The work which I decided to reflex on during this blog is the work of Paolo Cardullo “The right to the smart city” (2019), particularly the first chapter entitled ‘Citizenship, Justice, and the Right to the Smart City’. While I wasn’t too sure what to aspect from this book, I found it extremely interesting and enlightening by the time I had finished my read. The idea of ‘Smart Cities’ is not a strange one to me, however I had never thought of it in such detail until beginning this module. Cardullo’s work only made me even more aware of the differences, dangers and the innovation which can – and have – come from Smart Cities. The issue of ethics stuck out to me: in the UK a lot of our lives are already online through smart phones, email and cloud sharing both in personal and professional working lives, and multiple social media platforms allowing for anyone to post almost every aspect of their lives to the whole world. This seems to be done by many millions of people a day without the thought of the consequences which could happen to the amount of information they give out. This can cause so many ethical problems for researchers of all types: what is and is not allowed to be used, where the line is crossed between public to private. It is clear that this is not yet understood, nor are all the guidelines around ethical online research, and with technology only moving forward it will be interesting to see how these two topics end up changing and shaping both the Smart world which we live in and Smart (online) research.

References

Cardullo, P. (2019) The right to the smart city. Emerald Publishing.