Smart cities probably do redlining and capitalism lol

Programming Racial Difference The tendency of European civilization through capitalism was thus not to homogenize but to differentiate—to exaggerate regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences. cedric robinson, black marxism, 1983. Like any mode of capital accumulation, accumulation through smart governance proceeds in part through positing social, hence geographic, nonequivalencies. The implementation of computerized property and waste tech moves through long-standing structures of group-based inequalities, extending them in time and space, transforming them, creating in the process novel contradictions and forms of resistance. The centrality of profiling is made clear in computer-assisted property appraisal. Trevor Ngwane illustrates how property regimes have long served as mechanisms for racializing space, expressed in submarket differentiations.66 cama software reproduces these submarkets under the heading of putative finer districts, comprising high levels of home ownership, median household incomes, and proximity to amenities, among other factors, on one hand and “inner-city” submarkets determined by the preponderance of old buildings, residences with low square footage, and low home sale values on the other.67 The profiles, which map onto residential segregation, are then used as rationalizations for placed-based (dis)investment and tax abatement. This preserves existing disparities in property value, thus ensuring that minority neighborhoods maintain their relative valuelessness. In fact, lowering the values of minority submarkets, which always precedes gentrification, was the point of establishing algorithmic appraisal in New York, which was legitimized through multicultural rhetoric. Computer-assisted waste management similarly generates spatial profiles in ways that naturalize the logics of the market and contribute to “group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death,” given its toxic import.68 And it can do so only by encoding spatial and hence social differences. Municipalities also attempt to raise revenues from rural areas by coding them as distinct from cities in order to fund urban projects. This casts the rural as a resource for dealing with urban growth, though only through reproducing the nonurban. Technology firms similarly benefit from the production of regional difference by casting its commodity as a medium through which postcolonial hinterlands can close the development gap with Western countries. Smart governance reflects the extent to which forms of capitalist governance, computerized or not, rely on establishing notions of group-based inequality prior to and through the accumulation process. As Adam Bledsoe and Willie Wright argue, the enshrinement of racial inequality is one of several tactics of justifying the racialized effects of this process.69 And the tactic is deployed on a global scale. It is therefore important to stress that the planetary profusion of smart governance encounters, organizes, and disposes of humans and environments in ways that are prefigured by colonial racial classifications. This adds another dimension to the observation that contemporary urbanization is “variegated, uneven, volatile, contradictory, and emergent[and] assumes specific forms across divergent spatiotemporal contexts.”70 Specifically, we see that differentiation is not only an output of urban transformations but also an input, which offers deeper insights into where, why, and how economies of space are changing alongside sociotechnological mutation. Beyond the Algorithm Scrutinizing smart governance from the perspective of racial capitalism reveals the extent to which it is prefigured by and creates new forms of racial dispossession and disparity. These findings highlight the need for algorithmic abolitionist thinking that calls the types of norms and values behind smart governance to the fore. Such a point of view maintains that it is not enough to chronicle the unequal effects of the rise and spread of technologically administered populations. Such inattention to the social forces at work behind smart governance has led to some theoretical missteps. For one, in addition to chronicling how the spread of the smart city can reproduce established social inequalities, one must also scrutinize it in terms of whether or not the reproduction of long-standing social inequalities is one of its driving objectives.71 One thing that smart urbanization shows is that data-driven governance is employed in many instances to preserve if not expand inequity. This is most obvious in the way that racial taxonomies prefigure algorithmic practices in border patrol, law enforcement, and/or national security. The slow and uneven rolling out of smart technologies of governance does not signify the birth of a fully automated mode of statecraft, operating beyond the grasp of human control. Such phantom-like agency is an ideological mirage that renders invisible those who benefit from the application of computing technology to governance. Nor does it signify, as Zuboff suggests, the end of racial supremacy as an organizing principle of political and economic power.72 On the contrary, from the standpoint of racial capitalism, algorithmic governance is the latest vector of white supremacist political economy. It is therefore vital to understand the constitutive function that racial differentiation performs in creating conditions for smart modes of governance. As the cases explored above demonstrate, the algorithmic apparatuses of such cities are specifically designed such that they devalue specific areas and make them unequally susceptible to disinvestment and despoilment. In many instances, the key function is to legitimize the harmful practices required to increase profit rates, which are to begin with already ethno-racialized, gendered, nationalized, regionalized, and sexualized. An abolitionist view would direct attention to the extent to which such deployments of software technology permeate society. Moreover, the perspective is sensitive to the fact that the use of algorithms to differentiate populations and places according to their value can potentially generate new solidarities and ways of producing social space. The people and places that are identified by algorithms as economically devalued or exposed to pollution are revealed to share one common characteristic—they are relatively valueless from the vantage point of current configurations of global accumulation. This is not merely an issue of class: some of these groups are proletarianized; others are not. But what they all hold in common is that they have been differentiated by governances as less valuable, however defined. Acknowledging this provides a basis for coalition building between the various algorithmically devalued populations, which offers new opportunities for resisting the racial violence so central to the evolution of the capitalist mode of production.