Democratization in Urban Systems
Rapid urbanization is transforming the developing world. The political consequences of this transformation is not very well understood. For example, a recent (2017) study shows that democratic elections do not stabilize authoritarian regimes; rather, they are strongly correlated with urban mobilization and violence by both organized and unorganized groups. Across a range of levels of democratization, free elections and urban disturbances obey an inverted U-shaped relationship. That is, for low and high democratization, disturbances are rather low, while in the middle range of democratization, the disturbances tend strongly to be quite high. What we can conclude from this is that urban social disorder will be a significant feature of politics in the developing world for a long time to come.
But what about the developed world, the world of smart cities? What are the connections between the practice of urban design and aspirations for democracy and social justice? We can ask: Who defines democracy in smart cities? As smart cities develop, big data becomes an issue surrounding privacy, security and how the data is used and who has access to it. All of these features impact democracy in such a city in major ways. In short, what’s to be gained from creation of digital urban space and who benefits from it?
First of all, a city is nothing but the people who inhabit it. So a smart city can only be acceptable if it emerges from the ground up. Only strategic interactions between elites and ordinary citizens can give rise to a democracy. So a democracy is not caused by development; development only reduces the likelihood of a breakdown of a democracy that is already in place. So a city must create multiple types of value, not simply money.
With this picture in mind, it’s evident that the emergence of a democracy is by no means guaranteed by the creation of a smart city. As the famed architect Rem Koolhaas stated, why do smart cities offer only improvement? What about transgression. The vision many have today of the smart city is one promoted by large corporations like IBM, Cisco and Software AG as a vast, efficient robot, so that they might profit from big municipal contracts. Efficiency, optimization, predictability, convenience, and security make a city tolerable, but by no means valuable. We must ask what is the role of a citizen in such a smart city? An unpaid clerk? A “pixel” on a computer screen traveling to work, an unpredictable source of demands and assertions of rights? The answer hinges on whether we regard the city as a panopticon, a model for surveillance or a melting pot of cultures and ideas. In the first case, the smart city may well destroy any possibility of a democracy. In the second, democracy at least has a chance of emerging from the interplay of people and their environment.