Mechanic citizenship
Boston Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics and the constitution of digital citizens
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21703370 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Margarita Boenig-Liptsin (0000-0002-2965-7001, ETH Zurich, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 26 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Publication date | 2024-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Ethics and Information Technology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1388-1957 • E-ISSN: 1572-8439 |
| Publisher | Springer Science and Business Media LLC (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1007/s10676-024-09791-5 |
| OpenAlex | W4401976768 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 30 |
Projects to integrate digital technologies into the fabric of city life depend upon specific visions of politics and technology. In the process of their realization, they re-constitute the identities, agencies, and relations of human inhabitants, re-defining what it means to be a citizen. This article draws on the idiom of co-production and framework of constitutionalism from Science and Technology Studies (STS) to analyze the coming into being of a form of citizenship with smartphone technologies in Boston in the 2010s. When the Boston Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics (MONUM) used newly available smartphone apps to reconfigure the connection among city residents and government, they brought into being a specific mode of citizenship. I term this mode of citizenship “mechanic” to draw attention to the qualities of passivity, infrastructure, and connectedness that characterized MONUM’s early digital citizenship projects. I argue that recognizing that the constitution of the human, and specifically of citizens, is at stake in smart city projects entails re-thinking ethical analysis in contexts of smart cities. Instead of seeking to perform ethical assessments of technological consequences (“ethics of ” approach), scholars might begin with a situated analysis of how humans as citizens are constituted through smart city projects (“ethics in ” approach). By identifying the political affordances and commitments of the emergent digital citizenship models, scholars can make visible alternative forms of living and engaging politically in the city
Citizenship · Constitution · Political science · Politics · Sociology · COVID-19 Digital Contact Tracing · Digital Economy and Work Transformation · Ethics and Social Impacts of AI · Law
Citizens of Worlds
How We Became Posthuman
Man-Computer Symbiosis
Infrastructure and Modernity
The ethics of smart cities and urban science
The global landscape of AI ethics guidelines
Multi Scale Ethics—Why We Need to Consider the Ethics of AI in Healthcare at Different Scales
Bias in smart city governance
States of Knowledge
Aiming at the good life in the datafied world
In search of the Smart Citizen
Programming Environments
How the governance of and through digital contact tracing technologies shapes geographies of power
Towards new human rights in the age of neuroscience and neurotechnology
Panacea or diagnosis? Imaginaries of innovation and the 'MIT model' in three political cultures
Constitutionalism at the Nexus of Life and Law
Breakdown in the Smart City
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2024 - 2026 (3) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |