Smart cities: Who cares?

Abstract

The growing critical research agenda on smart cities and open data programs has largely overlooked the body-subjects that enable its (re)production. The “ideal” subject of the smart city is prefigured as tech-savvy, independent, and uber-modern, able to produce digital data and analyze it to hold city government “accountable.” In this subject production, however, we argue that smart cities continue to rely on forms of reproductive labor that are invisibilized in current research and public discourse: We focus here on unpaid domestic labor, low-paid caring and reproductive labor, and volunteer work. We introduce the term “digital care worker” to capture a new category of reproductive worker in the smart city—voluntary and low-paid data producers and analyzers such as those who undertake “hackathons,” usually expected to do so out of love for their cities and communities. Drawing on geographies of care and Eve Sedgwick’s notion of the “closet.” we argue that the invisibility of digital caring laborers exists in dialectic relation to the spectacularization of particular body-subjects charged with caring for the smart city. Drawing on a discourse analysis of promotional materials and mission statements of key open data advocacy organizations, we propose the idea of “marginalized coder incubators,” who deploy assimilationist rhetoric to spectacularize the voluntary labor of women, people of color, and LGBTQ communities that is ultimately performed for the benefit of elites in the neoliberalizing city.