The citizens’ strain to see through transparency : exploring reciprocity as an alternative in the smart city of Amsterdam

Urban life in Amsterdam has become increasingly digitized and datafied, which enables the municipality to provide tailor-made services to the citizens based on their data. Yet, citizens are often unaware of data collection processes, lacking knowledge of its execution and purpose. Transparency is frequently proposed and sought-after to ‘solve’ this problem. However, this orientation on transparency creates a smart city that offers information but disregards the act of justifying its governance practices towards its citizens. I will investigate reciprocity as an alternative to transparency. Reciprocal smart city governance incentivizes the Amsterdam municipality to explain and justify the benefit of their ‘digital conduct’ towards their citizens, which will stimulate more ‘benevolent surveillance practices’ in Amsterdam.