Abstract:
This article analyzes the impact of COVID-19 on urban culture, focusing on the biopolitics and new forms of bodily control that spread worldwide with the pandemic. At this moment when we are more digital than ever, it examines the technopolitics triggered by the pandemic context. After all, the pandemic exponentially instrumentalized the use of big data, the invasion of privacy through the massive use of population data, and artificial intelligence resources embedded in apps monitoring the spread of the virus. These forms of algorithmic control assert themselves through a set of instruments integrated into networks, via processes that evoke discourses on smart cities, the subject here of a bibliometric review intended to map the concept’s state of the art. Procedures such as contact-tracing technologies and thermal cameras were widely deployed during the pandemic, even without public debate, their success ensured by fear of contagion. The conclusion is that, beyond deepening the gulf of social disparities, the post-coronavirus shock doctrine has among its most perverse effects the normalization of surveillance in the wake of public health policies. In this context, transnational platform-states, constituted through alliances between major technology corporations and public authorities, begin harvesting private data, pushing to the limit relations of power and sovereignty already articulated by authors such as Benjamin Bratton, Adam Greenfield and Paul Virilio. The article argues that revisiting the bibliography on smart cities makes it possible to understand how the dynamics of event predictability and data appropriation, premises of smart-city techno-utopias, consecrate a new urbanism grounded in data control, oligopolistic and socially exclusionary in character, which consolidates itself in the new normal dictated by COVID-19.
Keywords
Coronavirus, Smart cities, Surveillance, Urbanism, New normal
Full article: https://www.academia.edu/44881194/Smart_Cities_Smart_Virus_tecnoutopias_do_novo_normal
BEIGUELMAN, G.; DEAK, A. Smart Cities, Smart Virus: tecnoutopias do novo normal.V!RUS, São Carlos, no. 21, second semester, December 2020. [online]. Available at: <http://www.nomads.usp.br/virus/virus21/?sec=4&item=1&lang=pt>. Accessed: January 7, 2021