Governmentality and urban control

Since the 1950s digital technologies have been used by governments in the global North for the purposes of managing populations and delivering services. Over time, with the development of more sophisticated hardware and software, and the creation of the internet, the use of digital technologies for the purposes of governance has expanded in scope and depth. This has included the use of computation to monitor, manage and govern urban infrastructures and systems (Mitchell, 1995; Graham and Marvin, 1996). From the late 2000s, networked digital technologies that algorithmically produce, manage, analyse and act on streams of big data to augment and mediate the operation and governance of urban systems and life were branded as smart city technologies (Townsend, 2013). Such technologies include: city operating systems, integrated control rooms, coordinated emergency management systems, intelligent transport systems, smart energy grids, smart lighting and parking, sensor networks, building management systems, social and locative media, and city apps. A number of scholars have argued that a key transformative effect created through the adoption of smart city technologies is the reconfiguring of urban governmentality and the practices of governance (Kitchin and Dodge, 2011; Braun, 2014; Gabrys, 2014; Klauser et al., 2014; Vanolo, 2014; Davies, 2015; Sadowski and Pasquale, 2015; Luque-Ayala and Marvin, 2016; Krivy, 2018). The general conclusion is that algorithmic forms of governance are producing a shift from disciplinary forms of governmentality towards social control.