Brady Kennedy recently completed his M.A. in Sociology at Columbia University. He served as a Community Research Intern in Trust and Technology through The Trust Collaboratory, and a mentor for high schoolers in New York City, NY, and West Palm Beach, FL, through the Center for Smart Streetscapes (CS3) My Streetscape Summer Research Institute. Below is Brady’s summary of his research findings, part of CS3’s Public Interest Tech Research Thrust.
Smart city projects leverage new data collection infrastructures to address both long-standing and emergent problems facing city populations.1 However, many new urban sensing systems have drawn public backlash and mistrust, leading to project delays and failures.2
Many researchers have advocated greater public involvement in smart city projects to encourage their acceptance, and other writers have begun to investigate the role of trust in the adoption of new technologies.3 4 5 6 7 Nonetheless, the implicit connection between these two literatures remains underexplored: how can participatory approaches lead to greater levels of trust in smart city technologies?
I argue that this framing of the question misses the point. Incorporating public input into the development and operation of smart city systems in order to engineer their adoption reflects a top-down view of trust, which locates the site of trust-building in the actions of smart city experts and the technical details of technologies themselves.7 8 9
Incorporating insights from recent developments in the sociological literature on trust can help reframe the question. Sociologists conceptualize trust as a dynamic social practice; it is given and revoked through interaction.6 10 Trust in and around technology is not merely the sum of a set of beliefs about privacy and security risks, but is manifested within sites of contact between the public, experts, and intermediaries.11
Trust also coexists with mistrust, as is necessary.8 4 Mistrust in smart city systems is then not a problem to be solved, but a legitimate expression of agency that reveals a misalignment between the public and project leaders.
A better question arises from this relational view of trust. How can smart city researchers create the interactive conditions for the public to gift their trust in new urban sensing systems?
Participatory approaches therefore can serve as the necessary social scaffolding for the active involvement of the public in smart city projects, within which trust has the necessary context to emerge. The sufficient conditions for granting trust correspond to the degree to which the goals and features of smart city projects are aligned with the public’s needs and values via their active involvement.
As smart city researchers, we can innovate ways to involve the public in active roles from the earliest stages of our projects. Based on my review of the participatory methods literature, I suggest the public can be involved in three distinct roles: as co-accessors of collected data and shapers of data governance, as co-collectors of data through active or passive crowdsourcing, and even more directly as co-designers of smart city systems.
In the pursuit of developing sought-after technologies to improve city life, we can increase the fit between these systems and the communities they serve through those communities’ active involvement. And in the participatory modalities and further research that will be required, we can expect many opportunities.
Works Cited
- Vito Albino, Umberto Berardi, and Rosa Maria Dangelico. 2015. Smart Cities: Definitions, Dimensions, Performance, and Initiatives. Journal of Urban Technology 22, 1 (January 2015), 3–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/10630732.2014.942092
- Pardis Emami-Naeini, Joseph Breda, Wei Dai, Tadayoshi Kohno, Kim Laine, Shwetak Patel, and Franziska Roesner. 2023. Understanding People’s Concerns and Attitudes Toward Smart Cities. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, April 19, 2023. ACM, Hamburg Germany, 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581558
- Walter Castelnovo. 2019. Coproduction and Cocreation in Smart City Initiatives: An Exploratory Study. Public Administration and Information Technology (2019), 1–20. Retrieved June 25, 2024 from https://ideas.repec.org//h/spr/paitcp/978-3-319-89474-4_1.html
- Gabriele De Luca and Michele Simoni. 2023. The role of trust in the diffusion of privacy-invading digital technologies. Technology Analysis & Strategic Management 0, 0 (2023), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/09537325.2023.2199892
- Dr. Tom Erik Julsrud and Dr. Julie Runde Krogstad. 2020. Is there enough trust for the smart city? exploring acceptance for use of mobile phone data in oslo and tallinn. Technological Forecasting and Social Change 161, (December 2020), 120314. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2020.120314
- Charles Schmidt and Meghan Manley. 2020. Trust In Smart City Systems: Characteristics and Key Considerations. Retrieved from https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/publications/Trust%20in%20Smart%20City%20Systems%20Report_0.pdf
- Anthony Simonofski, Estefania Serral Asensio, Johannes De Smedt, and Monique Snoeck. 2017. Citizen Participation in Smart Cities: Evaluation Framework Proposal. In 2017 IEEE 19th Conference on Business Informatics (CBI), 2017. IEEE, Thessaloniki, 227–236. https://doi.org/10.1109/CBI.2017.21
- Cristian Capotescu and Gyl Eyal. 2024. Trust vs trustworthiness: smart cities in the age of AI. Smart Cities World. Retrieved July 22, 2024 from https://www.smartcitiesworld.net/ai-and-machine-learning/ai-and-machine-learning/trust-vs-trustworthiness-smart-cities-in-the-age-of-ai
- Gil Eyal. 2022. Mistrust in Numbers: Regulatory Science, Trans-science and the Crisis of Expertise. Spontaneous Generations: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science 10, 1 (March 2022), 36–46. https://doi.org/10.4245/spongen.v10i1.38197
- Gil Eyal, Larry Au, and Cristian Capotescu. 2024. Trust is a Verb!: a critical reconstruction of the sociological theory of trust. Sociologica 18:2 (2024). https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/19316
- Oliver Schilke, Martin Reimann, and Karen S. Cook. 2021. Trust in Social Relations. Annu. Rev. Sociol. 47, 1 (July 2021), 239–259. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-082120-082850
- Blaine G. Robbins. 2016. What is Trust? A Multidisciplinary Review, Critique, and Synthesis. Sociology Compass 10, 10 (2016), 972–986. https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12391