Few remember it today, but it was five decades ago that the populist backlash against the technocrats – found too objective, too cold, too removed from the lives and struggles of ordinary people in the streets – first broke out. Those streets were real: it was a rebellion against the bureaucrat-knows-best mentality that shaped – and still shapes – our cities. The cities of the future, if they want to remain vibrant and democratic, will have to put such elitism behind them, putting their own citizens first – and bureaucrats and big technology companies second. We have tried to do just that in Barcelona in the past four years.
Back in the 1960s, the omniscient bureaucrat, once a respected figure and a model of rationality, came under sustained attack for lacking compassion, sufficient knowledge, and respect for fellow citizens. That early challenge to public authority was never fully resolved. As a result, many cities are today caught between the democratic aspirations of their new and often radical mayors (sometimes, as in Barcelona, brought into office by social movements) and the inner workings of the highly complex ossified bureaucracies they are expected to lead. Eventually, even the boldest reformists settle for the pragmatic option of simply not rocking the boat.
The heavily centralised, platform-knows-best model of the smart city that has conquered many localities in the past decade is a perfect testament to this predicament. It promises so much in terms of involving citizens in policy-making, democratising access to important infrastructure – and yet such plans often yield only more centralised institutions, transferring power to Big Tech rather than the citizens and making public decision-making even less transparent than before. Just as the city was the place where initial suspicion towards public bureaucracy got its first major impetus, it can also be the place where a new type of democracy – we have practiced it, to the best of our ability, in Barcelona – is reborn to make our cities more enjoyable and liveable while helping people regain trust in public institutions. How could we bring it about to ensure that the future of cities remains bright, inclusive and democratic?
First, city officials should acknowledge that digital technology can help citizens to solve many of their problems without having to wait for help from remote bureaucracies. But the idea that all the solutions have to come from above needs to be reconsidered in light of the immense innovation from below. Bottom-up democracy inverts how our top-down cities are run: it promises to make cities people-first, not technology-first. Done properly, it will also enable new forms of solidarity and collective action – not just the perpetuation of the “solutionist” mindset that reduces all problems to the level of the individual user or consumer.
Second, city leaders should be humble and confess they do not have all the answers but that they trust the citizens to help find them; the city bureaucrat of the future learns, not preaches. It’s currently easier said than done, as such answer-finding infrastructure is either non-existent or belongs exclusively to the tech giants that have their own plans for our cities. Sensors, algorithms, digital-identity systems: without these essential components, there can be no meaningful empowerment of the citizens. Digital infrastructures that empower citizens to participate in politics cannot be run using business models based on the manipulation of collective behaviours and fake news. They must be in public hands and controlled by citizens themselves.
Third, if urban leaders hope to re-establish long-term trust with citizens, they need to assure that citizens’ data is not only safe but that it’s actually generating public, not just private, value. The experiences of the past decade suggest that’s often not the case, with public authorities either failing to ask questions about how citizen data is to be stored or who is most likely to monetise it.
Cities should be proactive in setting up a system of digital rights, informed by a “privacy by design” approach, that will take any guesses out of the game: citizen data should not to be commercially exploited under any circumstances. Cities can become key agents in the transition from surveillance capitalism, where data ownership is opaque, to a model where data is a common good, co-owned by all citizens. Whoever wants to build new services on top of that data would need to do so in a competitive, heavily regulated environment while paying a corresponding share of their profits for accessing it. In the absence of such interventions, public tolerance of “smart” and “digital cities” might not last very long, making it hard to deploy technology to achieve tremendous efficiencies when it comes to sustainable transportation or energy consumption
Fourth, city leaders need to remember that their task is to reconcile private and often short-term preferences of their citizens with the long-term public good, not just greenlighting every single consumer trend that captures the imagination of some group of citizens. Short-term home rental, for example, might have many benefits rightly appreciated by its users; it’s the task of city officials, though, to see how well such benefits scale and whether, in scaling, they begin to negatively affect the wellbeing of the community at large.
Finally, cities – and the people who lead them – should show more humility and stop flaunting their cosmopolitanism and uniqueness. The growing chasm between the countryside and the metropolis, often invoked in the context of explaining the populist rage of today, is also partially the consequence of letting history and globalisation run their own natural course, with all the policy debates focusing on cities and the non-urban areas being expected to fend for themselves. No wonder the countryside increasingly tends to revolt – it has been forgotten. Yet, what point is there in “greening” or “revitalising” the city if the price is environmental and economic devastation in the countryside – which, eventually, wreaks havoc on the city too?
While there is no guarantee of success, this revamped city agenda, attuned to the importance of the digital realm, has the potential not just to make our cities more liveable but to even restore some of the evaporating faith in the power of public institutions and democracy. Or, as we like to say in Barcelona: there’s no digital revolution without a democratic revolution.
Francesca Bria is chief technology and digital innovation officer for the city of Barcelona
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
