FROM TECHNOCRATIC CITIES TO TRUST-BASED URBANISM: RE-CONCEPTUALISING URBAN PLANNING THROUGH ISLAMIC ETHICAL EPISTEMOLOGY IN THE DIGITAL AGE

Abstract

The modern rhetoric of smart cities is largely technocratic in its rationale in the sense that it privileges algorithmic efficiency and data mining over human wellbeing. This paradigm is commonly referred to as algorithmic governance, which has occasioned a crisis in trust, which comes in form of surveillance anxiety and social alienation into the urban space. The paper is a critique of the sterile determinism of the modern digital urbanism and suggests the re-conceptualisation of the planning structures by referring to the Islamic ethical epistemology. Using a qualitative conceptual approach, the paper integrates classical Islamic ideas, namely, Amanah (ttrustworthiness), Khilafah (stewardship), and Hisbah (public accountability), with contemporary theory of the city in order to create a model of Trust-Based Urbanism. These results indicate that the Islamic concept of Khilafah radically changes the planner into a bottom-up controller but Amanah re-categories data not as an object of extractibility (surveillance capitalism) but as a religious trust to be defended by ethical considerations. In addition the principle of Hisbah provides an algorithmic transparency mechanism so that digital systems are not unaccountable to the society. The paper finds that the incorporation of these metaphysical aspects of ethics do not rejection of technological progress but rather humanises the urban pathway by transforming the urban city into a technocratic city of sensors into a city of souls based on trust. It is a non-Western conceptual framework that contributes to the discussion of ethics and city governance in the digital world in a new way.