PhD defence V.M. (Vivien) Butot

Brief summary on the aim of the doctoral thesis:

The recent profusion of digital and data technologies is claimed to be making urban safety management “smarter.” While concerns about the implications of these new technologically-driven forms of safety management in “smart cities” have engendered much criticism, the perceptions, experiences, and reactions of citizens themselves have hardly been researched. This thesis seeks to address this knowledge gap by exploring citizen engagements with safety in smart cities beyond established notions of technology acceptance or rejection. To better understand how citizens engage with “smart urban safety” imaginaries and technologies, I first review how safety is (not) addressed in smart city discourses and practices in and around the Dutch city of Rotterdam, before presenting three empirical case studies in which Dutch citizens express their perceptions, experiences, and reactions to their emerging “smart” urban environment. In the first of these empirical case studies, citizens of Rotterdam react to speculative smart urban safety scenarios in semi-structured interviews. The second study adopts a form of instruction-based walking through various spaces in Rotterdam, drawing participants’ attention to smart urban safety surveillance. The third empirical study analyzes the eruption of widespread controversy in the Netherlands around the fifth generation of mobile telecommunications (5G), in which citizens organize against smart city infrastructure and vision-making by a coalition of government actors and telecommunications corporations. Together, these studies provide novel insights into a variety of citizen engagements with smart urban safety imaginaries and technologies, demonstrating various possibilities to anchor smart city critique democratically in the lived experiences of citizens.