Towards Data Sovereignty: Charting the Politics of Surveillance in Single-Site Supportive Housing

Abstract

As active and passive forms of surveillance become increasingly popular, as cities strive to lead the way technologically in the pursuit of the ‘smart’ city, asserting the right to data sovereignty has never been more critical. This thesis, in focusing on the power/knowledge implications of the smart city, seeks to investigate how development discourses, and the ethics of public health, are depoliticised and naturalised by surveillance capitalism and the neoliberal hegemonic order, to exert unwarranted surveillance and predatory profiling on those deemed by the neoliberal regime as ‘vulnerable’, ‘high-need’ or ‘at-risk.’ Looking directly at the evolution of the post-panopticon and the emerging desire for ‘absolute knowledge’ in the age of total transparency, this thesis assesses the growing global dependency on post-panoptic surveillance mechanisms in the urban: revealing the emerging intimacy between space and surveillance. With the smart city momentum less and less concerned with issues of transparency and citizen sovereignty, and in the context of the rapid marketisation, neoliberalisation and privatisation of urban space in Aotearoa, this thesis evidences the necessity for developing social alternatives to existing extractivist policies and platforms. Drawing links between the ideology of neoliberalism and the discipline of urban planning, this thesis looks to data as a new frontier for urban planners and spatial designers and seeks to explore emerging and radical approaches to the urban assemblage of technology and governance. Drawing from the works of theorists Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Henri Lefebvre and Byung-Chul Han, this thesis endeavours to highlight how the incorporation of surveillance into supportive housing, under the guise of advancing public health, is altering Aotearoa’s sociopolitical and techno-political landscape. The discourse and analysis carried out in this thesis will be directly applied to a prominent high-density single-site supportive housing development in Tāmaki Makaurau. The findings conclude that the quest for the smart city and home, in an ever-pressing race to lead in global technological innovation, is seeing innovation lauded over transparency and citizen sovereignty. Identifying surveillance as an essential component of neoliberal supportive housing, and its determination of concepts of care, safety, and support, this thesis determines the need for a duty and politics of care surrounding the incorporation of disruptive technologies into single-site supportive housing in Aotearoa. In full recognition of the powerful and influential capabilities of disruptive technologies, in their potential to improve the quality of state housing stock in Aotearoa, this thesis argues that a re-framing and re-centring of citizens' right to ownership of their data is required. In doing so, tenants of supportive housing in Aotearoa would be prevented from having to choose between their privacy or their health whilst cementing, in policy, a recognition of the full extent of the capabilities of emerging technologies in the age of Big Data.