This session will explore the social costs of smart city technologies, particularly how surveillance systems, often presented as lawful and efficient, reinforce structural inequality, target marginalised communities, and undermine public trust. In the participatory, non-formal educational format, we will explore real-world examples of urban surveillance: facial recognition, predictive policing, biometric data collection, etc. Through discussion, interactive exercises, and collective reflection, we will explore how these systems work and how the narrative of "smartness" and "efficiency" often obscures their harms.
We will examine urban experiences and case studies from underrepresented regions in Europe and beyond, such as Serbia, Georgia, and Brazil, to see how surveillance technologies operate unevenly across class, race, gender, and geography. The session allows participants to explore their thoughts regarding the following questions: Who designs smart cities and for whom? What is lost when digital control systems are normalised? Where do care, equity, and community agency intersect in urban tech development?
During this session, we want participants to collect and share strategies for resisting, subverting, or reimagining harmful urban technologies in their local contexts. We will also map a set of shared principles for more just and inclusive tech systems in cities, grounded in lived experience, resistance, and collective imagination.
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I’m a digital rights activist and a philosopher. After completing a PhD at the University of Edinburgh, I am now a postdoc at the University of Barcelona. My research focuses on questions of selfhood and self-representation, covering topics as diverse as infant self-other differentiation and the effects of technology on our self-conceptions. When wearing my activist hat, I am mostly interested in how we can use technology, and the internet in particular, to foster community and alternative forms of production and knowledge generation.
Masho is a non binary activist from Tbilisi, exploring the interconnection between the built environment, humans and our psyche. Economist and Architect by Education, Masho found their passion towards Urbanism from a Social and Political perspectives early on in their activist and NGO carreer and decided to dedicate their life to it. They are specialising on the topics of walkable cities and transport, housing policies, climate crisis resilience and urban gardening.