Making Smart Things Strange Again
In the post below, Vivien Butot, Gabriele Jacobs, Petra Saskia Bayerl, Josué Amador, and Pendar Nabipour reflect on their article “Making Smart Things Strange Again: Using Walking as a Method for Studying Subjective Experiences of Smart City Surveillance”, which appeared in the 21(1) issue of Surveillance & Society.
Smart cities are often seen as the penultimate embodiment of contemporary surveillance. Yet, concerns about surveillance in smart cities are mostly articulated for citizens by scholars, journalists, and activists. It is much less common to find testimonies of surveillance in smart cities that are articulated by citizens themselves. While cities increasingly become testing grounds for a multitude of information technologies that collect data about citizens and their activities for safety purposes, many of these technologies are invisible to the untrained eye, or they simply disappear into the background of everyday life. If the smart city is hardly a subject of conscious reflection in everyday life, then how can personal experiences of safety in smart cities be studied?
This was the leading question that led up to our transdisciplinary research project, which we recently published in our article for Surveillance and Society. In this project, we — a group of scholars and artists based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands and Sheffield, UK — collaborated in the development of a method that productively lets citizens reflect on their surveillance in mundane urban environments. Citizens of the Dutch city of Rotterdam took part in short walks, following instructions to observe, photograph and reflect on data points for public safety purposes. After walking in small groups, participants collectively reflected on their documentations of surveillance and safety in the smart city. This allowed us to gain insights into the ways these citizens of Rotterdam experience the emergence of their city as one that is addressing safety through “smart” technologies.
Observing a proliferation of surveillant technologies on their routes, many experienced a physically obtrusive sense of opacity in environments that were otherwise well-known. Participants shared experiences of personal visibilities to not only state actors, but also private corporations, and other citizens using surveillance technologies in the city. Rather than making tradeoffs between privacy and public safety, participants highlighted how noticing surveillance interferes with bodily movement, engendering the accommodation of context-specific norms. Furthermore, the ubiquity and social conditioning of surveillant technologies contributed to a sense of unavoidability of surveillance in everyday urban life. Finally, many participants were critical of the affordances of surveillance for ensuring public safety, instead arguing that at the root of public safety issues are socioeconomic, ethnic, and cultural inequities that surveillance typically does not address.
Reflecting on the results of our study, in our paper we argue that walking methodologies can productively be used to remedy what Murakami Wood and Steeves call the “(hyper)normalization” of “smart things” in our daily living environments. Walking has the benefit of critically engaging citizens with a phenomenon that is otherwise mainly discussed in “expert” communities of technologists, administrators, and academics. In this way, walking can offer alternative perspectives on public opinion polling and technology acceptance research. We therefore see much potential in further uses of walking as a method for fulfilling the interrelated projects of doing empirical research about subjective experiences of smart city surveillance and the inclusion of citizens in smart city discussions.
(All pictures are copyrighted ©Viven Butot, Gabriele Jacobs, Petra Saskia Bayerl, Josué Amador, and Pendar Nabipour)
