The Political Origins of Scale in Smart Urban Planning
To respond to the question of how we can “Rethink Smart, and Rebuild Scale’ in a Digital Urban Age” we need to remind ourselves of the political origins of ideas of scale and how democratic justice might help us rethink scale in future urban imaginations like smart cities. Ayona Datta’s exhibition and conference at London’s Building Centre is an opportune moment to reflect on this provocation. Susan Parnell, in her opening keynote said that “Governance and Regulation of the digital urban will be essential for ensuring the rights of marginalised people.” So here, I explain - drawing on the fascinating interventions at the conference and my own understanding of the political sociologies of governance in the developing countries- how reinstating democracy to the digital might help us put emancipatory politics at the heart of futurist development trajectories.
Sovereign power is always imagined in gigantic terms, and one need look no further than Hobbes’ Leviathan to visualise this. Emerging out of a landscape, the monarch in the form of the Leviathan clutches a sword with his right hand standing for worldly power and a crosier on his left hand standing for religious power. His torso and arms made up of hundreds of humans represents the social contract. Based on commutative justice, the social contract is where people submit their natural rights (that is their inalienable rights to life, liberty and property) for a political order that would ensure these rights and guarantee protection from violence. The social contract of course is a means to an end because if governments fail in providing rights and correlative duties, they are no longer legitimate to their citizens. And often we find that when sovereign power is on shaky ground and lacking in legitimacy it expresses its size and scale much more, through coercion. You just need to consider the lives of slaves and women in the 18th century and 19th century to envisage the scale of how white privilege and patriarchy controlled their lives and alienated them from these inalienable rights.
Scalar Logics, Identity and Power
Size, however is a relative concept and the concepts of small vs big are fundamental to conceptions of identity and difference. Binary logics of self and other, define relations of power and inequality and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is perhaps the most vivid and satirical illustration of how we deal with difference through ideas of size in organised societies. Whether he is with the 6inch Lilliputians or the Brobdingnag giants, Gulliver’s relative size to the inhabitants is a subject of spectacle and scepticism. Difference s turned in to agency in Gulliver’s travels as he helps the Lilliputians conquer an enemy naval fleet and he helps a Brobdingnag farmer earn a bit of extra cash as he exhibits Gulliver to an amused audience. But difference is also embedded in colonial encounters as Lilliputians risk famine to feed Gulliver and the Brobdingnag king is clearly not impressed by Gulliver’s efforts to modernise his kingdom with canons and guns.
Optimising for People-based values
In development, ideas of big and small have traditionally been associated with the dehumanising effects of mass production and alternative approaches for locally led sustainable development. Schumacher’s collection of essays in Small is Beautiful is a critique of economic concepts of value attached to optimisation. Some of his theses are quite relevant to rethinking smart technologies. What are we optimising for? If technology helps reduce labour-intensive production, it is perhaps desirable for employers who want to reduce costs but also for employees who don’t want to work so hard. But if the direction of optimisation is mainly to benefit corporation and thus make more money for the few then it isn’t very helpful, is it? However, if we attach value to work in a Buddhist sense- something that people do because they feel good when they do it, it gives them a sense of identity and purpose, then there is very direction for optimisation through technology. It is about doing what is good for you, for your community not some derived economic logic that tells you that profit and competition is the only value. Yes, we need money, and money is good for exchanging goods, but if we keep money as the only value, what will happen to people? Economics as if people mattered (not corporations) is a way of imagining development otherwise, and I would say fundamental to rethinking urban futures like smart cities. By extension, when we consider how to apply technology for optimisation with the value frame of people, we perhaps could do with simpler but more relevant technological applications – cost effective and people friendly, and thus scaleable! 'Frugal technologies as several papers in the conference argued.
Democratising Digitised Governance
Ofcourse, when we begin to envisage digited governance as a means to sustainable urban development, then we confront a form of power which is not quite as corporeal as the Leviathan. It is more latent, more elusive, more taken for granted but it is pervasive as it mediates through every aspect of our life, our behaviours and our thinking. In this respect therefore when we decide to rethink smart cities and digitised governance from a local first, small is beautiful approach we are in fact pressing for democratising approaches to futuristic development interventions. Now, democracy is one of the greatest ‘inventions’ of modern society but also most corrupted with oxymorons like illiberal democracy and majoritarian democracy. Substantively, democracy at its core is autonomy, the rights to deliberate on the norms that we decide should regulate our lives. In this sense, a good democracy is where people as members of a ‘political society’ (whether national or transnational) can express individual and collective autonomy when they decide on social rules and public policies. This is the deliberative aspect of good policies and upholds a very different notion of power. Power as Communication as Hannah Arendt argues not as Coercion or Bargaining as masculine/patriarchal rationalities of power uphold.
If we take autonomy as something that is not conditional on specific outcomes like efficient development but an expression of the people who decide on social rules, -good social rules - we can begin to envisage more inclusive, locally relevant, community-led futures for our cities. So, what does a democratic approach to smart cities and more broadly digital technology for development entail? Here I offer three elements:
1. Establishing a social contract where citizens consent to the form of collective rule or government which will guarantee their rights in exchange for correlative duties. The social contract is often missing in technocratic governance, as public-private partnerships tend to prioritise on efficiency and effectiveness in providing urban services, for example, but ambiguously bracket out or contract out the welfare functions to the ‘state’. In my ongoing research on the impact of the pandemic on urban mobility operators in Dhaka and Delhi it was clear that social contract did not exist for them. Relying on personal risk management for what is a Public health crisis most operators themselves left or sent away their families from cities in India and Bangladesh. Living with ‘belongings in a bag’ after the first lock down in March 2020, they acted well ahead of government announcements of subsequent lockdowns. Much unlike upper middle class residents who stayed put! Ideas of stakeholder citizens and anti-politics in smart cities (Datta and Srivastava) tell us that the social contract has shifted from legislative processes to elite coalitions of bounded epistemic communities (see Basu, 2019)
2. Make public reason or deliberation an integral part of policy-making, not just in the run up to elections (niti) but as a part of social justice claims-making throughout (nyay). This will ensure the most issues that don’t appear in the political radar – poverty, hunger, exclusion are addressed. After all, it has been conclusively noted by Sen, that famine never takes place in functioning democracies. Take the same to urban planning, if people and by this I mean all people - not just the middle classes - have access to the political spaces where they can deliberate on issues that matter, on norms they need then we would have much better social policies. Often avenues for public reason, focus on the ‘reason’ - what are rational arguments that are being made to further a particular policy but not on the ‘public- who is considered ‘rational’ enough to take part in public debate. The priorities have to shift to democratise deliberation – between and beyond parliaments and civil society. In sites where the where the ‘public’ contrary to liberal notions of equality is fundamentally ‘unequal’, subaltern counter publics that is discursive arenas that develop in parallel to the official public sphere- where subordinated groups can make counter discourses on their identities, interests and needs is much needed. Sarah Elwood’s argument that we need to consider A.M. Brown’s concept of Emergence in Digital Geographies, helps us consider how small actions and connections between digitally connected individuals can create new solidarities in times of crisis like the pandemic..
3. Knowledge is power and so is mis-information: Fundamental to democratic practice is access to information so that rational choices can be made. In most patronage societies like India, people make political decisions with little or no access to information. Votes are based on ethnic head counts, entitlement and relief measures are accessed through arbitrary rules made by middlemen and brokers not as rights. And more recently Data narratives created through public service apps expose dominance by concealment. India’s Poshan tracker app launched in 2017 has under reported child malnutrition data while in Bangladesh the Digital Securities Act has created a culture of surveillance and censorship on digital streets. There are immense possibilities for digitally connected publics to access, mediate, contest data narratives as knowledge is translated between analog and digital scopes, and this was vividly displayed through papers on digital witnessing in the wake of the earthquakes in Mexico for example (Andres and Alejandro) and jugad in post-pandemic digital cities (Gupte). As most processes get digitised in urban governance, in public life - translations between analog and digital, between local and non-local, real time and past time - create new frontiers for decolonising knowledge creation.
These suggestions I argue, would firmly attach democracy to digital governance. Much of the challenges we face today are a consequence of neoliberal logics, which promoted markets but forgot liberalism. A post pandemic sustainable urban future is an opportune moment to remind ourselves of the fundamental liberal tenets to address equality, diversity and decolonial ethics. Small is beautiful, local does come first, and all this I argue is possible if we repair liberal democracy in planning and development imaginations.
