Sofia Laborde: A socio-technical approach to privacy in smart cities.

Sofia Laborde holds a bachelor’s degree in sociology from the University of the Republic (Uruguay) and has eight years’ experience in public policy management in Uruguay. In 2017, she undertook a master’s degree in sociology at the doctoral school of Sciences Po Paris in order to change career direction and move into research.

Since April 2020, she has been working on a CIFRE PhD with Gustave Eiffel University and EDF’s R&D department. She is researching the socio-technical approach to privacy in smart cities. She is a member of LATTS (academia) and GRETS (industry), and a contributor to EDF’s TRACES project (Digital Technology, Privacy and Society).

The term ‘smart city’ is a broad concept describing an approach to the computerised automation of various urban network management processes (G. Jeannot and S. Bernardin, 2019). It involves the digitisation of traditional urban functions, the installation of sensors to manage public spaces in new ways, the development of public policies on open data for the purposes of transparency or to encourage innovation, and the creation of new, increasingly personalised services for citizens. This approach relies on the creation of complex information systems (D. Guéranger and A. Mathieu-Fritz, 2019) capable of integrating, processing and analysing data on technical infrastructure and individual behaviour within the urban environment (A. Picon, 2018).

Smart city information systems process a wide range of personal and non-personal data. This data comes from three sources: the local authority itself; companies that provide public services or manage utilities (energy, water); and residents, who may generate it voluntarily or in the form of digital traces. To date, the regional or corporate marketing of these projects has made a series of promises, including the integrated management of municipal services and respect for citizens’ privacy, but little is known about the approach taken by smart city managers to deliver on these promises.

This research project revisits a classic question in sociology: the value of understanding how individuals or collective actors manage the relationship between the public and private spheres, in this case in the context of socio-technical changes (drawing on G. Simmel, 1909). It focuses on an area as yet unexplored by this discipline: the intersection between privacy and the information systems of ‘smart cities’.

From the perspective of combinatorial ethnography (N. Dodier and I. Baszanger, 1997), this thesis analyses empirical data drawn from a primary field site (the city of Dijon in France) and at least one additional field site (Turku in Finland). By moving between different projects, first in Dijon and then in Turku, this project aims to accumulate a series of specific cases and identify different forms of action and their possible combinations regarding privacy in smart cities.