Edgelands Institute Fellow 2023

Delphine Dogot has been appointed Fellow for 2023 at the Edgelands Institute working on Smart Cities, Surveillance and Digital Technology. :

Smart cities have been conceptualized through a series of aspirational ideas such as efficiency or sustainability. Less visible perhaps, but nonetheless central, security is one of the main drives for the development of smart city infrastructures: security as a goal, as an aspirational state, and as a mode of governance. My research explores the relations between the security agenda and risk management practices in developing digital and regulatory tools and their effects. I look at the digitalization of security in relation to the securitization of digital practices, looking at regulations and digital infrastructures together. I am particularly interested in the way security and risk management innerve global governance discourses, tools, and practices aiming at governing smart cities through data-driven governance infrastructures. Smart city as a global governance project has been instrumental in deploying global sensing infrastructures that promise to enable smart cities as secure spaces.  In most global governance projects for smart cities ( OECD, United Smart Cities, U4SSC-UNECE, UN-Habitat, UNESCO, G20 Global Smart Cities Alliance, etc.), risk management is ubiquitous as a mode of thinking about problems and solutions. On top of rules-based frameworks, risk-based governance comes with a focus on prevention, prediction, and real-time monitoring that embeds sensing, surveillance, and assessment as core functions of technolegal assemblages. Regulations, digital infrastructures, and their interfaces are conceived through the lens of risk management, its dynamics, and aesthetics. But what does it do to governance and to the urban social contract to think about governance through a security agenda and its risk management toolkit? What effects do the technolegal assemblages of smart cities have on shaping governable subjects (individuals, communities, spaces)?  How is a risk profile governed, how does it relate to notions such as a legal subject or citizen?