Contesting the decision: living in (and living with) the smart city

Abstract

This paper proposes that ‘smart city’ initiatives provide a timely and pragmatic site of inquiry for legal scholarship to address the type of concerns being raised of ubiquitous computing, advances in machine decision-making and other so-called smart technologies. Delivered in two parts, I first describe the current state of smart city scholarship and explore how adopting a ‘place-sensitive’ approach might encourage legal scholarship to ground itself in the challenges faced by people situated in such an environment. Second, accepting the smart city as a site where regulation is increasingly designed into our environments and one in which there will inevitably be unresolved conflicts and tension, I continue to map this work to the body of scholarship exploring automated decision-making, data-driven policy and the algorithm by stimulating a discussion of what it might mean to protect the ability to ‘contest’ machine decision-making provided for in Article 22(3) of the EU General Data Protection Regulation 2016. Accordingly, I question whether we must also be cautious not to erode the ability to counter or exist outside of authority and tentatively provide two areas of behaviour where such a practice may prove valuable in supporting the city as a site of contestation and dissensus.