Special issue article: Worlding smart cities: Towards global comparative research

Urban Studies 1–20 From smart to rebel city? Ó Urban Studies Journal Limited 2019 Article reuse guidelines: Worlding, provincialising sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/0042098019872119 and the Barcelona Model journals.sagepub.com/home/usj

Greig Charnock The University of Manchester, UK

Hug March Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain

Ramon Ribera-Fumaz Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain

Abstract This article examines the evolution of the ‘Barcelona Model’ of urban transformation through the lenses of worlding and provincialising urbanism. We trace this evolution from an especially dog- matic worlding vision of the smart city, under a centre-right city council, to its radical repurposing under the auspices of a municipal government led, after May 2015, by the citizens’ platform Barcelona en Comu´. We pay particular attention to the new council’s objectives to harness digital platform technologies to enhance participative democracy, and its agenda to secure technological sovereignty and digital rights for its citizens. While stressing the progressive intent of these aims, we also acknowledge the challenge of going beyond the repurposing of smart technologies so as to engender new and radical forms of subjectivity among citizens themselves; a necessary basis for any urban revolution.

Keywords citizenship, place branding, policy, politics, provincialising, technology/smart cities

Corresponding author: Greig Charnock, Department of Politics, The University of Manchester, 4.058 Arthur Lewis Building, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK. Email: [email protected] 2 Urban Studies 00(0)

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ޣ䭞䇽 ޜ≁䓛ԭǃൠᯩ૱⡼ॆǃ᭯ㆆǃ᭯⋫ǃൠᯩॆǃ、ᢰ /Ცភ෾ᐲ Received December 2018; accepted August 2019

Introduction More recently, however, Barcelona has become a referent for a radically different Long before the ascent of the smart city vision of urban governance – as the quintes- agenda, the city of Barcelona was a widely sential ‘rebel city’ (Graham, 2018; Shea acknowledged referent for global urbanism. Baird, 2015). Under the leadership of the cit- From the early 1990s onwards, the so-called izens’ electoral platform Barcelona en Comu´ ‘Barcelona Model’ encapsulated the sup- (‘Barcelona in Common’, henceforth posed virtues of top-down strategic urban BComu´) since May 2015, the city’s leader- planning; the ability of city planners to adapt ship has been touted by the international left urban policy according to changes in the as an example of the reinvigoration of wider landscape of inter-urban competition municipal feminist-socialism in times of cri- and dominant understandings of urban sis, popular anxiety and the draw of right- growth; and citizen-focused urban policies wing populism (Russell, 2019; Shea Baird, (Garcia-Ramon and Albet, 2000; McNeill, 2017), and not merely in terms of its ‘pro- 1999; Marshall, 2004). In the 2000s, how- gressive local policies’ in crucial areas such ever, the Barcelona Model underwent a as housing and energy provision (Roth transformation. In the context of the global et al., 2018: 133; Rubio-Pueyo, 2017). fascination with the ‘knowledge-based econ- Rather, it has also been heralded as a signifi- omy’, and with the determinants of urban cant experiment in radical democracy competitiveness in an ever more ‘digital age’, (Gessen, 2018), in which the smart city successive local governments pursued more agenda in particular is being fundamentally entrepreneurial strategies in which the inter- re-purposed for citizens through the ests of global corporations, financiers and advancement of the right to information and real estate developers seemed very clearly to guarantees to open, transparent and partici- eclipse those of the city’s residents. This tra- patory decision-making through new digital jectory only seemed to be complete after and platform technologies (Postill, 2016). 2011, when – in the context of a profound For the critical smart city scholars Cardullo and protracted economic and social crisis – and Kitchin (2019: 11), Barcelona has today the city’s municipal government committed become the referent for ‘presently attempt- itself to making Barcelona the world’s lead- ing to formulate and implement a different ing smart city (March and Ribera-Fumaz, vision of a smart city and smart citizenship’, 2016). Charnock et al. 3 and for its attempt to ‘repoliticise the smart practice of smart city transformation; from city and to shift its creation and control a corporate-driven, top-down model to a away from private interests and the state citizen-centric, bottom-up one. toward grassroots, civic movements and Our contribution begins with a brief ela- social innovation’ (original emphasis). boration on what we find to be most instruc- While the case of Barcelona may stand tive about the worlding and provincialising out from a range of other examples in which literatures, as well as some preliminary com- the corporate-friendly, technologically deter- ments about why it is appropriate to adopt minist and essentially neoliberal vision of the ‘rebel city’ concept as a heuristic for urban transformation has been questioned reflection on the recent repurposing of the (Hollands, 2015; March, 2018), we suggest Barcelona Model of urban transformation. that it is worthy of deeper critical reflection We then turn, in the second section, to and elaboration. This, after all, is the intent reflect upon the version of the Model that of this special issue which, rather than focus- was explicitly aligned with the theory and ing on the politics of ‘actually existing’ smart practice of smart city transformation before city projects, asks critical questions of domi- 2015. We do accept that this was an espe- nant epistemological forms of knowing cially doctrinaire and dogmatic version, the smart city. In drawing upon the two which explains to some extent why its subse- approaches of ‘worlding’ and ‘provincialis- quent repudiation by BComu´has attracted ing’ to reflect on our own experiences of over so much attention (see, for instance, Kitchin a decade’s worth of fieldwork in Barcelona et al., 2019). We also make clear, in the third (including interviews with activists and section, that the ‘actually existing’ smart city municipal department leaders, and participa- in Barcelona was by 2015 already a product tion in initiatives aimed at repurposing the not only of worlding flows but also of a pro- smart city), our contribution explains how liferation of socially innovative practices and the Barcelona case evinces that: forms of contentious politics within the city itself. Seen in this light, it becomes less easy worldings that emerge from subordinated to narrate the arrival of the BComu´-led experiences, cutting across distinctive loci of council and its citizen-focused agenda as a enunciation, can (indeed) be productive of clean rupture with the smart city status quo alternative theoretical perspectives with the ante. We then examine the content of two potential to speak back against those theories important initiatives that have been at the underwriting global urbanism, thereby decen- centre of the new municipal government’s tring current geographies of knowledge and approach to repurposing digital technologies theory production. (Sheppard et al., 2013: 897; emphasis in original) for the citizen under the rubric of demo- cratic and participative ‘techno-politics’ and However, heeding the suspicion of any emer- ‘technological sovereignty’. We highlight the gent urbanism that draws upon or makes progressive intent of these projects, but con- ‘universalist’ claims, as well as the caution- clude the discussion by posing critical ques- ing by Henri Lefebvre (a primary influence tions of them. on Roy, 2011) against being uncritical of forms of ‘urbanism of the left’ (Lefebvre, On worlding and provincialising 2003: 163), we also want to resist taking at the rebel city face value the evidence that Barcelona’s recent experience signals a straightforward The two concepts of ‘worlding’ and ‘provin- sea change in the conceptualisation and cialising’ are gaining traction among 4 Urban Studies 00(0) researchers of planning, urbanism and urba- 2015. Once criticised both for being ‘over- nisation, while also being subject to multiple referenced’ among worlding urbanisms – and, at times, dissonant – interpretations, (McCann et al., 2013: 582), and also as the foregroundings and modes of analytical paragon of how strategic planning based on deployment (see the Introduction to this spe- stridently entrepreneurial forms of urbanism cial issue). It is worth, therefore, us provid- leads to ‘opportunities to pocket monopoly ing a brief explanation of what we find most rents galore’ and lures ‘more and more relevant and instructive in the two literatures homogenising multinational commodifica- for our own research on the Barcelona tion in its wake’ (Harvey, 2012: 104–105), Model. this repurposed Barcelona Model now circu- Having previously drawn on the work of lates as a referent for those looking for Henri Lefebvre in order to critique how ‘transformative political mobilisation to cre- representational models for knowledge- ate . a humanising urbanism’ (Kitchin based urban transformation have been culti- et al., 2019). vated and operationalised in Barcelona, even For Kitchin and other critical urban before the advent of the smart city agenda scholars, this new Barcelona Model of (Charnock and Ribera-Fumaz, 2011), we ‘smart citizenship’ offers a re-envisioning are especially interested in how Roy (2011) ‘that seems more grounded in the hopes and also draws on Lefebvre to elaborate her own politics of the ‘‘right to the city’’ agenda’ appraisal of how urban planning is impli- (Kitchin et al., 2019: 17); an agenda influ- cated in the production of space; a process enced by another of Lefebvre’s ideas determined (but not wholly so) by capital (Lefebvre, 1996). While the worlding litera- accumulation, and mediated in large part by tures together recognise that ‘cities are rife ‘the signs and symbols deployed by experts with worlding projects, each vying to be rea- as they seek to control and order space’ lised and each having different chances of (Roy, 2011: 8, 9). Roy highlights how success’ (Baker and Ruming, 2015: 66), the experts’ modelling increasingly relies on right to the city demand has become some- ‘referenced urbanism’ (see also McCann thing of a rallying slogan for the new inter- et al., 2013), which too often submits real national municipalist movement (Gilmartin, places and labouring bodies to the violence 2018). This is understandable: focusing on of abstraction as soon as the concretisation the right to the city as an explicit ‘horizon’ of technocratically conceived planning mod- might indeed ‘clear a path’, to use a couple els sets in motion the bulldozing and dispos- of Lefebvre’s most oft-used phrases, through sessions too often associated with planned the stifling and disjunctured melee of ‘critical urbanisation (Roy, 2011: 10).1 But Roy also thought, reformist ideology, [and] leftist explains how the circulation of models is opposition’ (Lefebvre, 2003: 161) induced by ‘complex’ and ‘disjunctured’: referencing can vying forms of urbanism. The problem, be both conformist and progressive in con- however, is that ‘the right to the city is an tent; it can represent the results of urban empty signifier. Everything depends on who transformations partially or selectively; and, gets to fill it with meaning’; as such, ‘it can consequently, it can provoke openings for never be an end in itself’ (Harvey, 2012: xv, debate about the questions ‘who plans?’ and xviii). Critical urban scholars should, there- ‘for whom do they plan?’ (Roy, 2011: 12). fore, be attentive to how the right to the city These questions are especially pertinent to rhetoric is endowed with meaning as it is the recent experience of the repurposing of adopted by circulating models; they should the smart city agenda in Barcelona since question, in particular, the opacity of the Charnock et al. 5 category ‘citizenship’ as it figures in various inscribe rights, but by no means guarantee right to the city manifestos, especially when enactment on a universal and inclusive basis the rights attached to citizenship – and of (Lemanski, 2019: 10). But even in contexts ‘smart citizenship’ especially – sit all too eas- where there is a palpable and widespread ily with those of the productive and juridical zeal for such projects as distributing citizen subject upon which the reproduction of capi- sensing kits to monitor noise pollution, or tal through production and exchange for platform-enabled participatory democ- depends.2 In other words, it is always worth racy among citizens, a further question can asking whether a worlding project claiming be posed: does the use of digital platform to advance the right to the city at least technologies to ‘include’ citizens merely acknowledges the class relations between cultivate a form of governmentality, or capital and labour inherent to in the produc- ‘smartmentality’ (Vanolo, 2014), in which a tion of space (even if it is also recognised great many citizens gain fulfilment from that there are limits to what might be done playing a functional role within the smart to transform these relations at the local city while continuing about their erstwhile scale), as well as the struggle for reimagined daily lives as entrepreneurial economic – forms of citizenship; and the intimate rela- and docile political – subjects (Datta, 2018: tionship between these two struggles. A city 411–413)? In focusing on ‘environmental- that adopted a project that went some way ity’, or on ‘governance through the milieu’, towards defining the right to the city in this Gabrys (2016: 191) certainly finds this to way, and with it redefining the idea of the beadefiningfeatureofagreatmanysmart urban commons on the basis of the collec- city design proposals, wherein ‘participa- tive retention of value by those who produce tion involves computational responsiveness it (Harvey, 2012: 87), would truly epitomise and is coextensive with actions of monitor- the ‘rebel city’. ing and managing one’s relations to envir- The provincialisation literature yields a onments’ (Gabrys, 2016: 196), and to the further line of questioning worth asking of degree that such proposals rely on citizens particular worlding projects, and even those as ‘ambividuals: ambient and malleable that purport to re-centre and, to some urban operators that are expressions of extent, re-signify the meaning of citizenship. computer environments’ (Gabrys, 2016: This questioning is focused not on the terms 201). of citizenship, nor on the rights of capitalists In what follows, we want to pose similar to command the production and appropria- questions of the Barcelona case; questions tion of value in the city, but on the political that resonate with a concern about leftist, subjectivity of the citizen herself; more pre- circulating worlding projects that purport to cisely, on the ‘anthropological production’ reactivate citizens and their rights: namely, of that subjectivity (Dardot and Laval, 2017: whether new techno-political imaginaries 12) as digital technologies become so integral and practices necessarily guarantee relief to everyday life and, importantly, as citizens from, or control over, the production of exercise their claims to rights through the space (in which flows of capital play a deter- internet (Isin and Ruppert, 2015). Here, the minate role); and whether they awaken problem can be initially posed in terms of among citizens a sense of their own produc- whether and how citizens’ digital rights are tive and political subjectivity that runs coun- both inscribed and enacted in specific con- ter to the reproduction of entrepreneurial, texts. Smart citizenship projects, like those docile and ambividual conceptions of we allude to above, can certainly claim to citizenship. 6 Urban Studies 00(0)

The apogee of smart urbanism in follow logically from the technology’ Barcelona: The ontologisation of (Lefebvre, 2008: 149). Lefebvre gave this the city species of ideologue – enthralled by the power of robots, by ‘the superiority of As explained in more detail elsewhere machines’ and by the capacity of computers (March and Ribera-Fumaz, 2018), the smart to learn autonomously from their environ- city imaginary was fully embraced by ment and therefore to programme the urban Barcelona’s city council with the arrival of – a name of its own: the cybernantrope Mayor Xavier Trias, of the centre-right (Lefebvre, 1972: 164–165). Converge` ncia i Unio´coalition, in 2011. This If ever there were a vision of smart city vision was characterised by a particularly transformation that portrayed its ideological insincere and vacuous notion of the citizen character, it is that which came from within as a social constituent. The understanding of the Trias administration: ‘We imagined the urbanism and planning as ‘worlding prac- city as a mobile phone: why can’t we have a tice’ helps us to understand the degree to city that works with an operating software which the Trias administration saw fit to based on standards that interact with the convert to and preach the smart city gospel, hardware (whatever it is) and software (any and the particular significance of the cate- app)?’ (Josep Ramon Ferrer, former director gory of ‘the citizen’ within it. And Roy’s of Barcelona’s smart city strategy, quoted in (2011) recourse to the critical theory of Carrasco et al., 2017: 1). The mobile phone, Henri Lefebvre is instructive, here. Lefebvre as Arboleda (2019) notes, is perhaps the deemed urbanism to be ideological precisely ‘flagship technological artefact of the fourth because it aspires (consciously or naively) to machine age’; it is, as Aschoff (2015) argues, ‘control the process of urbanisation and ‘both a machine and a commodity. Its pro- urban practice and subject [that process] to duction is a map of global power, logistics, its order’ (Lefebvre, 2003: 151). Lefebvre and exploitation. Its use shapes and reflects also expressed grave concern about what he the perpetual confrontation between the termed ‘information ideology’ and those totalising drives of capital and the resistance who would conceive of ‘computerised daily of the rest of us.’ Aside from the unfortunate life’: the vision of an ‘electronic Agora and association of the smart city with this arte- the disturbing project of a technological fact, the ‘city as software’ vision also encap- extension of the ‘‘audit’’. capable of being sulates the somewhat ‘cybernantropic’ extended to political and police control of notion that urban processes can – and spaces much vaster than the enterprise’ should – be ontologised.3 In urban settings, (Lefebvre, 2008: 148–149). As several other ontology engineering is said to be able to critical commentaries have argued, as a form assist in the reconciliation of ‘interoperabil- of instrumental reason and ‘computational ity and cooperation issues between data- urbanism’ the imaginary of the smart city is bases with urban information from different especially ideological (Cugurullo, 2018; sources’ (Martins et al., 2012: 507). The Marvin and Luque-Ayala, 2017). As an allure of rendering urban processes and data increasingly alluring and hegemonic form of machine-processable is therefore enhanced urbanism, it has come to play an active role once the ‘data inoperability barrier’ is trans- in the worlding of cities even while ‘these cended. That is, once any given city can be ideologues . refuse to concede they are pre- reduced to its most generic readable attri- senting, or representing, a tendentious politi- butes, and on that basis can be subjected to cal project. To them, the project seems to surveillance and control by means of the Charnock et al. 7 collection and processing of information 205): that is, in a thoroughly depoliticised (Sadowski, 2017). As Lefebvre (2003: 161) form. In this, the citizen herself becomes a notes, ‘the urbanist amasses data and infor- mere component of a taxonomised subsys- mation’. The instrumental appeal of being tem within a system: ‘the citizen, rather than able to read and control the city as a data- a political subject, becomes an operational base is considerable, whether seen from a component of the infrastructure’ (Luque- logistics, mobility, policing or environmental Ayala and Marvin, 2016: 205). management point of view. Add to this the As noted above, the ontologisation of the appeal of commercialising interoperable smart city, with its focus on standardisation techniques of reading the city and it is and interoperability, lends itself to market- unsurprising that city authorities and ICT ability. To this end, and in addition to the corporations the world over have sought to development of CityOS, the Trias govern- co-develop and market different versions of ment had also made considerable inroads an ‘urban operating system’, or Urban OS. into positioning Barcelona as the prime As Marvin and Luque-Ayala (2017) have international referent for smart city transfor- already observed, Urban OSs are generally mation through its leading role in the City built on exclusionary and depoliticising Protocol Society: ‘a delivery-focused net- assumptions that foreclose exterior chal- work of global cities that, in partnership lenges to their ontology, and which are func- with industry, research agencies and other tionally resistant to exterior sources of organisations’, expressly sought to produce innovation, creativity or problems that can- common technological and industry-based not be couched ‘in the necessary language of standards, technologies and solutions; data’ (Shelton, 2017: 27). ‘recognised and certified projects and poli- One such example, not discussed by cies of reference for cities, tested in cities Marvin and Luque-Ayala, was the CityOS that can be used as examples for other cit- developed in Barcelona as a joint venture ies’; and produced a database of indicators between the Trias administration and a (Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2012b: 7). It handful of corporations (Accenture, Triada sought, with ‘worlding’ intent, to make Telecom, Sinovia and Cofely Espan˜a) and Barcelona the standard referent or model at unveiled in April 2015, one month before the centre of a profitable endeavour to gen- the election of the BComu´-led city council. erate and circulate a standardised, interoper- It was formulated in accordance with the able ontology that could provide a ‘common administration’s bold vision that ‘all of the language’ with which to describe the anat- cities of the world want to be the protagonist omy of a city (Flint, 2012), whatever and [of smart city transformation] . a unique wherever the specific urban context. opportunity to apply solutions in which By 2011, tangible investments in con- Barcelona can be the laboratory and the structing new smart buildings and transport leader at the same time’ (Ajuntament de infrastructure, and installing cutting-edge Barcelona, 2012a: 3). As a form of ontology energy-efficient smart water cooling and engineering, and much like other examples heating systems for the city’s 22@ of representations of digital urbanism that Knowledge District, had already attracted reduce the city to a ‘logistical exercise’, considerable international investment and CityOS suggests that the standardised city recognition. Under the Trias administration, can be read and programmed irrespective of a range of additional concrete initiatives ‘changing organisation, ownership or orien- were undertaken to make Barcelona the tation’ (Luque-Ayala and Marvin, 2016: world’s leading smart city and, in the words 8 Urban Studies 00(0) of Barcelona’s then-Chief Architect Vicente recognise the ubiquity and heterogeneity Guallart (2012: 31), an international referent of different and differential representations for ‘a new model of networked cities, with of urban space and spatial practices, in self-sufficient and productive neighbour- the context of a deepening crisis of social hoods at human speed, within a hyper- reproduction. connected zero emissions city’. Strategic changes in the municipal administration of infrastructure, housing and environment Provincialising smart urbanism in were quickly implemented, creating a single Barcelona department – Ha` bitat Urba` – charged with Smart urbanism, we can safely assume, is as bringing city governance in line with ICT- likely to be frustrated by contradictions – ‘the and internet-focused processes. ICT and power and radicality of the ragged and the internet topologies were made the key order- irreducible’ (Merrifield, 2009: 939) – and polit- ing principles of a smart city that would ical struggles waged in provincial spaces over become the ‘economic engine for the cre- ‘the way in which technique is used, who uses ation of wealth and welfare for its citizens’ it, and for whom’ (Lefebvre, 2008: 152) as any (Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2012a: 2). other form of urbanism. Even in the midst of Contractual agreements were struck in 2012 the transformation of Barcelona from the with the likes of Cisco, Schneider Electric, 1990s until the advent of smart city invest- Suez and Endesa to develop several local ments, the city has always been a site of local projects and pilots, principally in the areas resistance against – and experimentation with of infrastructure, sensing and operation sys- alternatives to – top-down, strategic urbanisa- tems/software. Such was the additional tion and the corollary processes of gentrifica- progress made by the Trias administration tion and speculative real estate development by 2015 that, according to a Fortune report, (for example, Lo´pez Espinosa, 2016; Mansilla Barcelona was ‘the most wired city in the Lo´pez, 2015; Pascual-Molinas and Ribera- world’ with a smart city agenda that, at that Fumaz, 2009). The same was true for the time, ‘seemed unstoppable’ (Walt, 2015). period of smart city transformation instigated The resulting ‘actually existing’ smart city in earnest by the Trias administration after project that was realised prior to 2015 was, 2011; to the extent that by the end of the lat- however, just as characterised by ‘local vari- ter’s tenure in office, the ‘actually existing’ ety’ as any other example that has been ‘co- smart city in Barcelona amounted to a com- produced by its local, national and interna- plex array of those flagship public–private tional context’ and that has arisen through projects outlined above along with other nota- ‘messy social, technical and political pro- ble alternative economy and digital social cesses, rather than [being] determined by . innovation initiatives instigated outside of the policy discourse’ (Cowley and Caprotti, auspices of the city council and only subse- 2018: 429). It was, as Lefebvre might put it, quently co-opted or subsumed within the a produced smart space: determined and smart city Barcelona brand. mediated by multi-scalar, and contradictory, A study by Castells and Hlebik (2017: material and ideological flows, processes 162) attests to how, by 2011, Barcelona was and forms. As with all forms of urbanism, already ‘one of the most socially innovative the smart Barcelona Model was also neces- urban environments in the world’. They sarily characterised by important ‘blind document the extent to which there was an fields’ in its comprehension of urban reality explosion of alternative and counter- (Lefebvre, 2003; Roy, 2011). It failed to cultural social exchange, food production Charnock et al. 9 and reproductive care practices within the the PAH is that it ‘enacts anti-evictions acti- city: ‘embryos of a new economy, out of the vism as a collective social practice, not a pri- necessity of replacing dysfunctional capital- vate affair’. ‘In short’, she suggests, ‘the ism [and] also motivated by a search for a PAH actively promotes a process that not meaningful life’ (Castells and Hlebik, 2017: only re-houses, but also re-dignifies evicted 180). An ‘ecosystem’ of alternative econ- citizens through a deep-seated process of omy and digital social innovation practices politicisation that changes how citizens further thrived during the Trias years,4 and define themselves’ (Kaika, 2017: 1286). And it is important to recognise that this was one might justifiably argue that BComu´has not always at odds with that city council’s remained true to the PAH’s exemplary form smart city vision. For instance, the council of ‘politics beyond affect’ since its election in became partner in an EU-funded H2020 2015. Within just a few months (as detailed project, D-CENT, alongside local techno- in Charnock and Ribera-Fumaz, 2017: 194– political activists from the indignados move- 196), the new city council pledged to invest ment that had attracted so much interna- e180 million over an initial period of 18 tional attention for leading mass public months in quality jobs. In addition, it took demonstrations against the political elite in an aggressive stance towards banks over the Spain in 2011 (Charnock et al., 2012). It negotiations to halt evictions and to release was this project that went on to develop the vacant housing, among other initiatives to platform Decidim Barcelona, which is the increase the stock of available social hous- technological cornerstone of the new ing. It also committed to guarantees of food municipal government’s radical democratic security for the city’s children and adoles- programme (see below). cents; pledged to boost affordable means of While social innovation experiments pro- public transport; experimented with univer- liferated across the city after the onset of a sal income support for the poorest families profound recession after 2008, the city also in the municipality; and, under the campaign witnessed dramatic forms of social move- slogan ‘energy is your right’ (l’energia e´sel ment protest. Notably, Barcelona-based acti- teu dret), made substantive moves towards vists formed the Platform for Those Affected guaranteeing energy security that almost by Mortgages (PAH) in 2009, and have since immediately brought it into legal conflict led the way in contesting the tidal wave of with the largest Spanish energy providers. evictions in the wake of the crisis, saving And it also opened up the possibility of the thousands from homelessness and destitu- re-municipalisation of the urban water sup- tion – earning international recognition as ply service. human rights campaigners in the process. BComu´can therefore boast a radical ped- The PAH, as part of a broader indignados igree and track record of considerable integ- movement from 2011 onwards, reflected rity and repute – especially as regards its and, in turn, fomented a post-crisis revitali- prioritisation of the immediate and substan- sation of community-scale ‘insurgent prac- tive needs and rights of those inhabitants tices’ (Garcı´a-Lamarca, 2017) that in the most adversely affected by the economic cri- Barcelona case led to the momentous elec- sis and its enduring fallout. Its inception as a tion in May 2015 of BComu´to lead the city political movement – with its roots in strug- council. For Kaika (2017: 1280, 1285), who gles over housing – can therefore be is generally quite critical of ‘deeply affective explained as a product of radical responses but ultimately apolitical reactions to the cri- to the crisis, but also as a movement that sis’ across Europe, the unique example set by brought together pre-existing experiments 10 Urban Studies 00(0)

Figure 1. What is Decidim? and projects with digital technologies that itself to the radical technological overhaul of were not necessarily at odds with the smart democratic processes so as to allow for the city imaginary espoused by the Trias admin- fullest possible degree of collective participa- istration. This raises the question, therefore, tion in decision-making – and on an of the degree to which the BComu´-led city ongoing, ‘agile’ basis. In particular, the council has since made inroads towards Decidim Barcelona (‘We Decide Barcelona’) establishing a radically different vision of open-source platform for citizen engagement the relationship between institutions of and input in areas like budgetary planning, urban governance, digital technologies and which was launched in October 2015, has citizens. We now therefore turn to the con- been greeted as: tent of the new municipal government’s ‘smart’ policies. a decentralisation of power that equips com- munities with the instruments to make deci- sions collectively . To encourage the use of Digital democracy and digital infrastructures that can be re- technological sovereignty in the appropriated and to ensure they can be acces- sible and that people can learn to use them. rebel smart city (Roth et al., 2018: 135) In addition to confronting a general crisis of social reproduction in the city through sub- For its architects, Decidim Barcelona is stantive and radical spending and social pol- conceived as a means of ‘empowering icies, BComu´’s government has committed social processes as a platform for massive Charnock et al. 11 social coordination for collective action favour of cooperatives and collaborative independently of public administrations’ economy-based SMEs – terminating a con- (Barandiaran, 2018; emphasis in original).5 tract with Microsoft in the process. In It is a ‘‘‘technopolitical project’’ where legal, October 2016, the city council announced its political, institutional, practical, social, edu- Digital Transformation Plan, to which it cational, communicative, economic and epis- allocated a total budget of e72 million. The temic codes merge together’ (Barandiaran, Plan aims to ‘revitalise the entire municipal- 2018). Put more prosaically, Decidim ity, by consolidating the governance of digi- Barcelona ‘encourages the use of technology tal services, by generating profiles and to facilitate an active democracy’ (Morozov capabilities in free and open source software and Bria, 2018: 50), with citizens at its centre and the ethical use of data and by transform- (see Figure 1). As of 1 March 2018, the plat- ing public procurement’ (Bria et al., 2017: 6). form had more than 28,000 registered parti- For the city’s Chief Technology and Digital cipants and 19 participatory processes, and Innovation Officer, Francesca Bria, the Plan had facilitated 821 public meetings. This had points to how the city council has ‘reversed resulted in 12,173 proposals – of which 8923 the [smart city] paradigm completely’ (Bria, had been incorporated into public policy quoted in Tieman, 2017), and to the degree (Barandiaran, 2018). One notable result was that Barcelona now represents an alternative the participative drafting of the 2013–2018 to ‘the surveillance capitalism from Silicon Urban Mobility Plan to reduce air and noise Valley, and the dystopian Chinese model’ pollution, and the volume of city traffic by (Bria, quoted in Graham, 2018). 21%, through the construction of urban The alternative smart city model envi- superblocks (superilles) which limit passage sioned in the 2016 Plan has at its core the and accessibility for motor vehicles and goal of ‘technological sovereignty’ (sobirania which prioritise instead pedestrians’ right to tecnolo`gica, in Catalan): ‘That means taking enjoy open, shared, green and safe public back control of data and information gener- space.6 ated by digital technologies, and promoting In addition to harnessing digital technol- public digital infrastructures based on free ogies for participatory means, BComu´has and open source software, open standards also sought to overhaul the top-down char- and open formats’ (Bria, 2017). For its pro- acter of smart city governance in the city ponents, this represents a significant exam- (Nesti, 2018: 13). In September 2016, the ple of a broader political and geopolitical CiU-instigated contractual negotiations with agenda to ‘contest a privatised smart city Cisco and Schneider Electric to invest e37 constructed from the top down and favour- million in a Smart City Campus were sus- ing foreign corporations, oppose monopo- pended by the BComu´-led government, with lised ownership of intellectual property, and Deputy Mayor Gerardo Pisarello openly reverse the private appropriation of collec- stating that the ‘logic behind the project’ tively produced value by rent-seeking digital was one the new city government ‘could not platforms’ (Morozov and Bria, 2018: 27). allow to continue’ (Bolsamanı´a, 2016). Since More concretely, technological sovereignty then, the city council has invested in its own implies a series of tangible benefits in the open source digital economy projects such governance of the city: ‘an end to the oligar- as La Comunificadora (an incubator for col- chy of technology providers’; a ‘review of laborative economy start-ups), and it has contract frameworks to ensure data sover- launched a new public digital technologies eignty’; the ‘creation of crucial new capabil- procurement process that discriminates in ities in the public sector to regain control of 12 Urban Studies 00(0) digital services’; ‘increased efficiency in 2018; a coalition supported by the UN- terms of output and costs since 70% of Habitat programme and currently compris- investment in new software development will ing over 25 cities, which has ‘defined a set of be free and open source with open licenses’; digital ethical standards and policy guide- ‘enhanced local collaboration with networks lines that are now shared among cities’ as between cities and public administrations’; ‘the foundations for a people-centric digital and ‘enhanced access to data held by the future’ (Bria, quoted in Cities for Digital Administration and guarantees for citizens’ Rights, n.d.). basic [data] rights’ (Bria, 2017). But the question is whether the plans ini- The plans to further develop the Decidim tiated by the post-2015 city council carry the Barcelona platform, agile digital public ser- potential to transform the legacy not only of vice delivery and the technological sover- the especially dogmatic smart urbanism of eignty agenda are expressly anti- the Trias administration, but of the more establishment and anti-corporate. They do fundamental relation between the different indeed push back against dominant forms of worlding flows that together comprise, on urbanism, ideology and knowledge to enun- the one hand, the city as an urban process ciate alternative theoretical understandings, and, on the other hand, the demands of citi- and do so by also claiming to advance the zens as necessarily situated political subjects, perspective of the subordinated local popu- and the process of reconciling the essentially lation and to defend their interest. As such, contradictory relationship between these two they are provincialising in intent; they con- by means of mediation by municipal institu- centrate the goals of a wider grassroots tions. The final section of this contribution movement in Barcelona advocating ‘alterna- poses open questions of this agenda to repo- tive modes of digital development in urban liticise and repurpose the digital technologies life’ (Lynch, 2019: 1). Yet these plans are at its disposal for ‘the citizen’. also worlding in intent: the technologists and activists behind Barcelona’s new model The challenge ahead: Citizenship, are ‘actively cultivating and tactically enga- ging’ their own global imaginary for digital technology and subjectivity technology-enabled urban democracy and Harvey (2008: 23) argues that ‘the right to planning ‘from below’ (to paraphrase Baker the city is far more than the individual lib- and Ruming, 2015: 66).7 They are ambitious erty to access urban resources: it is a right to enough to aspire to setting an example for a change ourselves by changing the city’. For global network of rebel smart cities, generat- his part, Lefebvre understood that the ing interoperable participative digital plat- demand for the right to the city could not be forms for other municipalities and reduced to the demands of an ‘unreal uni- contributing to the development of a new versality’ on the part of the rights-bearing Barcelona Model: ‘Barcelona is positioning citizen: ‘the rights of the citizen are abstract, itself as a reference example in open digital fictitious’ (Lefebvre, 2009a: 75).8 Elsewhere, transformation . Barcelona is one of the he asserted that it would be naı¨ve to assume first cities in the world to present an holistic that machines and technology could be put framework at a municipal level’ (Bria, 2017). to use to realise the possibilities of general- It is testament to this ambition that ised self-management (autogestion) without Barcelona, together with Amsterdam and a fundamental revolution in ‘the expression New York City, initiated the Cities of social needs and the social control of pro- Coalition for Digital Rights in November duction’ (Lefebvre, 2009b: 151). What these Charnock et al. 13 prototypical critics of worlding urbanisms compromise between the two (Joss et al., both recognise is that ‘the citizen’ may well 2017). As noted in the first section of this constitute the fundamental subject of any article, the provincialisation literature on the urban revolution, but that this ‘citizen’ will smart city also warns us against such formal possess a specific form of subjectivity con- conceptualisations of political subjectivity. scious of its own necessarily social power (as Moreover, this view fails to acknowledge the opposed to the limited transformative capa- argument already made by other critical city of the passive ‘private’ citizen identified scholars concerning the construction of the by Kaika, 2017). This citizen is committed citizen-as-subject at the heart of the early to the collective overhaul not just of demo- Barcelona Model specifically. For Balibrea cratic processes of decision-making but of (2017), for instance, it was precisely during forms of social production and reproduc- the city’s hosting of the 1992 Olympic tion, and the repurposing not simply of tech- Games when ‘the volunteer’ came to repre- nological governance but of the urban sent the archetypal entrepreneurial subject of process itself, on a networked, global scale; a ‘bio-politics of urban branding’ (Balibrea, to rebelling, in other words, against the law 2017: 32) that resulted in Barcelona’s ‘speci- of value (Harvey, 2012: 153). alism’ as a global referent: namely, the pro- As we have seen, above, the BComu´-led duction of ‘neoliberal subjectivity itself’ municipal government’s agenda represents a (Balibrea, 2017: 9).9 concerted effort to break with the legacy of In other words, a question of fundamen- top-down governance after almost 40 years tal political importance that is yet to be of Socialist and – briefly – CiU rule, and to asked of the repoliticisation of the smart city ‘win back Barcelona’ for its citizens and for in Barcelona is whether it is indeed carrying the ‘common good’ (Charnock and Ribera- forward the ‘politics beyond affect’ Kaika Fumaz, 2017). Some have interpreted this deems to be characteristic of the PAH, and agenda as a welcome return to a citizen- is thereby engendering new forms of subjec- focused and broadly redistributive approach tivity among citizens themselves. Too much to urban governance characteristic of the of the commentary on Barcelona’s recent early Barcelona Model of the late 1980s and transformation from smart city to rebel city early 1990s (Eizaguirre et al., 2017). Yet this fails to recognise how, for citizens subject to nostalgic interpretation is precisely based worlding flows (Roy, 2011), ‘‘‘work on the upon an abstract and ‘unreal’ conception of self’’ (praxis) and ‘‘labour’’ (production) the citizen-as-subject. The notion that suc- combine’ (Lazzarato, 2014: 51). That is, they cessive city councils in Barcelona have estab- leave aside the possibility that ‘economic lished relations with citizens which are more activity and the ethico-political activity of or less ‘inclusive’ reduces the citizen herself producing the subject go hand in hand’ to a mere formal abstraction or personifica- (Lazzarato, 2012: 39), and in such a way as tion in which – in a perfect world – ‘every- to not only explain an explosion of insurgent body is equal before the law and, as practices in the context of a crisis of ‘labour’ equals, all are treated identically as abstract and social reproduction, but also to impli- citizens endowed with standardised rights’ cate citizens’ own ‘praxis’ in the co- (Bonefeld, 2003: 206). As such, the debate production of worlding processes that perpe- on the smart city in particular is then usually tuate the exploitation and alienation charac- framed in terms of whether it promotes teristic of the contemporary urban an ‘individual-liberal citizenship regime’, a condition; however ‘included’ they might be ‘civic-republican citizenship regime’ or some in a formal, procedural sense. Put another 14 Urban Studies 00(0) way, the question is whether the repurposing mediated by technologies perceived to be of the smart city agenda under BComu´car- essentially ‘neutral’ in nature.11 In the ‘new ries the potentiality to engender alternative technopolitical grammar’ of Decidim forms of subjectivity that go beyond the Barcelona’s architects (Barandiaran and ‘idiotic’ politics of affect characteristic of an Calleja-Lo´pez, 2016: 34), for instance, the essentially depoliticised citizenry appropriate technology is ‘a reflexive infrastructure that to neoliberal forms of bio-politics (Kaika, uses the very infrastructure to democratise 2017).10 itself’ (Barandiaran, 2018). The irony is that The conceptualisation of the citizen at the the goal here appears to be nothing less than heart of contemporary movements, such as the ontological engineering of democracy BComu´, has already been the object of cri- itself (Barandiaran et al., 2017: 140). To the tique by Barcelona-based anthropologist degree that this agenda – typified in Manuel Delgado. For him, the new ‘citizen- BComu´’s strategy for digital democracy – is ism’ (ciudadanismo) elevates the ‘abstract critical, it is only to stress that the demo- individual’ to ‘her maximum level of sym- cratic potential of platform technologies will bolic efficacy as a conceptual person’ be limited unless the ownership and open- (Delgado, 2016: 12), a signifier emptied of ness of the technology is guaranteed by a real social determination (Delgado, 2016: new ‘social contract’ on data. Otherwise, 14). He asserts: and second, it appears to assume the citizen – and social movements more generally – to [. C]itizenism is, today, the result of a process be essentially incorruptible, on the one hand, of the regeneration of social democracy and of and ultimately acquiescent in the contain- the liberal left . Without doubt, it is a new ment of her interests and aspirations within pseudo-ideological paradigm through which agile democratic procedures for the produc- the capitalist system aspires to suggest that it tion of consensus, on the other. In the case of can be more humane and, to that end, chan- Barcelona, it is not unreasonable to ask the nels and makes ‘reasonable’ the conflictive architects of BComu´’s new agenda for digital fractions of society by transforming them into democracy to what extent it addresses the ‘social movements’. [These are] alien and even hostile to anything that evokes the struggles bio-political legacy of decades of urban entre- preneurialism on the subjectivity of the citizen between classes. [They are] flows of collective 12 action undertaken by isolated individuals that herself. How, for instance, might digital strive together to have a good time and who, democracy in itself militate against city halls sooner or later, will be invited to ‘participate’: present or future using citizens’ zeal for par- that is, to be accomplices in their own domina- ticipation in sensing, planning and governance tion. (Delgado, 2016: 16) to brand ‘smart citizenship’ for bio-political, urban-entrepreneurial ends once again? It is debatable as to whether Delgado’s cynicism is warranted. Yet, it is the case that much of the justification for the radical Conclusion overhaul of the use of new digital and smart For us, another particularly useful dimension technologies in the city appears to accept of the provincialising urban theory approach uncritically two fundamental postulates that is in its questioning of monist forms of suggest that Delgado’s criticisms are not knowledge, ‘that is, a knowledge claim that wholly unfounded. First, the notion that becomes accepted as the only plausible democratic participation is an intrinsically account of a phenomenon’, with the aim of beneficent activity – especially when it is ‘disrupting norms about what we think we Charnock et al. 15 know’ (Leitner and Sheppard, 2015: 230). Of ORCID iD course, the main targets of the provincialising Greig Charnock https://orcid.org/0000-0003- literature (at least in Leitner and Sheppard, 0625-264X 2015; Sheppard et al., 2013) are those ‘master narrative’ forms of mainstream global urban- Notes ism that are conspicuously universalist (worlding), orientalising and wedded to the 1. To this, we would add the indirect gentrifi- methodological and epistemological funda- cation and displacement processes associ- ated with the speculative treatment of land mentals of neoclassical economic theory. and real estate as a financial asset in antici- But, presumably, provincialising critique pation of new flows of urban rents arising ought also to be wary of emergent forms of out of regeneration and smart city projects knowledge that, while appearing to reflect a (see Charnock et al., 2014). common experience of disaffected and disen- 2. See, for example, how the ‘right to the franchised subjects in specific urban contexts, (smart) city’ tagline (el dret a la ciutat purport to speak back against hegemonic (intelÁligent) in Catalan) was used by urbanism and for the subaltern in general. Barcelona city council at the Smart City That is, in ways which seek to legitimise Expo World Congress 2018 to brand not ‘rebel’ knowledges of urbanity, while none- only its commitment to digital rights, but also a range of initiatives from citizen sen- theless also aspiring to travel as a model for sing kits, to bike-sharing systems, to cus- left urbanism. We have argued that some of tomer loyalty schemes in local commercial what the new municipalist city council is try- and food markets (Barcelona.cat, 2018). ing to initiate with the repurposing of new 3. In computer science, ‘ontology is a technical digital technologies has been couched in spe- term denoting an artefact that is designed cific left-theoretical understandings that pos- for a purpose, which is to enable the model- tulate the essential beneficence of techno- ling of knowledge about some domain, real democracy and leave unquestioned citizens’ or imagined’; while ‘ontology engineering is own productive and political subjectivities, concerned with making representational choices that capture the relevant distinctions irrespective of their own ‘situatedness’. This of a domain at the highest level of abstrac- implies that while Barcelona’s newfound sta- tion while still being as clear as possible tus as the rebel smart city is richly deserved, about the meanings of terms’ (Gruber, 2009, and its government’s genuine commitment to emphasis in original). The point of ontology addressing immediate social needs should engineering, then, is to generate formal con- not be doubted, it is still worth maintaining ceptualisations of given entities, so that they a diligently critical eye on its continuing can be taxonomically organised within transformation. machine-readable and machine-processable data structures (Guarino et al., 2009; Me´tral et al., 2007). For critical comments on infor- Declaration of conflicting interests mation technology, technique and ‘objectiv- The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of ity’, see Lefebvre (2008: 146–153). In critical interest with respect to the research, authorship, theory terms, the instrumental impulse to and/or publication of this article. ontologise the social is to be treated with the utmost suspicion (Bonefeld, 2016; Lefebvre, 2016). Funding 4. Ca´mara-Menoyo (2018) recounts 29 ‘urban The author(s) received no financial support for commons’ initiatives in the city between the research, authorship, and/or publication of 2011 and 2015, ranging from the re- this article. appropriation of public space and buildings 16 Urban Studies 00(0)

of significant historical memory (Espai many Barcelonans that functioned politi- Germanetes, Cala` bria 66, La Flor de Maig, cally to quell dissensus regarding substan- Espai Gardenyes, Hort Aspanias), to the tive, ‘structural’ issues: ‘Consensus was defence of property, housing and public generated from below, so to speak, and this space against speculation, gentrification and made it all the more difficult for grassroots the impact of mass tourism (Defensem Port tactics or popular movements to contest Vell, Fem Rambla, La Borda, Asamblea de these municipal politics’ (Illas, 2012: 158– barrios por un turismo sostenible), and to 159). the promotion of participatory urban plan- 10. Morozov and Bria (2018: 20) also recognise ning and governance (Quina Gra` cia, the danger of digital technologies being used Decidim Barcelona). to unlock citizens’ full entrepreneurial poten- 5. Elsewhere, it is described as ‘demo-techno- tial, with ‘the use of communitarian rhetoric politics’ (Barandiaran and Calleja-Lo´pez, to justify offloading even more social respon- 2016). sibilities onto individual citizens’. 6. See Barcelona.cat (n.d.); see also Vox’s 11. For a discussion of the essentially non- (2019) five-part series on the superblocks. neutral nature of technological change in 7. See also Russell (2019), who highlights the capitalism, see Arboleda (2016) and Smith effectiveness of BComu´’s own International (2010). Committee in situating the platform as a 12. Not least, for example, when significant flagship for a new, global and collaborative numbers of Barcelona’s citizens are turning municipalist movement with the prefigura- to platforms like Airbnb to profit from tive potential to transcend the ‘local trap’. offering their own homes and properties as 8. Lefebvre knew that the rights of the citizen short-term rentals for the city’s booming are, at the same time, the rights that guaran- tourism market (Arias Sans and Quaglieri tee the double freedom of the producer; the Domı´nguez, 2016). (At the time of writing, ‘freedom’ upon which capital’s own exis- there are 18,346 listings in Barcelona, tence and self-valorisation is premised. according to data from Inside Airbnb, n.d.). 9. What really caught the eye of the European See Stabrowski (2017) for a discussion of social-democratic left, back then, was the how Airbnb, and the ‘sharing economy’ example Barcelona set for ‘a re-invented more generally, is producing ‘urban micro- municipal socialism, aware of globalisation, entrepreneurial’ subjects. willing to work in partnership with the pri- vate sector’ in its mission to regenerate the city and to revitalise public space (McNeill, References 1999: 10). This strategy, synonymous with Ajuntament de Barcelona (2012a) Mesura de Gov- the ‘new urban realism’ espoused by the ern MES: L’estrate`gia TIC de l’Ajuntament de Socialist Mayor of Barcelona from 1982 to Barcelona al servei de la ciutat i dels ciutadans. 1997, Pasqual Maragall, projected the city Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona. ‘as a strategic space to be controlled’; ‘multi- Ajuntament de Barcelona (2012b) Barcelona class, a space for citizenship as a basis of Smart City Tour. Barcelona: Ajuntament de identity, rather than being bourgeois or pro- Barcelona. letarian . [and] tied in with the Left’s search Arboleda M (2016) Revitalizing science and tech- for new social constituencies’ (McNeill, nology studies: A Marxian critique of more- 1999: 108, emphasis in original). For critics than-human geographies. Environment and like Balibrea (2017) and Illas (2012), a closer Planning D: Society and Space 35(2): 360–378. inspection of the relation between the city Arboleda M (2019) Planetary Mine: Territories of council and citizens in that period reveals Extraction in the Fourth Machine Age.Lon- how ‘control was implemented through don: Verso. agreement and cooperation’, experienced as Arias Sans A and Quaglieri Domı´nguez A (2016) a feeling of ‘collective euphoria’ among Unravelling Airbnb: Urban perspectives from Charnock et al. 17

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