The impact of ICT on citizens well-being and the right to the city or community

Description

While Information and Communication Technology (ICT) becomes an important tool for policymakers, placemakers, and urban dwellers, we need to understand better the consequences of its fast-paced implementation, to avoid unintended negative effects in terms of quality of life and democratic freedoms. This is particularly important in the view of the growing popularity of the smart city idea, which incorporates ICT to enhance the quality and performance of urban services and spaces. Critics point out that technological development should not be a goal, but a tool to achieve better conditions for everybody, with citizens’ needs and preferences as driving values. The minitrack aim is to understand how new technologies can shape the wellbeing of urban citizens and their ability to exercise their “right to the city”, defined by Lefebvre (1968) as freedom to make and remake our cities according to principles of democracy, equality, and social justice.

As technologies became an increasingly important aspect of urban life, moderating their negative and developing positive functions are among the main challenges for the near future. We know from numerous studies that new technologies have a huge impact on social life, changing the quality of personal relationships, the concept of proximity, the idea of authority, privacy, liberty, and democracy. ICT will have a growing impact on our lives, our cities, and communities and that a developing virtual interface will distract attention from physical, street-level processes, planning, and placemaking challenges. Along with catalyzing new needs of citizens and transforming the way they are addressed, we observe that ICT influences people’s ability to exercise the “right to the city” on several levels.

Technologies are changing city life in visible and invisible ways. There is a need to start looking closer at possible consequences of technological innovation in all spatial and political interventions, to avoid unintended negative effects as well as to strengthen their positive potential to enable wellbeing and urban democracy.

This minitrack invites research from across disciplines that addresses the changes in the local community that can be understood as the aftermath of the ICT implementation. Particular questions/topics of interest include:

• How can citizens benefit from novel digital technologies?
• What do citizens lose from the implementation of digital technologies by the cities?
• Which set of values does the digital transformation address/strengthens/threaten?
• How does the digital transformation impact and change the citizens’ right to the city?
• How is the digital transformation process managed over time and by whom?
• How ICT can strengthen/weaken the street-level processes and placemaking challenges?

Minitrack Leaders

Assistant Professor at the Robert Zajonc Institute for Social Studies at the University of Warsaw, Poland. She received a PhD with honors from the Faculty of Psychology, at the University of Warsaw based on research conducted in Jerusalem about consequences of collective memory for present intergroup attitudes. She holds MA Diplomas in psychology and cultural studies from Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland. She visited the European Research Centre on Migration and Ethnic Relations at Utrecht University as a pre-doctoral research fellow. Her research interests include: social and political psychology, intergroup relations, urban studies, and new technologies (especially, AI and human – robot interaction).