The Persistence of Neo-Colonial Relations in the Smart City

• In Event: Who Knows? Smart Cities as Epistemology

Abstract

The proliferation of sensors, analytics, and datafication practices exemplifying the “smart” city perform a triple function that (re)produce neo-colonial relations. They render access to and legibility within digital sensors and analytics as a social and political need, frame socio-political problems as amenable to digital-technical “solutions”, and then leverage the first two functions toward extracting surplus value from cities’ human and non-human inhabitants.

The first of these functions suppresses qualitative, interpersonal, social-relational, and ultimately non-hetero-white ways of knowing the city, so long as they are lived and expressed outside the legibility systems of smart technologies. The second supports the tendency to de-politicize problems such that “expert” knowledge needs only to collect the “right” data and perform the “right” analytical approach to solve the problems – and usually, of course, a private vendor stands attentively by to sell such technical solutions. These two combine, then, to narrow epistemological claims to those that produce profit and sustain capitalist imperatives. With the increasing embedding of sensors within the urban fabric, exponentially more behaviors and knowledges are being brought into the circulation of capital, subtending neo-colonial relations.

Incorporation to these neocolonial relations has complex repercussions. On the one hand, invisibility in the smart city can be empowering, as it leaves open some of the surreptitious forms of living that informality -- being “left out” of the sensors and analytics -- supports, but on the other hand such conditions are usually created not from the political interventions of those people.

Authors

• Ryan Burns, Department of Geography

• Morgan Mouton, University of Calgary