Smart Cities, Smart Virus: technoutopias of the new normal

Abstract

This article analyzes the impact of COVID-19 on urban culture, emphasizing biopolitics, and new forms of body control that have spread worldwide due to the pandemic. It is interesting to examine the technopolicies set off by the pandemic environment at a time when, as never before, we are so digital. After all, the pandemic has exponentially instrumentalized big data, the invasion of privacy by the massive use of demographic data and Artificial Intelligence resources, embedded in applications for monitoring the virus dissemination. Such forms of algorithmic control are imposed by a set of instruments integrated into networks via processes that refer to smart cities' discourses. This concept is the object of a bibliometric review here, aiming at mapping its state of the art. Procedures such as contact tracking technologies and thermal cameras were widely implemented during the pandemic, albeit without a public debate, as the fear of contagion guaranteed its success. The conclusion is that, besides the deepening of the social disparities, one of the most perverse effects of the post-coronavirus shock doctrine is the naturalization of surveillance in the wake of public health policies. In this context, transnational platform-states, which constitute alliances between big technology corporations and public authorities, start collecting private data, pushing the edge relations of power and sovereignty already mentioned by authors such as Benjamin Bratton, Adam Greenfield, and Paul Virilio. The article argues that revisiting the bibliography on the topic of smart cities allows us to understand how the dynamics of predictability of facts and data appropriation, as presuppositions of smart cities technoutopies, enshrine new urbanism, based on the oligopolistic and socially dividing data control, which becomes more decisive in the new normal imposed by COVID-19.