A non-rigid view about digitalisation for ‘smart cities’ opens greater understandings.

November 2023

This month's Smart Infrastructure Blog by CSIC Senior Research Associate Dr Kwadwo Oti-Sarpong, and member of the CSIC Digital Cities for Change team, advocates for a departure from narrow technocentric views, urging researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to adopt a more sociological approach in understanding large-scale digital innovations.

For decades, the dominant view is that technology is a panacea to many of the world’s problems. The 1980s saw an introduction of sociological views about the form and function of technology, its applications in society and the ever-changing relationships between technology and society. Sociological views of technology run counter to the dominant technocentrism, with proponents arguing that a better understanding of our techno-infused society can be achieved only if we take a more expansive perspective on technology. The sociological view does not discount how technology has improved society in many ways, but it seeks to offer a deeper understanding of technology as emerging from multi-faceted interactions in a network comprising social (e.g., human, organisational, regulatory) and technical (e.g., Sensors, Digital Twin, Artificial Intelligence) elements at a point in time for an identifiable outcome.

A main shortcoming of the rigid technological view is that, addressing any of these complexities is primarily a technical issue, although the issues go beyond ‘fixing bugs’ in a code or re-designing a user interface. Dr Kwadwo Oti-Sarpong, CSIC Digital Cities for Change

The world is becoming increasingly connected through digitalisation. Various elements of digital technologies permeate and facilitate everyday life at both the individual and societal level, generating insights that are being used to make decisions about urban infrastructure. The close-knit interactions between the ‘social’ and ‘technical’ cannot be ignored. A rigid view of technology fails to unpack the complexities of these interactions – e.g. disproportionate negative effects of using facial recognitions, inclusive decision-making, and challenges of scaling up ‘smart city’ pilots across regions and countries. A main shortcoming of the rigid technological view is that,  addressing any of these complexities is primarily a technical issue, although the issues go beyond ‘fixing bugs’ in a code or re-designing a user interface.

This post argues that turning to a sociological view of technological innovations would offer a useful lens through which to unpack and understand the intertwined complexities of largescale digitalisation.

Before proceeding, let us revisit the sociological view of technology as emerging from multi-faceted interactions in a network comprising social and technical elements at a point in time for an identifiable outcome. Taking this view forward leads to the understanding that whatever is viewed as a ‘technology’ (e.g., a city-level Digital Twin (CDT)) in a place, serving a function, is the outcome of various often contested viewpoints/interpretations held by a group of people (usually from diverse backgrounds) drawing on context-specific elements, societal demands, frames of reference, etc. to shape the form and function of the technical components. This understanding paves the way to closely examine the decision-making processes that lead to defining the form and function of the CDT, for instance.

The sociological view of technology makes it possible to interrogate how the decision to develop a CDT was made, and in so doing to identify the groups of people involved in or excluded from the process (for structural, conventional, political or other reasons). Gaining an understanding of these dynamics lays the foundation for clarifying how and why the use of digitalisation to create ‘smart cities’ may lead to disproportionate negative effects on sections of society (e.g., San Francisco’s banned facial recognition systems).

Exploring the interactions between the social and technical maximises the potential to see the ‘bigger picture’. That is, how other elements within the wider context (e.g., existing regulations, standards and laws) enable, constrain or refine the development and deployment of certain technical solutions as part of ‘smart city’ projects. The recently announced EU AI Act is a key instrument that will shape how artificial intelligence (as a technical artefact) can be deployed at different scales for various uses in the member states. Combining such knowledge with the foregoing can help to paint a richer picture of the multidimensional nature of the factors that need to be taken into consideration in scaling up ‘smart city’ pilots across regions and countries.

This blog has sought to demonstrate that, as digitalisation initiatives grow around the world, researchers, practitioners and policymakers need to interpret the complexities that they present with less tunnel vision. Moving away from the often dominant and convenient technocentric views towards more sociological views of largescale digital innovations offers a way forward. The latter non-rigid view of digitalisation for ‘smart cities’ holds the potential to deliver improved understandings about their intertwined complexities.

The proposed change in view is essential for policy, practice and research particularly because of growing efforts to tackle societal challenges while providing citizens with social, economic, and environmental benefits through greater digitalisation and the creation of connected places and ‘smart cities’.