Gender-equitable urban development in smart city contexts

Cooperation partner Graz: Prof. Dr. Anke Strüver, Institute of Geography and Spatial Research
Junior Fellow: Marcella Rowek

Incoming Senior Fellow: Prof. Dr. Sybille Bauriedl, Interdisciplinary Institute for Environmental, Social and Human Sciences, Department of Geography, Europa-Universität Flensburg
Incoming Junior Fellows: Yannick Ecker, Henk Wiechers

Period: March 2020 to February 2021
Symposium: March 4-6, 2021

Content:

The term "smart city" describes less the status of a city than the promise of increasing the quality of life in cities using digital technologies. Digital communication, digital infrastructures and digital connectivity are increasingly permeating the public and private spaces of working and everyday life. On the one hand, increasing digitalization offers potential for new forms of urban coexistence and, at the same time, shows a tendency towards universalization and standardization by dominant digital corporations (see Bauriedl/Strüver 2018: Smart Cities. Critical perspectives on digitalization in cities. Transcript).

As part of smart city strategies and the supply-driven expansion of platform economies, the areas of care work and mobility in particular are subject to great dynamism in large cities. Care platforms are offering an ever-increasing range of services (care, food and grocery delivery, house cleaning and gardening). Mobility platforms are offering more and more means of transportation (city cars, vans, bicycles, cargo bikes, e-scooters, e-scooters) and usage options (stationary or unbound, self-driving, shared or autonomous driving). Where and how these infrastructures and services are developed is an expression of social power relations.

The rapid expansion of online platforms shows a hierarchizing characteristic: a commodification of care and mobility services combined with the enforcement of precarious working conditions along gender and whiteness and an exclusive offer in socially privileged districts. Caring and sharing services reproduce a gendered division of labour and the special demand for care and mobility services in socially marginalized districts is hardly served. The digitalization promises for smart cities do not apply to the city as a whole, but rather to islands of smart privilege that already have excellent supply infrastructures. As part of the fellowship, these observations will be examined in more detail with the following questions for selected major European cities:

Do the promises of smart city discourses (effectiveness, availability and quality of life through digital technologies) address a gendered and racialized division of labour? Do platform-mediated care and mobility services lead to social and spatial privileges and intersectional hierarchizations?