Socrates Schouten: Digital cities with a conscience — What does a new government mean for Amsterdam?

Was it because of the ‘fake news’ epidemic that blew over the Atlantic in 2016? The steady conquest of urban life by platform powers like Airbnb and Uber? Or did the shocking news about Facebook and Cambridge Analytica tilt the debate? We can’t be sure — but Amsterdam’s radically different tone of voice on the issue of technology is crystal clear. The coalition agreement signed by Amsterdam’s new governing parties demands a digital economy that is social, privacy-assuring and supportive of urban commons.

In March, Dutch citizens elected new city councils across the country. In Amsterdam, a progressive council was elected, with the green party GroenLinks leading negotiations. After two months of consultations, a leftist four-party coalition presented their vision and programme for the city.

Waag president Marleen Stikker’s smile widens when she scans the document for her cherished topics — digital development and civic agency. The city is learning to recognise the value of ‘city makers’, she concludes. The tech-driven ‘smart city’, on the other hand, is regarded with increasing suspicion in the new proposal. Why should large corporations like Cisco and Google be allowed to turn Amsterdam’s data into a money machine without even lending an ear to the preferences and concerns of its citizens? The new coalition programme’s approach to addressing some of these issues is a welcome turn for the better. As just one token of change, the city officially joins the band of ‘Fearless cities’ spearheaded by Barcelona that by and large seeks to obliterate neoliberalism from public office.

Let’s take a closer look at the new coalition’s programme, “A New Spring and a New Sound” (highlights here, full version here).

Firstly, the city’s digital plans begin with instating a Digital City Agenda, setting out Amsterdam’s vision on cyber security, data sovereignty, digital participation and digital services, complex topics that cannot be solved overnight. Outlining the principles of ‘privacy by design’ and ‘data minimisation’, the programme is both digitally ambitious and insightful. It warrants optimism for Amsterdam as a DECODE pilot city and as a test site for digital identity and data innovation work. Moreover, the city also expresses determination to implement the Tada manifesto, a clear-cut guide for responsible data and technology management.

Secondly, the programme sets out to define the purpose of digital technologies: these should be designed and implemented around the needs of the city, as expressed by its citizens (rather than its ‘consumers’). Thus, the coalition supports the development of platform cooperatives that provide alternatives to platform monopolists like Uber, and steps up its efforts to open up city data in ways that allow for active participation. The coalition also reworks the Amsterdam Economic Board into the “Amsterdam Social and Economic Board”, and vastly expands its digital re-schooling programme aimed at skilling the workforce for the digital (and sustainable) age. The “smart city”, the old tech-driven approach favoured by urban digital policy makers, is nowhere to be found.

On the theme of citizen participation, the programme’s proposals are equally ambitious. Of particular interest is the coalition’s promise to actively support the establishment of new commons (resources that are controlled and managed by the community, for individual and collective benefit) in the areas of ‘energy transition, healthcare, and neighbourhood activities’. (I have discussed the commons in relation to digital social innovation earlier here.) Politically, the idea of the commons has not had much traction until now, but Amsterdam’s support for establishing new commons is a sign of a shift in political discourse. The city of Amsterdam isn’t alone in this: the Belgian city of Ghent recently completed an extensive mapping of commons in 2017, and Barcelona’s minority government led by Barcelona en Comù is working with projects such as D-CENT, Procomuns, DECODE and DSI4EU.

Not coincidentally, the topics of ‘Democratisation’ and the ‘Digital City’ are merged together under one heading in the programme. If we want to prevent the smart city from becoming a digital dystopia, a diversified and intensified urban democratic practice is key. Citizens and communities need to have control of how measuring, tracking and profiling is being done and by who. By developing the democratic or participatory toolbox — including public debate, voting systems, having rights to ‘challenge’ and suggest self-managed alternatives — many digital ills can be avoided. Already the city has reached out to many Amsterdam initiatives that work on democratisation, participation and stronger neighbourhoods to start working on this agenda together. Rutger Groot-Wassink, the responsible Alderman, has also pledged to arrange budgets for communities, commons and intermediaries so that they can share in the design, implementation and execution of these practices, instead of having the administration lead on everything itself.

Of course, all of this will prove quite challenging. I expect it will take certainly a year before this new way of working will really emerge, and some years of teething problems after that. The same goes for the digital agenda itself. Whereas the coalition agreement discusses digital rights and digital participation in detail, the crossover between digital technologies and other themes is considerably less developed. The city’s vision on digitalisation in issues such as logistics, mobility, crowd management, environmental management, healthcare, and internet infrastructure is yet to be confirmed. However, for the moment we can be pleased with Amsterdam’s progress, and hopeful for the future.

This blog was originally published in June 2018 on Waag.org and updated on November 25.

Header photo: City of Amsterdam (Amsterdam.nl), public domain.

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Socrates Schouten: More and more opinion leaders are mistaking a few big corporate platforms for the collaborative economy. We need a pro-active policy framework that bends the collaborative economy towards the public good.

Today the sharing, or collaborative, economy in which ordinary citizens swap products and co-create ideas and services, enjoys widespread attention. This enthusiasm not only comes from the citizens themselves, but also from businesses and governments. From these circles springs a dazzling stream of traditional policy reports and advice papers seeking to get a grip (quite literally) on the activities in the collaborative economy. As firms and governments have great influence on economic life, the angle they take on the sharing economy determines its future direction. That turns out to be ill-fated: the old economy is mapped onto, and smothers, the true potential of the collaborative economy.

By discussing two examples from the European policy context, I will explain why collaborative economy is misinterpreted on many levels. Let’s start with ‘An economic review of the collaborative economy’, a policy brief by the influential Brussels-based think tank Bruegel. In the text, three aspects stand out. First, the basic viewpoint of the Bruegel report is that collaborative economy initiatives fulfil market functions. Collaborative platforms, we read, ‘broker supply and demand’ and ‘increase economic efficiency’. The fast-growing collaborative platforms help meet ‘consumer preferences’ and ‘increase competition’. This free-market language is all over the report, while social ideas and incentives are hardly touched upon.

Secondly, Bruegel’s discussion of collaborative initiatives is heavily tilted towards the big corporate players. When demonstrating that Europe is ‘far behind’ on the collaborative economy compared to other continents, for example, Bruegel cites a number of a meagre 27 platforms – but with a combined worth of nearly two hundred billion dollars and boasting over 100,000 employees! Given the average value of $ 7 billion per platform, this must be the collaborative economy’s ‘1 percent’: the handful of top players owning nearly the whole ‘collaborative’ market. The other 99 percent are not in their view.

Thirdly, the report recurrently refers to the collaborative platforms as ‘intermediaries’. That is striking, because one of the intended merits of the sharing and collaboration movement was that of taking out the middle man (‘disintermediation’, in jargon). Of course, we know that the new mega-platforms are quite happy with their central, intermediate position. But it’s surprising how much they find allies in economic policy circles.

Collaborative? Or economy?

In fact, I wonder what’s collaborative about all of this. Bruegel’s collaborative economy amounts to a highly capitalist industry, a far cry from the “happy sharing, friends making” narrative so often heard in sharing economy circles. What we see here is a plain case of what Tomáš Sedláček calls ‘subject-object reversal’ in economics. We start with a genuine, heartfelt aim: an economy with ‘a sense of community, collective accountability and mutual benefit’ (I’m still citing the Bruegel paper here, actually). To get there, large digital platforms could be instrumental. However, the former is a messy target from a regulatory perspective, while the platforms are quite solid and good to analyse and administer.

So, next moment we find the platforms have become the collaborative economy. The corporations are what economists and policy makers bend their minds on and what are encouraged to thrive. Consequentially, the collaborative economy’s bigger social potential for economic life – the deep value brought to citizens and communities – is neglected and wasted.

Public good

The second document, the European Commission’s agenda for the Collaborative Economy, suffers from similar shortcomings. The Commission formally puts the attention where it ought to be: on the public interest, a.k.a the common good. The document maintains the official policy mantra that regulation should not impose more restrictions than is necessary to safeguard the public interest. That sounds beautiful, but results in a rather defensive strategy. When a new player, technology or disruptor enters the scene, regulators wait and see. Early ‘weak’ signals of dissatisfied citizens do not warrant a defence of the public interest. Only when negative impacts grow to unambiguous heights and the poo hits the fan, regulators spring to life. But having arrived at that point, their scope stops at rearguard action: patching up, limiting the harm done, frolicking for ‘case-by-case’ solutions. As a result, the public good is always one (big) step behind.

Collaborative economy policies have been staring too much at what’s coming out of the glass towers, and in the process forgot about the larger social sphere, where the magic actually happens.

So what do we need? We should develop a pro-active policy framework that bends the collaborative economy towards the public good. A framework that starts from the citizen, and allows civil servants to look for common benefit and make political value judgments. I’d like to kick off by suggesting two framework components:

1. What you give attention to, will grow. So let’s focus on the adjective in ‘collaborative economy’, instead of the noun. We have done enough of helping big companies make more profits. Now it’s time to shift gears. Invest in digital social innovation: the bottom-up generation of connective ideas and practices that generate sustainable value for all, instead of eroding the basis and enriching the few.
2. Let’s shake off the public’s cheerless self-image of being just the total number of residents in any corporation’s blast range. Today, ‘public’ is a rest category, an incoherent policy checklist. All too often the public interest is interpreted as merely consumers’ interest. But it’s the bread and butter of society, and a moving target at that. We should constantly make effort to redefine the public interest and let it determine, instead of receiving the blows of, technological developments. I therefore suggest the Commission, next to the ‘Digital Single Market’, launch the ‘Digital Single Public’: a forum and agenda to reinvent social values in the digitizing world. This Public will be ‘single’ in its connectedness and sympathy to the European spirit; but diverse and dynamic in its people, solutions and ideas.

At Waag Society, we are constantly looking for tools and interventions to widen the view on the collaborative economy, like our friends from FairBnB, who want to bring the community into the local tourism platforms, and keep the value there.

I hope you will join our mission to make the European public ‘great again’.

Images: cc Waag Society 2017

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