Populist Dissent and Digital Urbanism

How should the research community engage with populist narratives that undermine social justice?

Robert Cowley (King’s College London) reflects the Buildings & Cities special issue Data Politics in the Built Environment and considers a contemporary form of resistance to datafication: the (right-wing) populist, and often conspiratorial, rejection of digital technologies as instruments of oppression. Populism has a potential to distort public discourse and undermine the hopes for progressive alternative approaches. How might built environment academics shape more informed and balanced debates? Social justice will be better served if critical perspectives are supplemented by work that counters the misplaced fears about emerging digital urban technologies.

The four contributions to this special issue urge readers to resist certain problematic, and socially unjust, aspects of the datafication processes underpinning new forms of urban infrastructure. The authors are intervening at a historical moment before these novel infrastructures become entrenched and normalised – or, borrowing Amin and Thrift’s (2017: 120) formulation – before their “material and routines…settle and habituate distinctive regimes of social order and authority, and in ways that make the regimes seem natural, necessary, ordinary”.

In addition to the questions (and answers) provided in the special issue, another pressing concern also needs to be addressed: the ongoing influence of right-wing populism. This is most recently evidenced by anti-immigrant riots in the UK, Donald Trump’s ongoing US presidential campaign, and France’s narrow avoidance of electing Rassemblement National, among other examples. Pertinently, digital technology, in the form of social media, is widely understood as having accelerated the growth of these political tendencies (Fieschi 2019: 116). However, the primary concern of the present commentary is with the ways in which digital technologies have sometimes become a focal point for public dissent.

This dissent can most immediately be traced back to the COVID-19 pandemic, which catalysed the visibility of datafication processes in the public eye. Sudden international reliance on new communications technologies and delivery services dislodged assumptions that digital platforms were “flimsier than familiar local economies” or ephemeral “secondary innovations” (Bratton 2021: 88). Instead, their constitutive role in contemporary economies became apparent (Bratton 2021).

In parallel, however, other digital technologies became visible as targets for conspiracy theorising. Conspiratorial thinking is a historically common reaction to pandemic conditions (Uscinski & Parent 2014), but vocal opposition has continued to bubble up regularly as normality has returned. In the UK, for instance, a nexus of fears appears to have formed among some segments of the public, where urban data technologies (including surveillance techniques associated with imagined manifestations of the ‘15-minute city’ and ‘smart city’ agendas, digital payment methods, the cameras policing London’s ‘Ultra Low Emissions Zone’, and – during the pandemic itself – 5G telecommunication masts) have been rolled into notions of a ‘great reset’, ‘population replacement’, anti-vaxxing sentiments, and climate change denial. Such thinking has tended towards the “overinflation of the term ‘surveillance’ to dismiss all modes of social sensing as pernicious” (Bratton 2021: 13). As Nicholas Kelly (2022) observes, imagining surveillance as a personified representation of oppressive government forces or powerful corporations – “someone is watching you” (Kelly 2022: 175) – diverts attention from other potentially unjust outcomes associated with algorithmic governance, including those identified by the authors in this special issue.

This diversion of attention is inherent within a populist mindset, even in the absence of more paranoid thinking. While there is no space here to attempt a comprehensive survey of 21st century populism, a general consensus exists over its key symptoms, including a worldview constructing a normative, binary notion of ‘the people’ in opposition to a corrupt ‘elite’ (Mudde 2004) whose intentions are often explained through conspiratorial logics (Müller 2017), and a corresponding suspicion of ‘expertise’ (Oliver & Rahn 2016). Populist parties and their adherents typically believe themselves to be promoting social justice – even when their policies are reactionary or environmentally destructive, and the notion of a homogeneous ‘real people’ is at odds with a pluralist conception of democracy (Müller 2017). However, such takes on justice are unlikely to address any of the problems which the authors expose in this special issue. They do not obviously resonate, to take just one example, with the intersectional thinking advocated by Sharma et al. (2023).

It would therefore seem remiss to ignore the rise of populist politics in our studies of digital urbanism. Doing so, as Jan-Werner Müller argues, would be an effective way of strengthening populism’s own internal logics, as an illustration of elites “collud[ing] to exclude” (Müller 2017: 83) the voice of the ‘real people’. But what constructive roles might urbanist scholars play, if they are seen as representing the ‘elite’ classes, and if conspiracy theorists see themselves as “a kind of anti-intellectual intelligentsia” (Conway 2024: 8)? Ironically, the critical literature on digital urbanism may in some ways be aligned with populist sentiment, insofar as it aims to reveal the hidden workings of power behind normalised surfaces. In amplifying the novel characteristics of digital technologies, furthermore, it does little to challenge less sober tendencies to exaggerate their social significance. We may be drawn to well-crafted but dramatic claims such as Adam Greenfield’s proposition that algorithms constitute “steps toward the eclipse of freedoms we have enjoyed since the dawn of the modern public” (Greenfield 2018: 243), but do such arguments risk fanning the conspiratorial flames?

If we did wish to inspire more nuanced public thinking in this political arena, one strategy would be to challenge perceptions that datafication necessarily threatens justice and wellbeing. To this end, Shannon Mattern’s book A City is Not a Computer (2021) provides useful perspective. Irritated by the “elasticity, ubiquity, and deceptiveness” (13) of the ‘smart’ label in the voluminous critical scholarship around digital urbanism, and its roles in furthering “real estate development, ‘technosolutionism,’ and neoliberalism” (Mattern 2021), her counternarrative instead positions datafied technologies as just one among many ‘urban intelligences’, in the shape of “countless… local, place-based, indigenous intelligences and knowledge institutions” (Mattern 2021: 12). Datafication may, then, be constructively positioned as extending a long line of technologies ‘grafted’ onto “existing urban scaffolds and substrates” (Mattern 2021: 5), rather than as always radically unsettling.

Taking this further, a foundational understanding is that a city will always exceed any knowledge or representations, datafied or other, that is constructed about it. This excess describes not only what has not yet been calculated, or cannot be calculated, but also even the “unconceptualizable” (Hui 2021: 249). Insisting on the open-endedness of urban complexity and multiplicity places sensible limits on the hope that ‘more data is better’ – a hope which might be read into Mello Rose & Chang’s otherwise welcome (2023) contribution. It also enables a less pessimistic view than that implied by White & Larsson (2023) in this special issue. They observe, for example, that changes in Dublin’s taxi industry have destroyed certain well-established networks of social reciprocity. However, the parallel possibility should also be acknowledged that the city’s social life has receded further into the distance, no longer ‘seen’ by the data, but still an agentive source of hope.

In countering irrational fears, a potential third strategy would involve highlighting continuities with governance trends across time, rather than fixating on the novel implications of the shift towards “data-based governance” (Mello Rose & Chang 2023). In exploring the ways that newer technologies depart from traditional modes of statistical quantification, there is no need to reject understandings of datafication as sustaining historical trends towards basing decisions on ‘black boxed’ calculations. A similar case is made in Sally Engle Merry’s (2016) book The Seductions of Quantification, but with regard to the rise of an ‘indicator culture’ in governance processes internationally: she presents this as a characteristically contemporary phenomenon, but also links it to the much older project of state surveillance and population measurement. A historical perspective may be valuable, then, in diluting simplistic contrasts between a current world where the political underpinnings of governance technologies are deliberately concealed, and an imagined previous era of uncompromised civil liberties.

These possible approaches are advanced here as speculative, selective and illustrative only. My intention is not to imply shortcomings in the contributions to this special issue. Rather, it is to draw attention to one aspect of the politics of digital urbanism which is typically overlooked in the built environment literature. My hope is that future work on urban data politics will seek more directly to address and engage with, rather than ignore or dismiss, the misplaced fears that drive populist rejection of related technologies. This outcome, after all, would be well aligned with the broader goal of including “historically underrepresented groups in digitalisation processes” (Karvonen & Hargreaves 2023: 925). 

References

Amin, A. & Thrift, N. (2017). Seeing Like a City. Polity Press.

Bratton, B. (2021). The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World. Verso.

Conway, P.R. (2024). Repressive suspicion, or: the problem with conspiracy theories. Cultural Studies, Advance online version. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2024.2364260

Fieschi, P.C. (2019). Populocracy: The Tyranny of Authenticity and the Rise of Populism. Agenda Publishing.

Greenfield, A. (2018). Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life. Verso Books.

Hui, Y. (2021). Art and Cosmotechnics. University Of Minnesota Press.

Karvonen, A. & Hargreaves, T. (2023). Data politics in the built environment. Buildings and Cities, 4(1), 920–926. https://doi.org/10.5334/bc.394

Kelly, N. (2022). Facing surveillance: personified surveillance, algorithmic injustice, and the myth of big brother in post-Snowden popular culture. Surveillance and Society, 20(2), 172–185. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v20i2.14492

Mattern, S. (2021). A City Is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences. Princeton University Press.

Mello Rose, F. & Chang, J. (2023). Urban data: harnessing subjective sociocultural data from local newspapers. Buildings and Cities, 4(1), 369–385. https://doi.org/10.5334/bc.300

Merry, S.E. (2016). The Seductions of Quantification: Measuring Human Rights, Gender Violence, and Sex Trafficking. University of Chicago Press.

Mudde, C. (2004). The populist zeitgeist. Government and Opposition, 39(4), 541–563. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1477-7053.2004.00135.x

Müller, J.-W. (2017). What Is Populism? Penguin.

Oliver, J.E. & Rahn, W.M. (2016). Rise of the Trumpenvolk populism in the 2016 election. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 667(1), 189–206. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716216662639

Rivero, J.J., Sotomayor, L., Zanotto, J.M. & Zitcer, A. (2022). Democratic public or populist rabble: repositioning the city amidst social fracture. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 46(1), 101–114. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12898  

Sharma, N.K., Hargreaves, T. & Pallett, H. (2023). Social justice implications of smart urban technologies: an intersectional approach. Buildings and Cities, 4(1), 315–333. https://doi.org/10.5334/bc.290

Uscinski, J. E. & Parent, J.M. (2014). American Conspiracy Theories. Oxford University Press.

White, J. & Larsson, S. (2023). Disruptive data: historicising the platformisation of Dublin’s taxi industry. Buildings and Cities, 4(1), 838–850. https://doi.org/10.5334/bc.293

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