Finding safety in the smart city: A discourse analysis with strategic implications

Abstract

As the concept of the smart city gains attention among academic, industry and bureaucratic circles, policymakers and their partners are exploring its powers in many domains of city management. The city of Rotterdam (The Netherlands) is no exception, taking up the mantle of digitised governance with great fervour. However, urban safety management, there and everywhere else, remains seriously underrepresented as one such domain of application. This is a problem, since safety and its management pre-eminently bring out the most pressing ethical aspects of data-driven technologies (such as matters of privacy and social justice). To work towards a solution, we review the academic literature around smart cities and safety in general, analyse the commercial and policy discourses informing smart city initiatives around Rotterdam specifically, and take a look at some actual ‘smart’ urban safety practices in the city, which are not publicly qualified as such. In light of these analyses, we argue for a systematic and strategic integration of safety into the smart cities conversation in order to foster a more transparent, deliberate and therefore more democratically legitimate smart city.