Digital Rights in Smart Cities: Toward a Digitalization in the Service of Citizens

Key Takeaways

1. The example of Barcelona’s digital transformation, led by digital social innovation policy expert Francesca Bria, laid the groundwork for initiatives that advance a people-centered approach to urban digitalization.
2. Part of the challenge in these processes is safeguarding human rights to privacy, freedom of movement, and the exercise of community life.
3. Responsibility lies with the State, businesses, citizens, and social organizations.

In a context where cities, governments, and services are being digitalized, it is essential to focus on digital rights. Without that focus, it is easy to implement urban digitalization that benefits only a few. How do we ensure that citizens’ rights are not violated in these digital transformation processes?

In 2016, five years after Spain’s 15-M movement and the subsequent Indignados movement — whose primary demand was the consolidation of a more participatory democracy — Barcelona’s mayor and social activist Ada Colau appointed digital social innovation policy expert Francesca Bria as the new Commissioner for Technology and Digital Innovation. The mandate was clear: alongside the Barcelona City Council, she was to lead the city’s digital transformation process from the public sector. And with one condition: never losing sight of the fact that the project’s premise was, above all, that technologies and the opportunities of digital innovation should serve citizen agendas and a new model of collaborative economy.

A year later, at the Ouishare Fest held in Barcelona, Bria explained to specialists from around the world that it was this guiding principle that allowed her and her team to articulate solutions from the bottom up — or as she herself described it, by first analyzing the problems faced by citizens and then incorporating technologies as potential enablers. “The approach was different from what usually happens when smart cities are conceived; instead of being guided by technological determinism — the theory that technology, by itself, is capable of directly and positively influencing the socioeconomic development of a given group, and should therefore be at the center of every society — we first asked ourselves what the social problems were that needed to be solved, and whether technology had the capacity to solve them. Only in that way were we able to make it serve an organizational and social process of the city, rather than the other way around,” she elaborated in her talk.

In Barcelona’s case, as specialists explain, the focus was placed on education, social inclusion, collective deliberation, and citizen empowerment. The aim was to ensure that it would not be only large corporations — or governments — that benefited from hyper-digitalization and the extraction of citizen data. The implementation of technologies, or the ‘smartification’ of the city, took place only insofar as they genuinely solved citizens’ problems — such as housing, health, education, and mobility — while respecting both the right to privacy and certain ethical criteria.

Barcelona’s example — studied by international governments, urban planners, NGOs, entrepreneurs, technology experts, and the world of digital innovation — is recognized worldwide. In part because it laid the groundwork for a range of programs and initiatives that advance a people-centered approach to urban digitalization.

In 2020, UN-Habitat — the United Nations agency working to improve the quality of life of people in contexts of urbanization — launched its flagship program: People-Centered Smart Cities, which seeks to address the challenges that arise at the intersection of urban planning agendas in highly digital contexts and human rights. This is particularly relevant given that in 2019 there were still 3.7 billion people without access to the internet, and that the pandemic only made it more urgent for local governments to address digital divides in their territories, especially for historically marginalized populations.

Similarly, UN-Habitat, together with CAF — the Latin American development bank — and with the support of UNIT, is developing a program to co-design instruments that support the incorporation of a digital rights perspective into digital transformation processes. The project — which includes, among other things, co-designing a practical guide focused on public policy development and creating an expert ‘help desk’ — aims to strengthen the ecosystem between local governments and technologies, and to guarantee human rights in these new digital environments.

Programs such as these make clear that much remains to be addressed, and that cases like Barcelona’s are rare. The agenda driving technological development in urban contexts and digital transformation in cities is still missing a focus on digital rights — which are nothing more than the rights enshrined as fundamental to humanity, transposed into the digital space. Without that focus, we are left with an urban digitalization that benefits only a few. This is why specialists are currently asking: how intelligent are cities if they do not consider the collective intelligence of their inhabitants? And, consequently, how do we ensure that human rights are not violated in digital transformation processes?

Experts agree that the discussion is multidimensional, shaped by multiple factors, and that there is no single answer. But if we consider that developing countries are moving toward the digitalization of their cities — without losing sight of the fact that 700 million people worldwide still live in extreme poverty — the debate must be incisive, critical, and inclusive.

Claudio Ruiz, a specialist in technology policy and digital rights, explains that a starting point relates to how, as a society, we confront the dramatic advance of technologies in every dimension of our lives. “The regulatory approach, from political authorities and even from citizens, has operated under the notion that digital technologies are always for the better. Add to that the fact that we are entirely unaware of how they work, and we have simply accepted them as they are. Because there is an element tied to design and commercial narratives that makes them attractive and prevents us from questioning them,” he says. “This has made it difficult to develop a critical discussion about how or what to regulate in these digital technologies — which requires the capacity to step back and look with depth.”

Until that changes, Ruiz explains, it will not be possible to advance in a debate that seeks to dispel certain myths, raise awareness, and move beyond a simple affirmation of the need for regulation. “Fine, we need to regulate — but what do we regulate? Beyond what companies can develop and sell however they want, the key lies in how we critically examine those products and their effects in order to control certain perverse consequences, such as the extraction of data without our consent, or the creation of monopolies, which also fail to benefit citizens.”

To date, two paradigms govern regulatory models. In the United States, the tendency is toward greater commercial integration of certain companies to prevent them from controlling significant market shares, whereas Europe — through its Digital Services Package (the result of some 20 years of digital regulation) — establishes certain regulations protecting user privacy. These two approaches, as Ruiz explains, reveal the regulatory difficulty around the concentration of extracted data and the consequences of the growing digitalization of processes and services. “There is no single internet law, or digital services law, and therefore no single responsible entity. All regulatory actors have a role: the State, businesses, academia, the press, social organizations, citizens. And our governments must implement measures that are not contrary to certain internationally accepted standards.”

This discussion began with the mass adoption of digital technologies and has evolved over time. In the 1980s, the prevailing — and somewhat naïve — narrative held that new digital spaces would democratize information and be free from governments and regulation.

It soon became clear that the same inequities present in the physical world were being replicated in digital spaces. This made it necessary to reach a consensus that the exercise of human rights must be respected in any space and context. Otherwise, the benefits would accrue to technology companies whose business models are based on the extraction of personal information and data.

Thinking about rights for the digital world, Lara explains, is not about thinking about rights for a world of the internet, but for a world that — even outside that sphere — is prepared to turn people and their activities into numbers and codes upon which others make decisions.

This is also warned by Adam Greenfield, an American urbanist who has for years analyzed and exposed the risks of smart cities. He argues that the information collected ultimately favors decision-makers, and that in the process of technologizing everyday life — which claims to seek knowledge of users’ behaviors, habits, and needs in order to eventually provide optimal services — a hierarchy persists. Or someone who knows what we want, even better than we do ourselves.

In the analysis Rethinking the Smart City, Democratizing Urban Technology, published in 2018 by the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Foundation, it is argued that criticisms of the smartification of cities are rooted in their disconnection from real-world problems; in the technocratic pursuit of domination over our everyday urban existence (through sensors); in an almost obsessive fixation on surveillance and control; and in the inability to place citizens, rather than corporations, at the center of the development process.

And that perhaps a solution lies, as it did in Barcelona, in digital sovereignty: “a simple idea that seeks to allow citizens to have a say and participate in how the technological infrastructure surrounding them operates and what ends it serves.” Because if it does not serve the integral development of its inhabitants, is the city truly intelligent?