Technology and organised crime in the smart city: an ethnographic study of the illicit drug trade

Abstract The term “smart city” has circulated across the developed world affecting urban development programmes and government strategies. Such “future cities” are heralded for their efficient networked technologies embedded within the fabric of urban environments that provide new means of social control for the state. These cities are envisioned as a technological fix for the many problems of modern city life, yet emerging technologies are not flawless and have vulnerabilities that can be manipulated by criminal actors. Even so, there is an interesting silence about the issues of security amongst the advocates of smart cities. Furthermore, there remains limited insight into the impact of the smart cities programme from criminologists, particularly in relation to hitherto prioritised threats of organised crime, notably the illicit drugs markets and associated harms. Those who have addressed the impact of emergent technologies have done so through critiques of governmental programmes, drawing largely upon insights from science and technology studies. A key absence in this, as well as the commercial and governmental literature, is the voice of actors involved in the networks that actually constitute threats to urban security, and how they perceive and use emerging technologies for illicit ends. This paper aims to augment but also challenge this treatment of the impact of emergent technologies, by switching the analytical focus towards the principal actor-networks that constitute these threats, with a particular focus on ICT (mobile technologies and internet drug sales). It uses data from a 5-year ethnography to demonstrate how ICT reconfigures and virtually extends illicit drug markets, whilst providing insights into the workings of drug markets of the future.