Last updated January 8, 2022

• Seed

notes from A people-centric smart city for racial justice

• cities are the backbone and hope of social change
• either great benefit but also digital cages of surveillance and control
• what is the role of cities in the post-pandemic phase?
  • laboratories for democratic and sustainable innovations
  • smart, equitable, democratic cities
• tech has market AND social power
  • 9T market cap, more than the entirety of european stock market
• IMPORTANT QUESTIONS
  • smart for whom?
  • cities for whom?
• types of cities
  • big tech first → e.g. toronto (sidewalk labs)
  • turn data into common good and infrastructure
  • SHOULD be people first → make digital transformation work for all
    • reduce inequalities
    • affordable housing
    • health care
    • sustainable mobility
    • ecological transition
    • green public psaces
    • reduce carbon emissions
  • THEN see how we can apply tech
  • avoid techno-solutionism -> maintenance of existing systems
• involves citizen decision making
  • Making and Maintenance of OSS tech + tech that preserves privacy
• zero carbon cities of the future (energy transition)
  • electrify our mobility, shift to renewables
  • creating green spaces
  • super blocks → make larger blocks, reclaim some roads for public use
• agile digital transformation
  • ethical digital standards for cities
  • open source, open standards, interoperability
  • reproducibility
  • public money ↔ public code
  • data is the raw material of the digital economy
    • ML will increase ROI by anywhere from 10 to 30 percent
  • data extractivism
    • surveillance capitalism → you are not the customer or even the product, you are the raw material
    • black box society → strong need for public engagement
      • what are the social, ethical, racial & geopolitical implications of automated decision systems ( software is political)
      • latent costs of externalities related to manipulating data
    • new deal on data → data as digital public goods
      • data sovereignty, data portability, data trusts (data commons)
      • privacy + security by design
      • data infrastructure at city-scale
      • open standards, open APIs
      • access to historical, anonymized, and aggregated data which minimized privacy risks
      • assess automated decision systems and ensure accountability (make algorithms public)
• questions
  • how do you have mass citizen participation if there’s mass inequalities in the city?
    • how do you include the traditionally excluded?
    • participitary populations → ohh this would only be digitally native citizens
      • actually not necessarily true, lots of more senior citizens and more impoverished people
      • not a ‘facebook democracy’ → click here to sign a petition to solve a problem
      • hybrid process, physical participation, digital part just enhances participation
    • people of marginalized communities trust the government less (theyve failed them in the past)
      • make public institutions more transparent and accountable too, not just a citizen problem