In this paper, we investigate people’s perception of datafication and surveillance in Amsterdam Smart City. Based on a series of focus groups, we show how people understand new forms of hypervisbility, what strategies they use to navigate these experiences, and what the limitations of these strategies are. We show how people tried to discern between public and private sector actors, to differentiate who they trusted by building on the existing social contract. People also trusted the objectivity of data in relation to prior experiences of social contexts and discrimination. Lastly, we show how the experiences of some of the inhabitants in our study who were most vulnerable to hypervisibility highlight the limits to strategies based on the neutrality of data. By asking about perceived surveillance rather than emphasising actual practices of surveilling, we show differentiated contexts and strategies, providing empirical grounds to question the dominant technical framing of smart cities.

Transparency and Accountability (T&A) interventions are emergent social technologies in middle and low-income countries. They bring together citizen sensors, mobile communications, geo-browsers and social organization to raise public awareness on the extent of governance deficits, and monitor government's (in)action. Due to their novelty, almost all we know about the effectiveness of T&A interventions comes from gray literature. Can citizen sensors radically increase the transparency of the state, or are changes brought about by T&A interventions more likely to be incremental? We review the literature on transparency policies and describe their drivers, characteristics and supply–demand dynamics. We discuss promising cases of T&A interventions in East Africa, the empirical focus of an on-going collaborative research program. We conclude that the effect of T&A interventions is more likely to be incremental and mediated by existing organizations and professional users who populate the space between the state and citizens. Two elements at the interface between supply and demand seem rather crucial for designers of T&A interventions: accountability-relevant data and extreme public

While plans to develop “smart cities” are gathering pace across the world, we know little about the ways in which the discourses of datafication, smartness, and big data play out in material contexts of urban development, including utility and resource management. In this paper, we explore this intersection in the case of Bangalore’s water supply, where IBM in alliance with the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB) is implementing a water-flow sensor network and geographic database system under the label of “big data for water supply.” We illustrate how the BWSSB-IBM approach narrows down the complex field of water provision to a question of water in- and out-flow measurements and the monitoring of BWSSB ground personnel. In theoretical terms, we discuss the ways in which these processes constitute both particular claims to knowledge, and the redefinition of citizenship as consumption.