Doing Good for Disability in Asian Smart Cities?

In 2018, LG Electronics won a Korean contract to produce and supply 15,000 televisions with in-built voice guidance and captions, catering to people with hearing and visual impairments.¹Byung-yeul Baek, “LG supplies 15,000 TVs for deaf, visually impaired,” The Korean Times, 16 November, 2018, https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/tech/2023/05/133_258406.html.

In Singapore, the Senior Parliamentary Secretary for Social and Family Development announced the launch of new audible traffic signals at 325 pedestrian crossings in 2023, to “help those with disabilities travel for work and leisure more independently.”²David Sun, “New traffic signals to beep 24/7 in Tampines and Bedok, boosting mobility for those with disabilities,” The Straits Times, 2 April, 2023, https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/new-traffic-signals-to-beep-247-in-tampines-and-bedok-boosting-mobility-for-those-with-disabilities.

In Taipei, Chunghwa Telecoms launched a new application i4Blind in 2016, utilizing beacon-based micro location tracking installed in the city together with high-speed cellular data service to support people with visual impairment as they navigate the city.³GSMA, “Taipei: “A Smart City for All”,” (London: GSMA, 2016), https://www.gsma.com/iot/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/cl_chunghwa2_web_10_16.pdf; “Taipei Beacon Vision Impairment Application Service,” u.d., https://smartcity.taipei/projdetail/78?lang=en.

These examples are but a fraction of the kinds of technologies deployed for disabled people in Asian smart cities. Other examples include advanced eye-tracking technology to allow for communication; text-to-speech readers; technologies to support and enable healthcare such as telehealth; and machine vision and mapping mobile apps to support disabled people to navigate the city. In these examples, disabled people are no longer oppressed by disabling environments and barriers. Seemingly, the technologically enabled future envisioned by renowned disabled activist and scholar Vic Finkelstein has arrived.⁴Vic Finkelstein, Attitudes and Disabled people: Issues for Discussion (London: World Rehabilitation Fund, Incorporated, 1980); Vic Finkelstein, A Personal Journey into Disability Politics – First presented at Leeds University Centre for Disability Studies, 2001 (2001), http://www.independentliving.org/docs3/finkelstein01a.pdf.

These emergent uses of technology to support and empower disabled people in the smart city are also replicated globally. In the 2023 IMD Smart City Index, Asian smart cities are very much present: eight Asia-Pacific cities (Singapore, Seoul, Hong Kong, Canberra, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sydney, Beijing) are listed in the top twenty.⁵“Smart City Index Report 2023,” 2023, https://www.imd.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/smartcityindex-2023-v7.pdf. In Asian cities like Singapore, Taipei, and Seoul, the rhetoric and discourse of the smart city is increasingly embraced, with its technologies and practices deployed as a tool for the betterment of society, even as smart cities are seen as drivers for economic growth.⁶The case of Singapore is exemplary. See Gerard Goggin and Kuansong Victor Zhuang, “Disability as Smart Equality: Inclusive Technology in a Digitally Advanced Nation,” in Vulnerable People and Digital Inclusion: Theoretical and Applied Perspectives, ed. Panayiota Tsatsou (London: Palgrave, 2022), 257–275. More broadly, the AT&T-funded publication “Smart Cities for All” lays out the potential of smart city technologies to “to have a positive impact on people with disabilities and the aging,” noting that there is “a clear and urgent imperative to ensure smart cities do not perpetuate digital divides that have historically prevented community access to new advances.”⁷David Korngold, Martin Lemos, and Michael Rohwer, Smart Cities For All: A Vision for an Inclusive, Accessible Urban Future (AT&T, BSR, 2017), 7.

The case of Singapore is exemplary of the growth of smart cities in Asia and their focus on disability. As Gerard Goggin and Victor Zhuang highlight, the Singaporean state has embraced the Smart Nation as its key aim and focus. Present within the pursuit of the smart nation are also the deployment of technologies that aim to enable and empower disabled people and build a healthier and active nation.⁸Goggin and Zhuang, “Disability as Smart Equality: Inclusive Technology in a Digitally Advanced Nation.” GovTech, the national agency shaping the adoption of technology in Singapore makes clear how a “smart nation” can “improve the lives of those with disabilities” — for instance, by incorporating IOT devices at home or the use of augmentative and alternative communication devices.⁹GovTech, “An Inclusive Smart Nation: 5 Ways Tech Can Empower Persons with Special Needs,” https://www.tech.gov.sg/media/technews/an-inclusive-smart-nation-5-ways-tech-can-empower-persons-with-special-needs. And these notions of supporting and helping disabled people are very much present in Asian societies. Importantly, these developments take place in the backdrop of the recognition of disabled people’s rights to equal participation in society present in the United Nations Convention on the Rights for Persons with Disabilities.¹⁰United Nations General Assembly, “Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities: Resolution/ Adopted by the General Assembly on 24 Jan 2007” (2007), https://www.un.org/disabilities/documents/convention/convoptprot-e.pdf.

We note how the use of technology in Asian smart cities is often associated with notions of doing good for disabled people. At the recent Huawei Tech4City competition held in Singapore in 2022, a team from the National University of Singapore won the competition with an “AI-driven wearable sign language digitalization and translation system for the Deaf,” which aims to “assist the Deaf to achieve a better quality of life and build an inclusive community.”¹¹“Winners of Huawei’s Inaugural Tech4City Competition Announced,” updated 27 September 2022,  https://www.huawei.com/en/news/2022/9/tech4all-winner-talent-sustainable-singapore. The annual Tech For Good competition in Singapore frequently showcases innovative projects that highlight how the use of technology can serve to better disabled people’s lives. The smart city plans for Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo, and Taipei also contain projects that aim to solve specific problems for disabled and elderly populations.¹²“Japan’s Smart Cities Solving Global Issues Such as the SDGs, etc. through Japan’s Society 5.0,” u.d., https://www.kantei.go.jp/jp/singi/keikyou/pdf/Japan%27s_Smart_Cities-1(Main_Report).pdf; “Achieving a smart inclusive city,” u.d., https://digital.seoul.go.kr/eng2025/smart-2025/policy-tasks?article=4941&doing_wp_cron=1682901242.8530468940734863281250; “Smart City Blueprint for Hong Kong (Blueprint 2.0),” Innovation and Technology Bureau, 2020, https://www.smartcity.gov.hk/modules/custom/custom_global_js_css/assets/files/HKSmartCityBlueprint(ENG)v2.pdf; “Smart Taipei,” 2023, https://smartcity.taipei/?lang=en. As Gerard Goggin and Christopher Newell wrote in 2007, inclusive technologies are perceived as business opportunities which afford companies and technologists to both “do good (through inclusive technology) and make money at the same time. Or, in the strong version of the claim, doing good in this manner can and will make one more money.”¹³Gerard Goggin and Christopher Newell, “The Business of Digital Disability,” The Information Society 23, no. 3 (2007): 162, https://doi.org/10.1080/01972240701323572. In the smart city, steeped within such notions of profitability and technological advances are those of helping and supporting disabled people — of doing good.

In this article we consider what it means to deploy technology in Asian smart cities towards disability inclusion by considering the notion of doing good, which seems to be present in many of these technological innovations and deployments. We bring together the two trends we have sketched out thus far into critical conversation: first, the growth of smart cities in Asia; and second, the increased focus on deploying technology for disabled people. We are especially concerned with how technology is deployed for enabling and empowering disabled people in Asian smart cities, or what we describe as doing good.  Amidst the confluence of urban infrastructure, design, and technology within Asian smart cities, we ask, how can we move from simply doing good, to doing good better?

Doing Good in Asian Smart Cities

While a smart city is typically defined as the ways in which sensors are deployed to collect data to inform city management, we take a more expansive view. As Tina Kempin Reuter highlights, smart cities deploy technological advances to better the lives of their inhabitants.¹⁴Tina Kempin Reuter, “Human Rights and the City: Including Marginalized Communities in Urban Development and Smart Cities,” Journal of Human Rights 18, no. 4 (2019): 382–402. And it is this transformation towards building for better — especially within the nation-state — that we are ultimately concerned with. As the examples at the start of the paper highlight, mobilizing technological solutions towards solving specific problems that disabled and elderly populations face in the urban environment is one way that the smart city can build for the better.

Despite the technological focus in smart cities on disability, smart cities are not inherently inclusive. More broadly, smart cities have been critiqued for perpetuating a myth of equal opportunity and for often advancing a top-down policy approach that obscures its neoliberal and bureaucratic orientations.¹⁵Jane Yeonjae Lee, Orlando Woods, and Lily Kong, “Towards More Inclusive Smart Cities: Reconciling the Divergent Realities of Data and Discourse at the Margins,” Geography Compass 14, no. 9 (2020): 2, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12504, https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/gec3.12504; Rob Kitchin, “Afterword: Decentering the Smart City,” in Equality in the City: Imaginaries of the Smart Future, ed. Susan Flynn (Bristol: Intellect, 2022); Ayona Datta, “Cityzens become Netizens’: Hashtag Citizenships in the Making of India’s 100 Smart Cities,” in Creating Smart Cities, ed. Claudio Coletta et al. (London: Routledge, 2018). Others have critiqued smart cities as a neoliberal global North concept and an imposition that neglects how smart cities are conceptualized within Asian cities.¹⁶Ayona Datta, “New Urban Utopias of Postcolonial India: ‘Entrepreneurial Urbanization’ in Dholera Smart City, Gujarat,” Dialogues in Human Geography 5, no. 1 (2015); Shin Hyun Bang, “Envisioned by the State: The Paradox of Private Urbanism and Making of Songdo City, South Korea,” in Mega-urbanization in the Global South: Fast Cities and New Urban Utopias of the Postcolonial State, ed. Ayona Datta and Abdul Shaban (London: Routledge, 2017); Chamee Yang, “Historicizing the Smart Cities: Genealogy as a Method of Critique for Smart Urbanism,” Telematics and Informatics 55 (2020/12/01/ 2020), https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2020.101438; Glen David Kuecker and Kris Hartley, “How Smart Cities Became the Urban Norm: Power and Knowledge in New Songdo City,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 110, no. 2 (2020/03/03 2020), https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2019.1617102. The use of technology for disability is also fraught with problems and contradictions. Disability scholars have highlighted how emerging technologies that can be deployed as part of the smart city, such as algorithms and artificial intelligence, may contain inherent bias against disability.¹⁷Meredith Whittaker et al., “Disability, bias, and AI,” AI Now Institute  (2019), https://ainowinstitute.org/disabilitybiasai-2019.pdf; Shari Trewin et al., “Considerations for AI fairness for people with disabilities,” AI Matters 5, no. 3 (2019); “Sidewalk Toronto and why smarter is not better,” 2018, https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/sidewalk-toronto-and-why-smarter-is-not-better-b233058d01c8. However, both in practice and in research, smart technologies have been heralded as having the potential to support disabled people’s lives,¹⁸There is a large amount of scholarship on this subject, some of which is discussed in Kuansong Victor Zhuang and Gerard Goggin, “Rethinking the Smart City as Postcolonial Technology. The case of the Smart Nation of Singapore,” in Postcolonial Disability Studies, ed. Tsitsi Chataika and Dan Goodley (London: Routledge, Forthcoming). which is also replicated in the smart city plans of Asian cities.

In seeking to better disabled people’s lives, these uses of technology have been critiqued as problematic. Writing about what they call “the disability dongle,” Liz Jackson, Alex Haagaard, and Rua Mae Williams note “the phenomenon of design and engineering students and practitioners who prototype ‘innovative’ disability solutions.”¹⁹Liz Jackson, Alex Haagaard, and Rua Mae Williams, “Disability Dongle,” Platypus (2022), https://blog.castac.org/2022/04/disability-dongle/. In particular, these solutions portray their designers as heroic saviours who receive attention and accolades but ultimately only serve to make disabled people compatible for normative systems. For them, these uses of technology for disability are dongles because they negate, normalize, and make invisible disability experiences, trivializing disability in purporting to solve a problem. Alison Kafer has also highlighted how some technologies such as biogenetics are geared towards utopian futures where disability is eradicated.²⁰Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univ. Press, 2013). Importantly, what these disability scholars highlight is that the deployment of technology in smart cities can also contain inherent normative and ableist biases and we need to be cautious about the ways in which such technologies are deployed under the rhetoric of doing good.

At the same time, the problematic uses of technology in smart cities  contrast with their emancipatory potential. Internationally, the Global Initiative for Inclusive Information Communication Technology (G3ict), formed in the wake of the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Rights for Persons with Disabilities, has been at the forefront of promoting and supporting the development of technology towards greater inclusion. The Zero Project, based in Vienna and funded by the Essen Foundation, also features an extensive list of organizations and actors who deploy technology to support disabled people in society. As Alan Roulstone highlights, despite the problems inherent within technology, there is also a wide array of technological tools that have been deployed and normalized by disabled people — think wheelchairs, white canes, screen readers, and so on.²¹Alan Roulstone, Disability and Technology: An Interdisciplinary and International Approach (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Alan Roulstone, Enabling Technology: Disabled People, Work, and New Technology (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1998). What this goes to show is that technology can be both problematic and positive when deployed in smart cities.

Doing Good Better

Amidst this contradiction of how technology can be deployed in the smart city, how can we forge a way forward? In particular, if doing good is problematic, then can we do good better? What lessons might we learn from disability studies, which is founded on the critique of the social exclusion of disabled people? In particular, there is a particular strand within disability scholarship that takes as its starting point the generative potential of disability for design and technology.²²Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch, “Crip Technoscience Manifesto,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5, no. 1 (2019); Sara Hendren, What Can a Body Do?: How We Meet the Built World (London: Penguin, 2020); Graham Pullin, Design Meets Disability (Cambridge, MA: MIT press, 2009). Correspondingly, Arseli Dokumaci has argued that the ways that disabled people mobilize resources (such as technology) and make real the worlds they live in are examples of the generative potential of disability.²³Arseli Dokumaci, Activist Affordances: How Disabled People Improvise More Habitable Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2023). In other words, how can we centre on disability to do good better, especially in how we deploy technology within smart cities for inclusion?

A key answer lies in how disabled people and their communities have mobilized technology for themselves within the cityscape. The sidewalk — historically contested by disabled people — is a case in point. Today, we see examples of how disabled people have utilized technology to hack the city, such as deploying artificial intelligence to map out accessible routes that can account for incline, presence of curb cuts, or the existence of obstacles.²⁴Kuansong Victor Zhuang and Gerard Goggin, “Disability’s Right to the Smart City: A Manifesto for the Emergent Future ” in Critical Disability Studies Handbook, ed. Katie Ellis and Michael Kent (London: Routledge, Forthcoming). This mobilization of technology by disabled people reflects what Gerard Goggin and Victor Zhuang term “smart equality” — a means to appropriate the term “smart” and its associated notions of modernity and neoliberal capitalism towards disability inclusion. “Smart equality” draws attention to “how digital inclusion can build on disability as the organizing principle in order to reimagine digital infrastructures” (and also the city).²⁵Goggin and Zhuang, “Disability as Smart Equality: Inclusive Technology in a Digitally Advanced Nation.” Rather than see the use of technology within the smart city as inherently problematic, we conceptualize it as a tool that can, if deployed properly, contribute to disabled people’s emancipation in Asian cities. Put another way, doing good better means enacting smart equalities as practice. Doing good, especially where technology is concerned, often focuses on how the individual can do better to support disabled people, or where technology can be deployed in ways that solve particular problems for disabled people. Such a frame often relies on problematic notions that see disability as a medical problem in need of cure. Doing good better entails shifting the frame from solving an individual problem towards a systemic reckoning of the larger structures that inhibit the use of technology and disability. It is to acknowledge that disabled people continue to face barriers and exclusion in participating in society in these Asian cities.²⁶For further reading in various Asian contexts, see Kuansong Victor Zhuang, Meng Ee Wong, and Dan Goodley, eds., Not Without Us: Perspectives on Disability and Inclusion in Singapore (Singapore: Ethos, 2023); Eunjung Kim, Curative Violence : Rehabilitating Disability, Gender, and Sexuality in Modern Korea (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2017); Xuan Thuy Nguyen, The Journey to Inclusion (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2015). Importantly, shifting the focus from doing good to doing good better allows us to acknowledge that it is not only important to continue to build inclusion (through solving problems with technology), but also to address the larger structural issues at stake.

One key step is to acknowledge and address the issues that continue to inhibit disabled people in the adoption of technology. Discussing the use of assistive technology by blind students and their teachers in Singapore, Meng Ee Wong and Libby Cohen highlight how inconsistent knowledge among teachers and the lack of proper education continue to plague the adoption of technology by blind students.²⁷Meng Ee Wong and Libby G Cohen, “Access and Challenges of Assistive Technology Application: Experience of Teachers of Students with Visual Impairments in Singapore,” Disability, CBR & Inclusive Development 26, no. 4 (2015); Meng Ee Wong and Libby Cohen, “School, Family and Other Influences on Assistive Technology Use: Access and Challenges for Students with Visual Impairment in Singapore,” British Journal of Visual Impairment 29, no. 2 (2011). This state of affairs reflects what scholars have highlighted as the digital disability divide, one that continues to perpetuate inequality.²⁸Eszter Hargittai and Yu-li Patrick Hsieh, “Digital Inequality,” in The Oxford Handbook of Internet Studies, ed. William H Dutton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Kerry Dobransky and Eszter Hargittai, “The Disability Divide in Internet Access and Use,” Information, Communication & Society 9, no. 3 (2006); Kerry Dobransky and Eszter Hargittai, “Unrealized Potential: Exploring the Digital Disability Divide,” Poetics 58 (2016).   Importantly, we call for more attention to be paid to the adoption of ICTs by disabled people in smart cities, even as technology is constantly invented to solve specific problems.

Doing good better in smart cities also means moving beyond individualized notions of disability to consider how we can build and recognize what disability activists have highlighted as the mutual interdependencies that are present in communities.²⁹Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, The Future is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2022). Smart technologies can play a part in doing so. Discussing the development of a crowdsourcing platform in a smart city, Lee et al. find that members are most motivated to participate because of affective motives (for example, to interact with others and to display concern for members of their communities).³⁰Lee Chei Sian et al., “Investigating the Use of a Mobile Crowdsourcing Application for Public Engagement in a Smart City” (paper presented at the Digital Libraries: Knowledge, Information, and Data in an Open Access Society: 18th International Conference on Asia-Pacific Digital Libraries, ICADL 2016, Tsukuba, Japan, December 7–9, 2016, Proceedings 18, 2016). What this goes to show is that technologies in the smart cities can be designed around disability and to build community. In other words, doing good better means thinking about how disability and the knowledge that comes from disability — such as recognizing our shared interdependency — can form the basis for technologies that are designed and deployed in smart cities.

Importantly, doing good better calls attention to how doing good should be the starting point and not the end point. This is especially so, given how in these Asian smart cities, disabled people continue to face barriers to participating in society and are constantly fraught by “ablenationalist” demands.³¹Ablenationalism is a term deployed by Mitchell and Snyder to describe the ways in which disabled people are included only because they fit into the acceptable ways of being that the nation prescribes. Discussing the Singapore case, Zhuang notes how there is a tension between this ablenationalist belonging and that of disability rights in Singapore in the 1980s. Kuansong Victor Zhuang, “At the Margins of Society: Disability Rights and Inclusion in 1980s Singapore,” Disability and the Global South 7, no. 1 (2020), https://disabilityglobalsouth.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/07_01_02.pdf. In doing good, smart cities technologies can be the starting point; however, it is important that smart cities live up to the logics inherent in the United Nations Convention on the Rights for Persons with Disabilities and the call of the disability rights movement. The problems that are purported to be solved by technologies are not divorced from other issues that disabled people face in society, ranging from under-employment and discrimination to barriers to access. Doing good better means recognizing these, and also recognizing that simply doing good in smart cities is never enough today.

Kuansong Victor Zhuang

Kuansong Victor Zhuang is Fung Global Fellow at the Institute of International and Regional Studies, Princeton University, and International Postdoctoral Scholar at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information, Nanyang Technological University. His research lies at the intersections of communications, media, and cultural studies, and disability studies, especially as it pertains to the workings of technology and inclusion.

Tay Sze Hwee Jocelyn

Tay Sze Hwee Jocelyn is an autistic undergraduate student of History at Nanyang Technological University. Her main area of interest is disability history and the disability movement, with a particular focus on neurodiversity and neurodivergence. She is currently working to advocate for disability and neurodivergent rights in Singapore, as well as highlighting disabled perspectives within Singaporean history.

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Gerard Goggin

Gerard Goggin is Professor of Media and Communications, University of Sydney. Gerard has published widely on media, culture, and disability, with a particular interest on emerging technology and communication rights. His books include Routledge Companion to Disability and Media (2020), Normality & Disability (2018), Disability and the Media (2005; with Katie Ellis), and with Christopher Newell, the two books Disability in Australia (2005) and Digital Disability (2003).

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Meng Ee Wong

Meng Ee Wong is Associate Professor at the Psychology and Child & Human Development Academic group at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University. He teaches special education in the Master of Education (Special Education), the Diploma in Special Education and Advanced Diploma in Special Education programmes.  His research interests include special and inclusive education, disability studies, assistive technology, support for students with visual impairments and teacher education. Outside his academic work, Meng Ee also serves on a number of non-profit organizations including SG Enable, iC2PrepHouse and the Goh Chok Tong Enable Fund Evaluation Panel.

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​​Chei Sian Lee

​​Chei Sian Lee is an Associate Professor at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, where she is also the Associate Chair for Faculty. She is actively involved in research on issues related to everyday human-computer interaction to facilitate collaboration, learning and social exchanges. More broadly, her research focuses on how digital and emerging technologies can be designed and used to change social behaviors, benefit communities, and create social good.

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