Urban automation experiments and the user: Creating invasive technologies or New possibilities for inclusion?

Experimentation has become an important urban governance strategy, targeting energy intensive sectors such as transport, buildings and other infrastructures through technological innovation. Often, the tools tested are digital or “smart”, sometimes also in the form of automation or robotic technology. The goal is usually to intervene in some sort of practice that is considered problematic by trying out new solutions before up-scaling. Developing demonstration sites and pilot projects is often seen as an essential strategy for this. Such projects currently attract massive investments from actors in research, industry and civil society, as well as substantial policy support. The authors of this paper are STS scholars who are involved in, and study different national and international demonstration projects of this kind. Examples of project goals are “Smartening the distribution grid by developing methodologies for improved control and automation of distribution networks”, demonstrating ”smart integration of grid users from transport” and delivering ”cloud-based automated ICT solutions for real time demand response, which takes into account consumer behaviour, and provides active participation incentives”. Through participation in such projects, we have developed an interest in the way people, in the guise of technology users, customers, citizens, practitioners and publics, are imagined by key actors, as well as how they are included and enrolled in these kind of UA demonstration projects. Our analyses typically cover how smart technologies are domesticated and become integrated in the day-to-day activities and practices of households, industries or places like cities or islands. Drawing on insights from empirical studies of such technology-user interfaces, we explore how technology works in pilot or real-life settings (e.g for prosumers, users of electric vehicles, and smart metering). By studying different attempts to develop and implement UA, a key concern is how such emerging “smart”, digital and automated innovation in different areas of urban life are (re)producing forms of inequality (inclusion or exclusion). We are particularly interested in the way emerging smart technologies and different configurations of such solutions are contributing (or not) to the creation of public engagement and energy citizenship.