Paper by Christian Iaione, Elena de Nictolis and Anna Berti Suman: “Internet of Things, Internet of Everything and Internet of People are concepts suggesting that objects, devices and people will be increasingly interconnected through digital infrastructure that will generate a growing gathering of data. Parallel to this is the celebration of the smart city and sharing city as urban policy visions that by relying heavily on new technologies bear the promise of a efficient and thriving cities. Law and policy scholarship has either focused on questions related to privacy, discrimination, security or issues related to the production and use of big data, digital public services. Little or no attention in the literature has been paid to the disruptive impact of technological development on urban governance and city inhabitants’ rights of equal access, participation, management and even ownership, in order to understand whether and how technology can also enhance the protection of human rights and social justice in the city.
This article advances the proposal of complementing the technological and digital infrastructure with a legal and institutional infrastructure, the Internet of Humans, by construing and injecting in the legal and policy framework of the city the principle of Tech Justice. Building on the literature review on and from the analysis of selected case studies this article stresses the dichotomy existing between the market-based and the society-based applications of technology, the first likely to increase the digital divide and the challenges to human rights in the city, the latter bearing the promise to promote equal access to technology in the city. The main argument advanced by this paper is indeed that Tech Justice is an empirical dimension that can steer the developments of smart city and sharing city policies toward a more just and democratic city….(More)”.
