The street harassment’s political dimension: mapping applications as smart cities initiatives

Abstract

The street harassment mapping applications that began to emerge from 2014 in Brazil can be understood, at a first glance, as smart city initiatives. With these initiatives, the population and other social instances can participate in solving city problems. Such applications would help to combat street harassment and, consequently, improve the conditions for urban mobility of women. By analyzing the meanings produced by the semiotic texts of the applications, can we consider them as smart city initiatives? More specifically, does their discursive doing provide the appropriate political dimension to transform the narrative of harassment by promoting urban forms-oflife with more citizenship for women? To answer these questions, we analyze in this article – based on the canonical concepts of discursive semiotics – four street harassment mapping applications. The theoretical approach also operates an understanding of smart cities as helpers in the achievement of the object of value of society. In this case, such object should be the fight against street harassment. The analysis shows that not all applications accomplish the same performance, suggesting that the promotion of public policies is hampered by a repeated and distorted view of the problem.