Abstract Summary
Since the beginning of this century, the arrival of governmental Urban Technology - also known as Smart City Technology - in public spaces promises to keep the city clean, safe and well maintained. The livability and even the quality of life in cities is claimed to improve according to this narrative. In a four year research project we focus on how personal and public values are safe guarded in these developments. Although the efficiency and short term effectiveness of city municipalities seem to improve, there are some serious long term drawbacks of the growing number of technologies that largely take human presence and communication 'out of the loop'. In our action research in three large Dutch cities, we see two important clusters of warnings from citizens and civil servants against this development. First, our case studies indicate that with the advent of urban technology in public spaces, the leeway of civil servants is decreasing. They are either just not present in public space, because their work has moved to a computer screen or they focus on being 'effective' instead of forming an independent judgment about the moral correctness of their actions. Citizens complain, but the decisions and interventions civil servants make seem to become more black and white. Second, people claim that the self solving capacity of individuals and local communities is under pressure. A growing number of neighborhood tasks are executed by the municipality based on the signals from the various sensors and platforms covering the city. This unintentionally limits intensive civic engagement, but also undermines the agency present in the community for taking collective ownership of parts of these tasks. A considerable body of literature claims that deliberate and rational, efficient, effective, and results oriented approaches have expanded from technical issues to all domains of life with unwanted consequences like the ones described. In a series of workshops we explored the consequences of parking scan car and an online reporting platform for local issues and articulated interventions that somehow improve the presence of the civil servant, the city dweller, the community or the context in the ‘technology loop’. This implies re-introducing human improvisation and possibly a decrease of efficiency in favor of capable persons and communities. Both the explorations of the unwanted consequences and the articulated interventions for the two existing urban technologies will be shared and discussed.
