Criminology and the smart city paradigm: ‘Preventative technical imaginary’ or ‘Techlash’ vector?

Abstract

We live in the age of the smart city. But what should criminologists make of this situation? Clearly, urban smartness offers a host of beneficial options when it comes to preventing urban crime. But it also opens the door to a new urban computational order based on mass surveillance and predicated on environmental-behavioural control and manipulation. This article introduces the smart city paradigm to a criminological audience and poses a series of important questions about whether our current fixation with smart technology exposes society to a whole new set of crimes, risks, and system failures that previously would have been considered impossible. The article unfolds in three parts. It begins with a short introduction to the smart city that includes a brief review of some of the extant criminological research on the subject. In part two, drawing on critiques and counter critiques of Crime Prevention through Environmental Design and its hyper-rational approach to urban space, it introduces a new theoretical term for thinking about the relationship between urban smartness and situational crime prevention: the preventative technical imaginary. Finally, part three challenges the putative idea of a ‘no crime’ urban future often associated with the preventative technical imaginary by arguing instead that smart technology and other ‘Internet of Things’ systems actually expose our cities to an array of attack surfaces and vulnerability vectors that have no historical precedent—including new anti-technology “cultures of resistance” that are already crystallizing.