Smart and Sustainable Cities and Neoliberal forms
of Urban Governance: the case study of FabCity
Campus
MA Thesis
Mathilde Grenod
24
thof June 2016
Supervisor: Dr N.A.J.M (Niels) van Doorn
Second Reader dhr.dr. T (Thomas) Poell
New Media and Digital Culture-Graduate School of Humanities-University of Amsterdam-
Introduction
The documentary called Earth from Above (2004) was a memorable audiovisual experience. More than ten years after I first saw it, I still can remember its most marking images of the melting snow of the Kilimanjaro, the landscapes disfigured by human activity and industries or the overcrowded neighborhoods of the City of Mexico. It was for me like a wake up call: ever since, I have paid great attention to my carbon footprint and my ecological behavior in the cities I have lived in, from the amount of waste I produce to the mode of transportation I use. More importantly, I have always closely paid attention to the newest innovation in terms of sustainable development, and I discovered by moving to Amsterdam that this was going beyond the simple fact of separating the plastic and the paper to recycle: it was, for some people, a way of life. Amsterdam, due to its dense population and infrastructure, is a fertile terrain for research, development and innovation around environmental friendly solutions for a sustainable city. Big cities cannot afford to stay inert in front of growing global challenges: it is estimated than more than 60% of the world’s population will be living in cities by 2050 (UN, 2014). Sustainable development is not a luxury: it is an environmental emergency and a collaborative necessity that needs to be constantly researched and built on. Innovation has become a precious engine in the design of resource management. Understood as the creation of new products, processes, services or business models (Maxwell, 2009), innovation facilitated by Information Communication Technology (ICTs) has become a driving engine of urban development in many Western countries where the debates over the ‘city of the future’ have been affected by smart cities projects.
The Smart City movement is a complicated object to identify due to the plurality of definitions; the Climate Group et al. (2011) define a smart city as a city that uses data and ICTs in order to offer efficient services to citizens, to control policy outcomes, to manage and improve infrastructures and to enable new business models. Amsterdam has its own Smart City initiative since 2009, aiming at enhancing solution-making to urban challenges such as smart energy use, safety improvement or traffic reduction. As an example, the project Smart Light1 aims at designing street lamps which light can be adjusted via sensors in order to save
energy. However, due to the challenge to offer a unique definition, smart city initiatives are 1 https://www.amsterdameconomicboard.com/nieuws/smart-light-op-het-hoekenrodeplein-gerealiseerd
sometimes considered as remote from environmental concerns due to their business-oriented objectives of cities differentiation and competitiveness in a globalized economy. The need to foster the skills, the creativity and the innovation of a workforce as drivers of economic growth and city efficiency are characteristics that certain academics oppose to environmental concerns; the terms of “eco city” or “sustainable city” are therefore preferred to designate ICT’s participation in the management of natural resources and the improvement of human sustainability.
Indeed, within the framework of sustainable city projects, technology is not considered as an end by itself but a tool aiming at achieving a more environmentally and socially sustainable urban life, through collaborative logics and the creation of “local smart communities”. Sustainability is the process that aims at improving the quality of human life within the limitations of the global environment, and is based on the objectives to live within the limits of earth’s capacities to maintain life; to understand the interconnections between economy, society and environment; and to maintain a fair distribution of resources for the future generations. Despite the missing clear connection between smart city and environmental concerns, ICTs has a serious potential to target a sustainable solutions and environmental transition, enabling the design of new methods or products that would permit a better management of natural resources and the creation of the future livable city. Nevertheless, the emergence of such methods for better natural resource management is closely intertwined with the modes of governance of the city in question. In “Justice, nature and the geography of difference” (1996), Harvey maintains that “All environmental-ecological arguments […] are arguments about society and, therefore, complex refractions of all sorts of struggles being waged in other realms”. Defined as the pursuit of collective goals at local and political level, todays urban governance is never situated far from neoliberal objectives of profit making, market development and the logics of capital accumulation.
My starting point for this thesis was my curiosity towards socially and environmentally sustainable solutions in terms of technological innovations. The curiosity reached its peak when I attended a lecture at Pakhuis de Zwijger in December 2015 in Amsterdam introducing the project of the FabCity Campus. At the occasion of the Netherlands’ presidency of the European Union for six months starting in January 2016, the cultural program “Europe By People, The Future of Everyday Living” comprised, among other events, the organization of FabCity Campus, a temporary campus showcasing different activities and innovations aiming at achieving social and environmental sustainability by displaying alternatives modes of production and of urban governance. After this lecture
introducing the hypes and hopes of FabCity Campus, I could not help but wonder how this sustainability and the collective modes of production described as ‘post-capitalist’ were actually sustainable where “big money” was the dominant model. These projects were questioning the capitalist model of production, but how could they prosper in the long term without an adapted business model? Furthermore, it was repeated that “In a Fab City, citizens are empowered to be the masters of their own destiny, their resilience is increased and a more ecological system is developed because movement of materials and energy consumption is drastically reduced” (fab.city). But I was asking myself: who are these citizens ? Can everyone afford to be such a “citizen” ? What type and amount of engagement do environmentally and socially sustainable solutions to govern the city imply? I was intrigued by the focus set on the ‘empowerment of citizens’, on a need for population to act for themselves and become responsible of their own lives and ‘destiny’ which was corresponding. A third puzzling aspect of FabCity Campus was the underlying distinction made between “smart cities” and its promoted sustainable model. However, I could find many similarities between the two types of discourses, especially in their relationship with value-production and market-oriented methods and products stemming from urban technology and ICTs.
I therefore decided to ask the following question in this thesis: how are neoliberal forms of urban governance impacting smart and sustainable city discourses?
By answering this question in my thesis, I wish to bring a critical and insightful input to the academic field at the crossing of media studies, urban studies and sustainable studies. I aim at building a bridge between smart and sustainable cities when they are sometimes defined as opposed in the academia, and I aim at exploring how the possible impact of the dominant neoliberal model has been impacting them. In order to do so, I broke down this thesis in four chapters.
In the first chapter, I explore the literature relevant for this research. I first focus on the etymology of urban governance and focus on its relationship with neoliberal theories that have been shaping it for more than three decades now. Then, I show to what extent the science of cybernetics is important to understand the rise of big data and ICTs as new ways to organize the life of the city and design sustainable resource management solutions. In a third time, I emphasize on what is at stake when we talk about smart and sustainable city discourses, in terms of innovation, but also in terms of citizen participation in the ‘making of the city’.
In a second time, I explain the methodology of this research. The topic of this research involves to look into complex phenomena at the crossroads of the academic fields of
sustainable and smart city discourses, critical urbanism and neoliberal theories that require the use of qualitative research methods. I also explain the reasons of my choices to take FabCity Campus as a case study and attend to the Introduction Week. Because I wanted to explore discourses, opinions, visions about what smart and sustainable city are about and how neoliberal principles might impact them, I decided to conduct semi-structured interviews, in addition to adapt an observer participant practices in order to grasp a more extensive, although non-exhaustive, knowledge about this topic.
A third chapter will be dedicated to the findings produced during my research, which I will organize in three subsection. The first one will be dedicated to explore to what extent smart and sustainable cities are commonly focusing on the inclusion of citizens in the production of future sustainable innovation with the help of ICTs; I will argue that the production of data in order to better organize the life and flows of the city are similar to neoliberal objectives of efficiency. Second, I will argue that FabCity’s central pillar of education generates social homogeneity, despite objectives of knowledge spreading, and new forms of citizens’ engagement symbolic of neoliberal forms of urban governance. A third subsection will be dedicated to explore the underlying entrepreneurial aspect that penetrated sustainable cities and its principles of circularity and collaborative modes of production.
1. Theoretical Framework
In this chapter, I aim at discussing the literature and theories relevant to the study of the transformation of the type of stakeholders involved in sustainable and smart city initiatives and their relationship to city governance. This part of my research is somehow a very delicate one: I had to set the limits of my argument and truncate elements of broad concepts I engaged with due to a lack of time for this research. I aim at providing an insight on the aspects of the current modes of administrating the city. I will try to draw a bridge between the manifestation of neoliberal forms of governance in the form of engagement of new stakeholders in relation with smart cities and sustainable cities. In a first part, I will attempt to explore major academic research on the neoliberal impact on governance. After having compared the work of Foucault on the Birth of Biopolitics and major contemporary works related to neoliberal governance, I will emphasis my first argument that the state’s powers, which were concentrated into the city’s realm of action, took on a rather entrepreneurial form. In a second part, I will emphasize the common denominator between governance and Information and Communication Technologies, especially regarding the impact of cybernetics in the organization of urban flows and life. I aim at exploring how this relationship is manifesting within the framework of two major terms in smart urbanism theories, that is to say ‘smart cities’ and ‘sustainable cities’. This literature will allow me to bring about my research questions before I present the methodology of this research.
1.1 Neoliberalism and the entrepreneurial state: new forms of urban
governance
This part of my research aims at discussing the impact of neoliberal logics on the the traditional role of the state and the birth of new forms of urban governance. The purpose here is obviously not to define neoliberalism, if that is even possible. For Brenner et al. (2002), although its roots can be traced back to postwar ideologies with Milton Friedman’s and Friedrich Hayek’s writings, neoliberalism became largely widespread, if not hegemonic, during the late 1970s and early 1980s as a response to the global recession of the 1960s and the crisis of Keynesian welfare policies. Brenner et al (2002:350) argue that the core of the neoliberal ideology “is the belief that open, competitive, and unregulated markets, liberated from all forms of state interference, represent the optimal mechanism for economic
development”. Therefore, the limitation of state intervention in the market laws would be the key for a successful and competitive economy. There is an academic agreement that the basic principles of neoliberalism constitute an ideological project and a political philosophy (Peck and Tickell, 2002; Jessop, 2002; Brenner et al., 2002), being therefore more than a simply economic theory. The ideology of neoliberalism aspires to design an ideal model where free markets are liberated from state interference, but it has in practice sparked a considerable intensification of disciplinary forms of state intervention so as to impose market rule on every aspect of social life (Brenner et al, 2002:352). As we understood then, the political aspect of the neoliberal theory strongly relates to the role of the state, and by extension, to cities’ administration. Indeed, cities have become an essential platform for the mutation and reproduction of neoliberalism since the beginning of the 1990s (Brenner et al., 2002). The ‘urbanization of neoliberalism’ eventually links to the term “urban governance” that will be central in this research to understand projects linked to smart and sustainable cities.
First, let us explain etymological differences before defining urban governance. Government designates the system by which a state or a community is governed (i.e.: democracy, autocracy) and governance refers to the act or the manner of governing (i.e.: a set of rules established by the members of the government); in other words, governance is the exercise of the rules while the government is the body that designed and established these rules. Regarding urban governance, Peters and Pierre (2012:1) argue that “urban governance, simply defined, is about the formulation and pursuit of collective goals at the local level of the political system”, where the boundaries between and within private and public sectors have become unclear. What is specific about urban governance is the role of political institutions and their leaders at the urban level has never been as predominant as the level of the state. Urban governance perspective is therefore focused on the role of cities’ institutions in steering and coordinating the local community. As Peters and Pierre (2012:4) write, “the role of the city in this process is to set up goals and coordinate the actions of public institutions, market actors, and voluntary associations”. The city has become the new realm of decision-making and is the institution now dealing directly with its stakeholders. This perspective of urban governance is actually due to the evolution of the state’s role, very close to the neoliberal philosophy, especially when Jessop (2002:454) considers that neoliberalism:
(…) involves enhanced state intervention to roll forward new forms of governance (including state intervention) that are purportedly more suited to a market-driven (and, more recently, also allegedly knowledge-driven) globalizing economy. This typically involves the selective transfer of state capacities upwards, downwards, and sideways, as intervention is rescaled in the hope of
securing conditions for a smoothly operating world market and to promote supply-side competitiveness on various scales above and below the national level” (2002:454)
At first, Jessop’s definition of the state’s role might be contradictory as it evokes an enhanced role of the state intervention. Indeed, Peck and Tickell for instance argue that neoliberalism targets “aggressive forms of state downsizing, austerity financing and public service “reform” (2002:381). Mirowski and Plehwe add up on this argument by underlining the rolling back [of] the nanny state” where citizens are “being set ‘free to choose’” (2009:444); in other words, the will to ‘erase’ Keynesian policies and the welfare state, which therefore evoke a ‘retreat’ of state’s intervention. However, the two authors (2009:436) tend to nuance this theory by arguing that: “A primary ambition of the neoliberal project is to redefine the shape
and functions of the state, not to destroy it”, which links to Jessop’s argument in the quotation
above: the state’s responsibilities are downloaded or offloaded to smaller governmental institutions, which then share there responsibilities to local partners or companies, often belonging to the corporate sphere.
This redefinition of the state intervention towards new forms of urban-governance require to look into new forms of public-private partnerships. Indeed, partnerships at the local government level were initially designed in the 1980s and 1990s to promote and boost economic development according to Peters and Pierre (2012). In a globalized economy regulated by a fierce competition, the old bureaucratic model delivering public services is deemed inefficient, expansive and extremely slow. According to Osborne (1993), it needs to be entrepreneurial rather than bureaucratic; therefore in order to adapt to this need for efficiency, governments need to become more competitive, knowing that competition forces an organization to heighten its productivity. In this context of competing international economies, Peters and Pierre (2010:8) argue that the city’s challenge is to enhance a diversification of the local economy with a focus on service-sector and management services and businesses. By mobilizing the economic and political spheres of the community in a perspective of economic modernization, the urban governance aims at making the city less vulnerable to rapid changes in the global economy (Peters and Pierre, 2012:8). According to Jessop (2002) these partnership-based forms of governance represent the “neoliberal belief, if not inevitability, of state failure and/or the need to involve relevant stakeholders in supply-side policies”, the latter being a branch of economics that consupply-siders how to improve the productive capacity of the economy. Jessop mentions the report World Report on the Urban
an important emphasis was made on these public-private partnerships “rather than top-down national government” (Jessop, 2002:466). This idea of ‘top-down’ policies is contrasted by the constitution of partnerships and solidarity across different scales of economic, political and social organization. All in all, urban governance, through public-private partnerships, targets the development of more managerial and market oriented provision of services in order to achieve efficiency and competitiveness in a globalized economy.
As a consequence, this refers to a key concept, that of the ‘entrepreneurial state’. Now that we understood how important the role of cities has become in the urban governance, it is important to emphasize on the concept of the entrepreneurial city in order to understand many logics at stake in relation with smart and sustainable cities. Harvey (1989:15) argues that during the phase of neoliberal entrepreneurialism, “urban governance has moved more rather than less into line with the naked requirements of capital accumulation”. Therefore, he argues that neoliberalism promotes a “growth-first” logic to urban development where welfarist logics of redistribution and social investment become antagonistic to capital accumulation objectives. The city becomes the platform of growth-chasing economic development, and urban governance has become highly concerned with encouraging local economic development. Indeed, the aspect of re-shaping the state’s responsibilities and what Jessop (2002) mentions as the “transfer of state’s capacities upwards, downwards, and sideways” for smoother market’s logics is deeply intertwined with Harvey’s conception of entrepreneurialism. The author (1989:4) argues that from the 1970s, the local level of the governance took up the challenge of state’s responsibilities, as it permitted “support for small firms; closer links between the public and private sectors; promotion of local areas to attract new business”. This argument fundamentally stresses the current logics where the local government leads its own entrepreneurship in order to face economic and social changes brought by technology and industrial restructuring. As Monika Zimmerman indicates, “’Local government’ refers to public administrative units- the lowest tiers of government -and includes provinces, regions, departments, counties, prefectures, districts, cities, townships, towns, boroughs, parishes, municipalities, shires and villages” (2014:153). Therefore, the entrepreneurial city brought about a drift away from centralized macroeconomic logics and focusing on different levels of the locality as Zimmerman underlines. The governance has turned the government into a “result-oriented” one: in order to reduce the public spending on a project or a problem solving decision, governments now focus on measuring the outcomes of what they spend or will spend; in other words, target an objective and stick to it for an improvement in productivity and efficiency. Overall, government has become an enterprising
government, which sticks to the idea of organizing public spending reduction according to Osborne (1993). In “Reinventing the Government” (1993), Osborne gives the example of the city of Orlando that created an enterprise “Public Storm Water Utility” financed by the fees collected from buildings that own large parking lots that participate to the large pollution of water sources and lakes around the city. Owners of large parking lots are therefore convinced to invest into their own water treatments systems which lowers their fees but above all considerably lowers public spending over water drainage and environment protection. In other words, the externalization of responsibility of and by the government and the decision of making other actors accountable testifies of this entrepreneurial state that aims at lowering the costs and maximizing profit and efficiency.
The entrepreneurial city, impacted by a neoliberal philosophy has not only resulted in local governance and public-private partnerships: I wish to focus here on the crucial role of citizenship and community involvement. For instance, the objectives mentioned during the conference Urban 21 comprised a call for producing “’active and productive citizens’ who will not burden the state of demand entitlements without accepting corresponding responsibilities” (Jessop, 2002:465). There is a need to establish a partnership between government and civil society as well, rather than keeping on with the Keynesian welfare system, seen as costly, inefficient and overburdened according to the neoliberal critique (Jessop, 2002). Instead, family, neighbourhood, market-based and market-solutions should be adopted to solve social issues, therefore fostering the idea of partnerships and networks. Mirowksi and Plehwe (2009) consider that neoliberals theoretically reconstruct the state with various audit devices, placed under the sign of ‘accountability’: in theory, the government must be accountable and the governance must be transparent and controllable by the citizens who are not only “customers of state services” (Mirowski and Plehwe, 2009:437) but active participants of the urban governance services.
Where the concept of urban governance is used, very often that of “good governance” is implied (Jessop, 2002; Hollands, 2008; Komninos, 2011; Kitchin, 2014; Renner and Pruh, 2014). According to Renner and Pruh, “good governance is that which increases the efficiency of human groups and collective productivity” (2014:26). Here the notion of productivity already appears, closely tied to that of neoliberalism and market oriented literature. What good governance implies nevertheless is that no matter what domains of policy making (i.e.: human rights, sustainability, public health) “it appears that governance systems need to be inclusive and participatory: they need to allow the members of the system to change the rules when needed and to have a voice in the collective decisions that are made”
(Renner, Pruh, 2014:26). This aforementioned observation is of crucial importance: “participatory”, “members”, “voice”, “collective”; all these terms essentially refer to the vocabulary of collective policy making and the fundamental involvement of citizens. Muehlebach’s input on that new role of citizens in a neoliberal context is also of a significant importance, when she observes the rise of citizens’ voluntarism parallel to the state’s role readjustment, if not withdrawal, of social service programs. She argues that a new form of ethical citizenship has been produced by neoliberalism, where the citizen has become a volunteer, and where labour relationships have been reimagined.
In this subpart, I aimed at discussing to what extent cities have become the arena where numerous neoliberal initiatives have been articulated in the context of urban governance. The neoliberal imperative put on cities for them to become profitable, efficient and competitive in a globalized economy led to a reform of the state’s action from the national to the local, with the objective of leading urban policies based of capital accumulation and the inclusion of communities of citizens. What this literature on the shifts of governance levels leads us to however, is the role of Information and Communication Technology regarding the city management. Indeed, it is incessantly repeated in the academia or in the media, that ICT represent the key for a better knowledge of urban human, capital, or energy flows and permits an improved efficiency, responsiveness, innovation and creativity of cities. How can we link these ameliorations with neoliberal policies or economical undertakings in any way? Let us explore the literature on that subject in the further section.
1.2 The science of cybernetics and ICTs in neoliberal forms of
governance
In this subsection, I argue that in neoliberal forms of urban governance and the rapid emergence of ICTs that essentially stem from the science of cybernetics have permitted a better knowledge and control of the city, aiming at more efficiency and performance. These complex phenomena are highly linked to sustainable and smart cities that I present in the next subsection.
Before evoking the relationship between ICTs and the urban governance, we need to look into the funding source of ICTs and a rationale for the governance: the science of cybernetics. Historically, cybernetics finds its roots in the set of scientific practices developed
during the World War II by Norbert Wiener when he entered the MIT laboratory in 1940. The goal of this MIT lab, in war times, was to predict future locations of the enemy’s war airplanes in order to be able to shoot these planes more accurately. What Wiener found during his research is that, under situations of stress, the pilot’s behavior is repetitive and the pilot presents “algorithmic behaviors amenable to mathematical modelling and analysis” (Halpern, 2014:43). What is directly linked to this repetition is what Wiener called the ‘feedback loop’: according to him, future actions could be predicted on the basis of past actions. For example, a missile missing its target then adjusts its flight trajectory in response to the signal provided by its target (Halpern, 2014:45). The scientist defines this feedback as “the property of being able to adjust future conduct by past performance” (Wiener in Halpern, 2014:45). What Wiener was underlining here was the ability of machines, organisms and societies to have the capacity to self-sustain through this circular causality. Indeed, cybernetics aspired to be an universal science: “It is interesting that cybernetics even trumped the servomechanisms line of feedback thought by turning itself into a universal metaphysics, a Theory of Everything […]” (Pickering in Mirowski, 2002:12). Cybernetics are therefore also applicable to urban phenomena. The ultimate goal of cyberneticians was to transmit information without noise or interference, in order to have control over the future. Cybernetics and the concept of feedback loop would therefore enable a city to regulate and control future outcomes and reduce errors, such as control of domestic energy consumption of inhabitants, or evaluate and calculate crowds during a public event in order to prevent possible accident and design adapted responses.
Why are cybernetics, feedback and the machine relevant for this argument? As Wiener assesses in “The Human Use of Human Beings” (1954) that humanity relied too much on earth resources that are finite; the law of entropy therefore dictates that, in the long run, humanity will have to pay the price of technical improvement and resources consumption, which will probably be harmful for our own survival. He assesses that “We have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves in order to exist in this new environment. We can no longer live in the old one. Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions.” (1954:46). Wiener seems to underline here an injunction for humanity to act for itself, for a sustainable life and for its survival, an argument we will go back to later in this research. This establishes a direct link with environmental and sustainable concerns: it turns out that the science of cybernetics and the feedback loop represent a potential technique to reduce natural resources consumption and induce
sustainable policies and innovations. However, this is only possible through the help of data and ICTs.
Before explaining how data can represent a source for new modes of urban governance and can provide the raw material for a more productive and transparent cities according (Kitchin, 2014), let us explore the power that digital devices represent in order to do so. Indeed, urban analysts consider since the past two decades that ICTs have been exerting a constant impact on urban infrastructure, economic activity and everyday life according to Kitchin (2014). Misuraca et al. (2010:11) conducted a research and a survey led on these new models of governance in European cities and tried to answer the question “What key city
governance policy areas ICTs impact most and what governance changes are driven by ICTs?”. They found that overall, ICTs have a very significant impact on governance,
especially on decision-making processes (mainly regarding the information and communication policy area, e.g. public relations and citizens’ engagement and participation) and on service delivery mechanisms (mainly changes in the policy area of economic development, e.g. industry, business, SMEs). All in all, the researchers found that 60% of cities consider new ICT-enabled governance models are appearing. They also consider that the integration of ICTs into the delivery system of public services by the government eventually permits to:
“support social and institutional innovation, particularly in empowering officials and community representatives; ensuring social inclusion; providing timely, efficient, transparent and accountable services; improving the management of administrative operations; facilitating planning and policy making processes; monitoring and recording political decisions and assessing socio-economic impacts in the municipalities and their locale” (2010:2)
Obviously, this definition is an ideal model of what ICT-enabled governance should include, and the differences in governance models across different European countries result in different forms of ICT-enabled governance models. However, ICTs bear the power to make people more connected to their direct urban environment where they will be acting upon their future, based on more information they now have access to through ICTs. We could give the concrete example of the Smart Citizen Kit2, a tool for ‘urban monitoring’ where citizens
evaluate the pollution level of their city or neighbourhood via sensors. The data collected permits a better knowledge of users’ direct environment, permit more research via local maps of air quality or sound problems and “include participation in the political life in the everyday 2 https://smartcitizen.me/#sck
city” (smartcitizen.me). Thus, what seems at stake in addition to the integration of ICTs in the everyday life of a city is the essential role of data.
Indeed digital technologies have permitted the production of incredible amounts of data, called “big data”, that are according to Kitchin (2014) “much more sophisticated, wider-scale, finer-grained, real-time understanding and control of urbanity”. Such perceptions of the power of data-enabled projects such as Open Government Data. Often referring to terms such as ‘transparent’, ‘accountable’, ‘efficient’ or ‘sustainable’ to describe a city’s mode of governance, Open Government Data (OGD) refers to the “data produced and commissioned by government or government controlled entities, which can be freely used, reused and redistributed by anyone’. Exploiting such data, according to Yannoukakou and Araka (2014) corresponds first to an objective of better transparency and accountability of the public administration. Historically, OGD is a technological movement resulting in pressure put on governments worldwide to make their data freely available in the middle of the 2000s (ibid). As a result, it is expected that making information of the public sector freely accessible would foster “democracy by forming better informed and active citizens, who are more involved into the decision-making processes and exercise better control” (Yannoukakou and Araka, 2014:332). At the local level as well, citizens are said to be made more “active” in the decision-making process by being given the access to data bearing political value on the way governments work, so as to be better informed and express thoughts and opinions freely. More than providing a democratic participation ideal, the dissemination of this raw and unstructured data that can be redistributed and reused by anyone also bears an imbedded economic dimension.
It is said (Yannoukakou and Araka, 2014; Kitchin, 2014) that this OGD strongly aims at boosting innovation and growth. Within the framework of an OGD project by the G8, the United Kingdom declared in its G8 Open Data Charter that “Freely-available government data can be used in innovative ways to create useful tools and products that help people navigate modern life more easily. Used in this way, open data are a catalyst for innovation in the private sector, supporting the creation of new markets, businesses, and jobs.” (G8 UK Open Data Charter). Therefore, the will to engage citizens with freely accessible public information also meets the governmental objective to produce new products and services and generate economical value. It has been estimated that more than 40 billions euros benefit could be reached from the exploitation of this data (European Commission in Yannoukakou and Araka, 2014). Therefore, users can make use of this data both in objectives of accountability and
participatory governance as well as innovation and economic growth at the national, but also at the local level.
What I aim to establish here is a link between Open Data, citizens’ participation’s boosting and economical profit as a holy triptych guaranteeing a prosperous city. Of course, one should be critical regarding the heavy focus put on the power of data in the new forms of urban governance, the involvement of citizens and the creation of value. Indeed, Halpern (2014:4) underlines a certain reification of this data when she writes about the city of Songdo with a very developed computing infrastructure:
“This is a landscape where bandwith and sustainability are fantasized as organizing life through a proliferation of interfaces to the point of ubiquity. What constitutes “intelligence” and “smartness” is now linked to the sensorial capacity for feedback between the users and the environment: bandwith and life inextricably correlated for both profit and survival”.
Halpern critically engages here with the ubiquity of this ‘bandwith’, the big data now considered as the ultimate form of organization of life. She assimilates the features of the city to a machine. Halpern (2014:9) provides the example of Le Corbusier who enabled in the 1970s an ideal model of statistically managed cities when using the latest technologies and permitting a perfect organization that can be established and replicated through “systemic, machine-like principles and the application of careful statistical social science”. The intelligence of the city is formed by feedback loops between policy makers, designers, computers and users. Interestingly enough, the etymologies of ‘cybernetics’ and ‘governmentality’ are completely connected: both terms come from the Greek word
kubernetes, which means to ‘steer’ or to ‘rule’. Halpern underlines this strong link between
“cybernetics, vision, knowledge and power, culminating in contemporary concerns with biopolitics” (2014:7). The concept of biopolitics is relevant for this research as it is intertwined with that of cybernetics and data. Biopolitics corresponds to a new form of politics where the establishment of norms, hierarchies and the science of statistics are at the source of the creation of legal frameworks (Marks, 2006). As defined by Foucault, biopolitical processes have become part of the construction of everyday reality in capitalist economies, where the norms of education, insurance or health were articulated with the demands of mass and industrial and commercial activities. What is interesting here is to draw a parallel between the power allocated to data in the organization of the urban governance. For instance, the CityServiceDevelopment Kit3 (CitySDK) powered by the Waag Society in
Amsterdam, is a system that makes use of open data governments in order to have access to 3 http://citysdk.waag.org/
real-time information about the city, and make city’s services easier to implement. Once again, we encounter the terms ‘efficiency’, ‘control’, ‘management’ when discussing urban governance, therefore underlining the neoliberal aspect of new forms of governance. However, these new forms of governance are strongly linked with two concepts: that of the smartness of the city (the city is more efficient, competitive and self-improving thanks to ICTs) but also to environmental and social sustainability (the self-learning capacities are essential in improving natural resources consumption in urban areas). These two concepts will be discussed in the following section. In this important part of the literature I aimed at tracing a source of new modes of governance of the city through technology. I underlined the strong link between the science of cybernetics and the science of government, therefore making sense of an integration of ICTs and their production and usage of a continuous flow of data to better organize the life of the city, for a better participatory governance but also for larger economic fallouts. The power of ‘data’, however key in improving the performance of the city’s organization and economical production, needs to be nuanced, as it presents limitations. Overall, the objectives of better performance and resource management require to look into the concepts of smart and sustainable cities which we will discuss in the next subsection.
1.3 Smart cities, sustainable cities or smart and sustainable cities?
In this sub-part, we will explain and develop the term of smart cities, before exposing its limits in dealing with ecological concerns and more human-centered perspectives. Secondly, I will specifically focus on the phenomenon of sustainable cities and the socio-economic interpretations and environmental concerns relevant for this research. I will argue that the academia tends to differentiate sustainable city from smart city, when the former seems to have many common characteristics with the latter.Choosing the right academic term to look into urban processes aiming at improving public services in order to create a better environmental, economic and social conditions and to increase cities’ attractiveness represents a challenge. However, the term ‘smart cities’ and ‘sustainable cities’ dominate the academic discourses on new cities (de Jong et al., 2015), and are far much used than categories such as ‘green cities’ (Simpson and Zimmermann, 2013), ‘livable cities’ (Buchwald, 2003) or ‘digital cities’ (Lee et al, 2013) to name a few. For the purpose and the accuracy of this research, I will only focus on ‘smart cities’ and ‘sustainable cities’.
It has been mentioned that the term ‘smart cities’ has completely surpassed its predecessors in popularity in the academic use since 2013 (de Jong et al., 2012). Before starting to engage with a part of the academic literature available on smart cities, let us develop further on the meaning of ‘smart’. Joss (2015) argues that smart city is particularly focusing on the use of ‘ubiquitous’ technology, that is to say the omnipresence of technology, instantaneous computation and information for digitally coordinate multiple urban systems. Caragliu et al. (2011) define smart city through six emblematic characteristics: 1. Ameliorate economic and administrative efficiency and developing culture through network infrastructure; 2. There is a specific focus on business oriented processes; 3. It aims at including various types of urban citizens in public spheres; 4. It underlines the essential role of high-tech and creative industries in urban growth; 5. Focuses on the importance of social and network capital in the city development; 6. Environmental and social sustainability are a core aspect of smart city construction. However, Caragliu et al.’s definition presents limitations regarding a more practical reality concerning ‘3’ and ‘6’, an aspect that we will develop further in this research. Yigitcanlar (2014:27) emphasizes as well the objectives tied to smart cities solutions are to provide an effective model of resources and capabilities management, along with the stimulus of local innovation, the improvement of life quality and a low impact on the environment through ICT and a participatory engagement and action. Eventually, the author argues that what smart cities logics propose, that is to say a mix of human capital (e.g. workforce), social capital (e.g. open network connections), infrastructural capital (e.g. high tech telecommunications) and entrepreneurial capital (e.g. creative and risk-taking business activities), will lead to, in theory, an ideal city model. However, Yigitcanlar’s inclusion of environmental concerns into smart cities is quite limited. Manville et al. (2014) go even further by underlining six aspects of the smart city, namely mobility, environment, people, living, economy, and governance. On his side, Lee (2013) considers that the ‘human capital’, that is to say the possible skilled labor force that citizens represent in order to improve the performance of the city, needs to be completed by education as a driver of urban growth, rather than only relying on the role of ICT infrastructures.
In a more critical way and regarding a more ‘human-centered’ perspective, Hollands (2008) considers that cities should have as an ultimate goal to bring ICTs and people together in order to enhance innovation, problem solving, learning and knowledge that technologies offer. Innovation is an important term we will come across quite often in this research: it refers to the capacity to propose new solutions and methods and is “built in the creativity of [cities’] population, their institutions of knowledge creation, and their digital infrastructure for
communication and knowledge management” (Hollands, 2008:305). We can note here the focus put on a plurality of infrastructures that enable cities to stem innovation. Eventually, smart city imaginaries envision the city as an assemblage, a collaboration of different forces in a process always in construction. The combination of all these factors, according to Caragliu et al. (2011) should empower citizens with the access to information allowing them to debate and influence policy making. In the continuation of such a conception of the city, smart cities bring together ICTs and people to enhance learning, knowledge, innovation and issue solving solutions according to Hollands (2008). This is the aspect of the relationship between cities and ICTs that I wish to underline: that of human capital previously mentioned, r
elating to “skills, education, competencies and creativity” (Hollands, 2008:306); because I conceive this aspect of the smart cities as being an essential proof of a neoliberal impact on new forms of governance, namely city-governance. Hollands’ article “Will the Smart City Please Stand Up ?” (2008) is perhaps one of the most distinctive academic work that engages with the fundamental neoliberal aspect of smart cities initiatives, particularly in underlining the precious capital formed by the citizens. This notion of ‘capital’ when talking about urban governance actually very much relates to that of neoliberal objectives of production and competitiveness. Hollands suggests by that human capital a ‘pool’ of citizens’ skills, education, competencies and creativity. Indeed, he argues that smart cities’ existence relies on citizens’ participations, an argument that Coe et al. confirm by arguing that smart cities “are not possible outside of the development of smart communities- communities that have ‘learned how to learn’, adapt and innovate” (2001:13). These learning skills are essential for a city’s attractiveness. A smarter government is not simply regulating the outputs of economic and societal items, but it participates actively into a dynamical connection with “citizens, communities, and businesses in real time to spark growth, innovation, and progress” as argue Nam and Pardo (2011:287). The authors establish a link here with the wide ranging concept of smart growth. More than ever before, the drivers of economic growth are identified as creative and cultural industries, or social and environmental sustainability “in order to address various economic, spatial, social and ecological problems facing many cities today” (Hollands, 2008:306). But there is an inherent assumption that smart growth can be achieved through a supposedly consensus and involvement of smart communities in the transition. An IBM report states that in a very competitive environment, the “competitive differentiation of cities will increasingly be derived from people and their skills, creativity and knowledge, as well as the capacity of the economy to create and absorb innovation” (Dirks et al., 2010:1),
that is to say to integrate new methods, ideas or products generated by ICTs and integrate them in urban processes. The IBM report claims that developing more citizen-centric policies would allow cities to better attract and retain their citizens’ skills, knowledge and creativity. Nevertheless, one should challenge this assumption that changes within smart growth logics, and to a wider extent smart city discourses, are inherently positive. For instance Hollands (2008) denounces an incremental social polarization regarding these citizens’ ‘skills’, a growing contrast between this ‘creative class’ (Florida, 2002) and an unskilled or IT illiterate fringe of the population. In other words, we can argue that smart growth and innovation cannot stem automatically and regardless of social environment or classes of these smart communities. This sets the limits of the supposedly inherent ‘integration’ of citizens and smart communities into the urban decision-making process.
What I observed here is that all of the definitions cited above, among an even wider variety, focus more on entrepreneurial tech-innovation and socio-economic externalities while obscuring the objectives of sustainability and environmental concerns in the smart city discourses. Kramer et al. (2014:60) argue that “there is a very weak connection between the concept of a smart city and ecological sustainability”, just like the somehow fantasized citizen participation to the urban decision-making within smart cities initiatives I mentioned previously. The authors underline that ‘smart cities’ is in many case a concept used to attract investment, businesses, tourists and residents, which corresponds to Moser’s (2001:7) explanation of the choice for the term ‘smart’ as a term picking up on the commercial successes and public interest of ICT. Kramer et al (2014:60) therefore call for attention when using the term ‘smart’ regarding sustainability, and preconize the use of the term ‘smart-sustainable city’; the latter will be explored in the next subsection.
There are indeed in the academia robust differences between the terms used to define cities that prioritize technological innovations, social communities enhancement, or rather more environmental concerns. “Sustainable cities” bears a different meaning that “smart cities” for that matter. Sustainable cities is perhaps the word in the academia with the largest set of interconnections (de Jong et al., 2015) with other terms and concepts such as ‘eco city’ or ‘green city’ (Joss, 2015) and addressing ecological, economic and social dimensions of sustainable development. In a document entitled “Common Future” edited by the United Nations (un-documents.net), sustainability is defined as the capacity to meet needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Sustainable cities logics stem from concerns about climate change, accelerated urbanization and globalization processes (Joss, 2015). In that context, many economically developed cities
are engaged into various initiatives aiming at upgrading urban infrastructure and services in order to improve environmental, economic and social conditions and enhance attractiveness and competitiveness, through the lens of sustainable logics. In that perspective, the academia (Joss, 2015; de Jong et al., 2015) refers to a “triple-bottom line” including sustainability, ecological modernization, and scientific-technological innovation that has become mainstream in sustainable urbanism discourses.
However, despite a strong focus on sustainable and environmental measures, sustainable cities are not opposite to smart cities in terms of their relationships with economic concerns. Indeed, De Jong (2015:26) argues that the intelligent consumption of natural resources (e.g. electricity, solar and wind energy, recycled waste) can be a “source of future growth and development in a similar way as through labor and capital productivity”. This implies the substitution of hazardous substances, environmental product design, but most interestingly for this research, the use of ICTs in order to reduce energy use in cities. Interestingly enough, in their research on energy use in households Kramers et al (2014:60) argue that it is difficult to estimate the potential energy reduction in a significant way and that sometimes ICT solutions might actually result in an increase of energy use instead of a reduction. This rebound effect can however be compensated by combining ICT generated solutions with policy and planning instruments, or with other more ‘traditional’ indicators (e.g kilograms of decreased material resources). What one needs to remember is ICT’s potential in higher eco-efficiency in the economic value chain, which is often connected to the term ‘ecological modernization’ (de Jong et al., 2015; Joss, 2015).
There is a certain entrepreneurial aspect to the sustainable city. Technological firms are indeed interested in smart technology solutions to support sustainable urbanisms (Joss, 2015). By definition, urbanism corresponds to the “development and planning of cities and towns” (oxforddictionnaries.com). However, this somehow neoliberal approach might actually represent an “ecological enclave” (Joss, 2015), or an obstacle to proper green solutions. The aim to reach higher standards of sustainability, in combination with more efficiency and socio-economic achievements might sometimes be at the price of affordable sustainable measures for instance, where higher standards of urban living environments for a more affluent clientele are targeted (Joss, 2015:835). Therefore sustainable urbanism represents an investment and a development opportunity for tech-firms to invest in. The challenge for decision-makers in that perspective is to provide a solution to urban sustainability that will succeed in including wider communities in the urban processes for an enlarged participation and an ‘ideal’ democratic model.
Indeed, the sustainable city is conceived as a ‘bottom-up’ city making project (e.g. a project of neighborhood renovation stemming from citizen and communities reaching administrative decision-making realms) and an alternative to mainstream urban planning” (Joss, 2015:835). The risk in using technology to reach sustainability is technological-centered logics as well as limited energy-use reduction. Members of the academia (Hollands, 2008; Komninos, 2011; de Jong et al., 2015; Kramer et al, 2015) call for a focus on social relationships around which technological advances revolve. The application of technology should therefore be aiming at enhancing community and citizen engagement, create livable urban spaces and support political exchange and discourse. Oktay (2012) reinforced this assumption by arguing that in order for sustainable urbanism to gain action, it is essential to understand that citizens play an essential role in addressing key sustainable issues. There is a necessity to “integrate privatized environmental action into everyday life and to achieve resource savings (Oktay, 2012:20). This can only be implemented by the relevant governance structures, policy processes and planning tools, which often underline the importance of local governance. By enhancing a larger political and public accountability and a transparency of decision-making processes, city governance can implement sustainable logics and include a more community and citizen-centered policy making. However, the definition of citizenship here is of crucial importance: can everyone “afford” to be a citizen in terms of private resources? Under what form these citizens are getting involved in such policies ? This is other questions we will try to answer in this research.
Despite more or less accentuated traits between the smart cities and sustainable cities, the two terms remain conceptually close to each other, with rather similar characteristics. Their relationship to community building, efficiency and competitiveness boosting and city-governance’s action through Information Technology presents many common characteristics whether we talk about smart or sustainable cities that lead to my research question.
2. Methodology
In this chapter I will discuss my research methods. I first explain my choice to conduct my research based on grounded theory, which belongs to the qualitative research methods. I explain how and why I combined in-depth semi-structured interviews and participant
observation. I explain later my motivations to select FabCity as a case study. In a last sub-part, I expose the limitations of my research.
2.1 A qualitative research project: grounded theory, in-depth
interviews, participant observation and case-study research
methods.
In parallel to the literature gathering process on urban governance, ICT, smart cities and sustainability, I was already immersing myself in the Amsterdam smart cities’ scene, especially with events organized by the cultural center in Amsterdam Pakhuis de Zwijger. As previously mentioned in the introduction, is through De Zwijger that I had the chance to encounter and to be familiarized with what I chose as a case study for my research, the FabCity Campus. The complex phenomena related to smart and sustainable cities and neoliberal forms of urban governance require a qualitative approach of study rather than using quantifying tools proper to quantitative or mixed methods of research. My research question “how are neoliberal forms of urban governance impacting smart and sustainable city discourses?” therefore required to adopt qualitative research methods. I decided to design my research around two fieldwork methods, both belonging to the qualitative, ethnographic research approach. As Creswell (2014:234) underlines, “qualitative researchers typically gather multiple forms of data, such as interviews, observations, documents […] rather than rely on a single data source”. Data here refers to the information gathered by the researcher which is later categorized, analyzed and compared, whose importance is explained further in this chapter.
2.1.1. The choice for grounded theory in qualitative research methods
The selection of the methodology is of crucial importance for the relevance of the research and quite representative of its objectives. As Creswell (2014) argues, research methods are based on the nature of the research problem. In this research, I am trying to explore the relationship between neoliberal forms of governance and the rise of smart and sustainable cities, which required me to employ qualitative research methods rather than quantitative. Quantitative research is an approach designed to test objective hypothesis or theories. Creswell (2014) and Hopkins (2008) agree to argue that quantitative research is all about quantifying relationships between variables on a sample of population, cells or animals. Burns
and Grove (1987) argue that quantitative research describes, examine and verifies cause and effect relationships, using a deductive method of knowledge attainment. I needed to produce in this research an in-depth social and societal knowledge in order to study the possible impact of neoliberal logics on smart and sustainable cities; a type of knowledge that quantitative research was not able to produce. Qualitative research permits per se to grasp the nuances, contradictions and somehow ‘chaotic’ phenomenon that is not possible, and meaningless, to quantify through numerical data. Thus, I chose to use qualitative research methods that I describe further.
Qualitative research aims at describing certain dimensions of a phenomenon and “understand human beings and the nature of their transactions with themselves and with their surroundings” (Benohel, 1985 in Carr, 1994:716). Creswell (2014:32) argues that “qualitative research in an approach for exploring and understanding the meaning individuals or groups ascribe to a social or human problem.” As Pistrang and Barker (2012:6) consider, the strengths of qualitative research are to gain in-depth, textured data which enable to look at contradictions and nuances, to inductively produce theory often used in underresearched areas, or give more voice to research participants to describe their own experience in their own language. This method is suiting the best to this research as I explore the new form of stakeholders’ engagement in urban design, which requires a format of research such as qualitative grounded theory. Indeed, a grounded theory approach, as Ritchie and Lewis (2003: 201) consider, “involves the generation of analytical categories and their dimensions, and the identification of relationships between them.” Grounded theory mainly aims at capturing and bringing coherence to the information collected (Pistrang and Barker, 2012) later transformed into data; but specially to introduce more abstract and emergent concepts at an early stage of the analysis (Ritchie and Lewis, 2003). In other words, grounded theory is a design of research where the researcher derives a general theory grounded in the views of participants (ibid). In other to do so, I decided to base my research on the most common data sources for qualitative research, namely semi-structured interviews and qualitative observation (Pistrang and Barker, 2012). In order to select the participants, I first decided to choose a single-case study: that of FabCity Campus.
2.1.2 Qualitative case study methodology: selection of FabCity Campus
I am presenting here the qualitative case study method, the motivations of such a choice aswell as FabCity Campus as the case study object. 2.1.2.A. Qualitative Single-Case Study Methodology
Case studies are a tool of inquiry through which the researcher elaborates an in-depth analysis of a program, an event, an activity, a process or of individuals (Creswell,2014:43). It is usually pertinent to use case-studies research when the researcher wants to answer “how” and “why” type of questions, where the behavior of those involved in the study cannot be influenced, or when the boundaries are not clear between the phenomenon studied and the context. Case studies are inscribed in a certain time-span, and researchers collect information using a variety of data collection techniques over this sustained period of time (Stake, 1995; Creswell, 2014). The data gathered from multiple sources can be converged in order to “illuminate the case” (Baxter and Jack, 2008:556). Yin (2012) argues that there are mainly two types of case study: multiple-case study and single-case study. The former designs a comparison between two or more case studies and provides findings that might be replicated. Nevertheless, due to a limited amount of time available for an in-depth multiple-case study, to the difficulty to implement it (Yin, 2012) and to the relatively newness and singularity of FabCity Campus, I chose to design a single-case study research. With this method, I was enabled to analyze data relating to different themes. Therefore, I designed a ‘within case analysis’(Baxter and Jack, 2012) which permitted to make sense of data within the different themes tackled within FabCity Campus. In other words, case-study research ensures that a phenomenon is explored through a variety of lenses, which allows to reveal and understand its multiple facets. In the following sub-part, I present FabCity Campus as my single-case study and its context.
2.1.2.B. FabCity Campus as a Case Study
Let me first explain the context of my case study. In 2016, the Netherlands presided the Council of the European Union for six months, starting January 1st 2016. For this occasion,
FabCity created the FabCity Campus in partnership with the cultural program “Europe by People, The Future of Everyday Living”. FabCity is a collective created in 2014 as an initiative by the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, the MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms and the Fab Foundation, and operates within the Fab Lab network. FabLab.
Built on the Java-eiland in Amsterdam, the FabCity Campus was composed of almost fifty pavilions where entrepreneurs were showcasing their work around eight different themes
comprising among others “alternative forms of energy”, “new ways of transportation”, or “local food supplies”4.
Figure 1: FabCity Campus on Java-eiland in Amsterdam (europebypeople.nl)
It is defined on the Europe by People website as “a self sufficient society where young people-students, artists and professionals-will work, create, research and come up with solutions for every day city problems” (europebypeople.nl).
I experienced the introduction week of FabCity Campus in different manners. During the morning of the first day, I attended to the ‘kick-off’ speech of the Mayor of Amsterdam Eberhard Van der Laan and the Minister of Education, Culture and Science Jet Bussemakker on the FabCity Campus. It was followed by an organized tour of the Campus and a presentation of the different pavilions and the innovations showcased, which was the first dimension of my experience as one of the event’s participants.
The second dimension of my experience is that I conducted my participant observation as a student part of the “FabCity Off-Campus Research Student”. Indeed, parallel to the FabCity Campus was run the FabCity Off-Campus Research: it involved dozens of students from all over Europe that were participating in a research project on a voluntary basis. They were divided into eleven teams with which they studied eleven areas of Amsterdam, researched different issued and designed solutions by doing fieldwork, talking to inhabitants
of the neighborhood, exchanging knowledge and later in June showcasing their results.5
4 http://europebypeople.nl/on-campus/ 5 http://europebypeople.nl/off-campus/
Within that framework, Off-Campus students were invited to attend to many lectures, talks and workshops around different projects related to smart and sustainable innovations taking place at Pakhuis de Zwijger, the cultural center on the other side of the bridge linking the Java-eiland. The three days of introduction for Off-Campus student eventually provided me
with consequent and meaningful material for my research. However, I decided not to
participate further to the Off-Campus research in order to focus on my case study and the interviews I intended to conduct, in addition to a time limitation (an average of two days of research was demanded from the students of the Off-Campus).
Therefore, the afternoon of the first day of FabCity Campus introduction aimed at introducing Off-Campus students with projects presentations and lectures. The day was punctuated by a workshop called “Discussion on Future Skills-What kind of skills do you need to learn right now?” where representatives of a European Delegation (mainly representatives of European Universities) and the Off-Campus students were to discuss about how to get into the job market in a smooth and efficient way.
The second and third days were dedicated to other lectures, talks and workshops on how to design the smart and sustainable city of the future with technology and community building in urban areas. The topics were quite diverse, from ecological and sustainable neighborhood building to central domestic monitors for energy saving. The days were cadenced with lunch and coffee brakes, lectures and workshops, and were pretty well organized overall. Students had the time to meet and socialize with each other and talk to lecturers and participants at Pakhuis de Zwijger as well.
For all these events, I understood that the main objective was to get the public involved in the projects showcased by FabCity by letting them know ‘what is out there’. I experienced this introduction week myself as a discovery, exploring what is done in terms of technological advances, sustainable projects and community building in the city of Amsterdam, but also applied or applicable elsewhere. I was starting to distinguish patterns in the discourses, the ideas, the arguments given by the participants of the FabCity Campus and Off-Campus; recurring vocabulary and themes that were continual, almost pleonastic, about innovation, governmental absence, community work, sustainability, or efficiency. In order to grasp a more concrete and clearer idea of what was at stake with citizens’ engagement in smart and sustainable initiatives, I decided to organize semi-structured interviews.
I selected my participants after I first got in touch with them on campus during the Introduction week’s events, such as the talks, the workshops or the coffee breaks. I chose them as participants because of their different backgrounds and experiences and asked them after our interesting conversations whether they were willing to participate to my research. Among everyone I met on FabCity, I only selected the participants who had the knowledge that was most likely to enlighten my questionings. I was therefore able to organize with them my in-depth interviews.
In-depth interviews are often described as a form of conversation (Legard et al, 2003). Hammersley and Atkinson (1995) stress the power of language as a provider of description, explanations and evaluations on any aspect of the world. According to Creswell’s criteria, “individuals seek understanding of the world in which they live and work” (2014:37). In that perspective, Kvale (1996:4) compares the role of an interviewer in qualitative research of that of a traveler who “asks questions that lead the subjects to tell their own stories of their lived world, and converses with them in the original Latin meaning of conversation as ‘wandering together with’”. This is what I strived to do with interviewees during the research by providing them the necessary space for them to express their perception on their engagement in FabCity Campus, and to a larger extent to smart cities initiatives. Lindlof and Taylor (2002:173) also underline the major purpose of qualitative interviewing is to “understand the social actor’s experience and perspective through stories, accounts, and explanations”. This allows a collaboration in the construction of knowledge between the interviewee and the researcher (Legard et al, 2003). In a qualitative approach, “the researcher seeks to establish the meaning of a phenomenon from the views of participants” (Creswell, 2014:32) which requires one to identify a culture-sharing group and collect data in the participants’ setting. In accordance with this requirement, I aimed at collecting data in the specific setting of FabCity Campus where I could get in touch with the “culture-sharing group” formed by the participants and interpret their stories.
I chose to design semi-structured individual interviews for my research because I aimed at inviting participants to express themselves openly about their own perception of collaborative world building. I also considered that it would broaden the scope of responses from participants and increase the likeliness to explore even various themes and issues. Legard et al (2003) consider that in-depth interview is based on a combination between structure and flexibility, where the interviewer bases his research on key topics he wishes to cover during the interview; but his structure is flexible enough to allow a different order in the questions asked or unpredicted topics to be explored. With this method I wish to bring a
