Authoritarian Smart Cities and Total Urban Surveillance

This event will officially launch the CSS/Lab and the Canada Research Chair in Critical Surveillance and Security Studies led by Dr. David Murakami-Wood and welcome Dr. Azadeh Akbari as the 2024-2026 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Global Fellow.

“Cities at the End of the World: Technology and Urbanism in an Age of Crisis”  by Dr. David Murakami-Wood

As we enter an age of crisis, characterized by climate and environmental emergency, mass migration, accelerating inequality and an ongoing global turn to authoritarianism, our imagination of the futures of cities is narrowing. We are promised smart cities for all, yet in practice, we have divided, unequal cities, full of insecurity and precarity. We live with the unresolved problems of previous waves of utopian urbanism, now compounded by the already clearly flawed and perhaps impossible promises of sustainable development and new horizons of technological innovation, typified by the shining promises of Artificial Intelligence (AI). This talk examines the place of AI in current visions of urban futures, taking examples from national plans, corporate proposals and things in-between and beyond. It argues that these visions have lost sight of genuinely collective and planetary social and ecological future-making in favour of innovation favouring the welfare and security of a very small elite.

“Authoritarian Smart Cities: A Digital Development Dilemma” by Dr. Azadeh Akbari

Technological solutions have been an integral part of development discourse since its beginning. This talk takes a brief historical look at the conceptualisation of technology in the decades of development work and the faith in technological fixes for socio-political problems. I will introduce the digital development dilemma as a concept describing the inherent dilemma carried in the core of digital development programmes: increasing efficiency, inclusion, and participation on the one hand and paving the way for digital repression, consolidation of exclusion, establishment of new forms of technological dependency, and complicating digital self-determination, on the other. The talk discusses this dilemma considering the case of authoritarian smart cities, juxtaposing the utopian picture of a future -where data-driven, citizen-centred, and just cities thrive- with the prospect of smart control and authoritarian sociotechnical imaginaries.

About the speakers

Dr. David Murakami-Wood is the Canada Research Chair in Critical Surveillance and Security Studies, a Faculty Member at the Centre for Law, Technology and Society, and a Full Professor in the Department of Criminology of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Ottawa. 

Dr. Azadeh Akbari is a Visiting Scholar and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Global Fellow at the Centre for Law, Technology and Society at the University of Ottawa. She is an Assistant Professor in Public Administration and Digital Transformation at the University of Twente, in the Netherlands and has received the European Union’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Global Fellowship for her project on Authoritarian Smart Cities.