The rise of recent expertise means European cities are more and more “digital cities”. However is that this shift altering what it means to be human? Myria Georgiou and Sindhoora Pemmaraju talk about the implications of the “technologisation” of our cities and clarify why Myria Georgiou’s new e book Being Human in Digital Cities gives a toolkit for navigating new applied sciences with out giving up our humanity.
A 15-year-old Iraqi refugee in Athens speaks with uncontainable enthusiasm about his discovery of town. The pocket-sized expertise he carries in all places, his smartphone, comes with elevated confidence, as he doesn’t require anybody’s help to do what he needs, to go the place he needs. Google Maps is all he wants.
Google Maps navigation is acquainted to most of us, a strategy to uncover a brand new metropolis. But, for some, this autonomy is rather more than an exploration of an unknown place. For this teenager, as with many different migrants, a smartphone would possibly imply avoiding humiliation, even racism, as this treasured pocketsize expertise can supply entry to important data, decreasing dependence on others who is likely to be detached and even hostile. This teenage boy appreciates his telephone as, successfully, it permits him to dwell and discover town with autonomy and dignity – states of being that all of us have to turn into human.
Digital cities
As proven in a brand new e book, Being Human in Digital Cities, European cities are actually technologised. Their digital infrastructures – 5G, WIFI, and fibreoptic networks – open up huge alternatives for communication and connection.
They allow entry to instruments and abilities for residing with dignity to lots of these pushed to the margins by means of dehumanising city circumstances akin to poverty, racism and concrete divisions. With a smartphone at hand, somebody just like the younger man above positive factors a way of independence and belonging to town. Paradoxically, nonetheless, these are the identical applied sciences that constrain freedoms, particularly as they’re, on the similar time, instruments for connection and methods for surveillance and management.
This paradoxical function of digitisation in European cities generates an essential query: if a lot of what we do and know concerning the metropolis is determined by smartphones, networks, and digital infrastructures, how can we turn into human within the more and more technologised environments the place we dwell?
Whereas conducting analysis throughout European cities, we heard many individuals expressing consciousness of their smartphones’ contradictory capabilities. It is a expertise of reference to family members and an essential instrument for getting access to details about work, housing and training. Nevertheless, additionally it is rather more than a communication expertise.
Many know that, at any time, smartphones can be utilized by authorities and firms to extract knowledge and to watch who they communicate to and what they talk about. It’s expertise that may all of a sudden make their sense of safety and privateness unsure. The digital metropolis is on the similar time a website of humanisation and dehumanisation.
Common humanism
European cities, akin to Athens, Berlin and London, characterize totally different incarnations of digital cities. Some European cities have established or are evolving digital economies – as is the case in London and Berlin respectively. Others aspire to attain this standing, akin to Athens. Of their variations, European digital cities have one thing in frequent: their technological make-up can’t be separated from the methods town is claimed as a website of belonging, safety and freedom. In the end, what we see throughout Europe, albeit very otherwise, are cities which might be altering by means of digital applied sciences. And with them so are their people.
An essential commentary throughout Europe is the rising emphasis now placed on a human-centric imaginative and prescient of digital futures. For instance, Eurocities, the biggest community of European cities, centres its agenda for city digital futures on folks. This strikes past the technocentric and technocratic frames of digital change, embracing a human-centric conception of digital city transformation. Increasingly, we see coverage and company strategic narratives of the necessity to put money into applied sciences within the title of humanity, sustainability and democracy. That is what we may name a in style humanism.
Demotic humanism
Cities usually are not solely formed by these in energy nonetheless but additionally by these occupying their streets and neighbourhoods. Whereas decision-makers might need particular methods of change, with cities and folks promised freedom and democracy through technological pathways, city people interact with applied sciences tactically and in contradictory methods.
What we frequently see is that digitisation is wanted to maintain continuity, not change. A hanging instance is that of mutual assist teams, which exploded in numbers throughout British city neighbourhoods through the COVID-19 lockdowns. 1000’s of mutual assist teams throughout British cities used the easy functionalities of social media to develop horizontal and efficient networks of assist amongst neighbours in what we may name an instance of demotic humanism. This was a humanism rising as an peculiar and sometimes contradictory try amongst city people to maintain group and obtain solidarity in circumstances of disaster.
Demotic humanism, on this case, as in others, proved to be contradictory. Within the midst of the lockdowns, the language of mutual assist, as soon as a staple of anarchism, grew to become a demotic, shared discourse, enacted by means of an ethos of horizontal and collective motion. However this activism was additionally marked by liminality – a key facet of our digital lives. Liminality factors to how all the pieces is short-term and ephemeral.
Contemplate how a brand new pattern pops up each few days, is critiqued, made into memes, studied, pulled aside after which put again collectively earlier than one thing new captures folks’s consideration once more. What occurs when this logic of liminality is utilized to digital activism? How is that this linked to how we navigate our cities? Lots of the similar teams that momentarily enacted group throughout class and racial divisions quickly reworked into websites of middle-class city identification, with these extra lively sharing, not solidarity, however sourdough recipes and gardening recommendation.
A greater future
And so, whereas expertise can empower, we have to rethink what this empowerment means when it comes to its liminality and within the bigger context of digitisation of city areas, the place this empowerment is especially going down. Whereas particular person and collective acts of solidarity are examples of how people, on the demotic degree, resist the digital order, their liminality is a persistent downside.
We want a extra sustainable mannequin of resistance, a long-lasting one – a essential humanism. A essential humanist perspective would contain rebuilding what the phrase “human” means from a decolonised, feminist standpoint and recentring a politics of care and enduring solidarity. A number of organisations and teams are working to guard digital rights and promise a greater future – because the digital order does – however one rooted in democratic digital cultures. By permitting totally different views on what this “higher future” means, we will guarantee energy stays decentralised and resistance can thrive in plurality.
For extra data, see Myria Georgiou’s new e book Being Human in Digital Cities and the accompanying LSE occasion.
Observe: This text provides the views of the authors, not the place of EUROPP – European Politics and Coverage or the London College of Economics. Featured picture credit score: Rawpixel.com / Shutterstock.com
