Conceptualizing ordinary democracy and digital cities

Keywords: democracy, urban, infrastructure, smart cities, politics, platforms, digital, ordinary, algorithms, everyday life, power, agency
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

This paper outlines what it might mean to take an affirmative and pragmatic approach to ordinary practices of democracy in digital cities.

Current research tends to understand democracy and politics as either antagonistic or unconscious, pitting citizens against the powers that be in digital cities. These powers emanate from endeavours such as smart city projects led by technology companies or local governments; or alternately from the algorithmic agency embedded opaquely into digital platform architectures. Citizens are then seen as taking extraordinary political actions to resist the powerful coming from ‘top-down’; or as being manipulated by systems ​​operating inaccessibly ‘below’ conscious forms of politics. As a result, democracy exists only under limited conditions: either showing up as extraordinary resistance or by being absent.

Building upon the work of late geographer Clive Barnett, we seek to relocate democracy in its ordinary articulations and environments. First, we pay attention to the negotiations, participations and representations intending to improve living conditions in contemporary digitalized urban settings, from banal to professionalised to experimental. Second, we emphasise the phenomenological experience of digital urbanism as an ordinary environment for staking such democratic practices.

Taken together, we underscore how ordinary democratic practices interplay with both the powerful ‘top-down’ agents as well as the silent systems making up digital cities, in ways not always leading to acts of antagonistic resistance, nor unconscious forms of political manipulation. Rather, ordinary democracy involves imperfect, temporary yet recursive and constitutive negotiations that work with the forms of life offered by digital cities.