Collaborative Fieldwork

This article is based on collaborative ethnographic research with my PhD student Andreas Brandt (2022) and citizens and officials in the city of Vejle. In February to October 2019, while Brandt was conducting ethnographic fieldwork in the Technical and Environmental Services Department (henceforth referred to as the Technical Department) for his PhD, I was invited as his supervisor and leader of a research project on living labs³ to participate in a study of citizens’ use of the I-REACT app. The Resilience Business Cup award included an offer by the municipality to test the I-REACT app among its citizens and to help the start-up develop their prototype. As recounted by an official from the Department of Innovation and Entrepreneurship: ‘The main attraction of the Resilience Business Cup, and the carrot [that was held out] to the start-ups to participate, was this aim of framing the city as one giant test platform, a living laboratory, put at disposal for the winner’ (Brandt 2022: 140, brackets added).

Soon after the Resilience Business Cup, the responsibility for this promise to test the I-REACT app among citizens in Vejle entailed in the award had moved from the Department of Entrepreneurship and Innovation to the Technical Department. In the Technical Department, the water engineers and other officials responsible for preventing and controlling the floods and for passing on relevant information to the communication department and the public were not impressed by I-REACT and its affordances. They found the content too general and superficial, and the data infrastructure of I-REACT did not integrate well with the municipality's existing information systems, Moreover, they were irritated to receive this task from another department. Therefore, they hoped that two anthropologists would be able to help them to somehow turn the prescribed testing into a useful exercise.

Brandt and I suggested to rethink the task of testing the app completely and to organise an ethnographic living lab (Brandt and Bruun 2023). Together with four officials from the Technical Department, we invited concerned citizens to a series of workshops to discuss how they dealt with floods, and we also visited them in their homes and neighbourhoods to learn about their everyday life with flood risks. The first workshop with citizens coincided with a cloudburst which incited people to participate. This meant that we came in contact with some of the most discontent citizens in the most flood-prone neighbourhoods.

During the summer of 2019, we visited these neighbourhoods and interviewed 23 people, some of them several times, in their homes. It turned out that only six of them had used the I-REACT app and only very sporadically; they had just tried to download it and had a brief look at its different functions and quizzes. This confirmed our and the Technical Department's initial scepticism about the app and its usefulness. Thus, we never systematically tested the I-REACT app, but used it as a cultural probe (Boehner et al 2012) to investigate people's experiences with floods and public participation in flood management. Ironically, the app's irrelevance became a lever for broadening our conversations and for people showing us their alternative practices, such as mutual care and practical help in situations of flooding, and their desires and moral expectations of the municipality.

In May 2019, Brandt and I participated in the end conference of the I-REACT research and innovation project held in Venice, where we learned more about the project's broader contexts and the platform technology's logics of participation and trust through gamification, that is through a process that turns participation into a game whereby individuals can earn points and advance by answering quiz questions and be endorsed by others. We participated in a disaster simulation game where the Venetian palazzo in which the conference was held was turned into a control room demonstrating I-REACT's backend dashboard and the logics of participation that I discuss below were given full display. Luckily for us, the start-up that had promoted the I-REACT prototype at the Business Cup the previous year in Vejle gradually lost interest in any systematic testing of their app. Neither we nor the municipal officials in Vejle were ever confronted with demands to report our results to the Business Cup winner. Perhaps the company realised how difficult it would be to adapt their platform and app to local contexts and to integrate the I-REACT technology in existing organisations; perhaps they had never planned to go beyond the prototype stage once the project's funding expired. In any case, the I-REACT app is no longer available from any app store.

I-REACT as an Emblem of Contemporary Ideologies of Urban Governance

While ultimately the I-REACT app has failed, I argue that the I-REACT platform and project is emblematic of several political trends in contemporary urban governance that we can observe across places in the global North and global South. As evidenced by the Resilience Business Cup's award, I-REACT points to the global drive towards experimentation and turning cities into test-beds (Halpern et al 2013), urban experiments (Evans et al 2016; Levenda 2019) or living labs (Bulkeley et al 2016; Marvin et al 2018). STS scholar Thomas Gieryn analyses in an article on ‘The City as Truth-Spot’ how the modernist Chicago School of sociology turned the city into a laboratory for social science, constructing the city both as ‘a place where they located their investigations and as the entity revealed in their descriptions and theoretical explanations’ (2006: 7). In contrast, according to the postmodernist Los Angeles School of Urbanism, with scholars like Mike Davis and Edward Soja, the city does not appear as a scientific object but as a multiplicity of co-constructed and contested imageries, forever made and remade (Gieryn 2006: 26). Modernist masterplans have been turned into what Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin (2001) call splintering urbanism: urban planning today appears as fragmented projects, messy practices, experiments, networks and flows. It could, however, be argued that modernist planning and sovereignty have always existed as a layer of government in networked systems, and that data systems and dashboard overviews today reconnect scattered projects in ‘adjacent spaces of governance’ (Brandt 2022) into governable wholes.

Moreover, visions of urban experimentation and urban life as ongoing experiments implicate that citizens participate in such experimental processes as ‘citizens scientists’, ‘data collectors’, ‘co-creators’ and ‘innovators’. This kind of participation in urban experiments is significant for New Public Governance (Andersen et al 2020), a further twist on the forms of citizenship, participation and empowerment known from neoliberal governance and New Public Management (Cruikshank 1999; Koster 2014). In the era of New Public Governance, design thinking reconfigures citizens as resourceful co-creators, collaborators and producers of innovative solutions to so-called wicked problems, such as climate change, that allegedly cannot be solved using conventional means (Ansell and Torfing 2014). I-REACT and the Resilience Business Cup also bear witness to the proliferation of public–private partnerships and the conviction that start-ups and other private-sector enterprises are ‘change agents’ and can improve public administrations and public services. Start-ups and citizen participants as co-creators are attributed the capacity to solve environmental and social problems through innovative, creative and playful methods.

Last but not least, innovative and creative solutions are believed to be mediated by digital platforms and big data systems. Under the banner of ‘smart cities’, a variety of information and communication technologies are providing urban planners and disaster managers with new forms of data about cities and their populations that shape governance, variously called algorithmic governance (Danaher 2016), data-driven governance (Chandler 2020) or smart city governance (Löfgren and Webster 2020; Paulin 2018). In this way, contemporary forms of digitalised technomoral governance fuses techniques of power with technological interventions.

In a smart city, electronic devices and sensors, operated by people, carried by transport units or placed in the city, collect different kinds of data that are used to analyse, monitor and control resources and operations across the urban space. This can include data from traffic and transportation systems, heat, waste or water management systems, schools, hospitals or public libraries. At the core lies the conviction that urban processes can be computationally enhanced and rendered more efficient and more sustainable through processes of automation and optimisation. The smart city vision promises transparency and openness in processes of urban government, drawing images of smooth data collection and frictionless automation for the benefit of all (Löfgren and Webster 2020); everyone is heard and seen because everyone's data feeds into the electronic system. Dashboards and futuristic control rooms with walls of screens, multicoloured graphs and live streamed data visualisations such as the ones we saw simulated during the I-REACT conference in Venice promise full mastery and full transparency of the city (Mattern 2015).

Ethnographic studies have, however, exposed all the invisible human labour and inventiveness that are required to preserve the illusion of the smart city (e.g. Houston et al 2019). Critics have also pointed out that while the algorithmic systems claim to offer efficient and automatic forms of governance through combining and computing big data flows, these electronic governance systems are not themselves subject to control and democratic oversight (Kitchin 2014). Thus, smart cities’ technocratic mechanisms lead to a form of post-political governance where political difference and antagonism are overshadowed and repressed (Mouffe 2005).

On the one hand, algorithmic governance, data-driven governance and smart city governance draw on the authority and legitimation of calculability and rational modernist planning. On the other hand, the machine learning algorithms that animate and govern smart cities work quite differently from modernist government and planning rationales that claimed to make the world legible and known through modern scientific methods (e.g. Scott 1998). Machine learning algorithms use statistical and probabilistic modelling for empirical prediction rather than causal explanation (Shmueli 2010). Thus, smart city data systems do not ‘understand’ or ‘know’ anything about the city or people living there, and they do not collect ‘evidence’ in the same way that neoliberal audit cultures were committed to metrics, indicators, and evidence-based policymaking (Shore and Wright 2015). Instead, the smart city data systems claim to reflect urban life and act on citizens’ data contributions. If all citizens participate in the vast networks of data collection and react appropriately to the recommendations and sanctions generated by the data, data-driven governance is believed to have the potential to predict and prevent disasters, conflicts, pandemics and environmental problems (Chandler 2020).

The rationalisations, technocratisations and formalisations that such data systems imply stand in stark contrast to the fear of catastrophe, in this case floodings, that are supposed to drive people to deliver their data and swallow their hesitancies to participate. Before looking further into the I-REACT platform's logics of participation and governance, its alternatives and its failure to catch on in Vejle, in the next two sections I will introduce the city and citizens’ experience of living with water. As long as the city has existed, citizenship has been mediated by the management of the city's waterflows. We will meet one of Vejle's active citizens, Gertrud, who reflects on her engagement with the city's changing forms of public participation, including co-creation processes and resilience. At the same time, Gertrud's story offers a different view on how data might be produced and used by citizens in more equal and mutual relations with the state.

Citizenship, Participation and Living with Water in Vejle

The first settlement of Vejle was built in the early Middle Ages at the foot of a tunnel valley at the end of a fjord on the east coast of Jutland, the mainland part of Denmark. The city's name derives from the medieval Danish word for ford or wading place, and the city is located at a crossing where two streams converge and meet the sea. As one research participant, a geographer who lived in a flood-prone area near one of the streams, noted dryly, the city is built on river floodplains created during the ice age, and housing developments in the area ‘go against the natural flow of water’. Thus, constructing a city here represents a pinnacle of modernist urban planning and control of nature. Industrialisation and the development of modern Vejle with streets, textile factories, the expansion of the harbour and, in 1868, a railway station, were accompanied by a parallel regulation of water from the streams and the sea. As the city gradually filled up the valleys and grew up the hillsides, the landscape's streams were piped, meadows drained and sewage systems constructed.

Sarah Whatmore and Catharina Landström (2011) have outlined the association between flood controversies and the emergence of publics, just as Nikhil Anand (2017) has shown how citizenship itself emerges with efforts to control and manage cities’ waterflows. Vejle's chronicles show that floods and citizens’ demands to improve the city's sewage system have always stirred vigorous public debates between citizens, architects and members of the city council, and that citizens’ participation in urban governance has taken different forms over the years. In 1930, a local manufacturer called for a public meeting after a cloudburst caused a flood, and, shortly after, a riot broke out (Jensen 2017 in Brandt 2022: 182). At the end of the twentieth century, neoliberal reforms and partial privatisations of wastewater management recast relationships between citizens, the state, the municipal authorities and non-state actors, so that citizens who are affected by floodings today are struggling to find out who is responsible for the maintenance of pipes and other infrastructure and how they can make their voices heard. During our fieldwork, we spoke with several groups of citizens who did not know who to turn to when public infrastructure in their neighbourhood broke, simply because it was unclear which company, municipal entity or state organisation owned and/or was responsible for which parts of the infrastructure (roads, pipes, sewerage, waterways, etc.). This form of neoliberal governance through partly privatising public infrastructure and creating complex legal relations between different private–public entities undermines citizens’ ability to interact with authorities and sort out their problems and thus breaks their trust and expectations that the state will respond to their needs and demands.

When Vejle became a member of the 100 Resilient Cities programme in 2013, ideas of citizenship and participation took a new turn. According to the Resilience Strategy, people would ‘embrace new technologies and improve co-creation, efficiency, outreach, and inclusivity’ and ‘tomorrow's city’ would be created through ‘productive partnerships across public and private sectors’ (Vejle Municipality 2016: 20–21). In the 2000s, not only in Vejle, but across other Danish municipalities and organisational entities in Danish society, ‘co-creation’ (in Danish: samskabelse) entered public management discourse together with ideas of ‘public innovation’ and ‘design thinking’. Citizens should no longer just participate in public hearings or be ‘involved’ in decision-making (borgerinddragelse) but should participate actively in co-creation, which would innovate urban governance and the public institutions themselves.

Participation as Co-creation – and its Disappointments

Gertrud is one of Vejle's active ‘co-creative’ citizens who has participated in many public committees and consultations and whose name was mentioned again and again by neighbours and municipal officials during my fieldwork. At the time of fieldwork, she was in her mid-sixties and had lived all her life in and around Vejle. She described herself as a ‘project person’, always actively involved in projects in her social housing association, her neighbourhood and the city council where she served as a member of the neighbourhood's local citizens council. Gertrud lived in Westtown (Vestbyen), an old working-class neighbourhood near one of the city's streams where social housing estates sit ‘like beads on a string’, as she said. Locals used to work in the spinning mills, the iron foundry and the chewing gum factory that Vejle was known for, and the trade unions were strong. Today, the neighbourhood still has its own spirit of self- organisation, ‘a special DNA’, as Gertrud put it.

On a warm summer day in 2019, Gertrud gave me a tour around the neighbourhood and showed me the places that flooded and the stock of sandbags to protect people's entrances and basements from the water. ‘Things like [floods], for some reason, always happen after working hours, so somebody has to go out and get rid of the water from the basement’. Gertrud opened her phone and scrolled through the housing association's Facebook group that they had used to mobilise neighbours during flooding situations. Now that the flooding problems in the neighbourhood were under control, members’ posts were mostly about other repairs.

Westtown's local council was established in 2013 when Vejle became a member of the 100 Resilient Cities Network. In the following years, citizens had been invited to a series of ‘co-creative workshops’ held in the old spinning mills that once housed the city's textile factories and were renovated by the municipality as a ‘innovation and development environment’ for creative industries, exhibitions and conferences. The workshops’ themes had been how to become a resilient city and, more concretely, how rainwater that was running to Westtown from the hillsides could be collected in retention basins in parks and recreational areas. Together with Vejle Wastewater Utility, rain gardens and other ‘experimental environments’ for surface water were planned. ‘There has always been a lot of water here’, Gertrud told me. ‘They used to call Vejle the “Venice of the North”. Therefore, we might as well benefit from the water. It can also bring a lot of biodiversity and all sorts of things that are good for the environment’. She explained that the workshops had been popular with her neighbours and felt meaningful, especially because people had experienced several floodings of their basements in those years.

The workshops in Westtown had also included an ambitious renewal of a local playground, drafted together with an architecture firm, but the project never materialised due to a lack of funding. Gertrud shared her disappointment with the Resilience initiatives over a cup of coffee in the housing association's community hall. She talked about a ‘fatigue’ that she experienced after some years of ‘resilience talk’: ‘The problem was that the municipality took a lot of ideas and then stopped communicating with citizens after that. And you get really tired from that.’ She explained how she felt that citizens were used as ‘ideas banks’ but did not have a say in real decisions and long-term planning processes. In the end, the collection of innovative ideas from citizens led to a feeling of being exploited, and actual change did not come off.

It was within this context of where residents like Gertrud felt let down by the authorities that we need to understand her scepticism with respect to the I-REACT app. She was relieved when she learned that the two visiting anthropologists were not behind the development of the app itself. In her experience, such specially tailored apps were ‘expected today when one wants to obtain a project grant’, but she doubted that such apps would ever be useful. It was not that she was completely against digitalisation, data collection or the use of digital devices. Gertrud used her smartphone a lot in her work as an activist, not only Facebook groups but also other kinds of apps, such as the Too Good to Go app that supports people's fetching of surplus unsold food from shops and restaurants. For instance, she would like to use the digital data collected in Vejle to demonstrate how many people actually use the local playground in order to argue for its renovation. However, she concluded, data, for instance about crime, are usually only collected in working-class neighbourhoods like Westtown and used against citizens and not for the benefit of citizens. So, it was not the data collection itself that she resisted, but the way data were collected and how they were used.

Gertrud's story is one of lifelong participation and engagement in local public affairs, shifting with the different trends in urban governance policies. Her description of ‘participation as co-creation’ echoes other forms of ‘active citizenship’ in neoliberal democracies, such as the Dutch Participation Society where citizens’ care networks and community centres are supposed to counterweight welfare state deregulation and take over the roles and responsibilities formerly held by welfare state provision (Koster 2014). With the new wave of public innovation and design thinking, and the shift from New Public Management to New Public Governance (Andersen et al 2020), however, citizens participating in co-creative workshops are not just learning to help themselves; they are also, allegedly, challenging, or innovating, public organisations themselves with their ideas and input. This was at least the rhetoric around many co-creative workshops as recounted by Gertrud, and she also expected that her contributions would be taken into account. Her disillusionment came when participants’ ideas were not brought to bear on actual changes in the neighbourhood, and she and her neighbours did not get credit for their ideas or access to their data. So, when citizens like Gertrud were asked to contribute their data through a smartphone app like I-REACT, many were already tired of forms of participation that were either symbolic or extractive.

Participation, Gamification, Trust

During the summer of 2019, Brandt and I visited several other flood-prone neighbourhoods in Vejle. In some low-lying neighbourhoods, the main problem was that the sewage system was overloaded during cloudbursts, so that refluxing sewage was pressed into the houses through the toilets and drains. Local inhabitants who had experienced this several times felt stigmatised by the dirt in their houses and abandoned by the municipality that in their eyes allowed this to happen time and again (Brandt and Bruun 2023). Some of the most strained neighbourhoods had tried to invite politicians and city council members to see the consequences of the frequent floods in their area for themselves, and they recalled several situations when they were not taken seriously but felt abandoned.

Some of the most affected and discontent citizens participated in our workshop with the municipality where the I-REACT-app was introduced. When we later, during our visits and interviews, asked them about their experience with the I-REACT app, very few had tried to use the app or even download it. The last thing they would have done when they discovered the rising sewage coming up from drains, gratings and toilets would be to take a photo and upload it to a platform like I-REACT! Conversations about the failed prototype app, however, became a generative way for probing into citizen's relations with their municipality and other authorities, and when these relationships are mediated by digital tools and when not.

Those who had opened the app and tried out some of its functions, either derided it or were outraged, especially by the gamification and quiz elements where users of the app could earn points by answering questions in different categories, for example about how to react in cases of emergency. New users of the app started as ‘novices’ and could be promoted to ‘explorers’. The highest level was to be classified as an ‘i-reactor’. Points could also be earned if one reported large and small disaster events and uploaded photos from emergency situations or validated the reports and images uploaded by others. Similarly, one received points if other users validated one's reports. The logics of gamification and earning points resembles the Ant Forest feature of the Alipay app and platform in China described by Bruckermann (this issue), but unlike the comprehensive Chinese Alipay platform that covers all kinds of everyday interactions from bank interactions to car park tickets, I-REACT is designed as a closed, decentralised system and citizens’ data are not linked to other public platforms. Another difference is that the I-REACT prototype made no references to ‘society’ or collective, societal values, but was formed by the data scientists’ and engineers’ assumptions about motivation in individuals and politically neutral, dyadic relationships between citizens and the state.

As I had learned from my conversations with the I-REACT developers, the point system was an answer to the problem of data validation. How could they trust crowdsourced information from citizen-users of the app so that emergency assistance was not called on for false alarms? The developers behind the I-REACT platform seemed to assume that data are transferred in historyless and context-free vacuums, where ‘i-reactors’ can be classified as ‘trustworthy’ because they have used the app actively and their reports have been validated by other app users. The algorithms of the I-REACT platform that produced recommendations for disaster managers then took users’ trustworthiness, understood as their level in the game, into account when they computed different recommendations. This understanding of trustworthiness based on data entries and participation in online quizzes and games was one of the I-REACT features that our interlocutors in Vejle despised, as I will show now through the story of Anne and Morten.

Anne and Morten lived with their two children in a house on the banks of a stream that was overflowing frequently, and they had suffered from sewage in their basement several times. As a way to attract attention to the local problems, they had organised annual neighbourhood meetings, arranged back to back with a summer party. On these occasions and during everyday conversations, neighbours exchanged experiences and contact information so that they could help each other in critical situations, for example with blocking drain grids and manholes with sandbags in cloudburst situations.

A few years earlier, they had invited a local politician from the city council, who visited the area with an official from the Technical Department, but complex property relations and the division of responsibilities between the municipality and Vejle Wastewater Utility complicated the situation and stalled sewerage renovations. As a next step, Morten had mapped the area's water streams and plotted where the water diverted and ran into private houses and basements during cloudbursts as a kind of practice-oriented data material and an alternative to the city's future-oriented flood risk maps. During Andreas Brandt's fieldwork in the Technical Department, he forwarded these local, hand-drawn maps to the officials he worked with, and finally, Morten and Anne experienced some progress in their efforts to draw attention to the infrastructure problems in their neighbourhood (Brandt 2022: 193).

When we asked Morten and Anne about the I-REACT app, however, they almost got upset. They found it offensive and tasteless to turn people who suffered from floods into the recipients of games and quizzes, and they thought it was meaningless to classify users’ trustworthiness based on this. Having a game and then serious reports in the same place sends the wrong signals, they reasoned, also concerning citizens’ relationship with the authorities. Unlike the enthusiastic Chinese users of Ant Forest in Bruckermann's article (this issue), the citizens of Vejle we spoke with were not thrilled by I-REACT's games; perhaps because it was a simple prototype without elaborate visuals and sound effects, perhaps because Danish citizens are not used to eco- governance and state–citizen relations being mediated digitally through online games, and perhaps just because our interlocutors were middle-aged citizens and the wrong target group.

Anne's and Morten's problem with the I-REACT app was not that they did not trust the municipality's alerts or instructions, as I-REACT's engineers feared. They were ready to participate in warning systems, but they felt that they were talked down to and that their demands for infrastructure renovations were not taken seriously by the authorities. If trust can be described as ‘an always unfinished feeling’ that is ‘dependent on the morality of the stakeholders involved with a technology, rather than in the technology itself’ (Pink 2022: 47), this technology itself challenged citizens’ moral relationship with the municipality because they felt ridiculed and dismissed in their concerns.

Morten, Anne and some of our other interlocutors saw other opportunities in uploading photographs from floodings to official websites, not as emergency relief but as damage reports and documentation that damage was caused by cloudbursts. Cloudbursts are very local weather events, and it could be more than difficult to convince insurance companies that the threshold value for the definition of a cloudburst event had been reached in a particular area so the injured were eligible for compensation. Through lending this kind of documentation, crowdsourced data from whole neighbourhoods could benefit people in relation to their mundane concerns, they suggested. Thus, citizens in Vejle did not refuse the very idea to share data through platforms and apps, even with private companies, but they rejected being part of extractive, unequal or undignified exchange relations.

Another reason why people like Anne and Morten were offended by I-REACT's gamification and quiz features was the fact that it relied on an assumption that citizens are not already skilled and knowledgeable experts in their own right, and do not already take responsibility and participate actively but rather had to be nudged. Fieldwork in the flood-prone neighbourhoods proved otherwise. Like Anne and Morten, many homeowners relied on neighbourly help to prepare for cloudbursts, for example through smartphone chains and key arrangements where neighbours kept each other's keys and knew the peculiarities and weaknesses of each other's houses and basements in flood situations. Much like Gertrud's housing association in Westtown, they already used Facebook, Messenger and text messages to warn each other in cloudburst situations, so they did not need a special app to be activated. One of Anne's and Morten's neighbours even told me that, as a kind of consolation for all the trouble she and her neighbours went through with flooded basements and subsequent disputes with their insurance companies, the neighbourhood had become closer and developed a ‘spirit of community’ based on their exchange of experiences and mutual help.

From the perspective of the water engineers and other municipal officials whose job it was to prevent and control the floods and communicate with the public during critical weather situations, however, the problem with the I-REACT app pointed to a different understanding of the moral relationship between citizens and the municipality emerging through digital data and online communication. They feared that the I-REACT app would not lead to active participation and responsible citizenship but rather create an expectation that people can upload a photo through the app, and then the municipality ‘would solve their flooding problems for them’. They pointed to the existing IT platform and app that the municipality used to receive tips from citizens. It is called ‘Giv et praj’, a play-on-words, and an approximate but meaningful translations of this word play would be Tip us off or Give a tip. Through this app, citizens can report a pothole or fallen tree, but unlike blocked roads homeowners’ flooded basements were legally and practically outside the Technical Department's jurisdiction. So, the officials from the Technical Department held out a different configuration of citizen participation and good urban governance, one in which data relations with citizens should lead to responsibilisation (cf. Rose and Lentzos 2017).

Ironically, our fieldwork showed that both citizens and officials feared, and sometimes experienced, that the other party did not live up to the moral responsibilities that all found are part of trustful, mutual relations between citizens and public organisations in the Danish welfare state (cf. Jöhncke 2011). Data exchanged through digital platforms and apps were not disentangled from the moral situations and relations through which they were produced.

Conclusion

The story of I-REACT's arrival in Vejle and the criticism of it by local citizens and officials offers a view onto ideas and practices of algorithmic governance and smart city systems. For the technical developers of such data platforms, public participation is often seen as a matter of contributing data. Giving data is framed as ‘trust in technology’ and seen as a matter of individual motivation and decontextualised dyadic citizen–state relationships. At the level of policy-makers, we can observe a fetishisation of technology, especially emerging digital technologies, most recently machine learning and generative AI, and the idea that start-ups or larger IT platforms can co- create innovative solutions by engaging citizens. These citizen engagements are seen as seamlessly integrated parts of people's everyday lives, and their efforts and the labour they put into running both digital and physical infrastructure are invisible, except from more explicit, celebratory events. In the context of the city of Vejle, several policies of urban government came together in the I-REACT app, namely resilience, co-creation and design thinking, experimentation and the fetishisation of digital technologies, start-up companies and public–private partnerships.

This configuration of urban governance through participation in smart data systems, co-creative processes and urban experiments constitutes a deepening of neoliberal governance and a technology-driven form of technomoral governance (cf. Bornstein and Sharma 2016) promoting certain types of participation and moralised state–citizen relations. While Erica Bornstein and Aradhana Sharma are occupied with the technocratic language of law and policy, and their term ‘technomoral politics’ refers to how various social actors translate moral projects into technical, implementable terms as law and policies, in this article we have seen how such translations take a further step with digital systems based on data and processes of datafication – how, to put it slightly differently, technomoral governance encompasses both ‘techniques of power’ and ‘technological’ interventions. Indeed, there are signs of a growing rapprochement between political and legislative processes and processes of digitalisation, for example in the push for ‘digital-ready legislation’ which implies that legislation should build on simple rules and unambiguous terminology to give way to automated case processing (Plesner and Justesen 2022).

Policies like Vejle's resilience strategy are translated into different digital tools and platforms to engage citizens in the policies and promote specific kinds of behaviour and data extraction from their users. Not unlike Bornstein and Sharma's dictum that the technocratic acts are justified as ‘moral imperatives’ (2016: 77), participation on the I-REACT app also gets framed as a moral project for citizens to become resilient, learn to help themselves at times of ecological disaster and indeed become tech-savvy ‘i-reactors’ through using the app.

The case discussed here is admittedly a prototype app, but it contains many of the same features and logics as the more successful American tech giants’ apps and platforms. The story of this EU-funded research and development project that builds its own data platform and prototype app, which people have to agree to download to their phones and contribute their data, does, however, also tell us something about the EU's approach to digitalisation, datafication and e-governance, much more than I can unfold in this article. One important point is the fetishisation of technology, and technology companies, and the imbalance inherent in the fact that citizens are asked to participate in data crowdsourcing at the same time as citizens’ expectations are not met and they feel let down. The I-REACT was also planning to feed on all the data and digital traces that are collected automatically on people's smartphones and other devices by Google, Apple, Meta and Microsoft, facts that are not problematised either by our interlocutors from the Technical Department or by citizens, but taken for granted. I have not explored the part where I-REACT aimed to integrate data from social media that, for example, can easily trace people's whereabouts or ‘geolocation’, and one of the reasons why the prototype was not further developed was that such data integrations for government purposes are regulated in different ways across EU countries.

Importantly, the story of I-REACT in Vejle is about the way urban governance is planned and imagined to take place through algorithmic management and flows of detached, decontextualised data that are extracted from citizens through games, quizzes and other forms of social agencies that are called crowdsourcing. The participants in our study did, however, refuse to abstract their data and their data's contextual nature from their moral understandings of citizen–state relations. I have shown different forms of resistance in the form of local criticism and non-participation in smart city initiatives like I-REACT, both from the side of municipal officials and other citizens. Participation through delivering ideas in workshops or uploading data on platforms revealed itself as perfunctory, or even exploitative, when citizens’ contributions are not followed through, as with the co-created playground or the imaginaries of disaster relief through dataflows on the I-REACT platform. Instead, citizens used IT platforms and communication technologies for mutual care and support in local communities and neighbourhoods, and suggested alternative ways of using and experimenting with digital and other data. Public participation and ‘trust in technology’ cannot easily be programmed, gamified or crowdsourced but depends on people's previous experiences and the moral relationships between citizens, the state, the municipal authorities and other actors that are constantly renegotiated.