What does the emergence of platforms and algorithms mean for our urban culture? And how can we, as citizens and residents, shape the terms and conditions under which they operate?

These are the leading questions of Urban Life Under Algorithms. Click Here to Accept the Terms, the recent 'City Essay' Paul Rutten Rutten and I wrote, published by Trancity Valiz / Simon Franke. Free download here: https://www.trancity.nl/publicaties/stedelijk-leven-onder-algoritmes)

A third layer: Ville, cité and… réseaux

Our point of departure: urban life can be understood as composed of three layers that mutually influence each other. Years ago, sociologist Richard Sennett described the city in terms of the ville and the cité. The physical city of streets, buildings and infrastructures; and the social and political life. Staying with Sennett's elegant French terms, we added the réseaux as a third layer: the digital networks, platforms and algorithms through which we increasingly perceive, use and manage the city.

None of these layers fully determines the others; sometimes they align, sometimes they collide. As Sennett argues, their relation is somewhat 'crooked': they don’t always neatly map onto one another. That said, we do see the digital layer of the réseaux becoming more prominent. More problematically: its logic and power distribution is growing detached from the needs, values and political processes on the ground.

Sensing everything. Or: the disappearance of politics

Let's briefly take these apart. The logic of the réseaux is the logic of data, and the cybernetic logic of system optimization: computing the city. At a recent smart city expo, a vendor advertised its camera and image recognition system as 'Sensing Everything'. Well, really? Everything? What the system actually saw, was a narrow slice of urban life: loitering youths, illegally parked bikes, a missing manhole cover. That is: everything that departments for law & order would want to see.

Computing the city means treating the city as an information system: something that can be measured, modelled and optimised. What is measurable counts; what isn't disappears from view. Cities get studied like rainforests or galaxies: complex systems that self-organise. But unlike a rainforest, a city is a political community, with competing ideas about what a good city is. What disappears is the idea of the city as a polity: a social and poltical community.

From territorial to functional sovereignty

That brings us to the second issue: who sets the rules and goals of all this optimization? Increasingly, a handful of tech companies whose shareholder-value logic tends to trump any local vision of quality of life. Legal scholar Frank Pasquale calls this a shift from territorial to functional sovereignty: within their own domains, mobility, housing, delivery, platforms effectively set their own rules, subject to corporate rather than democratic control. In effect, they have started to govern the city.

Back to quality of life as a guiding principle

In our essay, we argue that in turn politics and the discussion about quality of life should take centre stage in the analysis, design, regulation and implementation of urban technologies. We introduce three lenses that can help analyse impact and steer policy:

The connecting city: towards diminished reality?

Cities are communities of strangers, and public space is where we learn to live with people unlike ourselves. Algorithmic personalisation puts that under pressure. When platforms guide each of us to "our kind of" places, we get software-sorted cities and a filter bubble with a geography: what one recent report calls not augmented but diminished reality. The result may be a city where we increasingly find ourselves living together apart.

The providing city: from universal infrastructures to the city as a licence

Infrastructure was once the great equalizer: universal access to water, energy and transport as a mark of citizenship. Now the city is becoming a bundle of personalised services, priced and permissioned in real time. Amazon changes its prices 2.5 million times a day; Uber stands accused of surveillance pricing (is your battery nearly dead? Are you late for a flight?). What you pay, and what you get access to, depends on your profile. We call this the city as a licence: rights granted by platform companies, derived from terms-of-service contracts rather than universal rights and duties of citizens.

The just city: data manipulation as politics

If the algorithms that govern us are black boxes we cannot change, what remains of politics? What we see emerging is data politics: political struggle shifts from debating outcomes to fighting over what counts as legitimate input. Residents of Zandvoort, tired of cut-through traffic, collectively reported fake roadworks in their navigation apps: a data guerrilla. But cities revert to this tactic too. When Amsterdam faced a similar problem, it ended up officially converting a street to one-way traffic. Not because that was locally desirable or necessary, but because it was the only way to block a shortcut invented by the algorithms of Google Maps. If the governance of the city moves to réseaux steered by platform companies, we risk that data manipulation is all that is left of politics.

Sensing everything, seeing the city as a whole

Each of these developments already triggers debate: regulating the self-driving car, banning predictive policing, restricting Airbnb. All important, but often isolated. What gets lost is the bigger question of what these technologies together mean for urban culture. So our essay argues to turn the question around. Not: how do we regulate what the market has built? But: in what kind of city do we want to live, and how can technology help us get there? Not: how do we file the sharp edges off Uber? But: what is a fair and sustainable vision for urban mobility, and what digital infrastructure would serve it? That is not a technical question. It is a political one, and it belongs in the democratic arena, not in a terms-of-service update.

An unexpected way out

Is there a way out? I found the beginning of an answer in an unexpected place: the IBM-built control room in Rio de Janeiro that has served for a decade as the poster child of everything critics fear about the smart city:  Big Brother, dataism, a city outsourced to a tech vendor. When I had the chance to visit some time ago, I went in expecting to have those fears confirmed. 

But what I found looked more like a town hall than a cockpit cum mega dashboard. No mathematicians or algorithm designers at the desks, but civil servants from departments across the city, sitting side by side, reading the incoming data together, weighing it against their own expertise, deciding in consultation how to respond. There was even a tribune at the back of the room where the press could watch along. 

My visit was of course too short to establish whether this all really worked out, but it held an interesting promise: the data didn't set anything in motion automatically; it started a conversation, with room for debate and human intelligence and embodied experiences of the city. That, in the end, is the wager of our essay: the way out is not to do away with urban tech and data. Rather, it is about finding ways to use data as the beginning of politics, feeding the democratic life of the cité rather than quietly replacing it.

Stedelijk leven onder algoritmes (in Dutch) is available as a free PDF via trancity.nl, or in print. It was initiated as a literary review for the research project The Quality of Life in Smart Urban Spaces (NWA route Smart, Liveable Cities), a collaboration between Hogeschool Rotterdam, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, Fontys and Waag Futurelab. 

I wrote my parts of the essay during a sabbatical visit at the UTS TD School as an honorary professor (thanks Martin Tomitsch ) and the QUT Media Lab / Desgin School / Digital Media Research Centre (thanks Marcus Foth Foth). Also thanks to Sarah Louise Barns Luke Hespanhol Joel Fredericks Ian McArthur 伊恩·麦克阿瑟 Marius Hoggenmüller Callum Parker Soojeong Yoo Glenda Caldwell and Chris Speed for hosting me while in Australia. And of course our subtitle is a nod to the work of Evgeny Morozov.