Madrid´s Mayor, Manuela Carmena, makes a speech on Sunday, May 24, 2015. AP Photo/Paul White. All rights reserved.
The smart city model has become extremely influential
throughout the world in the last decade. But this model, based on centralised
management and the commercialisation of citizen's information, is now falling
apart. It doesn't stop there. All of the practices, narratives and methods that
relate to 'data' and 'city' are beginning to point in the opposite
direction. The research-action
symposium data
for the common good, held in the Medialab Prado in Madrid, is reinventing the
management of such data from a non-centralised perspective.
Following Edward Snowden's revelations,
cryptography has become the latest trend in this new era, which is simultaneously
reclaiming transparency for the public and privacy for individuals. What's
more, for the first time ever, the ecosystem of the commons – collectively
owned resources which are accessible to all members of a society – is beginning
to relate directly to democracy. So what would democracy of the commons be
like? How could commons technology improve participation in the city?
Democratic
Cities: commons technology and the right to a democratic city, organised by D-CENT and the City Council at the MediaLab Prado and the Reina Sofia Museum (MNCARS), was an opportunity to reflect on how to make the democratic system
more in-sync with collective aspirations. The Democratic Cities event is worth
studying for many reasons, from the guests to the content of the programmes
featured. It brought together three aspects of 'the commons' ecosystem which do
not usually blend together easily: the digital commons, which is waging a war
on mass surveillance; the urban commons, which opens up the city to its
citizens; and the commons based on democratic participation. It seems that the
symbolic framework of democratic cities is being transformed into a common
space, within which different ways of life and political visions of the commons
coexist.
The
commons and participation
Following the event in Madrid, the new
Democratic Commons Network was formed, made up of activists, academics, social
movements and institutional technicians. The network will help share experiences,
coordinate efforts, and support the implementation of new democratic innovations
in democratic cities. The DemoCommons network which was launched on July 5,
aims to build "a completely democratic society in all aspects, driven by
possibilities for collaboration and work (digital and on-site)". Although
it has yet to be fully defined, the method proposed by the DemoCommons marks a
new direction: "creating, opening up and sharing organisational,
technological, methodological, and practical models, legal and narrative
material, and, in general, accessible communal resources that bring us towards
new forms of democracies based on the collaborative participation of
everyone."
The Democratic Cities event, common ground
of DemoComunes, was an authentic inventory of practices, methods, technology
and innovative thought aimed at reforming and redeveloping democracy. Working to
decentralise it. An inventory of the commons which, by empowering citizens,
regulates democracy. By supporting collective intelligence, it opens it up.
Democratic cities, understood as communal and accessible, is becoming a
symbolic brand which is displacing, perhaps permanently, the 'smart city' and
the obsolete politics of its multinational patents. Moreover, the democratic
commons reveals that it is possible to have political thought woven around the
commons and its corresponding activities and practices, generating a salient
feedback between institutions and civil society. The democratic commons is a world
vision which combines thought and practices: it is a political vision that goes
beyond theoretical frameworks and draws on engaged digital tools.
How do we measure and relate the diverse accounts,
forms and imaginaries of the democratic commons? Where do the institutional and
introductory practices related with direct or deliberative democracies, such as
decide.madrid.es, come from? The development
of the Spanish 15M or the Icelandic financial crisis protests in 2008, mark the
importance of taking squares, which began with the eruption of the Arab Spring.
Democracy based on a topology of distributed networks, endorsed by the
movement-party Wikipolitica in Mexico, Iceland's participatory platforms and
the direct democracy practiced in some "councils of change" (in
Madrid, Barcelona, Oviedo or Coruña for example), is just one practise to have
resulted from the occupied squares in 2011. It is not the only achievement, nor
is there a direct correspondence between the two elements, but the mantra which has
arisen from these occupied squares demanding political distribution is
beginning to become a reality.
The influence of collective protests like these,
strengthened through the presence of accessible free software in the taken
squares – such as the protestors who camped in the Puerta del Sol square in
Madrid – has been especially
relevant for the development of decide.madrid.es, an open government portal in
Madrid. It is not a coincidence that the #DemocracyLab session in the
Democratic Cities event in Madrid used both hackathons and datathons of
collective work to improve the digital tools for direct democracy. For example,
consider the Consul app for the open government portal in Madrid on which the decide.madrid.es is based. These are not so
different to the collective work carried out in the occupied squares.
Urban
Betas: the relational city
The urban commons is also a vision for the
world which fuses together citizen practices and political thought. The
effervescence of citizen interaction with public spaces – with Madrid and other
Spanish cities being global epicentres – can be understood by the term "relational
goods", coined for the first time by the philosopher Martha Nussbaum in
1986. These relational goods could be defined as the "relational
constituents of the good life"; intrinsically valuable human experiences.
The conversation with a waiter that makes us return to the bar. A shared communal
bookshelf in a cafe. Passing a neighbour taking his kids to school. The welcoming
chime of voices in the square.
"Relational goods" are formed
by intangible things such as trust, reciprocity or friendship. They are
co-consumed and co-produced simultaneously by the interaction of individuals. In
this world of important public relationships, competition gives way to
collaboration. Sharing is the DNA of this new ecosystem of goods, relationships
and interdependent reciprocities.
There is a strong correspondence between
public relationships and space: shared spaces, relational spaces, online
spaces. This notion fits in with the concept of the relational
city as explained by María Naredo. The relational cities model is forged with
intersubjective ties and woven with layers of affection: "the 'relational'
model proposes greater security in cities, thanks to improved public
associations, relationships and dialogue. In this model, security is grounded
in the recreation of strong social ties. Not avoiding the streets, but doing the
opposite: repopulating cities by strengthening relationships, with both our neighbours
and strangers. Thus, we can trust that should something occur in public,
someone will lend us a helping hand, whether it's the neighbour from five doors
away or the shopkeeper below." And if that weren't enough, the relational
city is also to be found in the mini-'manifesto' written by Enric Ruiz-Geli, which
looks for bridges, multi-directional relations and connections between the
inhabitants.
Just a few years ago, facing the brutal neoliberal
attack on urban spaces, public space was considered an unbreakable ideology.
Today, public space aspires to be communal space. A space belonging to everyone
-– not to anyone in particular – it is an atmosphere and norm where everyone can
breathe. Communal space – the very fabric of relational goods – is ceasing to
intuit urban prototypes, incomplete and collective, like those that the
Emerging Cities in
Chile, or the Campo de Cebeda in Madrid. Communal spaces live on in the
last assemblies of humans on the planet (the occupied squares, protests in the
streets) or in processes like the Ciudad Escuela in Madrid, which incentivise
urban mobilisation built with free licences, citizen participation and open
code processes.
Consequently, also featured in the Democratic
Cities meeting, was the Urban Betas session which brought together the
projects, stories, experiences and digital tools of diverse collective projects
and institutions including the Todo Por La Praxis, the Red de Espacios
Ciudadanos (REC), Territoris Oblidats o the Vivero de Iniciativas Ciudadanas.
The city, as a collective political subject and a manifestation of
relationships, is beginning to communicate with the digital commons. It is
enriching the world vision of the democratic communes, overflowing digital
platforms with processes, stories and practices.
The open, collaborative city has a double
heart: digital and analogical. It can be a synergy of hackers and town planners,
of kids and pensioners who build the city together. The open, communal city is
a polyphony of local, community-run cinemas (such as the User cinema in
Madrid), and of self-managed power stations in the suburbs (such as Orcasitas,
also in Madrid), networks of allotments, urban amenities which are built by the
neighbours, the true architects of the 21st century. As the researcher Ted
Nelson would say, our bodies are the hardware, our processes the software. So,
territory (the urban commons) is completing and creating a new meaning for the
participatory digital aspect of the democratic commons.
Human
rights by design
The third feature highlighted in Democratic
Cities meet in Madrid was that of the digital commons. More specifically, this
refers to the new battlefront that has been launched to counter mass spying, which
is often used by huge multinational businesses and governments. There was a
world that existed before Edward Snowden's revelations. There is also a
'Snowden era', in which we are currently totally immersed, marked by the right
to filtering and transparency. Cryptography, the variable which guarantees the
right to digital privacy, is another of the common elements of Democratic
cities. We will never have equality if large, elite companies practice mass
spying on citizens. The Brazilian sociologist Sérgio Anadeu states that the
world needs a "human right by design" technology which guarantees
human rights. Following Edward Snowden's revelations, which showed that some of
the most important technological multinationals are accomplices to mass spying conducted
by the USA's National Security Agency, privacy has become of the fundamental
human rights of our times. A human right for which, until now, there was no
international protection. Next to privacy, we find another key concept;
transparency. Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, a Jimi Hendrix of our era,
sums up the relationship between privacy and transparency very simply: "more
privacy for the weak, more transparency for the powerful". What is the
connection between these three features of the commons (democratic, urban,
digital)? How exactly can these commons, with their world visions, practice and
political thought, exist within the symbolic framework of democratic cities?
Aggregator
frameworks, communal practice
The development of the Smart City concept offers
a didactic example. After marketing itself as a paradigm city in which
technology aims to solve communal problems, the smart city has become a common
symbolic framework for everyone who wants to improve cities through the
implementation of innovative technology. As criticism of both this model and
the conduct of the large multinationals based on smart cities heightened, many
social collectives, researchers and town planners began to talk about "smart
citizens". To talk about smart citizens is essentially to accept the smart
city: to critique and discuss what is intelligent and what isn't, but not to
forget this framework completely. The equipment used by technological multinationals
has no problem in accepting the narrative debate in the symbolic frameworks
built specifically for it. After initial criticism of the smart city, the
market launched a new narrative: "smart citizens", thus reappropriating
the constructive criticism and transforming it into its own.
The market, cognitive capitalism and
governments are essentially bleeding hacker ethics dry, in addition to the collaborative
or culture lab, without truly understanding them. Opportunism seems to rub salt
into the wound in the case of large companies like Microsoft or Oracle, hard
copyright enforcers that play with open figures, dressed up as sponsors of the
hacker or smart citizens. The same thing happens in government: cities governed
by vertical parties and politicians, driven by Capitalism, creating spaces with
hacker narratives. The local council in Rio de Janeiro– who jumped on the
bandwagon of real estate speculation, evictions, the creative city of cognitive
capitalism and the technological control of the Smart City– created the
Lab.rio. The narrative lab of citizen laboratories and their subnarratives
(citizen innovation for example) are also fashionable. And they are started by
the people/ institutions that do not know how to work online nor know hacker
ethics.
To counteract the machines of fake symbolic
frameworks and the mafia of stolen narratives, other brands such as the rebellious
city are attempting to get a look in. But will such combative and anti-establishment
frameworks such as rebellious cities actually be able to enter the system, the market,
the mass media and the citizenry? Will it serve to create essentially antagonistic
frameworks?
Living
in democratic cities
The Democratic Cities event was more than
just a coming together of presentations, seminars and meetings, it left a very
important legacy: a neutral symbolic framework which continues to develop, made
up of communal practices. Because imaginary holes, empty narratives, and marketing
which misappropriates the voice of the citizens, do not serve anyone.
Democratic cities without the commons could become an empty framework that the
market will not take long in filling. Consequently, citizen participation, to
ensure it doesn't wind up as nothing, must function in accordance with
decentralised internet, an online commons, from below. Moreover, this is why
the international democratic cities conference picked out a new common sense of
democracy: pro transparency filtering, cryptography, peer-to-peer technology,
mechanisms for direct democracy, more dialogue, institutional hearing and civic
hacking. The framework for Democratic Cities, working in accordance with the democracy
of the commons, is another thing. It means cryptography and the right to
filtering, privacy and participation, open networks and collective
intelligence, the right to a city and the democracy of the common good.
Democratic cities might dream with the ideologies of rebellious cities, but will
configure in an aggregate space in which the whole world, and not just those
with ideological affinity, can participate.
Yes, the system wants to dispute the framework
of democratic cities; what enters, what is debated, what is proposed. But it
will find it difficult if the operative system and the logic of democratic
cities follows the path set by the democratic commons, urban commons, and new
conflicts surrounding digital commons which all featured in the democratic
cities conference in Madrid. It will be difficult to dispute such an
incompatible symbolic framework while citizenship participation is encouraged by
people such as Raquel Rolik, ex court reporter from the UN who participated in
the meeting in Madrid. "The real storm destroying the world today is
financial capital," Raquel stated in his conference. So, we will continue to
pave the way for democratic cities, living and developing the framework in
which not everything can fit, not least neoliberalism. Anyone who remains
outside of democratic cities, who doesn't accept their open rationale oriented
towards the common good, will have one name: the enemy of democracy.
____________________________
This article has been translated from its original in Spanish by Mary Ryder, member of openDemocracy's volunteer Program