Smart City, Surveillance City: Ubiquitous Computing, Big Data and Urban Life

‘Smart cities’ combine ubiquitous computing and urban management, and are characterized by pervasive wireless networks and distributed sensor platforms from video surveillance to meteorological stations, monitoring flows from traffic to sewerage and providing information in real-time or in anticipation of risks. These have extended from small projects for example, shopping / business complexes with integrated building control systems combining video surveillance, fire detection and crowd flow monitoring or other kinds of customer tracking, through larger but temporary initiatives like the command and control systems established for sports mega-events, to permanent whole-city initiatives like Rio de Janeiro’s Smart City, sponsored by IBM.

Although largely civic, corporate and managerial, these schemes have strong influences from police and military sources, from crime mapping and predictive policing models, to new forms of urban warfare involving forms of distributed sensor platforms, and computer analytics, to enable forces to get a ‘clear picture’ of the complexities of the urban landscape and its inhabitants. In some cases in the USA, these have come together in overt ways, for example in the new ‘Domain Awareness’ initiative in Oakland, California, which extends an existing port security project way beyond the maritime ‘domain’ into the surrounding city, combining military and conventional civil government.

Drawing on work in science and technology studies, media studies, sociology, geography and surveillance studies, this paper considers the smart city as the archetypical urban form of the ubiquitous surveillance society. The paper considers the place of human rights in a broad sense, not simply privacy but also equity and access to services and justice, and the ability to flourish, in cities in which flows of people are managed like goods or natural resources and asks whether such rights can be 'designed in' in any meaningful way, or will be written out.