Investigaciones Previas en Proyectos de Construcción 81

At the beginning of this chapter I argued that ‘smartness’ is a context specific concept. Similarly, what the smart city means to democracy or what smartness means to democracy also varies from culture to culture, it too is a very context or culturally specific concept. Despite the implicit arrogance, one expert’s response captured how the smart city could be less problematic in one context but more damaging in another

“And you realise, from a cultural point of view, when you did it from a London point of view, you think you are making the citizen smart. And you are giving power to the citizen, you realise when you write the same sort of plan for different cultural you are creating the ultimate surveillance state, meaning you really are monitoring people 24/7. You know when they moved, you know what they say you know where they are, you know where they work, it’s a really time sensor CCTV all over the place, and therefore, control those facts in a central state. That actually from an academic point of view that give us a bit of a, oh god what we are doing here and why are we creating like 1984? Coz that’s almost where you are. It’s just because, it’s that cultural shift. So here, smart is seen as good, in some views, other place around the world, it’s seen as good for the central controlling state.”

For some experts, the real question in the smart cities is “what technology can do to help engage more actively in decision making.” Currently, representative democracy has been

so deeply internalised as a model that people equate the idea of democracy and the idea of voting. Some of the experts believe that democracy should be more mundane, that democracy is more than just voting every four or five years. As one expert said, “democracy is not an event, democracy is a process.” Democracy is implicitly participatory to him that it is “where you spend your money, the words you choose to speak, the way you present yourself to the world, the way your dress, all of that is about, establishing a collective sense of shared public.”

However, not every expert felt comfortable to share their opinions on this topic despite their lived experiences as a citizen. It became more ironic when they said they didn’t feel “qualified enough” to comment on democracy regardless of the fact that the very nature of their work is to envision the future of democracy in a smart city. One expert works to inform policy making though feeling “not in the position” to imagine the future democracy still expressed his wish to “have a much more consolidated city governance system” that “we can increase democratic participation”.

The expert who worked in urban planning has envisioned how digital technology and smart city could impact on democracy in three-folds – how technology could impact on how we “run, grow and transform” the current democratic process using planning system as a context. According to him that“digital can change how we run the current planning system without touching the existing planning system pretty much, we can already make big improvement, growing it is then enabling increasing access to people to get involved in that and doing so you are beginning to change the system a little bit fundamentally, but the transform thing is really interesting, that’s when it really gets kind of high studies, you start to think hang on what is planning if we have people co-designing the houses with wiki-house modular open source construction. It could run from how to engage people better with the current system all the way through to a totally transformed system.”Essentially this is an example of democratisation of the planning process through participation. Similarly, digital applications such as FixMyStreet18 _{came up several times during my interviews}

as a positive example of a digital technology used to improve the citizens’ participation experience in our current system. However, I can’t help but to feel that the discussion we need to have should be a much more inductive and exploratory enquiry. It should be more than simply replacing part of the system and process with digital technology and hope that it will fundamentally transform democracy. One of my experts also shared my concern and problematised applications as such:

18_{FixMyStreet launched in 2007, is regarded as one of the most successful civic apps. It was developed with}

the help of a Government innovation fund grant and built in conjunction with the Young Foundation think tank. Citizens could use FixMyStreet as an alternative means to report problems they encounter with on the street and about their environment such as broken lamps, potholes and illegal dumping.

“We have asynchronous communication, why don’t we have asynchronous partic- ipation. So we are going to build digital platforms to allow people to participate in decision making asynchronously. And I find that, kind of unsatisfying. I think they are useful but I don’t think that’s any substitute for having to account for yourself in real space and time. It’s a nature of a deep conviction that there’s something profoundly different about decisions that are made being hashed out in person amongst a group of people, or forced to be present to one or the other and decisions that are made by pushing buttons on your screen.”

Another expert echoed this sentiment and offered me a similar argument that different means and forms of participation should be counted and accounted for differently.

“I think the danger is to assume [these] things should all count the same, that somehow our established forms of democratic process should be kind of some. . . equip to how people use to twitter or whatever. I am not invested in whether one thing is the same of the other. I just think they’d open up a kind of a platform for ways of participating and if we kind of are more open to that, then we can start to design new capacities for being involved and engaged.”

This quote is a rather perfect coda for this section on what the smart city could mean to democracy. In order to truly engage people in the pursuit of a smart city, the councils and us researchers will have to do more than simply treating engagement as communication tasks. Moreover, engagement requires a change in our mentalities too that we need to resist two forms cultural imperialism here. The first one is that instead of occasionally “granting a voice” or “giving a voice” to the people who we claim to care, what we need to do is to listen carefully, attentively and constantly so that we are in check with reality. The second one is that despite the possibilities the digital technologies and platforms may provide, we need to resist the technology solutionism and dataism. Blindly applying and implementing ‘the digital’ and ‘the smart’ in our system is not going to be adequate to transform it. However, these applications provide us a rare opportunity to explore the temporality and accountability associated with new forms of democratic practices. Rather than getting closer to find an answer, we are merely closer to finding the right questions to ask.