What makes a city smart? Academics and policy makers have paid a great deal of attention in recent years to answering this question. A smart city is often defined by the incorporation of information and communication technologies to support logistical enhancement, which allows governments to make decisions based on the collection, analysis, and sharing of data. Governments have invested in enhancing how they use data in order to achieve immediately responsive infrastructure and more accessible public services. However, this vision of urban intelligence is limited. Endless resources can be devoted to the pursuit of higher efficiency. But if a city's residents do not trust the institutions that govern them, then cities simply won't be able to deliver services. As a result of this learned and felt reality, cities around the world are rethinking how to build trust with their constituents. Trust-building efforts in cities range in strategy and tactic, and come with specific assumptions about how trust works and how to repair it. For some, distrust is primarily a consequence of inefficient systems and unreliable transactions, including antiquated computer systems and too much room for human discretion in the execution of programs and policies. And for others, distrust is due to a misalignment of values, including perceptions of elite politicians, racist institutions, and government offices as simply not caring about communities. 

          The reality is that public sector institutions are being forced to respond in order to govern. They are attempting to solve for the trust problem within a spectrum between two approaches. On one end, they are investing in bolstering the trustworthiness of the institution itself. This is done through communicating the benevolence and capability of the government by investing in programs where people have positive experiences with government agencies or government actors. And on the other end of the spectrum, cities are investing in proxy relationships, where a human or machine actor functions as an intermediary between the institution and the constituent. When repairing links of trust with particular constituents is perceived to be too costly, institutions are incorporating intermediaries that help to facilitate the relation between the institution and the constituent. In this talk, Eric Gordon will examine trends in technology-augmented proxies, including "Web3" technologies such as blockchain, as well as novel data practices, and artificial intelligence. The talk will examine existing governance practices in municipalities in the US and Argentina, and discuss the implications of outsourcing trust relationships on the future of democratic institutions.

-Dr. Eric Gordon