000), as a new distribution of the sensible, setting boundaries between the different aspects of reality and perception, and measuring them incessantly; in this sense, the border operates at an ontological and epistemic level. Second, I look at the nexus between algorithmic modeling, preemption and security decisions (Amoore, 2013; De Goede et al, 2014) that results from extensive data gathering and informs the government of digital cities. Third, I discuss the concept of “biopolitics 2.0” introduced by Jennifer Gabrys (2016) to make sense of the novel forms of life and power that are taking shape in sensing environments.

Author

• Ilia Antenucci, Institute for Culture & Society, Western Sydney University