This paper explores the tensions between urban and youth development in the information age so as to critically reflect on the rights of urban youth to reorient their socio-technological surroundings, and with it their own life course. Findings from two case studies of NYC youth are drawn on to consider both a ‘right to the city’ and ‘to research’ as deeply intertwined ontological and epistemological movements that reconfigure the production of space, knowledge and media in the smart city. As NYCs economy becomes oriented toward high-tech and creative industries, public investments are made to recruit and accommodate a highly educated, largely white, and supposedly more creative class of workers. Marginalized and poor youth are meanwhile segregated and largely sorted out of this ‘new’ economy. At a more intimate scale of development, apps like Uber shape public mobility, companies like News Corp equip public schools with educational media, and daily communication is largely facilitated by privately owned platforms and networks. The result is a geography of youth development that increasingly takes place in the proprietary cross-hairs of smart urbanism’s creative destruction. This paper unpacks two youth-based projects intended to shift this dynamic: one that developed an open-source social network and one that maintains a community-based WiFi network. Together, these projects help illustrate how broader calls for rights ‘to the city’ and ‘to research’ play out in the practical yet powerful ways youth are remaking the social, material, and digital configuration of the smart city.

1. Digital Sociology Conference | Digital Structures, Digital Institutions Session | 03/18/16
PLAYING WITH PROPERTY:
Young People and the Right to
the ‘Smart’ City
Gregory T. Donovan,PhD
Assistant Professor,
Communication & Media Studies
New Media & Digital Design
Urban Studies
Urban Law Center
FORDHAM UNIVERSITY
GTD.NYC @GDONOVAN

2. GTD.NYC @GDONOVAN
I. the ‘smart’ urban frontier
II. informational youth
III. two developments
IV. a right to the smart city?

3. GTD.NYC @GDONOVAN

4. “How can cities rise to meet big new challenges — and
serve more and more people — with resources that are
always stretched thin? By finding smart ways to use a
resource that is always growing: Data.”
GTD.NYC @GDONOVAN

5. digital.nyc/map
GTD.NYC @GDONOVAN
the smart city’s uneven geography

6. GTD.NYC @GDONOVAN
a “new” urban frontier?

7. GTD.NYC @GDONOVAN
Lefebvre, H. (2003). The Urban Revolution.
“in the urban, everything is
calculable, quantifiable, programmable;
everything, that is, except the drama that results from the
co-presence and re-presentation of the elements
calculated, quantified, and programmed.”
— Henri Lefebvre
*
*
urban (plat)form

8. GTD.NYC @GDONOVAN
Lefebvre, H. (1987). The Everyday and Everydayness. Yale French Studies, 73. 7-11.
“… the everyday [constitutes]
the platform upon which the bureaucratic
society of controlled consumerism is erected”
— Henri Lefebvre*
*

9. GTD.NYC @GDONOVAN
the urban platform accumulates all content

10. GTD.NYC @GDONOVAN
… but produces uneven knowledge
data-driven indifference

11. GTD.NYC @GDONOVAN
II. informational youth

12. mydigitalfootprint.org
a Youth Design & Research Collective production
GTD.NYC @GDONOVAN

13. cyberspace
your spacemy space
cyberspace is
magical!
GTD.NYC @GDONOVAN

14. youth as
informational ideal,
youth as
informational property
GTD.NYC @GDONOVAN

15. GTD.NYC @GDONOVAN

16. Circuits for access, or dispossession?
GTD.NYC @GDONOVAN

17. Proprietary ecologies are the
multidimensional ecosystems of
privatized data flows within which
everyday life increasingly takes
place.
… I theorize this as an “ecology”
because the concept bridges an IT
discourse of information systems
that interact at various scales
(i.e. information ecology) with a
spatial understanding of the
relations of production and
reproduction at various scales (i.e.
political ecology).”
GTD.NYC @GDONOVAN

18. YOUTH ARE THE CANARIES IN OUR CONTEMPORARY DATA MINE.
Their situated resilience, distress, empathy & apathy are
indicators of things to come.
GTD.NYC @GDONOVAN

19. GTD.NYC @GDONOVAN
III. two developments

20. GTD.NYC @GDONOVAN
Hudson Yards Redevelopment Amsterdam Housing Development

21. DESIGNING SMART CITIES
FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE
SPRING 2016
Comm &
Media Studies
American Studies
Urban Studies
Dorothy Day
Center
for
Service & Justice
Amsterdam
Houses
Amsterdam
Addition
Lincoln Square
Neighborhood
Center
COURSE ATTRIBUTES
SERVICE PARTNER COMMUNITY PARTNERS
JUSTICE-LEARNING PARTNER
NMDD 3883
SERVICE LEARNING
COURSE
GTD.NYC @GDONOVAN

22. GTD.NYC @GDONOVAN
Settling the New West (Side)

23. “Hudson Yards will attract & cater to
this vibrant, cutting-edge community.”
GTD.NYC @GDONOVAN

24. GTD.NYC @GDONOVAN
quantifying privilege

25. GTD.NYC @GDONOVAN
Amsterdam Houses
& Amsterdam Addition

26. GTD.NYC @GDONOVAN
PhotobyPopSpots:http://www.popspotsnyc.com/west_side_story/

27. GTD.NYC @GDONOVANGTD.NYC @GDONOVAN
Maps Generated By: I Quant NY, http://iqauntny.tumblr.com

28. 754 frisks
2 guns
.265% success rate
GTD.NYC @GDONOVAN

29. “… it’s not a disproportionate percentage of those
who witnesses and victims
describe as committing the murder.
In that case,incidentally,
I think we disproportionately
stop whites too much
and minorities too little.”
(June 28, 2013)
GTD.NYC @GDONOVAN

30. (USA Today, 2003)
(Fox New, 2003)
Brianna, 12
Forced by RIAA to pay $2,000 fine
as well as issue public apology for
file sharing in 2003.
Resident of UWS public housing
GTD.NYC @GDONOVANGTD.NYC @GDONOVAN

31. GTD.NYC @GDONOVAN
A Settlement House
for the Old West (Side)
GTD.NYC @GDONOVAN

32. GTD.NYC @GDONOVAN
A settlement house is a community center
with a stated purpose of “strengthen[ing]
individual and neighborhood assets, and
build[ing] collective capacity to address
community problems.”
— Beverly Koerin
*
*
Koerin, B. (2003). The Settlement House Tradition: Current Trends and Future Concerns.”

33. GTD.NYC @GDONOVAN
IV. a right to the smart city?

34. situating the settlement house
as techno-social interface
GTD.NYC @GDONOVAN
The settlement house,
rather than the new media district,
is a potentially potent techno-social interface
that could reorient neoliberal modes of
knowing and belonging for marginalized youth
in the smart city.

35. “… the right to the tools
through which any citizen can
systematically increase that
stock of knowledge which they
consider most vital to their
survival as human beings and to
their claims as citizens.”
The Right to the Smart City
“The right to the city is far
more than the individual
liberty to access urban
resources: it is a right to
change ourselves by changing
the city.”
GTD.NYC @GDONOVAN

36. PUBLIC SCIENCE PROJECT’S
RESEARCHERSFORFAIRPOLICING.ORG
GTD.NYC @GDONOVAN
qualitative communities & participatory platforms

37. GTD.NYC @GDONOVAN
qualitative communities & participatory platforms

38. GTD.NYC @GDONOVAN
qualitative communities & participatory platforms

39. Digital Sociology Conference | Digital Structures, Digital Institutions Session | 03/18/16
PLAYING WITH PROPERTY:
Young People and the Right to
the ‘Smart’ City
Gregory T. Donovan,PhD
Assistant Professor,
Communication & Media Studies
New Media & Digital Design
Urban Studies
Urban Law Center
FORDHAM UNIVERSITY
GTD.NYC @GDONOVAN