Governance inefficiencies threaten the potential of smart city projects to deliver equitable urban transformations. Current strategies often hinder implementation, and risk harmful technological effects on communities. Tackling this challenge demands urgent reforms to better integrate scientific insights into smarter governance practices.

This paper addresses the public contestation of the rollout of the fifth generation of mobile telecommunications networks (5G) in the Netherlands. Drawing on Pfaffenberger's framework of technological dramas, we analyze the variety of symbolic expressions about 5G made in documents published by "design constituencies" leading the technology's implementation, "ambivalent intermediaries" reporting on 5G's implementation and its emerging controversial status in the news, and by "impact constituencies" who organize on Facebook to oppose against 5G. The analysis describes a variety of publicly performed narratives and activities that build on symbolic meanings of a supposed public need for 5G, imaginaries of 5G futures, and scientifically manageable and responsible innovation. The paper demonstrates how the technological drama of 5G is constituted by tensions between different interpretations of these publicly performed meanings. However, amidst the drama, meanings of public need and imaginaries of 5G futures are temporarily suspended, constraining the stage for opposition and enforcing partial closure of the conflict.

Welfare states across the world increasingly experiment with the use of big data and algorithms in the name of efficiency gains and fair decision-making. However, recent public scandals in various countries show persistent problems with how digital welfare states operate at the cost of vulnerable populations. Problems include systemic forms of discrimination, increasing levels of surveillance, stigmatization, and restricted access to public benefits. Rather than viewing these problems as instances of technical implementation hurdles, we argue that digital welfare states currently operate in an institutional void in which legal, ethical, and quality procedures are lacking or ill equipped to address new challenges posed by digital technologies.Based on a secondary analysis of documents, we show how this institutional void empirically manifests itself in the Dutch welfare state by zooming in on two subcases that sparked public controversy in recent years: the childcare benefits scandal that focused on fraud detection and the Top 400/Top 600 that was set-up with the aim of crime prevention. By analyzing these cases, we show how sphere transgressions - understood as the encroachment of digital logic into the sphere of social welfare - can have detrimental consequences for citizens when there is an institutional void. We end with reflections on how to fill the current institutional void and identify 'soft signals' that could be used as pointers to recognize the potential undesirable consequences of new sphere transgressions.

In deze white paper geven zeventien wetenschappers en praktijkdeskundigen hun visie op de smart city. In duo-interviews laten ze zien hoe data en technologie kansen bieden om de stad leefbaarder te maken. En: om daar met burgers en bestuurders samen aan te werken. Tegelijk moeten we hoognodig met elkaar in gesprek over wat we in onze samenleving wel en niet willen met data en technologie.

Smart cities are proposed as a solution for problems of urbanization. Technologies associated with smart cities involve the monitoring of human activities and resulting data streams. These technologies affect certain public values, which may be subject to change depending on their sociotechnical development. This paper presents a method that enables decision-makers to anticipate on this pattern of value change. This method uses two axes that allow a technology to be plotted in terms of different value-laden functions: a first axis in which projects are classified that collect either personal information or impersonal information; a second axis that classifies projects as to whether they collect data for the purpose of service or surveillance. For 37 sensor-based projects in the city of Rotterdam, it has been studied how projects may shift from one quadrant to another. These shifts inform decision-makers so they are better capable of anticipating undesirable impacts of technological developments.

Corporate and government officials as well as social scientists studying smart cities are exploring gamification to help stakeholders engage with complex technological and societal issues. However, despite research addressing concerns of respondents’ engagement and the validity and reliability of the results of gamified research, there are hardly any empirical accounts of how respondent engagement, validity and reliability of results are affected by decision-making in multi-stakeholder processes of designing and producing gamified research. In this paper, we evaluate a gamified survey that we developed to do research about public perceptions and engagements with digitization and datafication in public space. We report and evaluate the ideas, discussions and decisions in the design and production of the gamified survey. These reflections offer insights into the politics of such a process and advice for other researchers considering the use of gamified research tools for examining seemingly invisible and intangible technological developments, whilst at the same time being critical of the validity and reliability of the outcomes that such a survey produced. Our analysis shows how and why pragmatism and stakeholder relations took precedence over academic and epistemological concerns. Whilst we produced a research tool that did provoke large numbers of different people to actually engage with the smart city, the resulting data were less rich than we had aimed for, and required additional, qualitative methods.

In this article, the authors present exploratory research about privacy behaviour in a smart city. They ask if and why people share personal data in a smart city environment. They designed a gamified survey that offers realistic scenarios in which people are asked to identify smart technologies and to share or withhold their personal data. The findings show that most respondents are willing to share their data for surveillance purposes and security benefits. They found that privacy behaviour was directly and most strongly explained by privacy concerns: people with more concerns shared less personal data than others. Smart city literacy had a much smaller effect on privacy behaviour, as did age, education, and income. They found no effect of gender or place of residence on any of the dependent variables. They discuss the meanings of these outcomes for local governments as a matter of digital placemaking (i.e., designing the smart city in a way that makes technology visible and provides transparency with respect to privacy and data governance).

Digitization and datafication of public space have a significant impact on how cities are developed, governed, perceived and used. As technological developments are based upon political decisions, which impact people’s everyday lives, and from which not everyone benefits or suffers equally, we argue that ‘the smart city’ should be part of continuous public debate; that it should be considered and treated as a social problem. Through nine focus groups, we invited respondents to explore and discuss instances and dilemmas of the smart city. We investigated which interpretative repertoires they used to frame the smart city as a social and actionable problem. Following Blumer's and Gamson's theories on the social construction of problems and on collective action frames, we assessed respondents’ discursive interpretations and their subjective construction of their senses of injustice, agency and identity regarding this subject. We find that – in the context of the city of Rotterdam in The Netherlands – citizens do not experience and consider the smart city as a social and actionable problem. Although they do associate the technological development of smart cities with potential threats, this does not change or constrain their sense of ‘actionability’, nor their behaviour, as they consider themselves to be powerless individuals regarding what, in their eyes, is a complex, elusive and inevitable situation they are confronted with. Strikingly, rather than specifically and contextually reflecting on smart city issues, respondents tended to express their concerns in the more general context of digital and data technologies invading everyday life.

Abstract The welfare state is currently undergoing a transition toward data-driven policies, management, and execution. This has important repercussions for frontline bureaucrats in such a “digital welfare state.” So far, impact of data-driven tools on frontline bureaucrats is primarily described in terms of curtailing or enlarging their discretionary space to make decisions. It is unclear, however, how daily work practices and role identities of frontline bureaucrats change in situ and which norms they develop to work with new data tools. In this article, we present an empirical study about the impact of a data dashboard in the Work and Income department of the municipality of Rotterdam. We answer the following research question: Which role identities, work practices, and norms of appropriate behavior of frontline bureaucrats in the social domain are reshaped by the introduction of a data dashboard? We use a multiple methods design consisting of semi-structured interviews, ethnographic observations, and document analysis. Our results reveal two role identities among frontline bureaucrats: (a) the client coach, and (b) the caseload manager. We show that the implementation of the dashboard stimulates a shift from a client coach role identity toward a caseload manager role identity. This shift is contested as it leads to role identity conflicts among frontline bureaucrats with a client coach role. Furthermore, we establish that the accommodation of the institutional void in which the introduction of the dashboard takes place, is centered around three themes of contestation: (a) data quality, (b) quality of service provision, and (c) data representations.

Most studies in the literature aim to discuss and examine the technologies in smart cities. Much less is known about the dynamics of their acceptance by citizens. Therefore, we conducted a systematic literature review of studies examining the acceptance of smart city technologies (SCTs), focussing particularly on Technology User Acceptance Models (TAM). Using a novel framework of SCTs based on the technology visibility and citizen interaction, we categorise them as individual-based explicit SCTs, collective-purpose explicit SCTs, digitising SCTs, and infrastructure SCTs. We assess that studies about citizen acceptation of SCTs have been mainly focussed on individual technologies. Also, the review shows that the field is nascent and fragmented, and that a wide variety of variables have been used to predict the adoption of individual-based explicit SCTs, with the classic ones of TAM (perceived use and perceived usefulness) unmistakably being relevant in the smart city context as well. As a result of the fragmentation of the field, our review was not yet able to identify generalisable knowledge about the acceptance of the smart city and its technologies by citizens. We end with some suggestions for future research approaches and designs.

There is a sharp contrast between the public value discourse that typifies smart city-making on the one hand and its democratic deficit on the other. In this article we explore this contrast in more detail and assess that the paradigm and practices of networked government, which dominates smart city making, positions citizens as "audiences" of smart city makers and civil servants as "shepherds" of their public values. In these positions, both citizens and civil servants participate in a wide array of smart city experiments and engagements. However, an active, autonomous agenda setting role by citizens or democratically legitimated advocacy of civil servants is rare and does not easily fit within the paradigm of networked government. We draw on the work of Dewey and Marres to envision such different roles and make them concrete by highlighting experiences of Dutch citizens and civil servants with urban data and technology. These show, first, that the desires and goals of citizens may differ markedly from those of the smart city, and-second-that civil servants struggle with legitimate ways to advocate for socially and economically balanced smart city solutions. We conclude, in the final section, that the smart city can only be developed further through representative democratic means of engagement, among which local elections that express the collective desires of citizens and frame the mandate of civil servants.

Social web data increasingly complement studies of various social phenomena, especially when the availability of traditional data is limited. One such case is that of vulnerable young populations that are disengaged from employment, education, or training; usually referred to as NEETs. This paper explores the extent to which social media data and discussion websites could complement conventional sources in the study of NEETs. We focus on user-generated content posted to the dedicated r/NEET subreddit, which gathers subscribers who self-identify as NEETs. We develop and implement a data processing pipeline for the analysis of the behavioral patterns and main concerns of this social group. Our analysis of Reddit data reaches similar conclusions to official reports from governmental institutions in Europe. The paper also provides insights into health-related issues and latent interests of NEETs, not recorded in official reports and related literature.

Public values or public conflict: democratic foundations for the smart city Public values and citizen participation are key terms in smart city discourse that are propagated by all its actors, from governments to corporations and civil society. Nevertheless, the design and development of smart cities are hardly ‘public’ as some publics and some forms of participation are never included. This is particularly visible in current protests against a key enabling technology for smart cities, 5G. These contestations tend to be considered ill-informed and irrational, while their methods are seen as conflictual rather than helpful. In this article the author argues that the public value approach to smart cities is rooted in a deliberative perspective of democracy, while the tensions that are produced by 5G and other forms of anti-technological protest are better understood as part of agonistic democracy. Such conflicts about the new smart technologies that are currently hidden from public sight need to be articulated and constructed as contentious issues for electoral politics, in order for the smart city to acquire its democratic legitimacy.

U.S., UK, and European municipalities are increasingly experimenting with data as an instrument for social policy. This movement pertains often to the design of municipal data warehouses, dashboards, and predictive analytics, the latter mostly to identify risk of fraud. This transition to data-driven social policy, captured by the term "digital welfare state," almost completely takes place out of political and social view, and escapes democratic decision making. In this article, I zoom in on The Netherlands and show in detail how sound data governance is lacking at three levels: data experiments and practices take place in a so-called "institutional void" without any clear democratic mandate; moreover, they are often based on disputable quality of data and analytic models; and they tend to transgress the recent EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) about privacy and data protection. I also assess that key stakeholders in this data transition, that is the citizens whose data are used, are not actively informed let alone invited to participate. As a result, a practice of top-down monitoring, containment and control is evolving despite the desire of civil servants in this domain to do "good" with data. I explore several data and policy alternatives in the conclusion to contribute to a higher quality and more democratic usage of data in the digital welfare state.

While there is a plethora of surveillance technologies in public space, they are hard to see, as they are sometimes literally hidden, or they have become such a common part of everyday surroundings that they escape conscious observation. Through this invisibility the smart city and its surveillance technologies escape public awareness, critical reflection and democratic debate. In this chapter we discuss several ways of raising awareness about surveillance technologies. We show how artists and activists have engaged in cultural performance to bring surveillance in sight; we review a number of instruments of participatory action research that critical scholars have introduced. These performative and participatory instruments to expose surveillance technologies do have an immediate effect, however it is a temporal one and one would need additional efforts to move discussions away from individual responsibilities to collective ones and from individual awareness to political agenda-setting. This directs us, as participatory action researchers, towards examining how the few political conflicts around urban surveillance technologies have emerged and played out, and towards designing new interventions for political representatives and their constituencies.

Vanaf oktober 2018 onderzocht een team van het Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Centre for BOLD Cities een jaar lang wat verschillende Nederlanders weten en vinden van de manieren waarop gegevens worden verzameld in de openbare ruimte. Het onderzoek werd opgezet in de vorm van een interactieve online game, ‘Jouw buurt, jouw data’, die mensen zowel thuis als op verschillende evenementen konden spelen. De uitkomsten van het onderzoeksproject zijn te lezen in deze uitgave.

'Gemeenten moeten het gebruik van big data in het sociaal domein meer richten op dienstverlening en minder op risicobeheersing.'

The editors of Feminism & Psychology, Catriona Macleod, Rose Capdevila and Jeanne Marecek, thank Tamara Shefer, who, along with Sally R. Munt, Vivienne Bozalek and Ronelle Carolissen, guest edited the special issue “Feminist Politics of Shame”, published in Volume 29, Issue 2. Guest editing is a lengthy and timeconsuming process. We are grateful for the active and constructive engagement with the authors of this special issue. The following people have taken time to review manuscripts for Feminism & Psychology over the last year. We are indebted to all our reviewers for their commitment to providing in-depth feedback. In addition, a number of people reviewed abstracts and attended presentations to decide on our annual student presentation awards. Thank you for undertaking this labour.