2019 Bonnycastle Lecture

Thu. Sep. 19 07:00 PM - Thu. Sep. 19 09:00 PM
Location: Convocation Hall

What makes a city smart?

Dr. Vincent Mosco (Professor Emeritus, Queen's University) takes on this question by describing, challenging, and offering democratic alternatives to the view that the answer begins and ends with technology.

In the wake of the 2008 global financial meltdown, corporations converged on cities around the world to sell technology, harvest valuable data, and deepen the private governance of urban life. They partnered with governments to promise what on the surface look like unalloyed benefits to city dwellers: safer streets, cleaner air, more efficient transportation, instant communication for all, and algorithms that take governance out of the hands of flawed human beings.

Another story lies beneath that surface. Technology-driven smart cities deepen surveillance, shift urban governance to private companies, shrink democracy, create a hacker’s paradise, and hasten the coming of catastrophic climate change.

In this lecture, Dr. Mosco makes that argument that people make cities smart, that human governance still matters, and that genuinely intelligent cities start with a vibrant democracy, a commitment to public space, and to citizen control over technology. To make this happen, we need to understand the technologies, the organizations, and the mythologies that power the global smart cities movement, as well as the growing resistance to the technology-driven city.