Digital Cities and Their Possible Renewal of Democratic Participation
From WouterBeek.com
Abstract
The technological developments of the internet in the last decennium have brought to us a powerful new medium that can be used to empower a more intense involvement of citizens in the process of political decision-making and thereby facilitating a revitalization of democracy at large. To implement these potentials in a working system, many governments have create so-called Digital Cities. But these original intentions are often trade in against other requirements. However for an online community to be truly democratic one would actually like to see the implementation of a Digital City to be independent of both the existing political powers and the prevailing commercial companies in the real world. However in this paper I will maintain that there always needs to be a certain connection between online and offline communities and that it is irrational to think of the Digital City as a means for achieving a completely reformulated idea of democratic participation, independent o both politics and commerce.
Problem statement
Is it feasible that Digital Cities will provide us with a completely revamped idea of democratic participation as opposed to the established political and commercial powers?
Introduction
According to many the technological innovations of the internet, and all of its related products, have created a strong potential for a new way of political participation of citizens to get involved into the decision-making processes within different spheres of politics. One way of implementing these potentials is the building of the so called 'digital cities'. Their general aim is to implement at least some of the potentials of internet communication technology by using the city metaphor.
Digital Cities as E-Government
The term Digital City refers to the online representation of a city on the WWW, the emphasis of which is on the local character. Thus providing local information and communication facilities that seek to empower the people within their local context. [Besselaar&Beckers1998] The motivations for these online platforms are not necessarily related to the improvement of the democratic participations of citizens. As we will see there are many Digital Cities that are biased because they are created and/or maintained by institution that have very specific interests and are active players in the democratic domain themselves.
Digital cities are thought by some to empower a new concept for extending access to public facilities through the use of new media. These people see it as the primary purpose of a Digital City to deliver services to the citizens, and to do this in a more effective and efficient way than in the old, offline way. While this is obviously a good initiative to come to a more customer-oriented organization of the political sphere, it is a very restricted view of a Digital City with respect to the potentials that, at least to some researchers, those technologies possess. This service-providing view towards Digital Cities is called e-governance. [Ke&Wei2004]
These Digital Cities are often seen as replacements of already existing offline services that are merely being implemented in another, digitalized way.
Digital Cities as democratic platforms
As opposed to these Digital Cities that primarily focus upon providing services to its citizens, there are those that try to improve the democratic participation of citizens into the decision-making, thus narrowing the gap between the government and its citizens. It thus becomes more of an experimental platform in which the participants shape the digital platform by defining their own rules and being closely involved in the design and regulation of the Digital City. This participation at a higher, more active participatory level results in an online platform that comes in existence in an organic way, i.e. without the usual stringent top-down rule-making. A coming into existence of rules and regulations through the communicative efforts of the citizens themselves is stimulated. The design of a democratic Digital City is therefore essentially bottom-up. [Oblak2003]
Contrary to the previously described, servicing Digital Cities, the democratic platforms are not only trying to replace already existing offline services but are also trying to extend the ways in which the communication between citizens and their government takes place in the offline world. It therefore requires more than the digitalization of already existing offline services to implement a real democratic platform. There are examples of online voting systems that allow people to vote for their candidate via the internet. [Oostveen&Besselaar2003] These systems are often called 'democratic' because they implement some previously offline available democratic activity, but they do not extend the democratic involvement of citizens in a qualitative way.
Let us have a view at some of the existing projects that have been developed with the notion of the Digital City metaphor as a prevailing idea. And let us look at whether these implementations have succeeded in creation a new democratic forum opposed to the offline establishment.
DDS / The Digital City of Amsterdam
The first Digital City that has been created with the intention of trying to extend the existing ways of communication and participation in its local political discourse, while at the same time provided a sufficient infrastructure to allow a large group of people to get involved in this participation process, was the DDS (which stands for ‘De Digitale Stad’, i.e. ‘The Digital City’) of Amsterdam.
It originated out of an experimental initiative in early 1994, driven by the political-cultural centre De Balie and a small group of computer activists who wanted to explore the possibilities the internet had to offer concerning the way in which citizens are able to communicate with their government. The citizens of the DDS however never were a true reflection of the citizens of the real, offline city of Amsterdam. There has always been a minority of females and elderly people [Besselaar&Beckers1998].
When the organization had finished its experimental phase it had to find financial means for supporting the project beyond this subsidized testing period. While originally being meant as a mere addition to the existing initiatives, the commercial component of the organization became more and more important. And with the increasing popularity of the internet and the subsequent coming into existence of many commercial organizations providing services similar to those of the DDS, it became harder for the Digital City of Amsterdam to achieve a profit.
Together with the more commercially oriented focus of attention by the developers working for the DDS, the experiments into the revitalization of democratic participation lessened and eventually ceased. The DDS refrained from its users and adapted a more top-down oriented organization mainly providing services to its users, like free e-mail and free access to the internet. In accordance to that government-related services were still provided, but they had a primarily informing function. The democratic potentials that were explored in it's experimental period were not further elaborated upon an were even actively ruled out by the maintainers' top-down mentality. [Besselaar2001]
Today the DDS exists no more. The company has shut down the Digital City since 2000 and it is now a fully commercially oriented internet provider.
ITN / The Digital City of Parthenay
The French city of Parthenay launched their Digital City initiative in 1996. However the project wasn’t just another experimental project amongst many other ones. Because unlike many other projects it had the full support and active involvement of the local government, with the mayor of Parthenay being its principal promoter. There was a very active campaign in trying to involve as many people as possible in the initiative. This was reflected in the relatively high percentages of women and elder people. So the ITN can be credited with having attained an online citizenship that was a fairly true representation of the real, offline community. [Beckers1998]
Contrary to the DDS, which was to become a self-supporting commercial organization, the ITN was not only constantly subsidized by the local government, its whole maintenance was completely taken care of by the local governmental agencies. The project also had a very strong social component, having the fairly ambitious idea of trying to have all citizens participate in the online project. Thereby trying to transcend social groups. And it is interesting to see that they (at least partially) succeeded in doing this. The demographic and sociographic diversity is much bigger than in other, comparable Digital City projects. [Beckers1998]
Digital City Kyoto
The Digital City of Kyoto has, in contrast with the previous two projects, a much more integrated character. The Digital City is not a mere online counterpart of the offline city but the interaction between online and offline services and communities is meant to constitute the future city of Kyoto. The idea is to mingle these offline and online properties in such a way that there will be no clear distinction anymore between the two. To make this close interaction possible the Digital City has an interface that closely resembles the real-world city with the extensive use of 3D imagery and thus bring offline properties to the online world. Also the communications among the users are made as dynamical as in the case of physical interactions. People can really walk the streets, have a chat with each other, go and buy a hamburger, etc. The close relationship between the online and offline worlds is further emphasized by providing real-time sensory data from the physical city. Also there is a lot of emphasis on the use and support of embedded and wireless computing devices, thus allowing an even further integration the other way round, namely the integration of small and embedded devices into the real world. [Ishida2000]
The Definition of Community
A community is an association between people that is not coordinated by the market or the government, but through the use of communication based on shared norms and interests. [Besselaar&Beckers1998] Communities are often locally anchored. This can be both in a geographical way or based on sharing information on the same subject within special interest groups. The prevailing idea behind community life is to rebuild the community by improving the communication between, and thereby stimulating the participation of, the people involved in that community.
The communication involved in this process can be implemented in various ways. The internet and its related technologies seem to be a particularly powerful implementation of the community idea. This because these technologies facilitate a dynamic (sometimes even real-time) two-way interaction process. This contrary to older media that allow for essentially one-way interaction processes (e.g. television, newspapers, radio) and are thus unable to capture the essence of interaction that is so essential to the concept of a community. [Oblak2003]
The Implementation of a Community
So now that we have seen several different Digital Cities, it is time to evaluate what aspects of community, and thereby what aspects of digital citizenship as a dynamic, interactive and truly participatory process have, in reality, been implemented. In the case of the Amsterdam DDS, the organization of the Digital City was institutionalized with a self-funding business model. This change in organizational structure brought along with it a top-down oriented administration that lost the contact with the citizen participants. So the interactive communication process became a one-way only practice, thereby crippling the democratic involvement of the citizen partakers. In the case of the French ITN there was no need for commercialization because it was entirely supported by the local governmental agencies. This has however a significant downside, because consequently the political topics the communication is about and the way in which citizens are at all able to communicate are entirely decided upon by the governmental agencies themselves. However in a true community one would like to see these decisions concerning the content of democratic participation to be handed over to the citizens of the Digital City themselves.
The Tokyo Digital City provides a much more advanced form of online community. Compared to the other examples that we have seen, this Digital City provides a much stronger interaction between the online community and the physical city. However for the Digital City to become a powerful player in the democratic decision-making the existing politicians and political organizations have to be involved in this integration process too. But the intermingling of established politics and/or established commercial organizations into the Digital City has in other cases been a negative influence, disapproving the democratic character of the Digital City. So how should we define this interaction between the already existing powers of the offline world on one hand and on the other hand the realization of a new online democratic forum that provides new ways for citizens to get involve into he real-world decision-making process.
Discussion
As we have seen above, for a Digital City to become truly democratic platform that is concerned with real-world politics, it is necessary for such a project to be independent of the established government. If a local government has full control over such a project, then one can not expect the provided information to be objective, since the organizing party has certain interests in the discussion itself. Such a politically managed project could therefore never be a perfect implementation of a truly democratically functioning Digital City.
On the other hand we have seen that if a Digital City seeks to become a self-fulfilling organization, certain financial constraints have to be met. In this way a Digital City can become politically independent, but this political independence comes at a certain cost. Now the organization of the Digital City needs to conform itself to the economical market. It is there dependent upon sponsors and has to responding to what the commercial market wants. We have seen that in such cases the maintenance of the Digital City as a democratic platform can become suppressed by other, financially more significant factors (e.g. such we have seen in the case of the Amsterdam DDS). Also it may be the case that existing companies try to obtain a influential position inside the Digital City. For example, in some Digital Cities there are plenty of advertisements of real-world companies and even shops that provide real-world products. This, of course, is an good opportunity for the organization of the Digital City to obtain its financial means. But the downside of this commercialization is that in this way the online democratic platform will be influenced by the same powers that are already controlling the offline world. So in this commercially oriented way, the idea of a ‘new’ platform that opposes the existing one and that brings ‘new’ democratic opportunities to the citizens of the Digital City becomes blurred.
So what one would actually like to see is a completely independent organization that has no ties whatsoever to both the established political powers and the commercial interests of corporations. Only in this way one could fully reach a completely objectively based online democratic forum where the participants are free to discuss various topics without being influenced by the maintainers or subsidizers of the project.
However this ideal notion of a democratic community is not feasible. Because for the online discussions of the citizens of a Digital City to become relevant to the real world society, and for their opinions to be incorporated into the real world political decision-making, it is necessary that there exists a certain association between the new online and the already existent and already established offline powers. So for the online citizens to have any influence at all, it is required to actively incorporate established politicians and established commercial institutions.
Conclusion
So while the internet clearly can be used as a technology for implementing an online community, it is not the technological properties alone that constitute a democratic online platform for citizen participation. We have concentrated on one aspect of providing an interface between government and citizens, namely by the use of the Digital City metaphor. We’ve seen that the original intentions and expectations often include an idealized image of an extensive change that may be brought about in the citizen partaking practice in governmental decision-making. But at the end of the day these ideals come often under pressure by various factors that threaten the notion of a democratic community.
A real online community that has an enduring effect on real politics needs to involve real politicians. A close interaction between the new online communities and the existing offline institutions, both commercially and governmental) is therefore needed in order for the citizens of the Digital City to become really able to influence political decision-making in the real world. To achieve this a Digital City essentially needs to be intertwined into the offline institutions. However it is at the same time very important that the Digital City remains objective and maintains the two-way communication process wherein the citizens are actively involved in the constitution of the Digital City itself.
Reference
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