The dilemmas around digital citizenship in a post-Brexit and post-pandemic Northern Ireland: towards an algorithmic nation?

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. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Citizenship Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Emerging digital citizenship regimes: Pandemic, algorithmic, liquid, metropolitan, and stateless citizenships

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.

Data-Driven Citizenship Regimes in Contemporary Urban Scenarios: An Introduction

This Special Issue presents new perspectives on the idea of digital citizenship by delving into the nexus between its emerging concepts, the consequences of the global pandemic crisis, and the urban environment. It does so by addressing a wide range of case studies from three continents and developing two main hypotheses. First, the COVID-19 outbreak has expanded the impact of digital technologies on citizens' everyday life. Second, the urban realm is the environment where new citizenship regimes are emerging through platformization, datafication, and the rescaling of the state. To introduce the Special Issue, this article: (i) examines recent scholarship about the effects of the pandemic on digital citizenship;(ii) discusses and expands concepts of digital citizenship through case studies;and (iii) assesses how emerging forms of digital citizenship are fostered by uneven ‘pandemic citizenship' regimes worldwide.

Data-Driven Citizenship Regimes in Contemporary Urban Scenarios: An Introduction

This Special Issue presents new perspectives on the idea of digital citizenship by delving into the nexus between its emerging concepts, the consequences of the global pandemic crisis, and the urban environment. It does so by addressing a wide range of case studies from three continents and developing two main hypotheses. First, the COVID-19 outbreak has expanded the impact of digital technologies on citizens’ everyday life. Second, the urban realm is the environment where new citizenship regimes are emerging through platformization, datafication, and the rescaling of the state. To introduce the Special Issue, this article: (i) examines recent scholarship about the effects of the pandemic on digital citizenship;(ii) discusses and expands concepts of digital citizenship through case studies;and (iii) assesses how emerging forms of digital citizenship are fostered by uneven ‘pandemic citizenship’ regimes worldwide. [ FROM AUTHOR]

Emancipatory Urban Citizenship Regimes in Postpandemic Catalonia, Scotland, and Wales

Wide tensions regarding the organization of nation-state power have been triggered over the last years in the UK and Spain. By contrast, in the UK, (i) the plebiscite on Scottish Independence has been characterized since 2014 so far by a regular hegemony of the SNP in Scotland, and (ii) more recently, distinct resilient responses to tackle COVID-19 have dramatically shifted perceptions about the potential constitutional arrangements in Wales partially opposing a state-centric vision of the UK. By contrast, the role played by the constitutionally illegal but socially constitutive referendum in Catalonia on 1 October 2017, remarkably provoked the re-emergence of the Spanish far-right narrative through the surge of the new political party called Vox. In both cases, the urban in Glasgow, Cardiff, and Barcelona has been shaping various oppositions to state-centric agendas, and such oppositions have shaped elections in the UK and Spain. This article sheds light on the distinct, emerging, and emancipatory urban citizenship regimes in Catalonia, Scotland, and Wales, particularly illustrating the roles that Barcelona, Glasgow, and Cardiff, respectively, are playing in articulating a counter-reaction by rescaling a state-centric vision. This article employs past elections' evidence to illustrate such regimes amid postpandemic times in datafied states.

The Right to Have Digital Rights in Smart Cities

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 CCDR global people-centered smart cities: Barcelona, Amsterdam, NYC, Long Beach, Toronto, Porto, London, Vienna, Milan, Los Angeles, Portland, San Antonio, and Glasgow. Particularly, this article examines the (i) understanding and the (ii) prioritisation of digital rights in 13 cities through a semi-structured questionnaire by gathering 13 CCDR city representatives/strategists’ responses. These preliminary findings reveal not only distinct strategies but also common policy patterns.

Platform and Data Co-Operatives amidst European Pandemic Citizenship

Many European pandemic citizens will likely be unemployed during the COVID-19 crisis. This article explores whether it is possible to alter existing data governance extractivist models to incentivize the emergence of platform and data co-operatives to protect European pandemic citizens’ labor and digital rights. As such, this article aims to decipher the rationale behind the proliferation of platform and data co-operatives by responding to how new forms of co-operatives using digital technologies can provide feasible socio-economic alternatives to improve post-COVID-19 working conditions for vulnerable or already empowered pandemic citizens. This article is structured as follows. First, the European “pandemic citizenship” term is described. Second, the rationale of this article is consequently presented. Third, the research question, two hypotheses, and the action research triangulation are described. The deployment of the triangulation methodology based on action research, mixed methods and social innovation reveals the main findings through (i) Delphi study results, (ii) a taxonomy for platform and data co-operative cases, and ultimately, (iii) fieldwork research conducted in Glasgow, Barcelona and Tallinn. This article concludes that co-operatives (platform-based or data-driven), stemming from the potential resilient response of European pandemic citizens, may currently portray a feasible alternative to data governance extractivist models.

Epilogue. RESETTING smart city citizenship: Amidst the post-COVID-19 hyperconnected-virialised societies

This epilogue concludes the book by pointing out the current reset the global world through its smart cities is facing. The epilogue suggests that smart city citizenship may evolve from the present ‘the new normal’ towards new emerging typologies of citizenship amidst the post-COVID-19 hyperconnected and virialised societies, including pandemic, digital, algorithmic, and liquid citizenship. As such, the epilogue states the term algorithmic nations as a geopolitical term by which the new global order may be established. In this changing global realm, at least in Europe, technological sovereignty principle could be intensified to protect citizens’ digital rights by embodying through platform and data co-operatives stemming from data altruism and donation policy schemes. Ultimately, the epilogue suggests the inevitable obligation to do the right thing after the reset.

Chapter 2 - DECIPHERING smart city citizenship: Techno-politics of data and urban co-operative platforms

This chapter focuses on the hegemonic smart city approach in the European H2020 institutional framework that is slowly evolving into a new citizen-centric paradigm called the experimental city. While this evolution incorporates Social Innovations—including urban co-operative platforms that are flourishing as (smart) citizens are increasingly considered decision-makers rather than data providers—certain underlying ethical and democratic issues concerning the techno-politics of data remain unresolved. This chapter deciphers the meaning of data-driven smart cities by helping to understand the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and the algorithmic disruption in citizens. This chapter helps to understand new forms of Social Innovation slightly surfacing in European cities and regions in light of the post-GDPR data-driven landscape. This data-driven landscape has become dramatically critical in the aftermath of the post COVID-19 era. Data and platform co-operatives as the most common forms of urban co-operative platforms may emerge as an alternative to challenge digital platform capitalism.