Human sensors in the city of super apps: mobilizing people as infrastructure for smart city development in Jakarta, Indonesia

In this paper, we argue that contextual factors such as the availability of infrastructure, sociocultural characteristics of users, governance style, and the regulatory environment in global south cities create opportunities for public and private sector actors to come up with innovative strategies for smart city development and the platformization of services. Despite different objectives, operationalization strategies, and expected outcomes between the public and private sectors, both sectors learn from one another to come up with innovative solutions for navigating contextual contingencies. Due to limited infrastructure and contextual diversities in global south cities, digital platforms require significant and specific forms of groundwork by humans that leverage their everyday networks and interactions with their surroundings. In the process of platformization, both governments and private entities strategically employ the discourse of smart, responsible citizenship to promote the innovative co-creation of platform services, thereby extending biopolitical control over citizens’ bodies and interactions. In this process, citizens are engaged as sensing nodes to support smart city development in global south cities. This paper examines two distinct cases of public and private sector ‘human sensing’ experiments in Jakarta: Jakarta Smart City’s JakLapor platform and Grab's human mapping initiative. In these experiments, ‘peopled collaborations’ (Simone 2021) between citizens are deployed by the government and the platform company as innovations where urban infrastructure is inadequate, or to fill gaps that cannot be filled by conventional digital infrastructure.