Thesis supervisor: Alexandre Mathieu-Fritz
Sofia Laborde holds a bachelor's degree in sociology from the University of the Republic (Uruguay) and has eight years of experience in public policy management in Uruguay. In 2017, she completed a master's degree in sociology at the doctoral school of Sciences Po Paris in order to change her career path and move into research.
Since April 2020, she has been working on her CIFRE thesis with Gustave Eiffel University and EDF's R&D department. She is working on the socio-technical treatment of privacy in smart cities. She is a member of LATTS (academia) and GRETS (industry) and contributes to EDF's TRACES project (Digital Technology, Privacy, and Society).
The term "smart city" is a vague concept describing an approach to the computer automation of various urban network management processes (G. Jeannot and S. Bernardin, 2019). It involves the digitization of traditional city functions, the installation of sensors to manage public space differently, the development of public policies to open up data for the purposes of transparency or to encourage innovation, and the creation of new, increasingly personalized services for citizens. This approach is based on the creation of complex information systems (D. Guéranger and A. Mathieu-Fritz, 2019) capable of integrating, processing, and analyzing data on technical infrastructure and individual behavior in urban spaces (A. Picon, 2018).
Smart city information systems process a range of personal and non-personal data. This data comes from three sources: the municipality itself; companies that provide public services or manage utilities (energy, water); and residents, who may produce data on a voluntary basis or in the form of traces. To date, the territorial or corporate marketing of these projects has made a series of promises, including integrated management of city services and respect for citizens' privacy, but little is known about the path taken by VI managers to fulfill these promises.
This research project revisits a classic question in sociology: the importance of understanding how individuals or collective actors manage the relationship between the public and private spheres, in this case socio-technical changes (based on G. Simmel, 1909). It focuses on an area that has not yet been explored by this discipline: the intersection between privacy and the information systems of "smart cities."
From a combinatorial ethnography perspective (N. Dodier and I. Baszanger, 1997), the thesis deals with empirical material from a main field of investigation (the city of Dijon in France) and at least one complementary field (Turku in Finland). By circulating between different projects, first in Dijon and then in Turku, this project seeks to accumulate a series of specific cases and identify different forms of action and their possible combinations with regard to privacy in smart cities.
Year of enrollment: 2020
Doctoral school: Organizations, Markets, Institutions (OMI)