Northern Ireland (NI) has pervasively been a fragile and often disputed city-regional nation. Despite NI’s slim majority in favour of remaining in the EU, de facto Brexit, post-pandemic challenges and the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) have revealed a dilemma: people of all political hues have started to question aspects of their own citizenship. Consequently, this article suggests an innovative approach called ‘Algorithmic Nations’ to better articulate its emerging/complex citizenship regimes for this divided and post-conflict society in which identity borders and devolution may be facilitated through blockchain technology. This article assesses implications of this dilemma for a city-regionalised nation enmeshed within the UK, Ireland and Europe. This article explores digital citizenship in NI by applying ‘Algorithmic Nations’ framework particularly relating to intertwined (i) cross-bordering, (ii) critical awareness, (iii) digital activism and (iv) post-pandemic realities and concludes with three dilemmas and how ‘Algorithmic Nations’ framing could better integrate NI’s digital citizenship.

This article develops a conceptual taxonomy of five emerging digital citizenship regimes: (i) the globalised and generalisable regime called pandemic citizenship that clarifies how post-COVID-19 datafication processes have amplified the emergence of four intertwined, non-mutually exclusive, and non-generalisable new techno-politicalised and city-regionalised digital citizenship regimes in certain European nation-states’ urban areas; (ii) algorithmic citizenship, which is driven by blockchain and has allowed the implementation of an e-Residency programme in Tallinn; (iii) liquid citizenship, driven by dataism – the deterministic ideology of Big Data – and contested through claims for digital rights in Barcelona and Amsterdam; (iv) metropolitan citizenship, as revindicated in reaction to Brexit and reshuffled through data co-operatives in Cardiff; and (v) stateless citizenship, driven by devolution and reinvigorated through data sovereignty in Barcelona, Glasgow, and Bilbao. This article challenges the existing interpretation of how these emerging digital citizenship regimes together are ubiquitously rescaling the associated spaces/practices of European nation-states.

COVID-19 has hit citizens dramatically during 2020, not only creating a general risk-driven environment encompassing a wide array of economic vulnerabilities but also exposing them to pervasive digital risks, such as biosurveillance, misinformation, and e-democracy algorithmic threats. Over the course of the pandemic, a debate has emerged about the appropriate techno-political response when governments use disease surveillance technologies to tackle the spread of COVID-19, pointing out the dichotomy between state-Leviathan cybercontrol and civil liberties. In order to shed light on this debate, this article introduces the term ‘pandemic citizenship’ to better understand extreme circumstances in which citizens have been surviving. Particularly, this article attempts to provide an overview by focusing on stateless nations and the need to conduct further research and gather policy evidence to articulate counter political strategies as ‘algorithmic nations’. The COVID-19 pandemic has inevitably raised the need to resiliently and techno-politically respond to threats that hyper-connected and highly virialised societies produce. Amidst the increasingly AI-driven governance systems in several nation-states in Europe, this article spotted the need to devolve data power to citizens through data ecosystems in European stateless algorithmic nations. This article argues that in the absence of a coordinated and inter-dependent strategy to claim digital rights and technological sovereignty by a set of stateless algorithmic nations in Europe, on the one hand, Big Tech data-opolies, and on the other hand, the GDPR led by the European Commission, might bound and expand respectively, stateless nations’ capacity to mitigate the negative side effects of the algorithmic disruption. Individually, we already observed subtle reactions in several nations, including Catalonia and Scotland, that are unlikely to be consistent unless a joint strategy takes place at the European level by stakeholders operating in these nations’ techno-political spheres.

The public health crisis generated by the Covid19 pandemic and its consequences, along with the crisis management measures put in place by the European States and Union, deserve an analysis. The brutal socioeconomic and health impacts of this unforeseen crisis should make us reflect, among other things, on crisis management and social protection models, our public policies, political systems and the relationship between technology and human rights. For this reason, the Coppieters Foundation has released a series of papers by experts to reflect on various topics related to post-Covid19 Europe. Paper #1, focussing on governance, is available here. Paper #2, focussing on the Green Deal and Next Generation EU, is available here. Paper #3, focussing on cross-border solidarity and the national reflex, is available here. Paper #4, focussing on digital rights and technological sovereignty, is available here. This book is a compilation of all of these papers.

Against the widespread assumption that data are the oil of the 21st century, this article offers an alternative conceptual framework, interpretation, and pathway around data and smart city nexus to subvert surveillance capitalism in light of emerging and further promising practical cases. This article illustrates an open debate in data governance and the data justice field related to current trends and challenges in smart cities, resulting in a new approach advocated for and recently coined by the UN-Habitat programme ‘People-Centred Smart Cities’. Particularly, this feature article sheds light on two intertwined notions that articulate the technopolitical dimension of the ‘People-Centred Smart Cities’ approach: data co-operatives and data sovereignty. Data co-operatives are emerging as a way to share and own data through peer-to-peer (p2p) repositories and data sovereignty is being claimed as a digital right for communities/citizens. Consequently, this feature article aims to open ...

Against the backdrop of the current hyperconnected and highly virialised post-COVID-19 societies, we, ‘pandemic citizens’, wherever we are located now, have already become tiny chips inside an algorithmic giant system that nobody really understands. Furthermore, over the last decade, the increasing propagation of sensors and data collections machines and data collections machines in the so-called Smart Cities by both the public and the private sector has created democratic challenges around AI, surveillance capitalism, and protecting citizens’ digital rights to privacy and ownership. Consequently, the demise of democracy is clearly already one of the biggest policy challenges of our time, and the undermining of citizens’ digital rights is part of this issue, particularly when many ‘pandemic citizens’ will likely be unemployed during the COVID-19 crisis. Amidst the AI-driven algorithmic disruption and surveillance capitalism, this book review sheds light on the way citizens take cont...

To cite this journal article: Calzada, I., Pérez-Batlle, M., & Batlle-Montserrat, J. (2021), People-Centered Smart Cities: An Exploratory Action Research on the Cities’ Coalition for Digital Rights. Journal of Urban Affairs, 43(10), 1-26. DOI:10.1080/07352166.2021.1994861.

New data-driven technologies in global cities have yielded potential but also have intensified techno-political concerns. Consequently, in recent years, several declarations/manifestos have emerged across the world claiming to protect citizens’ digital rights. In 2018, Barcelona, Amsterdam, and NYC city councils formed the Cities’ Coalition for Digital Rights (CCDR), an international alliance of global People-Centered Smart Cities—currently encompassing 49 cities worldwide—to promote citizens’ digital rights on a global scale. People-centered smart cities programme is the strategic flagship programme by UN-Habitat that explicitly advocates the CCDR as an institutionally innovative and strategic city-network to attain policy experimentation and sustainable urban development. Against this backdrop and being inspired by the popular quote by Hannah Arendt on “the right to have rights”, this article aims to explore what “digital rights” may currently mean within a sample consisting of 13...

This article aims to examine the current and timely situation that has recently emerged as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis by proposing a strategic wake up call in the Basque Country regarding the need to reimagine the international role of stateless nations through a not less urgent techno-political response and standpoint. Despite the fact that European city-regions presents rather distinct and unique compositions, this policy strategic analysis—centred comparatively in the Basque Country—sheds light on a potential roadmap to enhance the way digital transformations, AI, and data ecosystems/governance can provide an opportunity amidst this pandemic crisis for empowering citizens and institutions and opening up a transnational collaboration based on solidarity with other cities, regions, and nations in Europe and worldwide. Given the thorny aftermaths for many European city-regions, this article encourages particularly stakeholders in the Basque Country to take the lead and coordinate a strategic response in close collaboration with other European territorial realities’ stakeholders by suggesting the creation of the Basque algorithmic nation for renewing the national community discourse and the state building old narrative employed so far and thus putting at front the strength of the co-operative active response among city-regional businesses, institutions, civic society, academia, and entrepreneurs/activists to ensure (i) the wellbeing and social justice (life), (ii) a sustainable economic model and platform-driven socio-economic alternatives (economy), (iii) a more transparent AI for social good (techno-politics), and ultimately, (iv) further democratic and less dystopic panopticon (democracy). Hence, this article situates itself in the current data policy debate in the EU reinforcing the role city-regions could play in leading data ecosystems under the post-GDPR policy umbrella in the EU particularly by providing cases, projects, and initiatives about technological sovereignty as a result of the collaboration among stakeholders at the local and city-regional level. This policy article is structured in three main sections: (i) Diagnosis, (ii) Intervention, and (iii) Roadmap. To cite this article: Calzada, Igor (2020), Euskal Nazio Algoritmikoa Sortuz: Subirautza Teknologikoa Post-COVID-19 Gizartean/Setting up the Basque Algorithmic Nation: Technological Sovereignty Amidst the Post-COVID-19 Society. Bergara: TMLab. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.28853.01766/1 Available at/Retrieved from: https://telesforomonzonlab.eus/covid-19-gogoeta-gunea/ (accessed on 17th April 2020).

The pandemic resurrected gender as a central categorization of citizenship. COVID-19 reminds us that gender oppression continues in its traditional, materialist formulations to structure our economic, civic, and political lives. Postfeminism has diversified feminist discourses, and at times been used as a temporal claim-the "post" signifying the diminishing need for feminist theory or activism in light of advancements in gender equality. We use postfeminism in a genealogical and critical sense which encompasses the changes in feminisms and enunciates various contradictions that apply to generations of people. The conditions of COVID-19 prompt us to analyze what Stéphanie Genz aptly names boom and bust postfeminism. This analysis generates two implications for philosophers of education working in areas of gender and political identity.