Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Butot, Vivien
• Bayerl, Petra Saskia
• Jacobs, Gabriele
• de Haan, Freek

Titel

Citizen repertoires of smart urban safety: Perspectives from Rotterdam, the Netherlands

Ist Teil von

• Technological forecasting & social change, 2020-09, Vol.158, p.120164, Article 120164

Ort / Verlag

New York: Elsevier Inc

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• •Citizens reflect dynamically on system design, technology domestication, instrumental benefits, ethical risks and civic responsibility in the context of smart urban safety.•Citizens’ accounts reflect and produce subject positions of skeptical opposition, reluctant acceptance, technological defeatism, utilitarian optimism and civic anxiety, realism and morality.•Discussions of smart urban safety generate pronounced reactions and reveal key tensions of the legitimacy of smart cities in general.•Trade-off models applied to individual technologies do not adequately capture the variety and interactions of citizen perspectives on smart urban safety.•In methodological terms, vignettes are a useful instrument for eliciting citizen perspectives on smart urban safety. This article provides empirical research about the perspectives of citizens of Rotterdam, the Netherlands, on the emergent phenomenon of ‘smart urban safety’, which advocates advanced uses of digital technologies and data for urban safety management, and is gaining currency in thinking about urban futures. While smart cities affect many dimensions of city management, applications to safety management belong to the most controversial, revealing important tensions between disparate perspectives on technology and society in the context of urban living environments. Despite their influence, the concepts of smart cities and smart urban safety are largely unknown to the public. To gain insights into citizens’ perspectives, this study uses smart urban safety vignettes to which participants are invited to respond. Using discourse analytical techniques, their interpretations of safety in the smart city are described, which center on functional designs, express lacking influence over technological developments, and reflect on benefits and risks and on their civic roles vis-à-vis technologically mediated urban safety management. Our article concludes by arguing how these findings complement, but also show limitations to traditional technology acceptance models that are as of yet dominant in research of smart urban safety specifically, and smart cities more generally.