Architecture and the Smart City 9781000706710, 1000706710

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Architecture and the Smart City

Increasingly the world around us is becoming ‘smart’. From smart meters to smart production, from smart surfaces to smart grids, from smart phones to smart citizens. ‘Smart’ has become the catch-all term to indicate the advent of a charged technological shift that has been propelled by the promise of safer, more convenient and more efficient forms of living. Most architects, designers, planners and politicians seem to agree that the smart transition of cities and buildings is in full swing and inevitable. However, beyond comfort, safety and efficiency, how can ‘smart design and technologies’ assist to address current and future challenges of architecture and urbanism? Architecture and the Smart City provides an architectural perspective on the emergence of the smart city and offers a wide collection of resources for developing a better understanding of how smart architecture, smart cities and smart systems in the built environment are discussed, designed and materialized. It brings together a range of international thinkers and practitioners to discuss smart systems through four thematic sections: ‘Histories and Futures’, ‘Agency and Control’, ‘Materialities and Spaces’ and ‘Networks and Nodes’. Combined, these four thematic sections provide different perspectives into some of the most pressing issues with smart systems in the built environment. The book tackles questions related to the future of architecture and urbanism, lessons learned from global case studies and challenges related to interdisciplinary research, and critically examines what the future of buildings and cities will look like. Sergio M. Figueiredo is an architect, author, curator and historian. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Architecture History and Theory at TU Eindhoven, where he also heads the Curatorial Research Collective (CRC), a fledgling curatorial and research group. Previously, as a Fulbright scholar, he completed a doctoral dissertation at UCLA while also being appointed Senior Lecturer of Architecture History and Theory at OTIS College for Art and Design. He has contributed to several publications, ranging from refereed articles on Places and ARQ, to op-eds on DomusWeb and articles in Volume, as well as guest-editing an OASE special issue on architecture museums. His first book, The NAi Effect: Creating Architecture Culture, was published in 2016 by nai010.

Sukanya Krishnamurthy is currently a Chancellor’s Fellow/Senior Lecturer at the School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh. Her focus lies at the interface between urban and social geography, where her scholarship analyses how cities can use their resources and values for better sustainable development. Key interests include place-making and participatory approaches, urban cultures and representation, society and smart urbanism. Over the last few years she has brought these interests together within child-friendly planning, participatory processes within Living Labs, urban development and management of informal areas, and enabling agendas of context-driven planning. She serves as board member on various civic society associations (Apolitical, Play Scotland) and is also a member of Dutch and EU research evaluation commissions. She has been a PI and team member on research projects (EU, NWO, third-sector funding) in the Netherlands, Germany, Canada, Israel, UK, Turkey and India. Torsten Schroeder is an architect, researcher and design advisor. Currently he is Assistant Professor of Sustainability in Architectural Design at TU Eindhoven. His key research interests are sustainability, resilience and circular economy within architecture and cities and he focusses on translating these three concepts into comprehensive design projects. Torsten co-founded and co-directs the Archi Lab, a universitybased architectural and urban think tank dedicated to exploring, creating and developing future concepts and scenarios. He obtained his PhD in the Cities Programme at the London School of Economics and Political Science, winning the prestigious RIBA PhD research award in 2015. Torsten offers a unique blend of practical and research expertise. He has more than ten years of experience in designing and realising a wide range of outstanding architectural projects for leading design practices, amongst others for Rem Koolhaas/Office for Metropolitan Architecture as architect and project leader on projects in the USA, Germany, South Korea and China.

Critiques: Critical Studies in Architectural Humanities A project of the Architectural Humanities Research Association Series Editor: Jonathan Hale (University of Nottingham) Editorial Board: Sarah Chaplin (University of Greenwich) Mark Dorrian (Newcastle University) Murray Fraser (University of Westminster) Hilde Heynen (Catholic University of Leuven) Andrew Leach (University of Queensland) Thomas Mical (Carleton University) Jane Rendell (University College London) Adam Sharr (Newcastle University) Igea Troiani (Oxford Brookes University) This original series of edited books contains selected papers from the AHRA Annual International Conferences. Each year the event has its own thematic focus while sharing an interest in new and emerging critical research in the areas of architectural history, theory, culture, design and urbanism. Volume 6: Architecture and Field/Work Edited by: Suzanne Ewing, Jérémie Michael McGowan, Chris Speed and Victoria Clare Bernie Volume 7: Scale Edited by: Gerald Adler, Timothy Brittain-Catlin and Gordana Fontana-Giusti Volume 8: Peripheries Edited by: Ruth Morrow and Mohamed Gamal Abdelmonem Volume 9: Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence Edited by: Ines Weizman Volume 10: Transgression: Towards an Expanded Field of Architecture Edited by: Louis Rice and David Littlefield Volume 11: Industries of Architecture Edited by: Katie Lloyd Thomas, Tilo Amhoff and Nick Beech Volume 12: This Thing Called Theory Edited by: Teresa Stoppani, George Themistokleous and Giorgio Ponzo Volume 13: Architecture and Feminisms: Ecologies, Economies, Technologies Edited by Hélène Frichot, Catharina Gabrielsson and Helen Runting Volume 14: Architecture, Festival and the City Edited by Jemma Browne, Christian Frost and Ray Lucas Volume 15: Architecture and the Smart City Edited by Sergio M. Figueiredo, Sukanya Krishnamurthy and Torsten Schroeder AHRA provides an inclusive and comprehensive support network for humanities researchers in architecture across the UK and beyond. It promotes, supports, develops and disseminates high-quality research in all areas of architectural humanities. www.ahra-architecture.org

Architecture and the Smart City

Edited by Sergio M. Figueiredo, Sukanya Krishnamurthy and Torsten Schroeder

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Sergio M. Figueiredo, Sukanya Krishnamurthy and Torsten Schroeder; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Sergio M. Figueiredo, Sukanya Krishnamurthy and Torsten Schroeder to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Figueiredo, Sergio M., editor. Title: Architecture and the smart city / edited by Sergio M. Figueiredo, Sukanya Krishnamurthy and Torsten Schroeder. Description: New York : Routledge, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019023336 (print) | LCCN 2019023337 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367342067 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367342074 (paperback) | ISBN 9780429324468 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Architecture and technology. | Smart cities. Classification: LCC NA2543.T43 A719 2020 (print) | LCC NA2543.T43 (ebook) | DDC 720/.47–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019023336 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019023337 ISBN: 978-0-367-34206-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-34207-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-32446-8 (ebk) Typeset in Univers by Swales & Willis, Exeter, Devon, UK

Contents

List of figures Biographies Acknowledgments 1 Introduction: our brave new world

x xii xviii 1

Sergio M. Figueiredo, Sukanya Krishnamurthy and Torsten Schroeder Part I

Histories and futures

15

2 Frictionless futures: the vision of smartness and the occlusion of alternatives

17

Nick Dunn and Paul Cureton 3 Is the city becoming computable?

29

Antoine Picon and Thomas Shay Hill 4 The answer is “smart” – but what was the question? About some properties of utopian conceptualization

43

Oliver Schürer 5 The trouble with capitalist utopia: a totalizing scheme of subsumption and planetary urbanization

56

Angel Callander 6 The metaphor of the city as a thinking machine: a complicated relationship and its backstory

68

Sonja Hnilica

vii

Contents

Part II Agency and control

85

7 Hyperwwwork: is Alexa our new chief happiness officer? IoT and the logics of soft-production

87

Adrien Grigorescu and Romain Curnier 8 Soft sibylations: GPS navigation as urban speculation

101

Benjamin William Tippin 9 Intelligence and armament

113

Kevin Rogan 10 The right to the (smart) city, participation and open data

126

Jonas Breuer, Nils Walravens, Shenja Van der Graaf and Ilse Mariën 11 Scenarios of interactive citizenship

139

Renata Tyszczuk Part III Materialities and spaces

155

12 The IdIoT in the smart home

157

Delfina Fantini van Ditmar 13 Five strategies of socially smart cities

165

Geeta Mehta, Shreya Malu and Merlyn Mathew 14 Politics of sensing and listening

186

Dietmar Offenhuber and Sam Auinger 15 Recoupling soft and hard: engaging data as an immaterial practice

197

Maya Przybylski 16 Moving in the metropolis: smart city solutions and the urban everyday experience

210

Vesa Vihanninjoki and Sanna Lehtinen Part IV Networks and nodes

221

17 Standing out in a crowd: big data to produce new forms of publicness

223

Silvio Carta, Rebecca Onafuye and Pieter de Kock

viii

Contents

18 Operationalizing smartness: from social bridges to an urbanism of aspirations, affordances and capabilities

234

Shin Alexandre Koseki 19 New sensorial vehicles: navigating critical understandings of autonomous futures

247

Fiona McDermott

Index

257

ix

Figures

2.1

Seed Capital Area Masterplan

21

2.2

Jakarta Jaya – The Green Manhattan

23

2.3

Sidewalk Toronto

24

3.1

Jacques Bertillon, revenues per kilometer of Parisian omnibus lines in 1889, after Atlas de Statistique Graphique de la Ville de Paris, Paris, 1891.

3.2

1911. 3.3

34

SENSEable Lab, MIT, Real-Time Talk, a map showing the level of cellphone network usage in Singapore. Live Singapore! project, 2011

39

4.1

IBM System/360–5 (followed by System 370 in 1970)

44

4.2

Map of Utopia by Abraham Ortelius, 1595

46

6.1

City for 120 million inhabitants, Fritz Haller, 1968

71

6.2

Anthropomorphic town plan, Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Trattati di architettura, ingegneria e arte militare, Cod. Saluzziano, 15th century

73

6.3

De Digitale Stad 3.0, Local Information Network for Amsterdam, 1995

76

6.4

Richard R. Dietrich, METASTADT Wulfen, photograph 1975

77

6.5

Temporal tent city for the Qoyllur Rit’i Festival in Peru, 2016

80

7.1

Samples of the IoT ecosystem.

89

7.2

Floor plan drawings of workplaces attempting to reproduce the comfort

7.3

Floor plan drawings of work environments redefined by the emer-

7.4

Floor plan drawings highlighting spatial translations of managerial organizations.

95

7.5

Floor plan drawings highlighting different uses of transitional spaces.

96

of the home environment. gence of IoT.

10.1

92 93

Visualisation of real-time parking information based on linked open data in an online proof of concept (real-time occupancy in one garage)

x

33

Werner Hegemann, evolution of Berlin population after Der Städtebau,

133

Figures

10.2

Visualisation of real-time parking information based on linked open data in an online proof of concept (comparing garages across cities in relative numbers)

10.3

134

Visualisation of building accessibility information based on linked open data in an online proof of concept

134

11.1a and b WE KNOW NOT WHAT WE MAY BE Interactive Installation by Zoe Svendsen/METIS, The Barbican, London 5–9 September 2018 13.1

148

Urban safety and incomes in Medellin, Colombia, increased in direct proportion to the public transportation and social infrastructure built in informal settlements during the past decade

166

13.2

Medellin Escalator: transporting communities to the city center

168

13.3

Mismatch between demand for, and supply of, housing

170

13.4

Buildings in Sao Paulo occupied by squatters

170

13.5

Slum redevelopment housing in Maharashtra Nagar, Mumbai

172

13.6

Quadruple Bottom Line (QBL) showing Grand Rapids’ four sustainability pillars

13.7

177

People planning their public spaces: democracy in action in Lausanne, Switzerland

179

13.8

Diagrams showing the Social Capital Credits methodology

181

13.9

Oyster-tecture park in New York will restore the reef and coastal ecology

182

15.1

OnTheLine

200

15.2

Chemetall Foote Lithium Operation

201

15.3

Soft Materials. Reconceptualizing data, algorithms, code implementations, and hardware configurations as constituting part of a project’s material assembly. By materializing these digital components, they fall back to being clearly in the scope of the designer and, thus, require careful, thoughtful execution, not only from a technical perspective but also in terms of their social, political, and ethical agency

202

17.1

Waymo, connectedness and individuality

226

17.2

Enabling a new paradigm of connectivity of individuals and big data

231

18.1

Social Learning Theory. Created by the author

238

18.2

Agency as the product of aspirations, affordances and capabilities.

241

xi

Biographies

Sam Auinger is a sonic thinker, composer and sound-artist based in Berlin, Germany. With his collaborator Bruce Odland he investigates the theme of ‘hearing perspective’ through large-scale public sound installations. Auinger works with city planners and architects and speaks at international symposiums on urbanism, architecture, media and the senses. He was visiting professor at the University of the Arts in Berlin, associate at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and lecturer at the Art, Culture and Technology program at MIT. Jonas Breuer is a PhD researcher at imec-SMIT-VUB research institute. After a bachelor degree in European Studies from the University of Maastricht and a Master’s in Communication Studies, he has been working for several years at the research institute before starting a PhD track on stakeholder engagement and data protection in the smart city, with a focus on data protection impact assessment. Angel Callander is a candidate in the program MA Kunst- und Bildgeschichte (Art History and Visual Culture) at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her work focuses on the material impact of cybernetics and surveillance for embodied subjects in the face of cultural, political and ontological fluctuations. Her essay “‘Unable to establish a connection’: Interpreting empathy within the interface” was published in Interface Critique (Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2016). Silvio Carta is an ARB RIBA architect and Head of Design at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, where he is also Chair of the Design Research Group. His research and design interests focus on digital design, urban informatics and public space. Silvio is head of the editorial board of Seoul-based C3 magazine and an editor of A_MPS Architecture Media Politics and Society (UCL Press). Paul Cureton is Senior Lecturer in Design at ImaginationLancaster, Lancaster University. His primary research interests include Future Cities, Geo-Design, GIS, UAVs, mapping, modelling and digital fabrication. His recent publications include explorations of

xii

Biographies

the work of Lawrence Halprin ‘Rhythm, Agency, Scoring & the City’ in Landscape & Agency: Critical Essays (Routledge, 2018), the monograph Strategies for Landscape Representation: Digital and Analogue Techniques (Routledge, 2016) and the forthcoming book Drone Futures: UAS for Landscape & Urban Design (Routledge, 2020). Romain Curnier is an architect and urbanist based in Paris. His work, be it via a collective research group or professional experiences, seeks to understand the nature of connected and automated environments through the lens of architectural and territorial figures. In particular, he explores the spatial dialectic between the individual and the collective in light of varying economic and political contexts. He holds a Master’s in Architecture from the ENSA Paris Malaquais in the Digital Knowledge Department and previously studied at UDK Berlin. Pieter de Kock is an Australian registered architect (ARBV 15737) with a Master’s in Urban Design from the University of Westminster. He is experienced in a wide range of project types and sizes spanning several countries. Pieter is currently researching visual sustainability at the University of Lincoln. Nick Dunn is Executive Director of ImaginationLancaster, the design research lab at Lancaster University, where he is Professor of Urban Design. He is Senior Fellow at the Institute for Social Futures and leads research on the future of cities and urbanism. His work responds to the contemporary city and is explored through experimentation and writing on the nature of urban space. His latest book, Dark Matters: A Manifesto for the Nocturnal City (Zero, 2016), invites us to rethink urban environments at night. He is co-author, with Paul Cureton, of the forthcoming Future Cities: Visions for Tomorrow’s World (Bloomsbury, 2020). Delfina Fantini van Ditmar holds a BA in Biology and accomplished a year of a MFA at Konstfack University in Stockholm. Delfina completed her PhD at the Royal College of Art with a thesis entitled “The IdIoT.” Her research focuses on questioning and critically analyzing the embedded epistemology of the Internet of Things (IoT) in the context of the ‘SMART’ home. Currently Delfina is a tutor on the Design Products Programme at the Royal College of Art. Adrien Grigorescu is an architect and independent artist based in Paris. Through personal and professional practice, ranging from architectural design and prospective thinking to audiovisual experimentations, he seeks to explore how digital technologies question the design, representation and perception of space; how they are inscribed in existing social, political and cultural structures. Particularly, he investigates models and organizations based on collective intelligence and collaboration, and if/how digital tools and cultures can empower them. He holds a Master’s in Architecture from ENSA Paris Malaquais in the Digital Knowledge Department. Thomas Shay Hill is an urbanist, historian and data scientist focused on theoretical and mathematical models of cities, economies and space. Thomas’ current research concerns the use and misuse of ‘big data’ for the built environment;

xiii

Biographies

‘smart city’ technologies; and the history, theory and practice of urban simulation. Thomas received his BA in Urban Studies from Columbia University and is a PhD candidate in urban planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Sonja Hnilica (Dr.-Ing.habil) is Visiting Professor for Urban Design at Technische Universitaet Dortmund. She is a trained architect and got her PhD at Vienna Technical University in 2006. She has taught in Vienna, Dortmund, Venice and Kayseri, curated exhibitions and is author of numerous books and papers on the theory and history of architecture and the city. She habilitated sich at the TU Dortmund in 2017 with a thesis on post-war large-scale structures, published as “Der Glaube an das Grosse in der Architektur der Moderne. Grossstrukturen der 1960er und 1970er Jahre” (Zurich, 2018). Shin Alexandre Koseki is a researcher at the ETH Zurich, visiting at the MIT and research associate in the Chôros network. Prior to this, he was Visiting Professor at the University of Montreal’s School of Planning, Lecturer and Studio Director at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, Affiliated Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford, Visiting Fellow at the National University of Singapore and Academic Guest at the ETH Future Cities Laboratory. His research investigates how individuals, groups and communities rely on social and urban spaces to conduct democratic processes. By combining computational social sciences, social theory and institutional design, he aims to reduce social and political conflicts between individuals and local communities within contemporary metropolitan regions. Through this work, he also develops new design and planning strategies for contemporary metropolitan spaces. Sanna Lehtinen (PhD in Aesthetics, 2015, University of Helsinki) is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science HELSUS of the University of Helsinki. Her current research interests include developing philosophical approaches to urban aesthetics, philosophy of urban technologies and updating environmental aesthetics. She has collaborated with architects and urban planners and also teaches aesthetics at Aalto University, Helsinki. Lehtinen was a recipient of the Young Scholar Award from the International Association of Aesthetics (IAA) in 2013. She is an active member in the Philosophy of the City Research Group (PotC) and the President of the Finnish Society for Aesthetics. Shreya Malu received her postgraduate degree in urban design from Columbia University, and her architecture degree from India. She has led design projects for institutional and industrial campuses and regional master plans. Her research focuses on urban sustainability, equitable planning and inventive data analysis. She is one of the contributors to the book Building Social Capital through Design by Professor Geeta Mehta to be published by Columbia University. She is currently a volunteer Project Manager with Asia Initiatives, spearheading the development of the mobile/web application for the organization’s community currency for social good. She has also served on the editorial board of My Liveable City, a magazine published from Delhi.

xiv

Biographies

Ilse Mariën is a post-doctoral researcher at imec-SMIT, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, leading several policy-oriented projects related to digital inequalities, e-skills and e-inclusion, such as the four-year federal project IDEALiC that sets the future scene of e-inclusion policies in Belgium. She has been leading the development of the PAR4P-methodology that focuses on multi-stakeholder consultation for policy and strategy development. Ilse tested and implemented the PAR4Pmethod in several policy projects commissioned by regional, national and European governmental bodies, such as the PAR4-B project (2018–2022) that develops an e-inclusive smart city policy for Brussels through an iterative participatory and action-oriented research process. Merlyn Mathew is a recent graduate in sustainability management from Columbia University with a background in architecture and urban policy. She has over two years of experience as a research consultant working on several themes such as Transit Oriented Development (TOD) policy in Indian cities, living wages in temporary settlements, public–private partnerships in the road sector, globalization and livelihood adaptation, housing policy aspirations of migrant workers and designing spaces for an international art and cultural event. Currently she is a volunteer Researcher at Asia Initiatives. Fiona McDermott is a PhD candidate at CONNECT, the Research Centre for Future Communications and Networks at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland and formerly a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the School of Media Studies, the New School in New York City. Her research focuses on networked forms of urbanism and the ways in which Internet of Things technologies are restructuring urban practices, politics and design. She is a founding member of the Orthogonal Methods Group (OMG), a research platform based at CONNECT that works in critical and creative relation to technology. Geeta Mehta is Adjunct Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at Columbia University and the founder/president of Asia Initiatives, where she innovated Social Capital Credits (SoCCs), a community currency for social good that is being used in the USA, India, Ghana and Kenya. Geeta is also the co-founder of ‘URBZ: User Generated Cities.’ She serves on New York Mayor De Blasio’s Advisory Board for Waterfront Development, and on the boards of The Center for Living Cities and Women Strong International. She was recognized as one of the 21 Leaders of the 21st Century by Women’s eNews in 2015, and as the Social Entrepreneur of the Year by HSBC Bank in 2017. Dietmar Offenhuber is Associate Professor at Northeastern University of Art + Design and Public Policy. He holds a PhD in Urban Planning from MIT and Master’s degrees from the MIT Media Lab and TU Vienna. His research focuses on the relationship between design, technology and governance. Dietmar is the author of the award-winning monograph Waste is Information (MIT Press, 2017), he works as an advisor to the United Nations and published books on the subjects of urban data, accountability technologies and urban informatics.

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Biographies

Rebecca Onafuye is a PhD research student at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, where she is also a member of the Design Research Group. Her research focuses on the production of temporary social spaces through online interactions that are formed by young adults on social media. She is experienced in a range of residential interior projects and commercial public exhibitions in the UK and Nigeria. Antoine Picon is the G. Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology and Director of Research at the GSD. Trained as an engineer, architect and historian, Picon works on the history of architectural and urban technologies from the eighteenth century to the present. Picon’s most recent books, Digital Culture in Architecture: An Introduction for the Design Profession (2010) and Smart Cities: A Spatialised Intelligence (2015), offer a comprehensive overview of the changes brought by digital culture to architecture’s theory and practice, as well as to the planning and experience of the city. In 2010, he was elected a member of the French Académie des Technologies. He has been Chevalier des Arts et Lettres since 2014. He is also Chairman of the Fondation Le Corbusier. Maya Przybylski is an Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture at the University of Waterloo, Canada, where she runs the DATAlab research group (www.data lab.uwaterloo.ca). Through her research, she combines her backgrounds in computer science and architecture to position and develop methods for achieving more complete engagement with both the sociocultural agency and technical capacity of the computational components embedded within data-driven design work. She is an editor of [Bracket], a publication series that, since 2010, has documented the intersection of architecture, environment and digital culture (www.brkt.org). Kevin Rogan is a former architect and current urbanist, artist and researcher investigating labor, technology, politics and the philosophy of space. He recently graduated with a degree in urban sociology from The New School with his thesis “Anti-intelligence: a Marxist critique of the smart city.” Oliver Schürer is a researcher, curator, editor and author as well as Senior Scientist and Deputy Head at the Department for Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics, Vienna University of Technology. He has given numerous international lectures and has written many publications mainly on technology and media in architecture. He has curated a variety of small and large conferences as well as series of events. Since 2008 he has conducted experimental projects, as he develops theory by interlinking architecture, art, engineering and humanities intensely. In 2014 he founded the transdisciplinary group HAUS, researching ‘Humanoid robots in Architecture and Urban Spaces.’ Benjamin W. Tippin is a theorist and curator currently living and working in Los Angeles, California. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture from California State University Long Beach and studied at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he received a Master of Arts in Contemporary Art Theory. Tippin has collaborated to produce work and exhibitions in Los Angeles, Berlin and London. He works

xvi

Biographies

on the intersection of technology, art and political production, focusing mainly on digital image platforms and the aesthetics of networks. He currently works as an assistant curator at Torrance Art Museum and pursues independent scholarship. Renata Tyszczuk is Professor of Architectural Humanities at the University of Sheffield. She is an academic and artist whose work explores questions concerning global environmental change and provisionality in architectural thinking and practice. She convenes Culture and Climate Change, a framework for a series of research and public engagement projects on climate change. She was awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship for her research on cities in the Anthropocene epoch of human-induced impacts (2013–2014). Her most recent book is Provisional Cities: Cautionary Tales for the Anthropocene (Routledge, 2017). For her new project on ‘Collective Scenarios’ she has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship (2019–2022). Shenja Van der Graaf (PhD, LSE, 2009) is a Principal Investigator heading the strategic and innovative cluster ‘Smart Cities’ at imec-SMIT, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium). Her current work is concerned with social, economic and policy issues arising from innovations associated with the ICTs. Specific lines of inquiry include the integration and management of technological innovation in cities and communities; ICT and everyday life; (new) media users and ‘cultures of expertise’; mediated

participation;

urban

intelligence.

More

recently,

her

focus

is

on

understanding the socio-economic implications of AI, citizen behavior and the governance of public space. Vesa Vihanninjoki (MA in Aesthetics, 2015, University of Helsinki) is a salaried Doctoral Candidate at the University of Helsinki. His doctoral research examines the role that aesthetics plays both in urban everyday life and in the diverse forms of present-day urban development. The emphasis is on the questions of sustainable urban infill and a revised notion of urban place, combining the relative stability of the material environment and the dynamism inherent in all experience. With an academic background that also covers various fields of technology (e.g., civil engineering and urban planning), Vihanninjoki aims at providing a multidisciplinary approach to urban aesthetics. Nils Walravens is a Senior Researcher at imec-SMIT-VUB. He holds a Master’s degree in Communication Sciences from the VUB and finished his PhD in 2016 in the same field on the topic of public value creation in smart cities. Nils currently coordinates the Smart Flanders program, supporting 13 cities in Flanders, Belgium, with opening up data to support urban and societal challenges.

xvii

Acknowledgments

The essays collected in this volume were originally prepared for ‘Smartness? Between Theory and Practice,’ the 15th annual conference of the Architectural Humanities Research Association (AHRA). The conference was held at the Eindhoven University of Technology in November 2018 and explored how the ‘smart’ paradigm is affecting architectural and urban debates, design practices and our forms of living. This book proposes a collective critical reconsideration of the term ‘smart’ regarding architecture and the city, as it emerged across the multiple perspectives and conversations presented during the conference in Eindhoven. The conference’s title, ‘Smartness? Between Theory and Practice,’ intended to articulate not only the doubts and questions that the rapid emergence of smart systems in architecture and the city raise, but also to frame the common ground between technology and humanities where the most productive conversations could occur. Andrew Feenberg’s work was particularly inspiring in the framing of this common ground and, thus, in shaping our approach to the topic of ‘smartness.’ Ultimately, this book aims to foster a broad(er) understanding of smart systems in architecture and the city by conceiving and discussing them also as practices that include their social context. Only by questioning both the technical and the social dimensions of these systems could we begin to even formulate an answer—even if, for now, tentative—to the looming question of how smart systems can address current and future challenges of architecture and the city. We would like to thank the AHRA and its Steering Group not only for the opportunity to host its 15th annual conference at the Eindhoven University of Technology, but also for their continued support of the event and the preparation for its publications, including this book. In particular, we wish to thank Sarah Lapin for her support and participation in the conference, Christian Frost and Teresa Stoppani for their guidance and advice, as well as Jonathan Hale, editor of the AHRA book series ‘Critiques: Critical Studies in Architectural Humanities’ for his insightful comments.

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We would also like to thank the Department of the Built Environment at the Eindhoven University of Technology for hosting and supporting this project. Specifically, we would like to thank Professor Elphi Nelissen and Suzanne Udo for their belief and trust in our work, as well as for their continued support for this project. We would also like to thank the unit of Architecture Urban Design and Engineering (AUDE) in which we are embedded and, in particular, Bernard Colenbrander, Juliette Bekkering, Pieter van Wesemael and Jacob Voorthuis, who played a crucial role in the preparations for the conference and in the discussions that inform this book. The three days of the conference would not have gone off as smoothly if not for the volunteers. The efforts of Lennart Arpots, Justin Agyin, Dario Sposini, Seyed Morteza Hosseini, Özlemnur Ataol, Ji Li (Leo) and Lu Lu, need special mention. A word of appreciation is also due to the conference keynote speakers, Antoine Picon, Geeta Mehta, Dan Hill and Stephen Graham, whose interventions greatly contributed to frame the conversations and explorations of smartness in and around architecture and the city, both at the conference and in this book. We would also like to acknowledge the conference’s Scientific Committee, namely Andrew Feenberg, Michael Batty and Igea Troiani, whose support, guidance and discerning comments fostered several conversations among the Organizing Committee. We would also like thank the reviewers and session chairs at the conference who helped us translate the originally abstract themes and approaches to smart architectural and urban systems into a much more tangible and focused form, namely: Stefano Andreani, George Artopoulos, Jonas Breuer, Angel Callander, Anuradha Chatterjee, Carlos Smaniotto Costa, Paul Cureton, Nick Dunn, Shenja Van der Graaf, Ari Hynynen, Anubha Kakroo, Sarah Lappin, Sanna Lehtinen, Conor McCafferty, Cristina Nan, Youfang Peng, Annuska Rantanen, Ana Roders, Linda Shetabi, Vesa Vihanninjoki, Chuan Wang and Gretchen Wilkins. Finally, we would like to thank the many other colleagues and friends who helped us both directly and indirectly in organizing the conference and preparing this book. Sergio M. Figueiredo, Sukanya Krishnamurthy and Torsten Schroeder Eindhoven, May 2019

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Introduction Our brave new world Sergio M. Figueiredo, Sukanya Krishnamurthy and Torsten Schroeder

Technology and science in service of efficiency and convenience. While expressed in a multitude of iterations and approaches, this basic idea establishes the very foundation of most—if not all—smart systems that have come to colonize our buildings and cities. These systems are also often accompanied by an explicit promise that each time any iteration of this conceptual equation is solved, we will find ourselves closer to a societal bliss on the verge of utopia. Furthermore, with this promise of a better, more efficient and safer society, smart systems and devices justify any (potential) shortcomings as small sacrifices on the path towards a greater good. And this needs further disentangling. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the same ideas, reasoning and ambitions could be used to describe the futuristic society imagined in 1931 by Aldous Huxley in his novel Brave New World.1 However, beyond the promises of technology and efficiency, Huxley presented the social implications of such a pursuit by introducing his readership to a sinister and insidious society, or World State, of futuristic landscapes and technical marvels controlled by powerful elites. With a clear inspiration in Fordism, particularly as an industrial paradigm of mass production, standardization and predictability as well as an economic regime of a virtuous cycle of mass production and mass consumption, Huxley presented the logical conclusion of utopian attempts of societal efficiency at the cost of individual freedom: a totalitarian consumerist regime purged of everyday human concepts in which history is considered to be “bunk.”2

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Much like the World State, today’s smart systems in architecture and cities attempt to shape or suppress human behavior for the sake of a more efficient (and therefore inevitably improved) society, purposefully blurring the boundaries between collective and individual, public and private. Thus, issues first described almost 90 years ago in Brave New World continue to be remarkably relevant today, almost clairvoyant when considering the ongoing debates regarding smart systems in architecture and urbanism. From smart meters to smart buildings, from smart materials to smart grids, from smart communication to smart citizens. Increasingly the world around us is becoming smart. Throughout history buildings and cities have undergone major shifts. Today, the smart transition is in full swing, remodeling the world around us in a more fundamental way than we might fully understand. To engage with the smart transformation and to discuss the issue of “smartness” in architecture and cities, the editors of this book initiated, from November 15th to 17th 2018, the 15th Architectural Humanities Research Association International Conference at the Department of the Built Environment, Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). Titled “Smartness? Between Discourse and Practice,” the conference brought together more than 100 scholars from 30 countries worldwide. The city of Eindhoven was a particularly appropriate host for this conference, since in the past few years it has embarked on an ambitious quest to become one of the leaders—in the Netherlands and beyond—of “smart” urban solutions. This is best articulated in its establishment of Brainport Eindhoven, which is branding itself as “Europe’s leading innovative top technology region.”3 Through this program, the city is not only retrofitting smart systems into existing urban fabric, such as the massive deployment of networks and sensors across the city’s center, but also in developing new smart urban districts, such as the Brainport Smart District development project in Helmond.4 Likewise, the Eindhoven University of Technology has been deeply invested in researching smart architectural and urban systems both as an active member of the Brainport Eindhoven program and through a wide range of other projects and collaborations. But while both the city of Eindhoven and the Eindhoven University of Technology have been important instigators for research into smart technologies, their research has thus far concentrated on technical aspects of architectural and urban smart systems, a pursuit that has sometimes come at the cost of a broader understanding regarding their social contexts and effects. As such, the broader reflection on technology and its meaning provided by this conference seemed particularly appropriate. Effectively, the critical presence of the conference in this city—and in this university—was perhaps best captured in one of the conference’s opening speeches, by philosopher of architecture Jacob Voorthuis, as he discussed smartness and its relation to wisdom. Accordingly, he observed that “to be smart, is to be clean, tidy and well-dressed or, informally, to show a quick-witted intelligence,” while, conversely, wisdom was “to know good means to good ends and to know their value.”5

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Now, more than ever, it seemed important to question the good ends and the value of smart systems in architecture and the city.

Defining smart? “Smart” has become the catch-all phrase to indicate the advent of a charged technological shift that has been propelled by the promises of safer, more convenient, healthier and more efficient forms of living. The majority of politicians, infrastructure planners, security specialists, high-tech representatives and many more seem to agree that the smart transition of buildings and cities is self-evident and inevitable. But behind this apparent consensus many contradictions and open questions emerge. Architecture and the city are intertwined. However, while there is a broad body of scholarship surrounding the notion of the “smart city,” literature on “smart architecture” has thus far received less attention. Anthony Townsend defines smart cities as “places where information technology is combined with infrastructure, architecture, everyday objects, and even our bodies to address social, economic, and environmental problems.”6 Large corporations, such as Cisco, Siemens, Microsoft, IBM, Hitachi and others, have been major drivers of discourses, as they have come to appreciate the business opportunities inherent to this transition. These corporations “see big money as growing cities turn to tech,” since they are able to sell technology solutions “to address real and urgent problems such as those related to health and aging, traffic congestion and environmental quality.”7 Innovations pursued and offered by these large corporations are often technology-driven, with limited positioning on its impact on everyday life. Recently, Hug March and Ramon Ribera-Fumaz, and Alberto Vanolo and Rob Kitchin have criticized this lack of social contexts when it comes to the application of Smart City concepts.8 Others like Mike Crang and Stephen Graham, Robert Hollands and Mark Shepard, for example, have all criticized the technocratic and depoliticized view of smart-city policies for its non-committal, ambiguous definition, its lack of theoretical underpinnings, as well as the corporatization of urban governance due to the influence of the private (technological) sector and the manipulation of big data.9 It is often unclear how Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and its applications are embedded within urban and architectural environments. The absence of an integrated inter- and transdisciplinary view on how these applications impact everyday life demands analysis and better articulation. The title of this book, Architecture and the Smart City, aims to address this neglect. It also intends to question why architecture has received so little attention, despite being a central building block within the “smart city” fabric. It is in architecture that we spend time, that we sleep, recover, produce, trade and meet. Reflecting on the increased ubiquity of smart systems in architecture, Rem Koolhaas suggested that we must shift our perception of “architecture’s new relationship with technology,” since smart systems in architecture (and urbanism) are “catalyzing a nearly

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invisible shift … that is nevertheless far more profound and ubiquitous than the stylistic trends that have been the primary effects of digital technology on [architecture] thus far.”10 Specifically, Koolhaas warns, “[t]he tech world’s gradual colonization of architecture is taking place without the collaboration of its host.”11 So, if conversations around the smart city have been growing in reflection and thinking, what is the role of architecture in this brave new world? How do smart systems transform architecture? Why are architects not more engaged in these discourses? These questions seem hard to answer and position, as the “smart” transition brings together a broad range of different challenges, stakeholders, interests, timeframes, spatial scales and technologies: ubiquitous computing, democratic participation, safety monitoring, shared driving, autonomous elderly living, connectivity, unprecedented efficiency and many more. And it is precisely the vagueness of the term “smart” that has enabled the success story of the “smart city” concept as a welcomed projection for a broad range of stakeholders, issues and intentions. Nevertheless, discussions regarding the use of technology and cybernetics in architecture had been occurring long before the current proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) and other smart systems. In the 1960s, people like the British cybernetician Gordon Pask and the American architect Nicholas Negroponte first developed the concept of architecture machines in which human and machine collaborated to affect how architecture was both designed and experienced. These early experiments focused particularly on a convergence between human and machine through interactions that could challenge the static qualities of architecture and make it dynamically responsive.12 What was most interesting about these early efforts, however, was how these systems were not always efficiency-driven, but how the interaction between human and architecture machine was also regulated by dynamic criteria framed by underspecified goals. An interaction which, according to Usman Haque, was based on a completely different notion than “that used in many of today’s so-called interactive systems, which are premised on unproductive and prespecified circular, deterministic reactions” in which systems contain “a finite amount of information and the human simply navigates through an emerging landscape to uncover it all.”13 In the early 2000s, as the effects of ubiquitous computing on architecture were becoming increasingly noticeable, discussions regarding the interaction between human and environment continued to develop. Technological advances allowed architecture to now be smart, that is, to be interactive and present itself as an interface between users and their surroundings. In fact, according to Ed van Hinte, Marc Neelen, Jaques Vink and Piet Vollaard, by mediating “the demands and desires of users and environment,” smart architecture was “behaving intelligently” and thus allowing architecture to become efficient and do more with less.14 But even as these authors identified smart architecture with the technological advances of ubiquitous computing—specifically the deployment of sensors “to build up a ‘memory’ and to learn”—they nevertheless questioned the almost dogmatic positivism associated with technological-driven solutions and attempted to broaden the notion of smartness in architecture beyond technological apparatuses. In fact, they warned that “[s]ometimes a simple and hence ostensibly ‘dumb’ building

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[was] smarter than a technology-dominated living-and-working machine over which the user has lost control.”15 The loss of user control and meaningful human–machine interaction in smart architecture seems to have only escalated since then. The advent of big data, IoT and Artificial Intelligence (AI) has promised that our buildings will learn and do more with less. While these promises remain far from being fulfilled, the critique offered by authors such as Hollands on the all too often “selfcongratulatory” tones that cities put forward is far removed from reality. His article “Will the real smart city please stand up?” questions what it means to be smart and, perhaps more importantly, the means to get there. His argument that “progressive(ly) smart[er] cities must seriously start with people and the human capital side of the equation, rather than blindly believing that IT itself can automatically transform and improve cities” echoes Voorthuis’ nexus between smartness and wisdom.16 Where we seem to have ended up is at an ambiguous yet seemingly ubiquitous position where information technology can provide us with solutions that almost seem utopian. Using what Hug March and Ramon Ribera-Fumaz have labelled a “repoliticisation of the Smart City debate” to address the concern that smart systems “can function to disguise entrepreneurial urban development and further privatisation of urban services delivery under the veil of a new hype of ecological and technological branding,” the editors put forward the need to critically question where the debate on architecture and smart cities is headed.17

Question/ambitions This book aims to explore discourses and practices of architecture and the smart city by engaging with a broad understanding of smart technologies. The philosopher of technology Andrew Feenberg suggests one should develop a broad understanding of technologies as one that conceives them not merely as “efficiency oriented practices, but [as practices that] include their contexts as these are embodied in design and social insertion.”18 Such a broad understanding includes questions of responsibility, accountability, ethics, participation, knowledge (necessary to both produce and participate) and many more. To illustrate this line of thought Feenberg discussed the house as an example of both a complex technical object as well as an exceptionally rich and meaningful life environment. Today houses have become concentrations of technological devices: electricity, plumbing, heating, cooling, communication networks and diverse mechanical building technologies. To the builder the house consists essentially of these things. But to the dweller the house is his home, his romanticized life world in which many devices are obscured and hidden behind gypsum boards and flower wallpaper. The house considered as a concentration of devices is at least conceptually different from the house as a human environment. The one belongs to the realm of technology, the other to the lifeworld of meaning. […] But from

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an experiential standpoint these two dimensions—device and meaning, technical and lifeworld practice—and are inextricably intertwined.19 Essentially Feenberg encourages us to overcome the “ontological split between technology and meaning.” Instead he suggests focusing our attention on the “struggle between different types of actors differently engaged with technology and meaning.”20 And in “smart” architecture and cities there are expansive assemblies of different stakeholders that are entangled. This way we can explore how “smart city” concepts and their architecture become interpreted and translated into specific contexts. To position this and more, this volume—and its chapters authored by scholars across the disciplines of architecture, urbanism, geography, history and art—share the concern of how smart buildings and cities are being conceived, implemented, manipulated and assessed. The questions of what we can learn from history to inform the future, who is in control and how our built environment is shaped by these choices, are recurring themes throughout the chapters, that have here been organized into four parts, namely: Histories and Futures, Agency and Control, Materialities and Spaces, and Networks and Nodes. Across these four parts, the multitude of examples, projects and theoretical framings provides the beginning of a framework to examine architecture and the smart city in both conceptual and practical detail.

Histories and futures While visions of smart architecture and smart cities are often accused of being ahistorical, the concepts and precepts on which these visions are based have a long tradition in discourse and practice. As such, the historical precedents for technological optimism, the dogmatic belief in information, and the pursuit of efficiency through homogeneity (as, for example, during the High Modern period) can be contrasted with today’s challenges on smart appropriations.21 The crucial role of discourse in positioning smart systems, defining expectations, structuring experience and, ultimately, shaping reality provides an important entry point into this part. A close reading of current discourse reveals not just a similarity of generic and apolitical claims, or frictionless futures that are here critically analyzed, but one that can also be traced back to a narrowing of the discussion purposefully instrumentalized by ICT corporations. Another common trait in past and present visions of the future of our architecture and cities is found in their varied utopian ambitions of developing an ideal society. A closer look at the very notion of utopia, as first coined by Thomas More, however, identifies the primacy of the collective over the individual, of uniformity over individuality, of control over freedom, to not only question what one would willingly abdicate for an ideal society, but what would be so ideal about such a society.22 Thus, utopia becomes dangerously close to dystopia, with a boundary between both that becomes particularly permeable with “technological

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developments [that] stimulate expectations of enhanced connectivity and a better quality of life” in which increasing (private) systems of control claim to foster common wealth.23 Ultimately, this first part explores the making of tomorrow and its embeddedness in the past. Therefore, while grounded in the discussion of historical precedent, this part is not merely determined by reflecting on history but also by the increasingly risky activity of projecting into the future, even if the future is unlikely to unfold in that way. The part opens with Nick Dunn and Paul Cureton discussing the dichotomy between the visions of smart cities as clean technology-driven utopias—largely being promoted by major ICT corporations—and the reality of infrastructure, piecemeal development, and the inefficiencies that are typical of city life. Beyond reflecting on the disjunction between vision and reality, Dunn and Cureton detect further problematic issues in the presentation of smart cities as conspicuously bland, generic, ahistorical and apolitical spaces, particularly by questioning the latent alternatives these common visions hide or discredit. The questioning of dominant narratives is continued by Antoine Picon and Thomas Shay Hill, who present a powerful account of the smart city that rejects the narrative of the smart city as a radical paradigm shift. Instead Picon and Hill develop an explicit historical perspective in which they ground the emergence of the smart city in the historic developments of statistical techniques and cybernetics. In addition, they provide an overview of the wide range of players involved in the smart city movement in order to emphasize differences and similarities between current expressions and predecessors of the smart city. Oliver Schürer similarly reflects on the differences and similarities between current smart city discourse and its conceptual predecessors, specifically by questioning the utopian conceptualization that has become central to most discussions. Through a close reading of Thomas More’s Utopia, Schürer eloquently reveals how some central claims and arguments in current smart cities discourse are, in fact, a subversion of the utopian tradition that has only been made possible by transforming the term “smart” into a powerful floating signifier, which by omitting rather than emitting meaning can be adapted to any desired meaning. In the following chapter, Angel Callander also develops a historic perspective of the smart city by exploring the traditions of utopian imaginary regarding conformity, leisure and connectivity. Callander explicates how capitalism subsumed utopian thinking and thus gave birth to the smart development in architecture and urbanism. In the final chapter of this part, Sonja Hnilica unpacks the association of smart cities and thinking machines through the use of metaphors. Specifically, Hnilica traces the history of the use of metaphors to understand the city as a complex entity without clearly defined boundaries in order to better position current perceptions of the smart city. From the city as a thinking person as coined by ancient philosophers, to the machine analogy so important in modernity, to the current notion of the city as a thinking machine, the way we think about the city inevitably shapes how the city is created.

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Agency and control The part on agency and control presents texts that question the emerging power structures and ensuing exclusion and inclusion enabled by smart systems, while also exploring new forms of agency enabled by those same power structures. How can smart systems foster new ways to engage with buildings and cities? With the allseeing eye, the all-knowing brain, smart systems promise to be all knowable and controllable in new, dynamic, reactive ways, but at what cost? If Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon emerged as the clearest architectural expression of Michel Foucault’s disciplinary society, the current deployment of smart systems in architecture and urbanism appears to provide the clearest architectural and urban expression of Gilles Deleuze’s conception of the societies of control.24 This new data regime with its hidden apparatuses was, already in the early 1990s, presciently labelled by Deleuze as “societies of control.”25 In analyzing the broader societal and cultural implications of this regime, Deleuze made several salient points. Among those was the structural observation that in societies of control, control was exerted in a concealed form. This was identified as a remarkable transformation from the disciplinary societies previously identified by Foucault, in which the visibility of the control apparatus was a key component for establishing dominance through the binary of control/power (primarily by being a constant reminder of the existing power structures).26 According to Deleuze, the hidden nature of the apparatus was its most crucial quality, since it enabled all of its other traits. First and foremost, by obscuring the apparatuses for control, the society of control can present itself as freedom, when, in fact, a hierarchical observation with normalizing judgement is present (not so dissimilar to a disciplinary society). Furthermore, by remaining hidden, the apparatus of control is established as a disseminated matrix of information, pervading all areas of society and thus colonizing spaces that used to be private. Effectively, everything is monitored and encoded so as to be analyzed against patterns of what is acceptable and unacceptable. As Deleuze put it, “the different control mechanisms are inseparable variations, forming a system of variable geometry the language of which is numerical.”27 In this part’s first chapter, Romain Curnier and Adrien Grigorescu provide a reflection on how the architectural typology of the office has been transformed through the deployment of smart objects, ICT, and the ubiquity of the network. Specifically, they question the modern reorganization of work enabled by smart systems as it increasingly blurs the realms of workspace and home, work and leisure, as well as production and consumption. Issues of agency and control are further explored in Benjamin Tippin’s reflection on the role of turn-by-turn navigation software in reshaping not only our habits and perceptions of our environment, but also the physical development of urban fabric. Tippin presents Waze as an affirmative engine of Marc Couroux’s concept of cyberaffordance, reinforcing capitalist futures through cybernetic feedback while creating a site of capital development in which participation in its data collection is

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transformed into “soft” urban redevelopment—subjecting peripheral communities to aggressive urban speculation. The following chapter enquires on agency and control by deconstructing the master narrative of the smart city and assessing the particularities of its arrival. Upon identifying several trends in the current relationship between individuals and the sensorial network at the foundation of current conceptions of smart systems, Kevin Rogan extrapolates—and speculates—a future history of smart urbanism divided into four stages of development. Combined, these four stages reveal the smart city to be composed of several threads that are militated towards the construction of a cohesive grand narrative, or an ideology of intelligence which constructs itself along three axioms: the economic, the political and the spatial. In a similar vein, Jonas Breuer, Nils Walravens, Shenja Van der Graaf and Ilse Mariën question the right to the smart city through the Smart Flanders program initiated by the Flemish Government (Belgium) from early 2017. The work, taking Lefebvre as a starting point, analyzes what “smart city” has come to mean and how the “right to the city” manifests itself within the smart city paradigm. The work from Renata Tyszczuk concludes this part by looking at how interactive scenario-making can question the present and identify possible futures that acknowledge diversity of perspectives, views and approaches. To prepare for the prospect of uncertain futures, the chapter discusses how to enable societies through collaborative infrastructures.

Materiality and spaces In 1991, Mark Weiser, then chief technology officer at Xerox PARC, famously stated that “[t]he most profound technologies are those that disappear,” those that “weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”28 Weiser was specifically referring to ubiquitous computing, to describe the dissemination of computer power across everyday objects which would allow computation to flourish beyond the desktop computer, as well as to “gradually emerge as the dominant mode of computer access.”29 The deployment of such pervasive, or ubiquitous, computing would become the most fundamental condition for the development of most—if not all—smart systems in buildings and cities as their basic, underlying infrastructure. However, while Weiser described a world in which (through the dissemination of computing power) digital infrastructure would recede into the objects that compose the fabric of everyday life, the reverse would appear to be occurring, at least according to the prevailing narratives regarding architectural and urban smart systems. Not only is one of the myths of these smart systems that the material dimension of life is increasingly displaced by the immaterial, digital, virtual and simulated, but more often than not the architectural and urban spaces accommodating these systems are recurrently represented as non-committal, bare volumes of neutral colors, subdued by the overlaid networks of sensors, flows and interfaces.30

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Despite the ubiquity of such representations, smart ideas, technologies, spaces and cities crucially do have a material dimension. This part thus shifts our attention to these often neglected materialities, addressing not only the material infrastructure that supports these systems (such as switches, cables or data centers), but also the physical expression of these systems in our surroundings by reflecting on their specific logics, spaces, appearances and designs. While often forgotten or omitted, the smart revolution is dependent on its physical counterpart. It is shaped by the physical world and, in turn, is shaping the physical space that we inhabit. The hype around smart systems has initiated a snowballing of attempts to define, position and articulate its potentials and its potential downfalls. With an increasing emphasis on individualization and customization, smart technologies have the potential to enhance and shape our interaction with the surrounding environment. From the more visible, touch screens in public spaces and smart lighting, to the more invisible, embedded sensors, RFID tags, energy monitors, etc. But what do these visible and invisible interfaces mean for the spatial experience of the urban fabric and architecture? The common thread in the contributions is the push for recognizing the nuance required to connect smart systems in our homes, buildings and cities with policies and design practices by learning from other fields. In Chapter 12, Delfina Fantini van Ditmar develops an account of how a broad range of smart devices and their algorithmic logic permeate domestic architecture. Through Isabelle Stengers’ figure of the idiot van Ditmar reflects on this invasion to shift attention to wider questions which are frequently overlooked. The chapter from Geeta Mehta, Shreya Malu and Merlyn Mathew pushes for positioning the importance of social and ecological capital, and social and ecological justice, within smart cities. Similarly, Dietmar Offenhuber and Sam Auinger untangle the necessity to explore cultural, personal and economic relationships related to embedding sound sensing within smart city applications. Maya Przybylski follows this by arguing that, from an architectural perspective, it is important to shift attention to the material implications of the digital technologies. In consequence she calls for architectural designers that have the capacity to control both the hard and the soft implications of their design work. Sanna Lehtinen and Vesa Vihanninjoki then discuss how learning from urban aesthetics can help better articulate technological experiences in the urban sphere. Beyond proposing ways in which our understanding of smart systems in our buildings and cities can be productively expanded from other fields, these contributions sketch a clearer understanding of the material implications of the smart transformation at various scales. From workplace to public space, from dwelling to city.

Networks and nodes Beyond having been identified as the social morphology and cultural logic of our current societies, networks—and the connectivity allowed by them—are commonly

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recognized as the basic underlying condition for any smart system. The political, economic, cultural and social changes brought about by the spread of networked digital information are thus further exacerbated by the deployment of architectural and urban smart systems. As Jan van Dijk has famously demonstrated, the “division of power is one of the most important social aspects in the design and use of communication networks,” since networks are “by no means technically or politically neutral.”31 As such, the positioning toward—and enabled by—networks becomes of vital importance within a smart environment. Central or peripheral, connected or disconnected, included or excluded, become the defining conditions within a networked environment, far more important than the information or data that they carry.32 Notably, despite grand promises of symmetrical, ahierarchical organizations of peer-to-peer connectivity, most architectural and urban smart systems have been organized (and devised) within a logic of centralization and top-down control. While those promises remain largely unfulfilled, the potential to achieve them remains within the networked-systems’ very structure, as the organization of a network enables both centralization and decentralization. In short, the dispersed condition of networks allows centers, nodes and terminals to be connected in alternative ways, thus also facilitating ahierarchical structures that empower their many different actors. In this capacity to connect nodes and terminals in alternative ways, however, lies another flashpoint for further discussion, as the nature of the nodes being connected is equally worthy of attention. Specifically, within architectural and urban smart systems, individuals have become the most crucial nodes, connected in asymmetric relations with other individuals and systems. By being responsive, individuals also have the capacity to shape the network around them. Perhaps the best example of this condition is that of customization (of amenities, services, experiences and even spaces) enabled by the data flowing through the networks for the sake of convenience. Customization, however, often leads to personalization which can culminate in an overbearing individualization. At its extreme, unbalanced individualization can render common values and visions impossible. As individuals come to inhabit echo chambers and filter bubbles of intellectual isolation, if unchecked, architectural and urban smart systems may lead to an individualization of what had previously remained a collective experience.33 While individualized experiences can certainly be convenient and appealing to the individual, the atomization necessary for their deployment may have rather somber consequences for the public sphere and public life. At its extreme, atomization not only threatens collective identity, but without the common ground of a shared public life, it also threatens the very foundation of an inclusive society. This part thus explores the paradox of prevalent smart systems in which networks of instruments and data are organized towards top-down systematization of processes, but in which the dispersed condition of those networks also allows for nodes and terminals to be connected in alternative ways, thus also establishing ahierarchical structures that empower their different actors.

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The chapters in this part question the role of the individual within the existing large tracts of data, ranging from ethics to anonymization. This discussion is introduced by Silvio Carta, Rebecca Onafuye and Pieter de Kock who question new forms of publicness in the age of big data. By looking at open datasets from different cities, the paper positions technology as a tool through which to change relationships that individuals have with themselves and with the built environment. In Chapter 18 Shin Alexandre Koseki discusses how big data and artificial intelligence could change the understanding and planning of urban places in a way that could be beneficial for citizens. Koseki proposes a transdisciplinary model of human agency to operationalize future research in social science and computational social science for urban planning and policy making. In the concluding chapter, Fiona McDermott considers how the widespread car mobility since the 1960s reordered city streets, urban form, land use and society at large. From this perspective she argues for a reflective and critical thinking in the development of autonomous vehicles in the urban environment.

Conclusion The future direction of architecture and cities is largely shaped by the discourses and practices that become prevalent and thus push specific agendas. To a large extent these are strategically launched by specific actors and coalitions with vested interests. To this effect it is of paramount importance to reflect on, and engage with, potential future directions that are enabled through smart technologies. The smart transition is not a technical fix that simply applies a solution to a problem. Rather, this transition is a complex, heterogeneous and meaningful endeavor. “Smart” interventions are contested, as they involve multiple stakeholders that are differently engaged with smart technologies. An intervention might be beneficial for some stakeholders but might become a nightmare for others. These entanglements require reflection and deliberation with the involved stakeholders. At this stage it is crucial not only to critically explore “smart architecture” and “smart city” interpretations, but also to participate in shaping these agendas, by proactively engaging in these interpretations, and by bringing forth alternative visions and proposals. How can smart technologies contribute to solve the most pressing socio-spatial challenges of our times? In what kind of smart architecture and city do we want to live together in the future? In this quest, architecture and urban design should play a crucial role. It is through the power of design, understood here in architecture’s capacity to visualize future scenarios, to make ideas tangible, to help in aligning diverse stakeholders around a shared vision and thus influence the course of “smart” developments. However, this is far from an easy, or straightforward, exercise, but rather one that starts by accepting that the city and its architecture is determined through negotiations between different actors in many divergent ways. As evidenced by the contributions in this book, the notion of “smart” needs to be broadened. It must

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Introduction

address how social, cultural and political impacts differ based on cultures and geographies, and allow for the concept of smart systems in architecture and the city to move beyond mere data and a one-size-fits-all model.

Notes 1 Aldous Huxley. 2006. Brave New World (Harper Perennial Modern Classics: London). 2 In Brave New World, the phrase “history is bunk” is uttered by Mustapha Mond, the Controller and one of the most powerful proponents of the World State, but is attributed to Henry Ford. With this saying, the World State Controller is asking his citizens to ignore the lessons of the past in order to live in the present and focus on future progress. Furthermore, Mond is concerned that the discussion of history may introduce undesired ideas that might make people think and reflect on their own condition, thus potentially destabilizing the system enacted by the World State. Huxley, 34. 3 See https://brainporteindhoven.com (accessed May 10, 2019). 4 In Eindhoven’s city center the presence of networked sensors and systems has been nothing short of ubiquitous, most notably with the program Eindhoven’s Citybeacons, which, while appearing as simple infotainment devices and WiFi beacons, also have an “invisible policing presence with six smart cameras, 64 microphones and 22 lampposts with adjustable lighting,” all hidden from view (see Josh Plough, ‘Criticism in the city’ (Onomatopee Projects, 2018). In the nearby municipality of Helmond, Brainport Eindhoven is spearheading the construction of the Brainport Smart District, a “smart living and working district in which the urban environment is designed in conjunction with new transport, health, energy generation and storage and circular building technologies.” See https://brainportsmartdistrict.nl/en/(accessed May 10, 2019). 5 Jacob Voorthuis, Head of the School of Architecture, Urban Design and Engineering at TU/e, opening speech of the conference. 6 Anthony M. Townsend. 2014. Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.: New York), 15. 7 Jenifer Booten. 2015. ‘Big corporations see big money as growing cities turn to tech’. In Market Watch, September 17, www.marketwatch.com/story/big-corporations-see-big-money-as-growingcities-turn-to-tech-2015-09-17. 8 Please see the work of: March, Hug, and Ramon Ribera-Fumaz. 2016. ‘Smart contradictions: The politics of making Barcelona a self-sufficient city’, European Urban and Regional Studies, 23(4): 816–830, doi.org/10.1177/0969776414554488; Vanolo, A. 2014. ‘Whose smart city?’, Accessed 10 January, www.opendemocracy.net/en/opensecurity/whose-smart-city/; Kitchin, Rob. 2015. ‘Making sense of smart cities: Addressing present shortcomings’, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 8: 131–136. 9 Please see the work of: Crang, Mike, and Stephen Graham. 2007. ‘Sentient cities: Ambient intelligence and the politics of urban space’, Information, Communication & Society, 10: 789–817; Hollands, Robert G. 2008. ‘Will the real smart city please stand up? Intelligent, progressive or entrepreneurial?’, City, 12: 315; Shepard, Mark (ed.). 2011. Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA). 10 Rem Koolhaas, ‘The smart landscape: Intelligent architecture’, artforum.com, April 2015, https:// artforum.com/inprint/issue=201504&id=50735 (accessed April 25, 2019). 11 Ibid. 12 Nicholas Negroponte. 1973. The Architecture Machine: Toward a More Human Environment (MIT Press: Cambridge). 13 Usman Haque. 2007. ‘The architectural relevance of Gordon Pask’, Architectural Design 77(4): 58. 14 van Hinte, Ed, Marc Neelen, Jaques Vink, and Piet Vollaard. 2003. Smart Architecture (010 Publishers: Rotterdam), 7. 15 Ibid., 24. 16 Hollands, Robert G. 2008. ‘Will the real smart city please stand up? Intelligent, progressive or entrepreneurial?’, City, 12: 315. 17 March, Hug, and Ramon Ribera-Fumaz. 2016. ‘Smart contradictions: The politics of making Barcelona a self-sufficient city’, European Urban and Regional Studies, 23(4): 816–830, doi.org/10.1177/ 0969776414554488. 18 Feenberg, Andrew. 1999. Questioning Technology (Routledge: London; New York), xiii. 19 Ibid., xi–xii. 20 Ibid., 24., xiii. 21 Adam Greenfield. 2013. ‘The smart city replicates in tone, tenor, form and substance most if not all of the blunders we associate with the discredited high-modernist urban planning techniques of the twentieth century’, in Against the Smart City, 1.3 edition (Do Projects).

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22 More, Thomas. 1997. Utopia (Routledge: London). 23 Pedro Gadanho, João Laia, and Susana Ventura (eds). 2017. Utopia/Dystopia: A Paradigm Shift in Art and Architecture (Mousse Publishing: Milan). 24 Many have discussed the parallels between Bentham’s Panopticon model and Foucault’s disciplinary societies, but few have matched the clarity of Robin Evans’ inquiry. See Robin Evans. 1971. ‘Bentham’s panopticon: An incident in the social history of architecture’, AAQ: Architectural Association Quarterly 3(2): 21–37. 25 Gilles Deleuze. 1992. ‘Postscript on the societies of control’, October, 59: 3–7. 26 Michel Foucault. 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Vintage Books: New York). 27 Gilles Deleuze. 1992. ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, October, 59: 3–7, 4. 28 Mark Weiser. 1991. ‘The computer for the 21st century’, Scientific American, 265(3): 94–105, 94. 29 In what would appear to have become the dictum for the proponents of architectural and urban smart systems, Weiser went on to claim that, “ubiquitous computing [would] produce nothing fundamentally new, but by making everything faster and easier to do, with less strain and fewer mental gymnastics, it will transform what is apparently possible.” Mark Weiser. 1991. ‘The computer for the 21st century’, Scientific American 265(3): 104. 30 Antoine Picon. 2018. ‘Urban infrastructure, imagination and politics: From the networked metropolis to the smart city’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 42: 263–275. 31 Dijk, Jan van. 2012. The Network Society (SAGE: London), 95. 32 As McLuhan has so forcefully demonstrated, the introduction of new systems, or media, has decisive impact on the “patterns of human association” as its cultural logic shapes the restructuring of society. Marshall McLuhan. 2003. ‘The medium is the message’, in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, ed. W. Terrence Gordon (Gingko Press: Corte Madera), 7–21. 33 For a more detailed account of the ‘filter bubble,’ see Eli Pariser. 2011. The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You (Penguin Press: New York).

References Booten, Jenifer. 2015. ‘Big corporations see big money as growing cities turn to tech’, Market Watch, September 17, www.marketwatch.com/story/big-corporations-see-big-money-as-growing-cities-turnto-tech-2015-09-17. Crang, Mike, and Stephen Graham. 2007. ‘Sentient cities: Ambient intelligence and the politics of urban space’, Information, Communication & Society, 10: 789–817. Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. ‘Postscript on the societies of control’, October, 59: 3–7. Dijk, Jan van. 2012. The Network Society (SAGE: London). Feenberg, Andrew. 1999. Questioning Technology (Routledge: London; New York). Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Vintage Books: New York). Greenfield, Adam. 2013. Against the Smart City (Do Projects: London). Hollands, Robert G. 2008. ‘Will the real smart city please stand up? Intelligent, progressive or entrepreneurial?’, City, 12: 303–319. Huxley, Aldous. 2006. Brave New World (Harper Perennial Modern Classics: London). Kitchin, Rob. 2015. ‘Making sense of smart cities: Addressing present shortcomings’, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 8: 131–136. Koolhaas, Rem. 2015. ‘The smart landscape: Intelligent architecture’, Accessed May 2019, https:// artforum.com/inprint/issue=201504&id=50735. March, Hug, and Ramon Ribera-Fumaz. 2016. ‘Smart contradictions: The politics of making Barcelona a self-sufficient city’, European Urban and Regional Studies, 23(4): 816–830, 10.1177/0969776414554488. More, Thomas. 1997. Utopia (Routledge: London). Picon, Antoine. 2018. ‘Urban infrastructure, imagination and politics: From the networked metropolis to the smart city’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 42: 263–275. Shepard, Mark (ed.). 2011. Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA). Townsend, Anthony M. 2014. Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.: New York). van Hinte, Ed, Marc Neelen, Jaques Vink, and Piet Vollaard. 2003. Smart Architecture (010 Publishers: Rotterdam). Vanolo, Alberto. 2014. ‘Whose smart city?’, Accessed 10 January, www.opendemocracy.net/en/open security/whose-smart-city. Weiser, Mark. 1991. ‘The computer for the 21st century’, Scientific American, 265: 94–105.

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Part I

Histories and futures

Chapter 2

Frictionless futures The vision of smartness and the occlusion of alternatives Nick Dunn and Paul Cureton

The promise of being smart The ubiquity of “smartness” in contemporary discourse suggests an advancement of some kind, albeit predicated on various technologies. Smart cities typically present an optimistic view on what can be achieved by using data to address and improve the operation of various urban management systems.1 While some of the ambitions and goals behind smart cities are positive and beneficial for collective life, the over-reliance on software that features in their concept has led to their visions largely being promoted by major ICT corporations interested in the deployment of technical solutions for city development and management. With many cities facing difficult challenges and dwindling budgets for how they manage and operate, such technical solutions can appear very attractive to city leaders and governors responsible for the effective organisation and maintenance of urban systems and infrastructures. That is not to suggest that technocratic dreams come cheap.2 More problematical perhaps is the lack of a clear definition of what a smart city is. Further, the growing disquiet concerning issues including data privacy, security, and trust suggest we have a long way to go before public adoption and acceptability convincingly mesh with governance and policy of such systems. Part of this difficulty appears to lie in the very intangibility of what the smart city is. The absurdity of the pursuit is rendered by Michael Batty, “Thus the question ‘what and where is the smartest city?’ not only has no answer, it is also ill-defined, largely because smartness or intelligence is a process, not an artifact or product.”3

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Driven from a technocratic position these “frictionless futures” consolidate the role of corporations in providing a dominant view “where data and software seem to suffice and where, as a consequence, knowledge, interpretation and specific thematic expertise appear as superfluous”.4 Indeed, despite their diversity of approach and features, the vision of most smart cities is one of conspicuously bland, generic, ahistorical, apolitical spaces whose identity is characterized by information technologies that could be applied anywhere. However, this has not prevented such visions from dominating how we conceive of future cities. Part of the appeal would appear to lie in the name itself – the term “smart city” is a great meme since it is easy to remember and difficult to contest on some levels. It has thus travelled effortlessly around the globe, often absorbing other types of urban future along the way, so that despite the considerable variety of smart city projects underway and proposed it has resulted in a convergence of visions for future cities rather than opening up alternatives.5 Even if we resist the technocratic determinism that such a paradigm is largely predicated upon, we find ourselves struggling, grasping for truly radical alternatives for future cities or exhuming the corpus of past futures.6

Diagrammatic logic and “architectures of vapour” When we examine the way smart cities are portrayed, two principal categories are discernible, which suggests a paradox occurring in what might constitute the smart city. On the one hand, the quest for a completely knowable and controllable city suggests a pathway toward firm demarcation of that which is the city and that which is not. Imagine here Buckminster Fuller’s Dome over Manhattan (1960), underneath which the city functions in a self-referential manner, hermetically sealed at least ideologically if not physically as a closed system of systems – a veritable snow globe of smartness. Yet on the other hand, the very depiction of the smart city is one of flows, glows and dissolution as the very fabric of urban life appears to scroll before us as ethereal scripts and signs quickly become lost to the atmosphere. This shift from the grounded and bounded hard facts and material construction of the city towards what we might consider to be “architectures of vapour” serves to reinforce the dislocation of the urban core to the “metropolitan galaxy” that Lars Lerup has discussed.7 If we consider the first form of representation, the diagram is key to illustrating the smart city as a rational sequence. Indeed, as Marvin and Luque-Ayala have shown, the use of computational logic diagrams to explain how urban operating systems work in smart cities is prominent if rarely questioned. Their analysis calls into question the proliferation of this method, not least in how, by reducing the complexity of the city to a simplified logic of circulation and control, “an emerging computational urban diagram operating beyond simple representation, [is] playing a role in creating a new type of reality”.8 They are powerful since through their simplicity they encounter,

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or to be more specific do not illustrate, any potential blockages, hazards, or other complications to their smooth and efficient workflows. Such diagrams promote frictionless futures in which the city is easily disassembled and reassembled into a coherent whole for operational optimization without question. Further, they elude the complicated intermingling of hard and soft systems that occurs in cities that form new territories and work in a multi-scalar, often networked manner.9 On the contrary, diagrams of this nature deliberately conceal these various forces (physical, human, social, and of course, computational) and the resistances that emerge through their interaction. This is not a new phenomenon. In his seminal 1965 essay A City Is Not A Tree, Christopher Alexander discussed the problems with representational simplification and its role in providing an easy way to comprehend cities at the cost of hiding the adaptive and evolving characteristics of urban systems.10 With regard to the second form of representation, the stylized and typically animated visualizations are both illusive and elusive. They are illusory in their depiction of a future that will never arrive but convincing enough for us to be drawn into their portrayal of a fluid transformation toward an urban environment that has familiar features even if they are highly choreographed and somewhat hyperreal in their bright depiction of urban life. These images are also elusive in their construction and framing, given as they are to bird’s-eye or, perhaps more accurately given recent technical parlance, drone’s-eye views which rise up and over the smart city. This aerial possibility resonates with De Certeau’s observation of disconnecting the urban mass through architectural verticalism.11 The uncanny qualities of such perspectives have not gone unnoticed. As Gillian Rose has observed when discussing the FutureLife project by Siemens, it presents a pleasurable albeit smooth and untethered view, replicating digital visuality rather than actual spatial experience and it is here that we may detect some problematic issues.12 This example is synonymous with other corporate visions, which, despite their innocuous display, contain powerful agency in how we conceive future urban life. When we are presented with street perspectives, from what might reasonably be assumed to be a human scale, things tend to get even more kaleidoscopic as the latent data underpinning the smart city is shown to us, albeit primarily through visual banners, symbols, and signifiers. Thus, despite all the technology inferred to be available in the future, from the present position we are resigned to literally read how the city will work. Antoine Picon identifies the new aesthetic of how smart cities are represented, in particular the use of pixelation and patterns that are combined “as if to express the troubling poetics of augmented reality, it favours the piling up of layers and effects of transparency that allow the overlapping content to be read.”13 What is striking about these floating layers is their ephemerality yet potency. Typical visualizations illustrate “architectures of vapour”, i.e., blurring, superimpositions, and transparency of advertising, wayfinding, and other information to compose a Learning from Las Vegas-style ghost urbanism that, even with their fervour for signs and symbols, might have had Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown reaching for the off button.14

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Grimeless and glitch-free worlds The illustrated smart city draws its elements and characteristics from the same modelling library for its construction. The result is a series of strikingly similar, somewhat standardized representations that reflect processes of globalization, having no particular geographical base or contextual understanding. If the drag and drop image composition forms an increasingly homogenous vision for the smart city, then it is not just the visual components that are cut and pasted. The ideology of smart cities as stated in their specific descriptions frequently becomes a reshuffled word cloud of key terminology and even their nomenclature with repeated use of “data”, “grid”, the prefix “i”, and the ubiquitous “smart” found amongst project titles.15 But what of the atmospheres and environments to be found in these futures? The digital flow and glow inherent to many visualizations of smart cities belies their purpose. From a representational perspective it is evident that their content is deliberately banal and benign, yet as Rose has observed, their power lies in their affective resonances of speed and seamless mobility across spaces where coloured light substitutes for data and everything is in perpetual flux.16 When we direct attention to how people move around smart cities, the visions are typically replete with walkable environments accompanied by green and blue infrastructures, conspicuously free from grime, debris, and pollution. Such clean futures are utopian, glitch-free worlds wherein technology supports frictionless and seamlessness. But in doing so, these visions hide other possibilities for the future, depicting preferable ways it may manifest rather than the far more likely and potentially much more interesting “future mundane”. As Foster suggests, rendering the future as a partly broken space makes it relatable and reminds us that it “will include taxes, illness, weather, transport delays and allergies. Things will break, things will fail to perform as promised, things will need fixing.”17 Mundane realities such as these are not evident in the projections made for smart cities, where urban environments are presented as gleaming, shimmering miniature worlds of transparent surfaces and greenery. Although often visually enticing many of this type of city vision occlude the vitally accretive nature of urban futures and thus remove the challenges and obstacles of clean energy production, let alone those of maintaining them free of detritus. This drive toward a perfectly choreographed world for urban life in which interactions and sequencing are akin to the elaborate stage set of The Truman Show (1998) is of course not possible. For example, the vision of Seed Capital, Amaravati, to be fully realized by 2050, developed from Jurong International Holdings Pte. Ltd. and Surbana International Consultants Pte. Ltd. of Singapore (2015), also visualized in 2017 by Fosters & Partners, is to be realized on prime agricultural land. Strategic site choices were made by a tabula rasa in which to realize a new “smart city”. The visual material that supports such a vision provides a critical reading in the masterplan’s emphasis; see the “IT Hub” Building near right in the visualization, along with transportation emphasis in e-buses, metros, and water taxis (Figure 2.1). There are also glaring omissions which have been raised by the plan’s critics; the lack of informal settlement, the dehumanized aspect of

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Figure 2.1 Seed Capital Area Masterplan. © Government of Singapore, 2015

the image, public–private partnerships and high technological finish.18 Drawings are often contractual documents, in this case, the remit of a new city is particularly narrow. The representation of the environment here can be a computationally intensive process which, unless modelled through environmental science, often is subject to pure abstraction and symbolism rather than any condition, deformer or site specificity. Nature and environment within the smart city scheme of representation are often subject to the least consideration, paradoxically when such schemes present themselves as the palliative for sustainability principles and viable solutions for climate change. Skyscrapers modelled here are atypical, an off-the-shelf selection. There are no details, no geographical nodes or orientations, but this is exactly the point; the frictionless future visualized here in this perspective is a composite of generalized symbolic forms that hint at wider immaterial flows of data in a globalized world. This intangible and immaterial aspect of the smart city paradigm is what allows much of its shortcomings – from resources costs to occlusion of alternatives – to be obscured. This vision is not necessarily about the place, material architecture, but a visual grammar to establish, in this case, India within a neoliberal globalized economy through integrated technologies. The everyday, humanized aspects are occluded from many of these works as the hubbub and disorder of people doing things both individually and together is conspicuous by its absence. Indeed, the ebb and flow of urban life, replete with the negotiations and tensions of coexistence, is entirely unaccounted for. In their place is data, typically depicted in these visions as hyper-smooth networks, whereas data and its representation are often subject to competition, uncertainty or generalization, null values, voids, anomalies and spikes. Data is messy, rarely interoperable, monetized, privatized, with

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negligible consideration of visions of open source platforms for the public at large and reliant on people with urban analytical skills to utilize it. All of these factors, borne from complexity, materiality, global forces and what they enact, are powerfully subsumed. Why might the results of these supposedly visionary projects be so homogenous? This convergence appears to be the result of three key factors. First, the flexibility of the smart city concept has afforded it to encompass many other possible trajectories for future cities within its expansive if ambiguous remit. Second, the intertwingled and pervasive nature of digital technologies, including methods of representation, have enabled the production of visualizations for future cities to emerge and proliferate within a fairly narrow spectrum of possibilities in terms of the techniques and features applied to create them. Third, processes of globalization have consolidated particular elements and themes to be replicated within these images in order for them to communicate credibility on a world stage. As a consequence of these three interlocking factors, heterogeneity is largely removed as the smoothing and flattening of specific characteristics occurs in the formation of visions for different locations. The combined effects of these modes of representation: the smart city diagram and flowing semiotics amidst visualizations of urban settings is powerful. As part of a wider project narrative they extend the desire for totality, i.e., a city that is entirely knowable, controllable, and manageable. Inherent to many visions are the various benefits for sustainability and, key to a quantified city, i.e., a smart one, measurable targets. An excellent example of the latter is illustrated by SHAU’s proposal for Jakarta Jaya – The Green Manhattan (2012 onwards), which has typically ambitious environmental and social sustainability targets via its comprehensive smart city strategy (Figure 2.2). Based on a multi-grid design, this future city seeks to respond to existing issues and anticipate future problems through a sustainable framework for living in a compact, diverse area inspired by the Manhattan grid. Technology underpins the delivery of the city’s aims to meet objectives including zero net carbon dioxide emissions, 50% land use for green and blue open spaces, 80% of water self-provided, 90% car-free zone with automated public and private transport, 150% green energy produced, and 150% garbage recycled. It remains to be seen whether this new Manhattan will be constructed or remain an award-winning vision.19 In a stylistic departure from the surfeit of smart city visualizations that draw heavily on the modes of representation discussed above, the vision for Sidewalk Toronto (2017) by Sidewalk Labs portrays a friendly, convivial atmosphere that utilizes drawing software that gives the images and overlays on video footage a hand-drawn appearance (Figure 2.3). These visual materials suggest an approachable future city, supporting its concept that borrows from Jane Jacobs’20 assertions of the significant role of people being on the street towards the vitality of public urban life. Although the open-frame architecture, cartoonish qualities and colour palette infer a flexibility and playfulness so beloved of forebearers of fun such as Cedric Price and Archigram, by significant contrast the vision for city management has raised major concerns by privacy advocates in relation to the monetization of citizen data amidst the proposed agile and smart urban governance. Although quite different in its visual character from other corporate visions for smart cities, it is useful to know that Sidewalk Labs is an

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Figure 2.2 Jakarta Jaya – The Green Manhattan. © SHAU Architects, 2012

urban innovation organization owned by Alphabet Inc., the latter formed through a corporate restructuring of Google in 2015. Public input into this future city is laudable if perhaps suspect given the parent company’s track record on data privacy which contributed to its restructuring. Projects such as these support an identifiable trend toward greater societal and global ambitions of environmental and social sustainability for urban life. Yet an alternative reading might argue that the branding of corporate visions to align with political and economic agendas enables technocratic determinism to camouflage itself amongst positive ecological and people-orientated attributes and messages. Therefore, it is highly likely that smart city visions actually constitute a wide spectrum of futures from legitimate and innovative strategies to attain low or zero carbon development through to proposals that have been subject to “greenwashing” as part of their frictionless worlds.

Preferable futures and the absence of people What, therefore, can we deduce about the visualization used to describe smart cities? First, different types of digital images are a key component in the articulation of the smart city narrative.21 Second, in spite of the variety of representational techniques the visual materials in most smart city narratives are based on computational logic and/or untethered, smooth transitions around the future urban environment. Across much of the documentation produced to express the visions of smart cities is the notable absence of people. In their commitment to efficiency, innovation and integration, smart city visions appear largely detached from social needs or aspirations, which has led to considerable criticism.22 In future studies the notion of “preferable futures” has

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Figure 2.3 Sidewalk Toronto. © Sidewalk Labs, 2017

also been subject to considerable debate regarding whose aspirations, hopes and desires they are preferable for, especially when pertaining to design.23 Articulating who and who does not have a voice in how these futures are conceived and enacted is obviously crucial to their formation, but also to those alternatives that become occluded or discredited by association. Key here is the “who” in such processes. In The Politics of Aesthetics, Rancière explains how making sense of a sense is inherently political since it concerns “what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.”24 Thus, there is also a sense in which, mirroring its own dynamic animation in its own digital language, these videos show the smart city to itself. They are feedback loops through which data visualizations endlessly circulate, showing themselves to themselves, their viewers human no more. This is evident in the steady, albeit highly regulated, increase of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in cities to produce imagery that presents the city from the “drone’s eye view”, reinforcing this decoupling from the streets with gliding motions and vertiginous perspectives. This self-referential aesthetic and political power relation can be seen explicitly in the detachment from the city street through vertical urbanism, but also through private flight. This has long been a promise in transportation, appearing in urban visions through aerial vehicles from Eugene Henard (1911), Frank Lloyd Wright (1932), and popular culture such as the Fifth Element (1997), amongst many others. The technological investment in vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) autonomous single passenger aircraft and taxis by numerous leading manufacturers, coupled with the parallel developments in drone delivery and logistics, has created a policy and regulatory platform struggling to keep pace. The irony of increasingly congested urban

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airspace as new technologies enter them, largely driven by the previous failures of car-based urbanism, is exacerbated by the steady accumulation of resistances within this domain, which to date have largely been viewed, at least from the public perspective, as the most frictionless environment. This reflexive aesthetic is one component of the smart city frictionless promise of private flow of persons and possessions, but also individual escape from the bustle of the city. These are embedded in numerous examples throughout history, yet are particularly prominent from the early twentiethfirst century onwards. Recent examples include projects such as Humphreys & Partners’ Pier 2: Apartment of the Future (2018) and futurological children’s books illustrating the way we will live next, such as Lonely Planet’s How Cities Work (2016).25 Smart city visualizations thus symbolize vertical escape from the paradoxically densest urban regions on earth. That many of these are also some of the most affluent cities reinforces the luxury of the frictionless view afforded by being above the city.

Creative grit in the smart city dream machine We have shown that in the imagery that depicts smart cities there is an abundance of seemingly frictionless, clean, utopian futures wherein technology is often portrayed as providing the capability toward seamless choreography of urban. Yet the future is unlikely to unfold in this way as the tensions between the local efforts of projects for, and the global imaginary of, the “smart city” continue.26 Instead, the reality of patchwork infrastructures, piecemeal development, brittle and hackable urban systems, and the incoherence and inefficiency that typifies the vibrancy of cities suggest very different futures for collective life. Luca et al.’s analysis provides robust evidence that despite smart cities emerging as a burgeoning subject of scientific inquiry, the knowledge produced is “singularly technological in nature. In that sense, lacking the social intelligence, cultural artifacts, and environmental attributes, which are needed for the ICT-related urban innovation that such research champions.”27 In order to avoid path dependency, urban visions can only provide transformative capacity if they are able to account for elements that explicitly produce friction toward a radically alternative future.28 Different ways of thinking about cities and our fundamental relationships and experiences within them are essential. The prevalence of frictionless futures demonstrates a clear and urgent need for us to explore improbabilities, paradoxes, and risks against which we can question the consensual and rationalistic narratives that currently dominate our purview. Kitchin and Dodge recognise the enabling potential of smart technologies but also highlight the need to better understand their intrinsic vulnerabilities and that to mitigate these “requires a reframing of the value around technology and a rethinking of the balance between convenience/efficiency and security/safety. It requires a counter-narrative against ‘smarter is better’”.29 While Kitchin and Dodge are discussing this in the context of cybersecurity and the need to create “air gaps” to disrupt hackers, who intercept nodes and prevent them from having chain control with systems further down the

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line, it parallels with the wider “frictionless motion” pervasive in the smart city discourse. These seemingly frictionless futures may find themselves subject to further scrutiny via data analytics in order to quantify key environmental and social dynamics of the city. Yet this remains predicated on the measurable and still plays deeply into the technological sublime upon which the smart city is founded. At best the integration of these dreams with the unregulated and appropriated may, as Sterling offers, lead us to a future that “is not a comprehensive, sleek, point-and-click new digital urban order, but many localized, haphazard mash-ups of digital tips, tricks, and hacks.”30 But what lies beyond the smart city? Is a quest for less technologicallydriven and a wider view of futures that enables social and global drivers to be taken into greater account possible? It seems crucial if we are to form visions for future cities that valorise plurality and agonism, not least in the visioning process.31 Opening up the black box of the smart city to promote futuring as a process that facilitates cocreation and participatory modes that are transparent and have parity may be one way.32 Visions are created as ways of expressing the “not-yet”, and such imagery shapes our ideas of, and intentions toward, futures.33 Moving away from solutionorientated approaches that dominate the representation of smart cities to understand them as part of a considerably wider range of methods enables us to visualize and gain knowledge of the underlying similarities, tensions, and contradictions. Without this sense of what options are available to us, the limited, apparently frictionless future cities that dominate our view remain an urban mirage and occlude important alternatives.

Notes 1 Carlo Ratti and Matthew Claudel, The City of Tomorrow: Sensors, Networks, Hackers, and the Future of Urban Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016). Anthony M. Townsend, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia (New York: WW Norton & Company Inc., 2013). 2 Stephen R. Galati, “Funding a Smart City: From Concept to Actuality.” In Smart Cities: Applications, Technologies, Standards and Driving Factors, eds S. McClellan, J. Jimenez, and G. Koutitas (Cham, Switzerland: Springer International, 2018). 3 Michael Batty, Inventing Future Cities (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2018), 178. 4 Ola Söderström, Till Paasche, and Francisco Klauser, “Smart Cities as Corporate Storytelling.” City 18, no. 3 (2014): 308. 5 Nick Dunn, “Urban Imaginaries and the Palimpsest of the Future.” In The Routledge Companion to Urban Imaginaries, eds C. Lindner and M. Meissner (New York: Routledge, 2018), 375–386. 6 The Garden City, for example, being a seemingly indestructible zombie ideology in the context of the UK since its original conception in 1898 as identified by Nick Dunn, Paul Cureton, and Serena Pollastri, A Visual History of the Future (London: Foresight Government Office for Science, Department of Business Innovation and Skills, HMSO, 2014). 7 Lars Lerup, After the City (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000), 46. 8 Simon Marvin and Andrés Luque-Ayala, “Urban Operating Systems: Diagramming the City.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 41, no. 1 (2017): 100. 9 Benjamin Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016). 10 Specifically, Alexander identified that what he termed as “artificial” cities were designed in a manner that failed to recognize the complex fabric of urban life apparent in “natural” cities, the structure of which he proposed as an interconnected semilattice rather than a strict hierarchy of independent parts. See Christopher Alexander, “A City Is Not A Tree.” Architectural Forum 122, no. 1 (1965): 58–62 (Part I) & no. 2 (1965): 58–62 (Part II).

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11 Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984). 12 Gillian Rose, “Screening Smart Cities: Managing Data, Views and Vertigo.” In Compact Cinematics: The Moving Image in the Age of Bit-Sized Media, eds P. Hesselberth and M. Poulaki (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). 13 Antoine Picon, Smart Cities: A Spatialised Intelligence (London: John Wiley & Sons, 2015), 138. 14 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1972). 15 For example: www.nominet.uk/list-smart-city-projects (accessed 25 January 2019). 16 Gillian Rose, “Look Inside™: Corporate Visions of the Smart City.” In Geomedia Studies: Spaces and Mobilities in Mediatized Worlds, eds K. Fast, A. Jansson, J. Lindell, L. Ryan Bengtsson, and M. Tesfahuney (New York: Routledge, 2018). 17 Nick Foster, The Future Mundane, 2013, available at: www.core77.com/posts/25678/The-FutureMundane (accessed 25 January 2019). 18 Carol Upadhya, “Amaravati and the New Andhra: Reterritorialization of a Region.” Journal of South Asian Development 12, no. 2 (2017): 177–202; Chigurupati Ramachandraiah, “Andhra Pradesh’s Master Plan for Its New Capital Speculation and Weak Foundations.” Economic & Political Weekly 50, no. 38 (2015). 19 Although the recipient of the Smart Cities prize for Masterplanning at World Architecture Festival in 2017, at the time of writing the project remains as speculative as the rebuilding of a new Manhattan in Ryan Boudinot’s Blueprints of the Afterlife (New York: Black Cat, Grove/Atlantic, 2012). 20 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961). 21 Donald McNeill, “IBM and the Visual Formation of Smart Cities.” In Smart Urbanism: Utopian Vision or False Dawn?, eds S. Marvin, A. Luque-Ayala, and C. McFarlane (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016). 22 For example: Adam Greenfield, Against the Smart City: The City is Here for You to Use, 1.3 ed. (New York: Do Projects, 2013); Alberto, Vanolo, “Is There Anyone Out There? The Place and Role of Citizens in Tomorrow’s Smart Cities.” Futures 82, September (2016): 26–36; Vanessa Thomas, Ding Wang, Louise Mullagh, and Nick Dunn, “Where’s Wally? In Search of Citizen Perspectives on the Smart City.” Sustainability 8, no. 3 (2016): 1–13. 23 Paul Coulton and Joseph Lindley, “Vapourworlds and Design Fiction: The Role of Intentionality.” The Design Journal, 20, supp1. (2017): S4632–S4642. 24 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. G. Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2009), 13. 25 James Gulliver Hancock, How Cities Work (Carlton, Vic., Australia: Lonely Planet Kids, 2016). 26 James M. White, “Anticipatory Logics of the Smart City’s Global Imaginary.” Urban Geography 37, no. 4 (2016): 572–589. 27 Luca Mora, Roberto Bolici, and Mark Deakin, “The First Two Decades of Smart-City Research: A Bibliometric Analysis.” Journal of Urban Technology 24, no. 1 (2017): 3. 28 Louis Albrechts, “Ingredients for a more radical strategic spatial planning,” Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 42, no. 3 (2015): 510–525. 29 Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge, “The (In)Security of Smart Cities: Vulnerabilities, Risks, Mitigation, and Prevention.” Journal of Urban Technology, 0 (2017): 14. 30 Bruce Sterling, “Stop saying ‘Smart Cities.’” The Atlantic, 2018, available at: www.theatlantic.com/ technology/archive/2018/02/stupid-cities/553052 (accessed 25 January 2019). 31 Carl DiSalvo, “Design, Democracy, and Agonistic Pluralism.” Design & Complexity (Design Research Society, Montreal, 2010), available at: www.drs2010.umontreal.ca/data/PDF/031.pdf (accessed 25 January 2019); John Pløger, “Strife: Urban planning and agonism.” Planning Theory 3, no. 1 (2004): 71–92. 32 Serena Pollastri, Nick Dunn, Chris Rogers, Chris Bokyo, Rachel Cooper, and Nick Tyler, “Envisioning Urban Futures as Conversations to Inform Design and Research.” Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers – Urban Design and Planning 171, no. 4 (2018): 146–156. 33 Fred Polak, The Image of the Future, trans. E. Boulding (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1973).

References Albrechts, Louis. 2015. “Ingredients for a More Radical Strategic Spatial Planning.” Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science 42, no. 3: 510–525. Alexander, Christopher. 1965. “A City Is Not A Tree.” Architectural Forum 122, no. 1, April: 58–62 (Part I); no. 2, May: 58–62 (Part II). Batty, Michael. 2018. Inventing Future Cities. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Boudinot, Ryan. 2012. Blueprints of the Afterlife. New York: Black Cat Grove/Atlantic. Bratton, Benjamin. 2016. The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

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Coulton, Paul and Joseph Lindley. 2017. “Vapourworlds and Design Fiction: The Role of Intentionality.” The Design Journal 20, suppl 1: S4632–S4642, https://doi.org/10.1080/14606925.2017.1352960. De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. DiSalvo, Carl. 2010. “Design, Democracy, and Agonistic Pluralism.” Design & Complexity. Montreal, www.drs2010.umontreal.ca/data/PDF/031.pdf (Accessed 25 January 2019). Dunn, Nick. 2018. “Urban Imaginaries and the Palimpsest of the Future.” In The Routledge Companion to Urban Imaginaries, eds Christoph Lindner and Miriam Meissner. New York: Routledge, 375–386. Dunn, Nick, Paul Cureton, and Serena Pollastri. 2014. A Visual History of the Future. London: Foresight Government Office for Science, Department of Business Innovation and Skills, HMSO. Foster, Nick. 2013. The Future Mundane. Available at: www.core77.com/posts/25678/The-FutureMundane (accessed 25 January 2019). Galati, Stephen R. 2018. “Funding a Smart City: From Concept to Actuality.” In Smart Cities: Applications, Technologies, Standards and Driving Factors, eds Stan McClellan, Jesus Jimenez, and George Koutitas. Cham, Switzerland: Springer International, 17–39. Greenfield, Adam. 2013. Against the Smart City: The City Is Here for You to Use. 1.3 ed. New York: Do Projects. Hancock, James Gulliver. 2016. How Cities Work. Carlton, Vic., Australia: Lonely Planet Kids. Jacobs, Jane. 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House. Kitchin, Rob and Martin Dodge. 2017. “The (In)Security of Smart Cities: Vulnerabilities, Risks, Mitigation, and Prevention.” Journal of Urban Technology 0: 1–19, https://doi.org/10.1080/10630732.2017.1408002. Lerup, Lars. 2000. After the City. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Luca, Mora, Roberto Bolici, and Mark Deakin. 2017. “The First Two Decades of Smart-City Research: A Bibliometric Analysis.” Journal of Urban Technology 24, no. 1: 3–27. Marvin, Simon and Andrés Luque-Ayala. 2017. “Urban Operating Systems: Diagramming the City.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 41, no. 1: 84–103. McNeill, Donald. 2016. “IBM and the visual formation of smart cities.” In Smart Urbanism: Utopian Vision or False Dawn?, eds Simon Marvin, Andrés Luque-Ayala, and Colin McFarlane. Abingdon: Routledge, 34–52. Picon, Antoine. 2015. Smart Cities: A Spatialised Intelligence. London: John Wiley & Sons. Pløger, John. 2004. “Strife: Urban Planning and Agonism.” Planning Theory 3, no. 1: 71–92. Polak, Fred. 1973. The Image of the Future. Trans. E. Boulding. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Pollastri, Serena, Nick Dunn, Chris Rogers, Chris Bokyo, Rachel Cooper, and Nick Tyler. 2018. “Envisioning Urban Futures as Conversations to Inform Design and Research.” Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers – Urban Design and Planning 171, no. 4: 146–156. Ramachandraiah, Chigurupati. 2015. “Andhra Pradesh’s Master Plan for Its New Capital Speculation and Weak Foundations.” Economic & Political Weekly 50, no. 38: 10–13. Rancière, Jacques. 2009. The Politics of Aesthetics. Trans. G. Rockhill. New York: Continuum. Ratti, Carlo, and Matthew Claudel. 2016. The City of Tomorrow: Sensors, Networks, Hackers, and the Future of Urban Life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Rose, Gillian. 2017. “Screening Smart Cities: Managing Data, Views and Vertigo.” In Compact Cinematics: The Moving Image in the Age of Bit-Sized Media, eds Pepita Hesselberth and Maria Poulaki. London: Bloomsbury, 177–184. Rose, Gillian. 2018. “Look Inside™: Corporate Visions of the Smart City.” In Geomedia Studies: Spaces and Mobilities in Mediatized Worlds, eds Karin Fast, André Jansson, Johan Lindell, Linda Ryan Bengtsson, and Mekonnen Tesfahuney. New York: Routledge, 97–113. Söderström, Ola, Till Paasche, and Francisco Klauser. 2014. “Smart Cities as Corporate Storytelling.” City 18, no. 3: 307–320. Sterling, Bruce. 2018. “Stop saying ‘Smart Cities’.” The Atlantic. Available at: www.theatlantic.com/ technology/archive/2018/02/stupid-cities/553052/(accessed 25 January 2019). Thomas, Vanessa, Ding Wang, Louise Mullagh, and Nick Dunn. 2016. “Where’s Wally? In Search of Citizen Perspectives on the Smart City.” Sustainability 8, no. 3: 1–13. Townsend, Anthony M. 2013. Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia. New York: WW Norton & Company Inc. Upadhya, Carol. 2017. “Amaravati and the New Andhra: Reterritorialization of a Region.” Journal of South Asian Development 12, no. 2: 177–202. Vanolo, Alberto. 2016. “Is there Anyone out There? The Place and Role of Citizens in Tomorrow’s Smart Cities.” Futures 82, no. September: 26–36. Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. 1972. Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. White, James M. 2016. “Anticipatory Logics of the Smart City’s Global Imaginary.” Urban Geography 37, no. 4: 572–589.

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Chapter 3

Is the city becoming computable? Antoine Picon and Thomas Shay Hill

It is easy to view the rise of the “smart city” as a radical break with the past: indeed, the ascendance of computational and “big data” approaches to urban issues is often framed in these terms, whether by journalists, urban planners, or representatives of IBM or Google. The rise of the “smart city”, premised as it is on the abundance of urban data and the availability of high-performance computing, is routinely presented as a radical breakthrough with few real historical precedents. This resistance to history is part of a larger cultural trope emphasizing the novelty of “big data”: it has by now become cliché to use the Kuhnian language of “paradigm shifts” in reference to the challenges and opportunities big data pose to the various scientific disciplines.1 And yet, as we narrate in this chapter, the current quantitative turn in the theory and practice of urban development is simply the latest episode in a longer history, one that stretches back to the very birth of urban planning as an academic and professional field at the turn of the 20th century. Since the age of rapid European urbanization in the 19th century, the scholarly approach to cities has in fact oscillated between two extremes. On the one hand, there is what could be called a “romanticist” view, a belief in the city as fundamentally beyond the powers of human comprehension and thus best apprehended through qualitative means. Opposite this is a quantitative tradition committed to the belief that the structures, patterns, and dynamics of cities can be reduced to numbers. In this chapter, we trace the long history of this latter ambition to develop an applied science of cities, from the very birth of urban planning in the

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late 19th century to the “smart city” initiatives of today. We focus in particular on two prior moments of enthusiasm for quantitative methods in urban planning: one at the turn of the 20th century, and the second in the decades immediately following the Second World War. With the recent explosion of interest in “smart” technologies and the attendant drive to create “smart cities” in the years since 2008 approximately, we seem to be at the crest of a third such wave. In tracing the development of urban quantitative methods through each of these three waves, we aim to show both the continuities leading up to the current enthusiasm for the “smart city”, and the radical breaks that distinguish each of these episodes. The current mania for urban data and its applications raises a series of questions that, to the urban historian, are in fact quite familiar. Will the development and application of big data, “smart” technologies, and machine learning finally make the city computable? Are we indeed witnessing the birth of a true “science” of cities, as the physicists Geoffrey West and Luis Bettencourt would have us believe?2 And what will the insights of this new science mean for more qualitative approaches to urban life? Will a scientific approach to urban systems outlast the present enthusiasm for “smart” technologies, or will the current moment be followed by a period of backlash and reversal as were the two previous waves? Both at the turn of the 20th century and in the age of cybernetics, proponents of the urban quantitative tradition sensed they were on the verge of unlocking the mysteries of urban dynamics. Needless to say, their efforts were ultimately unsuccessful. Before we begin our narrative, it is important to explain what we mean when we discuss a “science” of cities. What does it mean to mathematically “describe” a city? The answer to this question is not self-evident, precisely because the city is not a traditional scientific object: as a social system continuously evolving in space and time, the city is better understood as a social construct without obvious boundaries or components.3 Many features that seem to define cities – the abundance of creativity, cultural richness, the fast pace of life, etc. – have been beyond the traditional methods of scientific analysis, precisely because these parameters themselves elude exact definition or measurement. What distinguishes each of the three historical moments we discuss here is a significant expansion in the features of urban life that can be measured; and correspondingly, an intense development of new mathematical methods for analyzing and studying the relationships between these newly measurable quantities.

The birth of urban analysis Our story begins at the hinge of the 19th and 20th centuries. It is in this period, in the rapidly growing cities of Western Europe and North America, that an ensemble of techniques for planning and managing the growth of cities began to coalesce at the

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nexus of architecture, engineering, and public administration. The development of urban planning had both utopian and rearguard motivations – driven as much by the urge to develop a better urban future as by bourgeois paranoia surrounding the historically unprecedented concentrations of poverty in the cities of the day. These dual ambitions demanded more than just a set of professional practices culled from the various existing disciplines; in the nascent urban planning approaches of this period, we see also the inklings of something greater, of an ambition to create a proper science of cities adequate to the complicated mechanics of urban growth. Urban planning has never completely shaken this ambition. While urban planning – or “urbanism” as it is often called in Europe – only solidified as a discipline at the very end of the 19th century, the field’s scientific objectives can be seen as an extension of the general quantitative turn in social and political thought beginning in the mid-19th century. Historians of statistics designate the 1830s as a turning point in the history of the discipline: an “era of enthusiasm” that began with the revolutions of 1830 and closed with those of 1848.4 Most official statistical agencies in Europe originated in this brief window: France began printing criminal statistics in 1827, and revived its census bureau after the July Revolution of 1830; Britain established its Board of Trade in 1832 to publish economic statistics, and in 1837 formed its General Register Office to collect mortality records and administer an expanded census. Statistical associations formed among private individuals in almost every major British city during this period, and became prominent advocates for sanitation improvements, public education, and reform of the poor laws.5 The failure of these efforts to prevent the revolutions of 1848 spelled the end of this blind enthusiasm, but by then the major statistical organizations of Europe had been cemented.6 The decades that followed can be understood as a process of assimilation, as academic disciplines and governments alike developed new methods of analysis based on social data and strove to make productive use of the insights gleaned thereby. The second half of the 19th century witnessed a profusion of methods for analyzing and visualizing data that was both prolific and eclectic: private organizations as well as municipal and national governments across Europe and North America ventured new techniques to make sense of the unprecedented wealth of data then available. Sporadic international conferences offered venues for the exchange of techniques across these different national and metropolitan contexts. As early as the 1830s, scholars and theorists saw in this flood of numerical data the promise of a science of society: Adolphe Quetelet’s “social physics” pronounced a set of mathematical laws governing aggregate human phenomena. But a science of cities would await the late 19th century: only in the last quarter of the 19th century would this quantitative social thought take a “spatial turn”; only in these closing decades did urban and territorial concerns come center stage, and only then did a set of techniques develop to analyze the urban and geographic aspects of social data. Two international gatherings in the final quarter of the 19th century were critical in the formation of the technical apparatus that would become urban planning. The Congrès international de Géographie, held in Paris in 1875, convened delegates

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from geographical societies worldwide and served as a forum for the exchange of quantitative approaches to urban and territorial information. The cartographer and agricultural scientist Gustave Heuze presented his complete set of agricultural maps, and Pierre Émile Levasseur presented some of his early maps of France’s industry and population which would lead ultimately to his Grand Atlas de geographie physique et politique.7 This geographical congress brought together a cast of characters – and a set of ambitions – which would be reunited ten years later at the 50th Anniversary Jubilee of the Statistical Society of London in 1885. Virtually all the major figures of late-19th-century statistics were represented at this 1885 convention: in addition to Levasseur, in attendance were Sir Francis Galton, the Bertillons, and – crucially for the history of quantitative urban thought – Charles Booth. Émile Levasseur’s contribution La Statistique Graphique, delivered on the conference’s second afternoon, constructed a lineage of statistical cartography up to that point, tracing the field’s major contributions as they filtered across different national and institutional contexts. As Levasseur narrates, this tradition began with the statistical maps of Baron Charles Dupin in Restoration-era France, was further developed in Andre-Michel Guerry’s choropleth maps of criminality in France and England, was brilliantly extended with the groundbreaking information graphics of Charles Minard, before presumably culminating in the striking statistical cartography Levasseur himself was in the process of developing.8 The statistical and cartographic techniques shared at these two international conferences became integral to the nascent urban thought then emerging in the cities of Europe and North America. The historian Enrico Chapel catalogues the wide range of cartographic methods that began to emerge in the 1870s and which reached staggering proportions by the 1890s.9 The thematic maps produced by the Service de la Statistique Municipale de Paris are illustrative: led by the father–son duo LouisAdolphe and Jacques Bertillon (both of whom had been present at the 1885 Jubilee of the London Statistical Association), the service published an atlas of statistical graphics for the city of Paris in 1888 and 1891 (Figure 3.1), counter-posing graphics of medical and sociological data with infrastructural and physical measures, such as transit ridership along the city’s omnibus lines.10 In the English-speaking world, Charles Booth extended this cartographic tradition to the physical and social conditions of working-class London. Booth’s maps are rightly recognized as a turning point in social statistics, social cartography, and urban thought.11 His brilliance was to spatialize the variety of data newly available at the urban level: in presenting these data cartographically, Booth’s creations indicated correlations and suggested relationships between a wide range of physical and social phenomena.12 In the American context, the Boothian tradition of urban analysis and social cartography was assumed directly into the ambitions and methods of the Progressive Movement, which took as its targets the troubling concentration of wealth and urban poverty wrought by industrialization. Urban concerns figured centrally in the objectives of the Progressive Movement, and municipal governments were a key venue for enacting progressive reforms. Booth’s work was the direct inspiration for the demographic maps produced by Jane Addams and her associates at Hull House in the 1890s.13 The settlement house movement initiated by

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Figure 3.1 Jacques Bertillon, revenues per kilometer of Parisian omnibus lines in 1889, after Atlas de Statistique Graphique de la Ville de Paris, Paris, 1891.

Jane Addams translated Booth’s cartographic methods to the American urban context, producing a series of brilliantly colored maps that illustrated the ethnic diversity, cramped living conditions, and low education levels of working-class Chicago.14 Jane Addams’ Hull House was not just a laboratory for early sociology: it was a point of contact between social theorists, activists, and members of the building arts; as Anthony Alfonsin narrates in his history of urban planning at Harvard, Hull House attracted a number of architects and landscape architects interested in transforming urban life through physical redesign.15 In nearly all cases, the development of scientific, quantitative methods for analyzing cities went hand-in-hand with the call to reorganize the structure of the urban environment. Charles Booth was adamant in his insistence on the need for the reorganization of London and the rational planning of its future growth, and gave specific recommendations for the improvement and maintenance of working-class neighborhoods, the provision of open space, and the greater integration of slum areas into the broader urban fabric through improved transportation.16 Of a piece with these new urban theories and management practices was the advent of a new generation of urban infrastructures designed to improve urban quality of life. With the first networks of urban electric lighting appeared the control room, where electricity consumption and other network activities were closely monitored and turned into information relevant to decision-making.17 Edison’s Pearl Street dispatch center for the world’s first electrical distribution network in New York is representative:

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Figure 3.2 Werner Hegemann, evolution of Berlin population after Der Städtebau, 1911.

both instrumental in improving urban livability, and heavily dependent on information for its management, the electricity network and its nodes of central control were emblematic of the technocratic optimism of early urban managerialism.

Cybernetics and the city In the long history of the “smart city”, the decades following the Second World War represent a second key moment, one marked by various attempts to apply cybernetics and systems theory to urban planning. Cybernetics articulated a philosophy of selfregulating systems that seemed to transcend existing disciplinary boundaries. Few disciplines in the post-war years went untouched by the promises of cybernetics, but urban systems assumed particular importance as a testing ground for cybernetic ideas. Two key features of this second moment deserve to be articulated at the outset. First, the notion of the mathematical model became central to urban theory and practice. The drive to develop quantitative models based on those developed in physics transformed the practice of economics after the Second World War, as Philip Mirowski (among many others) has narrated, but urban planning was no less affected.18 Closely related to this first feature, the importance of computation to the cybernetic enterprise was a second key characteristic. If the fin-de-siècle enthusiasm for a science of cities was

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precipitated by the sudden abundance of datasets at the level of the urban, this episode can be interpreted as a product of the computer’s arrival on the scene. For a brief moment in the middle decades of the 20th century, digital computation seemed to offer the possibility of bridging the divide between the social and natural sciences – of putting the study of society on a solidly scientific basis. Strongly reductionist in orientation, this emphasis on mathematical models and computational methods offered the possibility of resolving all sorts of previously intractable problems through numerical simulation.19 From the 1940s onwards, these methods were applied first to the development of nuclear weapons, before being extended to the conquest of space, the simulation and prediction of weather patterns, and the conduct of the Vietnam War under the impetus of U.S. Secretary of State Robert McNamara.20 Several concerns precipitated the extension of this cybernetic impulse to the planning and study of cities. The first and most immediate was the nuclear threat: the prospect of a nuclear strike on one or multiple American cities demanded a search among America’s post-war planners for ways to spatially reorganize the American population.21 Norbert Wiener, the father of cybernetics, along with two of his colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published an article on this topic in Life Magazine in 1950.22 Wiener et al. stressed the critical function cities play in America’s economic and cultural life: cities are critical nodes in the spread of information throughout American society, and thus must be preserved at all costs.23 The authors proposed a process of planned decentralization in order to reduce the vulnerability of this network to nuclear attack.24 The second concern – which built over the course of the 1960s, in part as a consequence of the nation’s decentralization out from existing metropolitan cores – was the specter of social disintegration epitomized by inner-city poverty, race riots, and urban “blight”. One of the most striking examples of work in this vein is the career of Jay Forrester, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineer and researcher who became one of the masterminds of the emerging field of operations research.25 Following his successful leadership in designing the SAGE missile defense system, in the late 1950s Forrester turned his attention to questions of communication and optimization in networked human and machine systems.26 Forrester articulated his general philosophy of “system dynamics” in his 1961 work Industrial Dynamics, and soon looked for other complex systems to which he could apply this new corpus of mathematical and computational methods. That cities would become an object of the cybernetic enterprise was, by the 1960s, overdetermined: urban riots had become almost routine, as economic opportunity drained rapidly out to the newly constructed suburbs.27 Forrester’s 1969 Urban Dynamics laid out a computational framework for simulating how cities work: after years of empirical study of various different American cities, Forrester devised a set of equations describing how all of the major components of urban systems (as he saw them) operated and interacted with one another: housing and labor markets, transportation systems, and government programs, among others. Forrester’s book captured the zeitgeist of an intense but short-

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lived craze for simulation modeling among American planning circles. Key moments of this story included: the shift of defense contractors like TRW and RAND towards urban and public administration contracts in the late 1950s, as narrated in Jennifer Light’s brilliant From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America; Pittsburgh’s Community Renewal Program, which developed computer simulations to guide its urban renewal efforts; and New York City’s disastrous experience in shuttering fire companies in the Bronx in light of the RAND Institute’s studies. The failures of these methods were obvious almost from the moment of their inception, and by the mid-1970s, the field of urban planning had definitively abandoned its earlier enthusiasm for predictive models.28 What explains the failure of the cybernetic approach to cities? To the contemporary observer, the models developed by Forrester and his contemporaries display a curious disregard for both space and time. Forrester’s equations attempt to explain a whole range of macro-level patterns (unemployment, urban decay, population decline) through a set of mechanisms that completely ignore the spatial and temporal dimensions of human society: the facts that historical circumstances matter, that past events and decisions constrain future developments, that geographical unevenness is both cause and consequence of social and economic dynamics, and that the macro-level patterns societies exhibit are the outcome of countless individuals interacting with one another in space. The perceived inability of mathematical models to integrate these spatial and temporal complexities of the social world would be the basis for a whole range of critiques of positivist methods from across the humanities and social sciences beginning in the 1970s.29 That computational models might be able to transcend some of these critiques would await a later generation of quantitative approaches, as we discuss in the next section. The journalist and public thinker Jane Jacobs is widely recognized as the most vocal and articulate critic of these reductionist approaches to planning: in her chapter “The Kind of Problem a City is” towards the end of her 1961 classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs develops an erudite critique of the quantitative methods of both late-19th-century urban thought and the cybernetic turn of her era. As Jacobs argues, cities are neither “problems of simplicity”, defined by causal relationships between a limited set of variables, as the theorists of the 19th century took them to be; nor are they “problems of disorganized complexity” amenable to the methods of statistical physics, as various thinkers from cybernetics and information theory assumed. As Jacobs articulates, cities are rather “problems of organized complexity”, characterized by hypothetically infinite actors and variables all responding to one another in curious and unpredictable ways.30 The decades since the disasters of modernist planning have seen the effective canonization of Jane Jacobs as the planning profession’s patron saint. So-called “advocacy planning” emerged in American planning circles in the 1970s as an heir to Jacobs’ critique of top-down planning; its fierce opposition to anything reminiscent of the technocratic, reductionist approaches of the 1960s successfully purged the discipline of the cybernetic impulse for the remainder of the 20th century.

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Dawn of the smart city Jane Jacobs’ philosophy and the insights of advocacy planners transformed the planning profession into one more reflective of a diverse, democratic society: planning practices around the democratic world today are largely premised on the importance of urban residents as users of the city; the interests and well-being of these ultimate “end-users” are without question difficult to reduce to a set of parameters in a computer simulation. And yet, in the opening decades of the 21st century, new computational methods are once again raising the call for a proper “science of cities”. In the eyes of some, a range of insights at the nexus of statistical physics, evolutionary biology, and computer simulation are yielding a new kind of science, one adequate to the problem Jane Jacobs articulated over 50 years ago. The physicist Luis Bettencourt makes this explicit in a 2013 article addressed directly to Jane Jacobs’ problem. Bettencourt makes the case that a new set of methods for studying “complex adaptive systems” offers the key to explaining the range of social phenomena newly available for scientific study in this age of big data.31 Bettencourt and other urban modelers today commonly identify two specific conditions as precipitates for their work: first, the sudden appearance of vast social data sets, which all of a sudden has made a whole range of social phenomena amenable to scientific study; and second, the incredible advancement and democratization of computational power, which allows not only major corporations and academic institutions but essentially any interested coder working in isolation to bring immense computing power to bear on a particular problem. We will not survey here the range of approaches that the term “smart city” today encompasses; that has been done elsewhere, most comprehensively by Anthony Townsend in his now-canonical 2014 book Smart Cities. What is worth mentioning here is the wide range of players involved in the current smart city movement. A review of this cast of characters helps to illuminate the similarities and differences between this moment and its predecessors. The first set of actors are the major digital companies producing the infrastructure of the new “smart city”. IBM figures centrally here, and is ultimately responsible for the very moniker “smart city”: as computer sales and other areas of its business faltered in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, IBM launched its “Smarter Cities Campaign” in 2009 to disseminate its services and expertise to metropolitan governments around the world.32 Cisco and Google’s Alphabet followed suit, with Google’s sister company Sidewalk Labs now orchestrating the development of an entirely new mixed-use district along Toronto’s Eastern Waterfront.33 Urban governments have been a second key set of actors in the current wave. The municipal governments to whom these major tech companies market their services have been more than passive consumers of “smart” technologies: much of the drive to enhance urban data collection and make use of computational methods for optimizing city services and infrastructures has come from mayors themselves. The third relevant group is the network of start-ups and urban activists – what the journalist Anthony Townsend refers to as “civic hackers” – who are taking advantage

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of the vast range of publicly available datasets newly available at the level of the urban. Examples of this group include the range of start-ups clustered around such centers as MIT’s DesignX, which incubates new business ventures leveraging machine learning and other computational approaches to the fields of real estate, construction, and design. The 21st-century urban resident, equipped with a smartphone, is the fourth actor worth mentioning, and perhaps the one that most distinguishes the current moment from its predecessors. The vast increase in real-time, geo-localized data since 2008 rests largely on the movements and social lives of this set of actors. Finally, this cast of characters would not be complete without noting the strong presence of academic researchers in developing the theory and technical methods of this emerging science of cities. The physicist Geoffrey West is on the way to becoming a household name for his work on urban growth and scaling laws. West is joined by a wide range of academics from across the fields of computer science, urban planning, and geography who have together developed a wide-ranging corpus of methods and theories for mathematically describing the dynamics of cities. Over the past 20 years, the planner Paul Waddell and his collaborators at the University of Washington at Seattle and later UC Berkeley have developed UrbanSim, a simulation platform for city governments to test the effects of transportation investment, zoning regulations, and other policy changes on various social, economic, formal, and environmental parameters of urban systems. Over the years, UrbanSim has been deployed by municipal governments in San Francisco, Paris, and the Puget Sound region. The statisticians Luc Anselin and Sergio Rey, meanwhile, have developed a set of statistical packages for the programming languages R and Python to work with the vast, spatially referenced datasets that characterize this current quantitative turn in urban studies.

Smart and computable cities What, in the end, is new about the science of cities which these various actors are together developing? Are we finally heading towards both smart and computable cities? Understanding what is truly novel about the smart city requires a knowledge of its precedents: as fashionable as it is to proclaim the newness of the smart city enterprise, we hope to have shown above that this moment is part of a greater lineage. The current enthusiasm for smart cities in fact seems to replay a number of features that marked the previous two moments discussed in this chapter. First, the role of mathematical models: as in the cybernetic moment of the post-war years, mathematical models and numerical simulation are central methods of the new urban science. Ed Glaeser’s models of land use, Paul Waddell’s models in UrbanSim, and Bettencourt and West’s models of urban scaling are all testaments to the return to fashion of the reductive paradigm of urban modeling. Reductionism is back in a big way: each of these approaches rests on the assumption that the city is a system whose behavior can be explained by isolating the relevant parameters and understanding the interactions between them.

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Second, the relevance of information: contemporary observers are insistent on how unprecedented the current tsunami of “big data” is, and indeed the volume of real-time, geo-located datasets that are the ultimate raw material of the “smart city” does without question vastly exceed the data available at any other moment in history in absolute terms (Figure 3.3). But this is not the first time a flood of data has overwhelmed the collective intellectual apparatus of society: the flood of data that began with the first statistical associations in the 1830s likewise overwhelmed the episteme of the day, and it took decades for governments, academic disciplines, and private organizations to reorganize in response. We are at the crest of a similar tidal wave of data, and the implications of this flood of data will likely take decades to be fully assimilated by governments, academic disciplines, and private organizations. It is worth noting that “big data” was not a significant feature at the very beginning of the smart city concept. The early smart city initiatives of 2009 and 2010 placed much more emphasis on computational methods and traditional modes of data analysis; “big data” from the social world is more a product of the ubiquity of the smart phone, and thus should be dated to slightly after the dawn of the smart city. The potential uses of the massive volumes of geo-located, time-stamped social datasets generated by our everyday movements and activities in the age of the smart

Figure 3.3 SENSEable Lab, MIT, Real-Time Talk, a map showing the level of cellphone network usage in Singapore. Live Singapore! project, 2011. © MIT SENSEable Lab and Carlo Ratti

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phone was quickly recognized by smart city advocates, and thus “big data” was in short order folded in to the smart city enterprise. What seems to distinguish the smart city moment is not just the intensification of these features that likewise marked earlier episodes – i.e., the vast expansion in scale and scope of the data available to contemporary urbanists, alongside the immense computational capacity modelers can use to run their simulations and analyses today. Rather, what is unique to the current moment is the integration of these two features into a single, comprehensive urban science. What seems to be happening is a synthesis of the reductionist paradigm of urban modeling with the totalizing logic of “big data”, whose ability to quantify every aspect of our social and biological lives seems to know no bounds. What this synthesis amounts to is a much more powerful – and arguably much more nefarious – positivism than that which characterized either of the previous two moments. The assumption that seems to underlie many of these smart city approaches today is that our models do not simply approximate reality: in integrating so much of the social and material world through the data sets continuously fed into them, they are in fact precise numerical reflections of reality. This assumption is perhaps the signature of this new quantitative moment: more and more, our cities appear to be made of the very same stuff as the traces of urban activities and processes stored in the cloud. It is as if data itself is the fundamental substance of our cities. In this sense, our cities may very well become computable to the degree that we interpret them in reductionist terms: forgetting that there are many other dimensions that compose the city, not least its political character. As in past moments, the drive to quantify the city goes hand in hand with attempts to transform it. That duality is in the very nature of urban planning, as a discipline that strives to be at once a social science of cities and a professional practice. The assumption is that a deeper understanding of the mechanics of cities will allow for a greater ability to plan and manage them. This dual aspect to urban planning has always posed the risk of putting the cart before the horse: as the disasters of cybernetics made clear, quantitative models of cities risk spatializing the contradictions of our own flawed models. Have our models progressed far enough beyond those of the cybernetic moment to nullify this risk? Do smart city models encompass a sufficiently expansive set of parameters? Are our models adequately sensitive to the complexity, path-dependence, and randomness that seem to define our social world? An answer to any of these questions would be premature. The mathematical approaches underlying the current smart city movement do indeed represent significant advances over earlier quantitative methods, both in the richness and scale of the information they can conceivably encompass and also in the assumptions their models make about the nature of social reality. What is clear at this point is that the current impulse towards making the city computable is a far more powerful and expansive endeavor than either of its two predecessors.

Notes 1 See, for example, the 2009 article by Google’s director of research Peter Norvig on the ways in which the rise of “big data” is rendering the scientific method obsolete. (Halevy, Alon, Peter Norvig, and

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2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

Fernando Pereira, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data”, IEEE Intelligent Systems 24, no. 2 (March 2009): 8–12.) West, Geoffrey B., Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies (New York: Penguin Press, 2017). Voldman, Daniele, Bernard Lepetit, and Christian Topalov, “La Ville Des Sciences Sociales.” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire, no. 77 (2003): 137. Westergaard, Harald, Contributions to the History of Statistics (London: PS King, 1932). Porter, Theodore M., “A Statistical Survey of Gases: Maxwell’s Social Physics”, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 12, no. 1 (January 1981): 82. Hacking, Ian, “Biopower and the Avalanche of Printed Numbers”, Humanities in Society 5, no. 3–4 (1982): 279–295. Congrès international de Géographie à Paris, “Congrès international de Géographie à Paris en 1875”, Le Globe. Revue genevoise de géographie 13, no. 1 (1875): 105–124. Royal Statistical Society, Jubilee Volume of the Statistical Society – June 22–24, 1885 (London: Stanford, 1885). Chapel, Enrico, L’oeil raisonné: l’invention de l’urbanisme par la carte (Genève: Metispresses, 2010). Bertillon, Jacques, “Paris 1888: Recettes Kilometriques des Lignes d’Omnibus”, (1888). Bulmer, Martin, Kevin Bales, and Kathryn Kish Sklar, The Social Survey in Historical Perspective, 1880–1940 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Booth, Charles, Charles Booth on the City: Physical Pattern and Social Structure. Selected Writings (The Heritage of Sociology). (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 87. Schultz, Rima Lunin, Hull-House Maps and Papers: A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District of Chicago, Together with Comments and Essays on Problems Growing out of the Social Conditions (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2007). Bulmer, Social Survey in Historical Perspective, 32. Alofsin, Anthony, The Struggle for Modernism: Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and City Planning at Harvard (London, UK: W.W. Norton, 2002), 42. Booth, Charles Booth on the City. Picon, Antoine, Digital Culture in Architecture: An Introduction for the Design Professions (Basel: Springer Verlag, 2010). Mirowski, Philip, Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Edwards, Paul N., A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). Galison, Peter, “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision”, Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1 (1994): 228–266. Galison, Peter, “War against the Center”, Grey Room 1, no. 4 (2001): 6–33. Martin, Reinhold, The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). Wiener, Norbert, “How US Cities Can Prepare for Atomic War: MIT Professors Suggest a Bold Plan to Prevent Panic and Limit Destruction”, Life, 18 (December 1950), 76–84. Light, Jennifer, From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). Edwards, Paul N., The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). Townsend, Anthony M., Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2013), 77. Ibid. Ibid., 81. See, for instance, the works of Andrew Sayer or of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. Jacobs, Jane, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Modern Library, 2011). Bettencourt, Luis, “The kind of problem a city is: New perspectives on the nature of cities from complex systems theory”, Santa Fe Institute Working Paper (2013). IBM Global Business Services, “A vision of smarter cities” (2009). Sidewalk Toronto, “Sidewalk Toronto”, https://sidewalktoronto.ca.

References Alofsin, Anthony. 2002. The Struggle for Modernism: Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and City Planning at Harvard. New York: W.W. Norton. Bertillon, Jacques. 1888. “Paris 1888: Recettes Kilometriques Des Ligne d’Omnibus.”

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Bettencourt, Luis. 2013. “The Kind of Problem a City Is: New Perspectives on the Nature of Cities from Complex Systems Theory.” Santa Fe Institute Working Paper. Booth, Charles. 1967. Charles Booth on the City: Physical Pattern and Social Structure. Selected Writings in The Heritage of Sociology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bulmer, Martin, Kevin Bales, and Kathryn Kish Sklar. 1991. The Social Survey in Historical Perspective, 1880–1940. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Chapel, Enrico. 2010. L’oeil raisonné: L’invention de l’urbanisme par la carte. Genève: Metispresses. Congrès international de Géographie à Paris. 1875. “Congrès international de Géographie à Paris en 1875.” Le Globe. Revue Genevoise De Géographie 13, no. 1: 105–124. Edwards, Paul N. 1996. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. Inside Technology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Edwards, Paul N. 2010. A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Galison, Peter. 1994. “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision.” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1: 228–266. Galison, Peter. 2001. “War against the Center.” Grey Room 1, no. 4: 6–33. Hacking, Ian. 1982. “Biopower and the Avalanche of Printed Numbers.” Humanities in Society 5, no. 3–4: 279–295. Halevy, Alon, Peter Norvig, and Fernando Pereira. 2009. “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data.” IEEE Intelligent Systems 24, no. 2 (March): 8–12. IBM Global Business Services. 2009. “A Vision of Smarter Cities.” Jacobs, Jane. 2011. The Death and Life of Great American Cities [50th anniversary ed.]. New York: Modern Library. Light, Jennifer S. 2003. From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Martin, Reinhold. 2003. The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mirowski, Philip. 2002. Machine Dreams: Economics Becomes a Cyborg Science. New York: Cambridge University Press. Picon, Antoine. 2010. Digital Culture in Architecture: An Introduction for the Design Professions. Basel: Springer Verlag. Porter, Theodore M. 1981. “A Statistical Survey of Gases: Maxwell’s Social Physics.” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 12, no. 1 (January): 82. Royal Statistical Society. 1885. Jubilee Volume of the Statistical Society … June 22–24, 1885. London, UK: Stanford. Schultz, Rima Lunin. 2007. Hull-House Maps and Papers: A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District of Chicago, Together with Comments and Essays on Problems Growing out of the Social Conditions. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Sidewalk Toronto. “Sidewalk Toronto.” https://sidewalktoronto.ca/. Townsend, Anthony M. 2013. Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, first edition. New York: W.W. Norton. Voldman, Daniele, Bernard Lepetit, and Christian Topalov. 2003. “La Ville Des Sciences Sociales.” Vingtième Siècle. Revue D’histoire 20, no. 77: 137. West, Geoffrey B. 2017. Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies. New York: Penguin Press. Westergaard, Harald. 1932. Contributions to the History of Statistics. London: PS King. Wiener, Norbert, Karl W. Deutsch and Giorgio de Santillana. 1950. “How U.S. Cities Can Prepare for Atomic War: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professors Suggest a Bold Plan to Prevent Panic and Limit Destruction.” Life, 1950, December 18, 77–86.

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Chapter 4

The answer is “smart” – but what was the question? About some properties of utopian conceptualization Oliver Schürer

“What is a city but the people?” William Shakespeare, from The Tragedy of Coriolanus, mentioned by Sicinius, Act 3, Scene 1 (written about 1605).

Cities are an everlasting source of wish-driven hope. Today, many cities around the globe are in the process of being restructured as smart cities. Anthony Townsend, a smart cities critic and research director of the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, has subtitled his book The Quest for a New Utopia.1 Referring to the utopian potential of smart cities he engaged in a debate with IBM-Citigroup Strategic Advisor Irving Wladawsky-Berger in 2013 initiated by The Economist and titled “Are smart cities empty hype?” Townsend described conventional smart cities as sterile, contrasting them with the untidiness of the real city: For Cisco and others, it was the Internet, […] to […] streamline the energy-hungry infrastructure of cities in the battle against climate change. But in their rush to leap into a well-planned digital future, the designers of these prototypes have ignored historical experience, how people shape cities, and the messy and organic nature of urban development. Sterile Utopian enclaves, they have failed not only as real estate developments but also as incubators of future urban lifestyles. These would-be smart

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cities, fitted out with proprietary ‘urban operating systems.’ … are the architectural nodes of a ‘mainframe’ style of urbanism.2 Although Townsend himself refers to the utopian tradition, he criticizes utopian enclaves negatively. Obviously this is a confrontation of differing utopian approaches. What terms are involved and how are they interpreted to foster the various lines of argumentation?

Terms These days, technical progress is expressed with the attribute “smart.” The term “smart” shares a utopian peculiarity with the “electronic brain.” Back in the 1960s, those technical parts were central to computers only, machines that processed

Figure 4.1 IBM System/360–5 (followed by System 370 in 1970) © IBM, 1964–75

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important matters distant to everyday life, and which almost no one understood. Already in the 1970s, however, the electronic brain was made banal and utilized, for instance, in washing machines. The term smart, much like the electronic brain, represents the up-to-date epitome of an element of the future in the present of its time. In this cultural continuity, where digital data processing is equated with human characteristics, nowadays the organizing metaphor of the “brain” is hardly used anymore— instead the cognitive image of the attribute “smart” dominates. This is a term that is usually translated to other languages, such as German, as “intelligent,” but clearly has a wider range of meaning in English, such as “cultivated,” “shrewd,” “cunning,” “genteel,” and “swift,” not to mention the connotations “to burn” and “pain.” The symbol of the brain as master-controller is followed historically by the portrayal of one of its ascribed capacities; smartness. By translating smart to intelligent, one single meaning of the term got prioritized: the behavioural characteristic called intelligence is quantitatively functional. It took some time and effort to communicate the idea that wraps this concept to various markets. One made varying successes. While the ICT-industry-driven attempt to make houses and flats “smart” failed in the 1990s, in contrast to cars and telephones, which have since then been made very successfully smart—is it now cities that are targeted to be the next ICT industries’ market? By referring to terms like “mainframe computer” and “electronic brain,” Townsend dooms the smart city approach, as represented by the ICT industry, to origins in a long-gone technological era. Furthermore, Townsend refers back to one of IBM’s historical setbacks, in which the former leader of the global IT market underestimated the economic potential of Personal Computers (PCs) and for a long period did not gain access to this burgeoning market. The smart cities critic ties the theme to infrastructures. The internet, a young infrastructure, should make the ancient infrastructures of energy supply sustainable. The metaphors he uses to describe his search for Utopia are borrowed from information technology so it is hardly surprising that he finds the metaphor for a suitable model there as well: “Rather than design and build a smart city like a mainframe, what if we built it like the web?”3 Townsend is a critic, not an opponent. His concerns are not alternatives to the smart city idea, but rather the kind of methods, questions of planning and the objectives to produce smart cities. What is at stake here, when a city model based on the mainframe yields socially sterile and economically unprofitable utopias and a city model in correspondence with the Web leads to suitable utopias? Townsend’s way of reasoning shows how important the meanings and usages of terms are for producing arguments and images in debates around urban technology. His countersuggestion to the “Mainframe Style” states that: “civic hackers are tinkering their way towards a different kind of utopia. They eschew efficiency, instead seeking to amplify and accelerate the natural sociability of life.”4 The bottom-up access serves “natural sociability” in contrast to top-down efficiency. Yet “sociability,” the willingness or urge to live close together, not only leads to utopian potential but also to social inequality and conflicts, especially when resources are naturally scarce or are

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being kept artificially scarce. As this is the case in many cities of the world it cannot serve as a “natural” solution. The utopia at stake, offered by ICT industries, actually negates many essential features that are generally attributed to cities. Townsend understands this as a weakness in this new search for utopia. But, wasn’t the original utopian thinking determined exactly by negation, the “u-topos”? Among smart city proponents one finds an intrinsic debate on properties of utopian conceptualization: Which utopian potential should be actualized? What kind of discourse is it? Which assumptions about the material and social aspects of cities are about to be adopted as cultural standards through this kind of discourse?

Figure 4.2 Map of Utopia by Abraham Ortelius, 1595

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Actualization The term Utopia is inextricably connected with the city. In Utopia from 1516, Thomas More describes the cities of his fictional country as the most significant places for developing a perfect society:5 “The whole island of Utopia is a union of cities with their surrounding lands.”6 The ideal society had once gone into voluntary isolation; the island used to be a peninsula, which became artificially separated from the mainland by the country’s establishment. The conqueror and founder of the country Utopus “decided to separate them from the continent, and to bring the sea quite round them. To accomplish this he ordered a deep channel to be dug.”7 The residents of Utopia are almost solely city inhabitants, and the participation in the community is structured fairly simply; just as the cities to the country, so families are the central reference point for society. Community is not only experienced through cooperative work, but also while attending the collective meals at their community meeting house. More repeatedly emphasizes the homogeneity of the socio-cultural facilities that Utopia offers, which could not be established for countries during the Renaissance period: “There are fifty-four cities in the island, all large and well built, the manners, customs, and laws of which are the same.”8 He does not begin the description of a city with the morphology or with the magnificent buildings, but instead with the terrain. Subsequently, he mentions the importance of the city’s expansion followed by infrastructure, starting with the biggest traffic route, then the water supply, fortifications, the streets, and only at the very end, buildings appear. Gardens are allocated to the latter—a passion of the otherwise fairly pragmatic Utopians is revealed. The individual community groups compete with one another over the most beautiful community garden. The control of fate in the cities of Utopia is similar in that it works according to a few simple laws, leading to the fact that “there is not in the whole world either a better people or a happier government as Utopia”9—but not happier people or a better government. More coined the term “utopia” with this work. Nevertheless, the model of his social utopia has repeatedly been criticized as the totalitarian contrary to social liberation, as a dystopia. In her Journey through Utopia, Marie Louise-Berneri asserts that “the lack of individuality is apparent—from the uniformity of the houses and clothes up to the strictly regulated workflow.”10 More, however, describes the rigid organization of the utopian society through social participation and a degree of control extended to the level of individual citizens: Thus you see that there are no idle persons among them, nor pretences of excusing any from labour. […] all men live in full view, so that all are obliged both to perform their ordinary task and to employ themselves well in their spare hours.11 Berneri recognizes a contradiction therein, arguing that “More’s ideal human beings are utterly inhuman, to the extent that they are incapable or have been prohibited to possess other feelings than that are dictated in a designated law.”12

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But More’s Utopia can, quite easily, also be understood ironically. How is it that the tale of “the best condition of a country,” recited with severity, is contradictory in many details?13 More generates contradictions between the description and the designation, however these were only understandable for the educated elite of his day familiar with Old Greek. This becomes obvious when having a closer look at the title of the mayor, Ademos, meaning “without citizens,” the name of the capital, Amaurotum, which is a reference to London and thus “a bleak city,” and the name of the most important river, Anydrus, implying “without water.” Briefly, More’s Utopia in its subtext is a country without citizens, without ground, but with a perfect social system. Describing “the best condition of a country” seems so daring to More that he conceals his request behind irony and himself behind a fictitious front man: Raphael Hythlodeus, the “talkative buffoon.”14 The utopian base of his society is that private property does not exist. With Utopia, More is not just denouncing the arbitrariness of the rich and the powerful in British Renaissance society—he is also substantiating critiques to the feudalistic society model and offering an alternative.15 More has plenty of derision for the regalia of wealth. A certain self-irony becomes apparent when comparing his portrait “Thomas More as Lord Chancellor” with the description of the ambassadors who visit the country Utopia in his book.16,17 The former post of Lord Chancellor corresponds roughly to today’s Prime Minister. According to Raphael Hythlodeus’ report, gold and silver, which the Utopians receive by trading their surplus products, find application as “chains and shackles of […] slaves, who became fleeting.”18 Slaves are citizens condemned to forced labor due to a violation of law. Should an escape be attempted, it is chains of gold and silver that keep them imprisoned to their disastrous situation— More wants to exemplify how possession becomes a burden and divides society. This is quite contrary to the situation of the Utopians, all of whom are provided equally with goods, merits and rights, and live without any worries. Presumably, More never intended to realize Utopia. Rather, he wanted to argue causes of, and alternatives to, feudalism. While philosophizing about the best society, he more than likely became aware of certain problems in his social concept. This contradiction was not only made fertile by means of irony, but is also explicitly expressed in his text: “After Raphael had discoursed with great judgment on the many errors that were both among us and these nations, had treated of the wise institutions both here and there.”19 More’s irony also contrasts a lesson on political pragmatism with the impractical ideal of the state. Only the pragmatics of realizing an idea can lead to real-life circumstances. In his brittle description of Utopia one finds a secluded discussion about the substance of this city-based utopian society: should that ideal social artifact be constructed by systems of control or by fostering common wealth?

Discourse Debates over the meaning of the term smart city were initiated 491 years after More, in 2007 with an IBM marketing campaign, which culminated in 2011 with

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the company registering the trademark “Smarter Cities.” Since then, IBM has been successful in defining today’s biggest topic in urban studies. But these debates cannot really be summed up as a discourse. If it were a discourse, an exchange of ideas and search for consensus would be primary. However, the campaign is obviously a form of communication by which the ICT industry—and above all IBM— enforces a single, dominant opinion that is pushed to become common sense. This campaign clearly exceeds traditional marketing in the direction of exercising power. It is not discourse, but propaganda. Why tediously and slowly seduce individual consumers with offers, as with the failed 1990 campaign of smart living in the housing market, when it can exploit the fact that entire cities have to use infrastructural services? The discourse on urbanism had to react. It mainly went for defining smart cities, by understanding it as a complex problem, as mentioned in many discussions on urbanism.20 This move contributes perfectly to the propaganda. As the term was not coined to be defined, but instead to be used, it claims as many different definitions as there are cities and participants. What emerges from the resulting diverse opinions seems thoroughly positive, but this refers only to the nearly endless extension of the term, diverting attention from the term’s very tiny intension:21 digital control. So whatever the definition of a city may be, the objective of the propaganda is to inextricably match it with the attribute of digital control. Whatever one wants to control, one achieves; pragmatic things such as water supply, garbage disposal, safety-related surveillance of public space, questionable issues such as crime prediction or problematic goals like the control of political opponents in a totalitarian regime. Therefore it is not a question of a complex term but rather of an open term—a floating signifier. These are expressions that have no certain meaning. Being meaningless in and of themselves, they can be adapted to any desired meaning.22 In A Dictionary of Critical Theory, one can find its relation to the construction of the meaning defined with: “a signifier that absorbs rather than emits meaning.”23 While the term “smart city” is charged with multiple urbanized meanings it clears away other more important discourses in urbanization such as affordable housing or waste water systems, which are much more significant themes for many cities in the world. Establishing the term “smart city” leads to the construction of a certain reality, in the sense of ICT industries. In a speech by Rem Koolhaas at the European Union (EU) on smart cities, the function of propaganda in architecture became visible: “smart cities would be more persuasive if the environment that the technology companies create was actually a compelling one that offered models for what the city can be.”24 Concerning visions, the Pritzker prize winner did not turn to his own guild for models of city realities to come but towards the ICT industry. Seen in that way, control seems to be merely a theme of technical optimization and infrastructural efficiency in order to make cities sustainable. However, a research group at the Institut de Géographie, Université de Neuchâtel, has made unequivocally clear that there is much more at stake: “underneath it is primarily a strategic tool for gaining a dominant position in a huge market […] what one of our IBM informants calls a market creation strategy.”25 The way “what Cities can be”, that is the potential of urban life with dynamically controlled infrastructures, is about

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to be formed into a market. The commodity traded is digital control. How does that influence assumptions about material and social aspects of cities?

Assumptions In the society of Utopia there are hardly any changes and the Renaissance concept is laid out statically. In the twentieth century, on the contrary, overcoming static social situations was a major goal. Four hundred and forty-eight years after Utopia was published, a new urban term has been introduced to utopian conceptualization. In the same London, with the same hope of developing a perfect society by means of cities, in Archigram Magazine’s fifth issue, much like More’s perfect society, the idea of a “Computor [sic] City” appears, subtitled “[a] synthesized [sic] metropolis with electronic changeability.”26 This trendy suggestion from the time of “Swinging London” equates the future of the city with the implementation of a computerized infrastructure to register any alteration in the city: The activities of an organized society occur within a balanced network of forces which naturally interact to form a continuous chain of change. A metropolis is situated at the point of maximum display of interactive energy and shows the most complex field of forces.27 For his idea of liberation, the architect and urbanist Dennis Crompton developed a certain utopian potential by charging the term “change.” Change not only corresponds with the sense of life in the post-war economic wonder of the 1960s, but also with the functionality of a new form of control. In the Computor City this energized field is synthesized at a much higher sensitivity and is programmed to respond to changes in activity. Time scales of change are fed into the computor so that reaction follows the natural cause at optimum rate.28 In order to channel such timescales of change into a computer, a certain technological infrastructure is necessary. “The sensitized net detects changes of activity, the sensory devices respond and feed back information to program correlators.”29 Who or what program correlators are and what they do, whether the organization is top-down or bottom-up, remains unclear, much like the strategies correlating the elements of a Smart City today. This architecture-driven utopia has not directly experienced a realization. But the concept of the “sensitized net” did, just devoid of architecture. A threefold concept of some technologies, a promise and a wish that might come true: a city-wide network to process sensor data of city processes, the promise of a solution to all kinds of permanently changing city problems, and the promise that results will be in harmony with the socio-political demands of an urban population. Today we observe this concept to become urban reality under the catchphrase of Smart City.

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As More in Utopia, so Crompton in his project “Computor City” focuses on infrastructures. In the latter, infrastructures are brought to a close linkage through the feedback of the “sensitized net.” The Archigram group later became very influential for architecture, but unlike Utopia, where social impact is in the foreground, in “Computor City” a utopian potential is merely developed from an abstract technological impact. In Crompton’s speculative design, computer technology is already imagined as a tool for optimizing the city. The project is a precursor of techno-centric concepts in urbanism where digital technologies are applied for the organization of the city. It marks an important moment in the urbanistic concept of the post-war city: change is currently a generally accepted, socially high-ranking value. Change not only allows for the dissolving of all kinds of complex, pre-war-period problems by making groups, individuals and their life concepts dynamic, flexible and mobile, but also by affecting material flows and social targets. Since 1964, at the very latest, some avant-garde architecture represented a vision of a new form of technological control intending to bring order to the challenge of urbanization in a techno-centric manner. Cities, today as ever before, aim for the optimization and efficiency of their infrastructure, and a new market of cities offers the application of automated digital control technology at very large scale. Automated control is supposed to mediate between whatever infrastructure and the citizens living with it. Thus, digital control of optimization and efficiency imply increasing automation in the use of a city. Mediation is passive by monitoring people’s behaviors in many ways, or active by means of mobile technologies according to the scheme of social media, something which is criticized by Koolhaas: The citizens the smart city claims to serve are treated like infants. We are fed cute icons of urban life, integrated with harmless devices, cohering into pleasant diagrams in which citizens and business are surrounded by more and more circles of service that create bubbles of control.30 In a lecture at the London School of Economics, Sociologist Saskia Sassen expresses ideas similar to Koolhaas but sees problems only where “we could slide into a managed space where ‘sensored’ ‘becomes censored’.”31 Contrary to Kolhaas and Townsend she sees opportunities in a kind of combination of top-down and bottom-up approach, claiming that “vertical institutions that begin to leak some of their power and bureaucratic control to a more generic operational space that enables citizens to work with at least some of what is useful in those leaks.”32 Despite the obvious differences in their concepts—Townsend emphasizes efficiency, Architect Koolhaas focusing on the structure and Sociologist Sassen in lifting out data retrieval—they all agree on techno-centrism as unspoken basis of their arguments: technological answers to social difficulties. But there is still more at stake, control that claims to follow collective interests or even more, to represent them, involves one issue in particular: civil rights. One example from the development of digital technologies is the de facto loss of correspondence privacy through e-mail, a right that had been fought for in the bloody

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bourgeois revolutions of the nineteenth century. Due to a paradoxical historical development, today, posted letters enjoy privacy rights that emails might never obtain. Hence, not only the visual but also the structural simplification in accordance with the patterns of social media questions the quality of civil rights. Still the impact has an even farther reach. A declared opponent of smart cities, Adam Greenfield, author of Against the Smart City33 and a self-proclaimed “advocate for the human-centered design of technological systems,”34 points out the ethical dimension of the representation of interests, which cannot be decided by means of techno-centric optimization. “Cities are not like technical systems, where an operator can cleanly and without undue ethical complication choose to optimize one regime of performance over another.”35 Control over changes allow for powerful economic drives. But inscribed in the role that change plays in urbanism, one finds a conflict of interests. For the ICT industries it is ends, but for urbanism’s conceptualization, on the contrary, change is means. What is directly altered by this kind of control are the possibilities in how decisions are constructed and how the decision-making processes could be pursued by its citizens. That are the information bases that provide fundamentals for citizens’ decisions, the exercise of influence on policy and above all their extent and impact. The introduction of such technology fundamentally alters civil rights—without ever having been discussed. The understanding of the city as a socio-cultural artifact is currently being transformed to an understanding of the city as a socio-technological system. The next transformative step towards a techno-economical system nearly seems to be unavoidable. There are questions in the foreground about how a society should use control-technology, and not about which urban problem-situations exist and, if they do, how technology should be structured towards application in order to solve those problems. Consequently, the achievement would be exactly what the ICT industry was striving for with its propaganda: the ancient socio-cultural premise of the permanent optimization of urban infrastructure becomes glossed over with techno-economical promises.

Conclusion A very similar discrepancy to that in the work of Thomas More is discernible in the development of social, and in particular civil, rights in the smart city model: presented as a prospect on an ideal, beneficial condition, a more precise insight shows several disadvantageous and dubious conditions. Whereas in Utopia an ideal society once went into voluntary isolation, today smart cities are erected as gated communities, controlled by social media, that are technologically programmed (gated) in order to generate technocratic compulsion for use. Not unlike the Utopians’ competition for the most beautiful community gardens, contemporary urban gardening as part of sustainability is harmless only as long

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as it is not used as a form of distraction from rigid social conditions. For More, social participation is equated with ubiquitous external control, down to the level of the individual citizen. Today, everyone can be a smartphone-equipped citizen-reporter of the smart city, to always and everywhere force conformed behavior or to capture deviation. A perfect consumption motor tied to life within city infrastructure is just about to emerge, where the micro-variations of behavioral modes, enforced through specific habits from social media structures, become commercialized, and like in Utopia, only allow for the expression of certain emotions. With the term “smart city,” the ICT industry established a floating signifier. Through propaganda, the multiple discourses around cities are about to be displaced by a sub-theme of technological development. The smart city does not have utopian potential in facilitating diversity, but in enforcing particular interests. Efficiency through optimization is promised, not the “best condition” which More once anticipated. More’s major question, whether to decide the direction of development towards community or common wealth, will not be answered by such concepts, but they certainly distract from it. Nonetheless there are possibilities for a critical discourse. Urban situations should not be developed nor restricted by—but in challenging—technology. Technocentric values, derived from technological possibilities, may not become the premises of social and spatial processes. As holistic urban development can only thrive in a system of values and targets, not restricted by technology, but instead driven by general social and cultural manners. For architecture concerns, the answer to the floating signifier may be the development of an involved and democratic narration that communicates social values and targets, in that it focuses on common wealth, much like More’s original Utopia once did.

Notes 1 Townsend A.M. 2014. Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 2 Siegele L. 2013, 3 December. Economist Debates: Are smart cities empty hype? London: The Economist, [accessed 3.12.2013]. 3 Ibid. 4 Townsend A.M. 2014. Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 5 Morus T. 1516. Utopia, www.gutenberg.org/files/26971/26971-h/26971-h.htm. 6 Berneri M.L. 1982. Reise durch Utopia: mit Plato, Plutarch, Aristophanes. 1. Aufl. ed. Berlin: Kramer. p. 72. 7 Morus T. 1516. Utopia, www.gutenberg.org/files/26971/26971-h/26971-h.htm, p. 70. 8 Ibid., p. 70. 9 Morus T. 1516. Utopia, www.gutenberg.org/files/26971/26971-h/26971-h.htm, p. 122. 10 Berneri M.L. 1982. Reise Durch Utopia: mit Plato, Plutarch, Aristophanes. 1. Aufl. ed. Berlin: Kramer. p. 58. 11 Morus T. 1516. Utopia, www.gutenberg.org/files/26971/26971-h/26971-h.htm, p. 96. 12 Berneri M.L. 1982. Reise durch Utopia: mit Plato, Plutarch, Aristophanes. 1. Aufl. ed. Berlin: Kramer. p. 62. 13 Morus T. 1516. Utopia, www.gutenberg.org/files/26971/26971-h/26971-h.htm, p. 68.

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14 Sitter-Liver B. 2007. Vorwort, Vol. 1. Fribourg: Acad. Presse. (Utopie Heute.) p. 8, “ […] the rapporteur on Utopia is called ‘Hythlodaeus’ by More, which might be best translated as buffoon.” 15 Whereas the term feudalism was not used by More and came into use only in the eighteenth century. 16 1527, painted by Hans Holbein the Younger. 17 Morus T. 1516. Utopia, www.gutenberg.org/files/26971/26971-h/26971-h.htm, p. 95ff. 18 Ibid., p. 103. 19 Ibid., p. 20. 20 For an overview of the many inconclusive definitions and the strive for a common definition see: Dameri R. 2013. Searching for Smart City definition: A comprehensive proposal. International Journal of Computers & Technology, 11(2544.). 21 The extension of a term consists of the things to which it applies. The intension of a term consists of the things that are implied or suggested by the concept in question [definition]. New World Encyclopedia, www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Intension_and_Extension [accessed 5.4.2019]. 22 Kneer G. 2009. Handbuch soziologische Theorien. 1. Aufl. ed. Wiesbaden: VS. p. 423. 23 Buchanan I. 2010. A Dictionary of Critical Theory: Over 750 In-Depth Entries, 1. edition. Oxford: Oxford Reference, p. 173. 24 Koolhaas R. 2014, 24 September. My thoughts on the smart city (lecture transcript), [accessed 14.1.2019], http://ec.europa.eu/archives/commission_2010-2014/kroes/en/content/my-thoughtssmart-city-rem-koolhaas.html. 25 Klause F., Ola Söderstrom, Till Paasche. 2014. Smart cities as corporate storytelling. City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action 18(3), pp. 307–320. 26 Archigram. 1964. Archigram Magazine “Issue no. 5”, [accessed 14.1.2019], http://archigram. westminster.ac.uk/magazine.php?id=100. 27 Crompton D. 1964. Computer City Project. Metropolis, Archigram Magazine, [accessed 14.1.2019], http://archigram.westminster.ac.uk/project.php?id=59, p. 14. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Koolhaas R. 2014, 24 September. My thoughts on the smart city (lecture transcript), [accessed 14.1.2019], http://ec.europa.eu/archives/commission_2010-2014/kroes/en/content/my-thoughtssmart-city-rem-koolhaas.html. 31 Sassen S. 2012. Urbanising technology. London: LSECities, [accessed 6.3.2015], https://lsecities. net/media/objects/articles/urbanising-technology/en-gb/. 32 Ibid. 33 Greenfield A. 2013. Against the smart city (The city is here for you to use; part 1). Edition 1. New York City: Do Projects. 34 Urbanscale. 2015. Design for networked cities and citizens, [accessed 4.19.2015], http://urbanscale. org/about/adam-greenfield. 35 Siegele, Ludwig, Wladawsky-Berger, Irving, Townsend, Anthony, Are smart cities empty hype?, p. 31.

References Archigram. 1964. Archigram Magazine “Issue no. 5”, [accessed 14.1.2019], http://archigram.westminster. ac.uk/magazine.php?id=100. Berneri M.L. 1982. Reise Durch Utopia: Mit Plato, Plutarch, Aristophanes. 1. Aufl. ed. Berlin: Kramer. Buchanan I. 2010. A Dictionary of Critical Theory: Over 750 In-Depth Entries. 1. ed. Oxford, UK: Oxford Reference. Crompton D. 1964. Computer city project. Metropolis, Archigram Magazine. [accessed 14.1.2019], http:// archigram.westminster.ac.uk/project.php?id=59. Dameri R. 2013. Searching for smart city definition: A comprehensive proposal. International Journal of Computers & Technology, 11(2544): 2544–2551. Greenfield A. 2013. Against the Smart City (The city is here for you to use; part 1). 1. ed. New York: Do Projects. Kneer G. 2009. Handbuch soziologische Theorien. 1. Aufl. ed. Wiesbaden: VS. Koolhaas R. 2014, 24 September. My thoughts on the smart city (lecture transcript) [accessed 14.1.2019], http://ec.europa.eu/archives/commission_2010-2014/kroes/en/content/my-thoughts-smartcity-rem-koolhaas.html. Morus T. 1516. Utopia, www.gutenberg.org/files/26971/26971-h/26971-h.htm. Sassen S. 2012. Urbanising technology. London: LSECities [accessed 6.3.2015], https://lsecities.net/ media/objects/articles/urbanising-technology/en-gb. Siegele L. 2013, 3 December. Economist debates: Are smart cities empty hype? The Economist.

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Sitter-Liver B. 2007. Vorwort, Vol. 1. Fribourg: Acad. Presse. (Utopie Heute). Söderstrom, O., F. Klauser, and T. Paasche. 2014. Smart cities as corporate storytelling. City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action, 18(3): 307–320. Townsend A.M. 2014. Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Urbanscale, design for networked cities and citizens. [accessed 4.19.2015], http://urbanscale.org/about/ adam-greenfield.

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Chapter 5

The trouble with capitalist utopia A totalizing scheme of subsumption and planetary urbanization Angel Callander

Architecture, along with laws, social norms, and the market, is used as a system of regulation and control, such that it physically structures human interaction with external environments. Looking to the intellectuals involved in founding Ekistics – the study of human settlements – in the 1960s, there is an emerging enthusiasm for networks and global interconnectedness that sparked a revolution in urban planning and architecture, which underpins the conception of the smart city today, functioning contemporaneously as a capitalist utopia. The Italian architecture collective Superstudio shows hyperbolically the aesthetic and ideological dimensions of globalization that are at the heart of capitalist conceptions of utopia. As a totalizing scheme, global capitalism is impossible to epitomize, as Frederic Jameson notes, “in which the informing power is everywhere and nowhere all at once, and at the same time in relentless expansion, by way of appropriation and subsumption alike.”1 This chapter investigates this appropriation and subsumption in regards to aspects of traditional utopian thinking that romanticize conformity (and thus regulation), leisure, and (global) connectivity. By looking at early conceptions of utopias in literature, such as the seminal example of Thomas More, and drawing a line through the 1960s and 1970s to today, this chapter examines the concept of utopia through its traditional imaginaries and the subsumption of utopian fantasies by capitalism giving birth to the “Smart City,” in which technological innovation and connectivity are seen as the ultimate ways of improving the social and economic problems experienced in urban life. In so doing, the question of whether

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“utopia” is an outdated concept, or one that has been otherwise hollowed out by this subsumption for use by capitalist enterprise has stuck out in my mind, and whether the inherent closure/connectivity paradox of utopia distorts ways of thinking through its structural inadequacies as a society-building concept. In viewing smart city technologies and the accompanying Internet of Things as components of capitalist techno-utopianism, it becomes clear that capitalist utopian conceptions are more apt to address “the symptoms” and not “the disease.” Technologies implemented in de novo smart city projects like New Songdo, South Korea – that is, smart cities that are built as such from scratch – are not transferable to cities that already exist; likewise, what works in a large city like New York City is not appropriate in a smaller, economically disadvantaged city like Detroit, Michigan. Most data used to implement new technologies in already-existing cities assumes that all citizens already have access to the same digital resources like smartphones and the Internet, which is of course untrue. Thus, implementation of smart city technologies is not only stratified worldwide, but also within cities themselves. What becomes evident is the difficulty in reconciling utopian dialectics, such as closure, connectivity, work, leisure, sameness, and difference – seeking either closed, homogeneous societies, as in many historical totalitarian projects, or a borderless world without sovereign states, as in the optimism of globalization. In the case of capitalist utopian fantasies, both globalism and sovereignty play conflicting roles. Utopianism can perhaps be distilled as rightness, that there is one system that believes itself ideologically to be the truest one, and thus attempts to emerge independently and sustain itself for as long as possible. This is also important to capitalist society as it asserts, given the examples of failed socialist and communist projects, that there are no other alternatives left.

Traditions of the utopian imaginary Historically, utopian creators have concerned themselves with the larger categories of the literary utopia and the design utopia. That is, architects such as Leon Battista Alberti and writers like Thomas More have been at the forefront of utopian thinking using the strengths of their respective disciplines, accounting for the principles and attributes of social and physical organization. The literary utopia created its idealistic conception for the future by altering institutions and social organizations. Conversely, design utopias conceived of the future as “altered artifacts and the origination of space.”2 As Martin Meyerson writes, those who imagined a social utopia concerned themselves with creating more contented, productive, and religiously pious individuals by altering society’s institutions, whereas many physical utopian creators believed healthier, more placated and orderly individuals who were “inspired by beauty” could only become so if their physical environment were altered.3 More’s famous fiction Utopia (1516) was written on the cusp of an emerging capitalist society in Europe. In More’s Utopia, the themes of work, participation, and material abundance are central to what he felt would constitute a fully functioning society, without luxury. This “triple

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achievement” would ostensibly be realized through rigid systems of social control, punishment, and reward.4 Though he was devoutly Catholic, More’s ideal society of Utopia “anticipated some of the features of the Protestant ethic, which later provided an ideology to reinforce the development of the civilization of industrial capitalism.”5 That More’s seminal Utopia was created with a burgeoning capitalism, and the work ethic that has come to be one of its principal elements, provides clues to the ways in which the advanced capitalism of the present day has come to appropriate aspects of utopian thinking, and to be thought of by many as a utopia in itself. In 1825, English industrialist Robert Owen purchased the township of Harmony, Indiana, from Lutheran settlers to found a utopian community with the belief that properly organized industry should require people to labour less while still being adequately compensated in material abundance, renaming the town as New Harmony. Like More, he proposed a society based on collectivity in places of work, education, dining, and even sleeping quarters. And, also like More, Owen emphasized virtues of work, participation, and education.6 His society ultimately failed after two years, which was supposed by others to have been due to his “bumptiousness, arrogance, and conceit” as being “bound to provoke reactions in other people which would have defeated plans of Omnipotence itself.”7 At this point in the early 19th century, the industrial revolution was beginning to reveal much of its brutal nature. The utopias of American literature in the 1890s assumed all of society’s ills were purely economic, and nearly all were convinced that technicians would be the ones to rectify the situation. Technological innovation had the potential to free humans from their desires, and they would be happy if they conformed to a single group.8 At issue was always the motivation to work, which in turn produces abundance. Edward Bellamy conceived of this ensured participation in work through rigid sanctions and the projection of “suitable” personalities for those who wanted to be members of utopia.9 We have not lost this requirement for conformity through the assumption that certain personalities, appearances, and ways of life are inherently superior to others because they are more productive, and thus aberrations must be eradicated, or otherwise vilified to coerce them into sameness. Even early utopias were suspicious of deviation from prescribed, acceptable norms and sought freedom from outside influence. More’s Utopia, according to Frederic Jameson, exemplifies fantasy and a “commitment to closure,” where “closure is achieved by that great trench the founder causes to be dug between the island and the mainland and which alone allows it to be Utopia in the first place.”10 This commitment to closure through eliminating heterogeneity leads, glaringly, down the path towards totalitarianism. In various utopian projects of the 20th century, from the fascist to the communist and everything in between, we have seen the attempted closing of the social via the eradication of heterogeneity in favour of the totality as prescribed by the state. Jameson reminds us that during the Cold War period, “Utopia” became tantamount to Stalinism: [it] had come to designate a programme which neglected human frailty and original sin, and betrayed a will to uniformity and the ideal purity of the perfect system that always had to be imposed by force on its imperfect and reluctant subjects.11

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Thus, the term “utopia” has often come to designate something particularly derogatory in its contemporary usage. For many, this hostility to difference and affinity to totalitarian closure of predominantly nation-focused projects makes utopian thinking a threat to human society, but which sparks the imagining of new solutions to those problems that are consequently classified as utopian fantasies.

Globalization and utopia Following Saïd Arjomand, globalization has replaced post-modernism following the failure of “really existing socialism” as a dominating motif of social sciences in a new era.12 To the believers, it represents an increase in global interconnectedness, opening up the world to freer exchange in market capitalism and providing opportunities for equal participation. Globalization as a “dominant new imaginary” falls into either a particular approach to utopian representation, or “a threatening dystopian predicament,” depending on which side of the argument one is examining.13 As a utopia, globalization provides a framework for improving three major aspects of human existence. Economically speaking, it facilitates a “world without borders, encompassing truly free trade, high-tech production, progressive equalisation between nations, and unheard of individual freedom and choice.” Politically, we encounter the possibility of disintegrating sovereign states in favor of “multilateral negotiation, human rights … and global governance.” Culturally, global cosmopolitanism connects people to each other in such a way that the “global village of mutual understanding and constructive interchange” allows for a marketplace of humanity’s diverse cultures to be picked and chosen from at will.14 In this way, utopianism and globalization are inextricably linked, as they attempt to negotiate the dialectic of closure and connectedness. There is, however, a fine line separating this vision of transgressing global borders and embracing difference worldwide, and the kind of cultural imperialism that is often referred to in postcolonial theory as a means of reinforcing hegemony as a utopian vision. Modernity, and its ideals of rationality, competitiveness, individualism and technological innovation, advocates for globalization as a unifying force that transforms the world and its citizenry into a civic whole and brings with it the hope of justice and freedom for all. The dark side of this phenomenon (or, its “dystopian discontents”) are those effects of oppression, exploitation, poverty, war, and colonialism.15 In tandem with capitalism and European colonial expansion, globalization is the apex of our transformation to modernity and beckons forth “the gradual integration of all societies on earth into a single domain of interrelation.”16 These concepts of utopia and globalization cannot be simply condensed into capitalism, but they are altogether inseparable from one another. Marx identified capitalism’s internal logic as inherently global, which can be explained with respect to three fundamental components: “a single world market driven by Western expansionism; the development of strong states via the consolidation of market networks; and a system of exploitation integrated via core, peripheral,

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and semiperipheral zones.”17 That is, regimes of exploitation of resources and people in certain locations is built into capitalism’s survival architecture. The modern ideals of individualism and competitiveness are driving forces that ensure the sovereignty of certain market players over others (the “developed” vs the “developing”). This represents one of the most fundamental truths as to why capitalism precludes the utopian vision of the equal distribution of justice, human rights, and market participation to all areas of the globe: there must be a winner. Another of its survival tactics, then, is to insist on its utopian potential, that there is simply no other system to look for; it prompts us to consider how spectacularly socialism, communism, and totalitarianism have failed. Capitalism is presented as the only system that gives us abundance and freedom of choice. It is here that we approach technological utopianism, libertarian cyberutopianism, and Silicon Valley utopianism. In these frameworks, cyberspace represents a place that is absent of power and domination, that supports the becoming of fully realized human subjects. Here, the focus is on the prospect of circumventing state control and regulation using global digital communications. The Silicon Valley ideal of a technological utopia, in which advances in science and technology bring about improved social conditions and living standards, crumbles rather easily when confronted with the fact that capitalism prevents this from being a true global reality. We see this in the sole circumstance of astronomical gentrification endeavours in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Silicon Valley resides and where its investors relocate their homes and enterprises. If the area in which this utopian conception emerged cannot avoid severe dispossession and disparity of its local population, what hope does it have for saving the entire world? As Slavoj Žižek explains, in regards to Bill Gates’ hope that the Internet would usher in what he called “friction free capitalism,” this “friction” is essentially the “traumatic social antagonisms [and] power relations” to which we are accustomed. But what is disguised by this fantasy, and its hope for the “freedom to escape unnatural state intervention and be ourselves,” are the actual power relations, political resolutions, and institutional circumstances that ultimately facilitate the survival of Internet culture in the first place.18 Governments and corporations have found ways to exert influence and control, surveillance and censorship, threatening all the personal and geographical freedoms that cyberspace once purported to offer. However, there has always been inequality of participation in digital communications. On one hand, this is due in part to the geographical distribution of communications resources, which hinders proper access for many people due simply to proximity. On the other hand, state regulation and censorship disallows the freedom to communicate or access certain resources online for those in many countries. Libertarian cyber-utopianism necessarily obscures these problems, since any contestation to its particular conception of how the world is and should be is deemed as only standing in the way of a technological utopian revolution.

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Network fever Before the inception of the Internet as such, groups of architects, media theorists, and other intellectuals came together, founding the Ekistics journal for studies of the evolution of human settlements. The fascination with networks of all kinds on global, national, and local scales spurred many theorists and designers to consider connectivity and technological innovation as the most plausible way of achieving a new kind of territory and citizenry. As the story goes, Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan met for the first time in Athens for a cruise around the Greek Islands on July 6, 1963. They, along with 32 other intellectuals, had been invited by Greek architect and urban planner Konstantinos Doxiadis for a symposium deliberating “the evolution of human settlements.”19 McLuhan was working on elaborating the image of prosthetics for his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, published a year later. His study of extending the human nervous system in the electrical age, which “confuses the problems of living space,” became important for the event as it was tangled with “the study of changing problems of … national housing.”20 On the boat, he argued that electronics are an issue of biology, as “an organic system with particular effects. The evolution of technology is the evolution of the human body.”21 If new developments in electronics represented new body parts, comprising new organisms and spatial systems, they were thus rife to constitute a new architecture as well.22 Doxiadis viewed settlements as organisms in themselves with the capacity to grow and change on a continuous basis. His designs for global and regional “systems” were conceived from the principle that the architect should articulate the body rather than simply finding a way to house it. Those involved in the Ekistics project chiefly concerned themselves with the aesthetics of network connectivity – how to visualize the individual at one with the network. McLuhan’s famous term of the “global village” came from his belief in the fact that what he referred to as the electronic “extensions” of the human body had displaced the traditional city, constructing this global settlement in which space had been radically altered. Therefore, urban planners should consider that this new, post-Euclidean “form of physical world” must necessarily be assembled using computers.23 Today we would consider the global village as a direct effect of globalization that attempts a world without borders, without sovereign states, and with a cosmopolitan outlook on world cultures that encourages mutual understanding. It also suggests that McLuhan either predicted, or inadvertently laid the groundwork for the contemporary Internet of Things. As far as McLuhan was concerned, it was no longer possible to do any research into cities without also including electronics. What we know today as the Internet of Things is a quasi-utopian invention that allows people to experience the convenience of controlling their household items over the Internet while they are away, or to synchronize devices like televisions and computers. The Internet of Things represents a middle-class capitalist fantasy of seamless integration, connectivity, and convenience. This is a smaller, more personal scale of the smart city, that is built on the same principle of assimilating the individual

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into the network. Ekistics had been unconcerned with political and economic systems; it was more interested in the aesthetic and pragmatic dimensions of connecting humans to their surroundings. It did, however, create a viable blueprint for the smart city in late capitalist urban planning, in which the network is something inescapable. There is no possibility of living off the grid.

Smart cities The model of the smart city has become synonymous with the modernity of urban space. As a consultant for the think tank of the Institute for Constructive Capitalism at the University of Texas Austin in the 1980s (only a decade after the heyday of Ekistics), Sheridan Tetsuo proclaimed that all places should attempt to emulate Silicon Valley.24 The notion of a wired city, part of a global network of advanced information and communication exchanges, became a capitalist utopia that promised “inclusiveness in access to digital technologies.”25 Today, we can perceive that this promise has not rolled out the way it may have intended. Wealth disparity increases, access to digital technologies is not a level playing field, and havens of tech start-up companies, like Silicon Valley, are also hotbeds of gentrification, attracting wealthy investors and causing rents to increase exponentially. For an existing city to announce that it is commissioning proposals for smart city innovations becomes a stimulus for competition, namely for financial investments and attracting certain types of qualified workers. It is predicted that the smart city market will be valued at US$1.565 trillion by 2020, and by 2025 more than 26 “Global Cities” are predicted to become Smart Cities, with roughly 58% of the world’s population (4.6 billion people) living in urban areas.26 This proclivity for competition and investment makes smart cities especially attractive as capitalist utopias. The market for the Internet of Things, as well as for the development of management applications, delivers opportunities for constant and steady revenue streams for firms by issuing contracts with governments. Cities are thus transformed into “machines for living,” vehicles of relatively utopian thinking “based on technological fixes for those aspects of urban settlement and the concentration of human beings that make for human frustration and slow the flow of goods and services.”27 It is, however, largely agreed upon that the technologies posited by and for smart cities as “fixes” to improve quality of life in urban areas are ill-suited as solutions for what is truly at the core of those problems: wealth inequality, gentrification, dispossession, poverty, and homelessness (to name a few). As Amy Glasmeier and Susan Christopherson write in their introductory essay for an issue of the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society on smart cities: “Poverty is not on the agenda of smart city planners. They may solve traffic problems, but it is not clear how they will regenerate

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divestment.”

schools

or

find

ways

to

include

neighbourhoods

facing

It is often the modus operandi of capitalist society to vilify those who

find themselves in situations of precariousness and dispossession, rather than to

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attempt any real remedy of the conditions that lead to those situations. This is, in large part, attributable to those modern ideals of individualism and competitiveness which sit at the heart of capitalism. Glasmeier and Christopherson note that many proposed smart city innovations operate on the assumption that each resident of a city has a smartphone and uses it to its full potential. This assumption means that “smart city innovations being developed for high-prosperity cities are light years ahead of the fundamental needs of most of the world’s urban populations.”29 Dhaka, Bangladesh, one of the world’s largest and most densely populated cities, hosted Smart City Week in 2017 to “focus on building people-centred cities by not only investing in technology and infrastructures alone but also engaging smart people who care.”30 However, Dhaka does not even have maps of its transit systems, which is a particularly illustrative example of how these blanket proposals for new technological mediations in urban life do not account for the uneven playing field of access. While unquestionably not a cutting edge technology by any means in our contemporary world, the absence of even an analog transit map conceals the territory of the city and thus tells an important story of how far we really are from “making technology available for the purposes of basic navigation.”31 What becomes clear from examples like this is how dependent smart city technology as utopianism really is on assuming sameness and ignoring heterogeneity. Large swathes of the urban population are not consulted or considered in the decision-making of what would actually improve the quality of urban life – particularly the elderly, poor, and disabled. Is technological access really being promised to everyone? Does the smart city continue to exclude significant groups of people in society by design? Inevitably, the actual “smartness” of a smart city is stratified among its own residents, since not everyone begins with the same resources.

Superstudio At the forefront of what came to be known as Italian Radical Architecture, an architectural design collective by the name of Superstudio emerged in Florence in 1966. None of their concepts or designs were ever realized into architectural projects, though they conceived of grandiose, world-embracing utopias with a hint of parody at the expense of globalization and capitalist consumerism. By continuing to call themselves “architects,” with no real-world architecture to show for it, the collective was often criticized for “vocal nihilism” and “juvenile provocation.”32 Superstudio’s attitude of “abstaining” from (architectural) work follows in a framework of Italian Leftism and labour thought, particularly the movements of Operaismo (Workerism) and Autonomia (Autonomism).33 For many architects, there were only two options from which to choose: either agree to build elegant villas for the nouveau riche, or otherwise work for wealthy developers in order to build modern condominiums. Instead, Superstudio sought a revolutionary compromise from these limitations. The two aforementioned options represented cities in the throes of advanced late capitalism with

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its propensity for completely dominating public and private life. They represented disenfranchisement, exclusion, and gentrification under the guise of beautification and modernization. The Marxist architect and critic Manfredo Tafuri condemned the strategies of his peers as “philosophical navel-gazing.”34 Namely, Tafuri maintained that any “critique of capitalism could only be produced from within, from the categories and forms through which intellectuals were – consciously or unconsciously – culturally mediating the effects of continued capitalist production or participating in its reifications.”35 As such, architectural production could not be effective as a leftist critique of capitalism without advancing through the channels of the system itself; any position taken outside remains outside. This is, of course, a serious paradox. It can certainly be argued that any critique of a system, created by participating in the very confines of that system, only manages to be swallowed whole and eventually does not perform any critique at all. This is especially true given the nature of capitalist enterprises to effectually incorporate strategies of resistance for their own advancement, and to simultaneously dull the power of these strategies in themselves. How, then, does design implement insurrection? How can we reconsider what constitutes architectural labour in the sense of actually offering prototypes for structural change? Superstudio labelled their critical endeavour as “evasion design,” an attempt to “introduce foreign bodies into the system.”36 The group’s most notable work, The Continuous Monument: An Architectural Model for Total Urbanization (1969–1970), was created as a series of conceptual collages showing a sleek, grid-like megastructure embracing the planet. It was a pure, flat landscape with everything humans need to survive. In their own sardonic way, Superstudio created a parody of globalization; the way the phenomenon had been progressing by the 1970s we may as well have been living in a single, unnamed megastructure removed of our local cultures. This unifying act was Superstudio’s attempt at a negative utopia. Returning to the idea of globalization as emerging within the transformation from feudalism to modernity, Superstudio uses its Continuous Monument to exemplify the systematic consolidation of all societies on earth into an interconnected totality amidst the legacies of capitalism and colonialism.

“Black hole capitalism” At this juncture between the caricature utopia of Superstudio’s Continuous Monument and the real life endeavours at creating technological utopias in smart cities, in which every person is faithfully and consistently connected to government and corporate services via the Internet and other centralized amenities, we are confronted with the disillusionments of increased urbanization. The notion of “black hole capitalism” maintains planetary urbanization as a condition of “implosion–explosion,” in which utopian fantasies perform as filling empty spaces of capital while “ultimately [being] undermined by the chaotic forces that they conceal.”37 Constructing “real” utopias

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becomes crucial at this stage, at which the aggregations of capitalist organization “threaten to obliterate all social life.”38 This phenomenon of “capitalist agglomeration” privileges the urban over the rural such that the rural may at some point completely cease to exist. Globalization favours urban space for its proximities of centralized services, government offices, and shopping centres, and for its population densities. Planetary urbanization, therefore, renovates the world to become a “machine for the endless valorization of value,” while the fantasies of neoliberal capitalism “despatializ[e] the real globe, replacing the curved earth with an almost extensionless point.”39 Aside from taking literally the etymology of utopia as “no place,” this phenomenon mirrors what Superstudio’s hyperbolic megastructure ultimately did by rendering the globe an anonymous, despatialized totality. Throughout its lifespan, capitalism has inspired many fantasies of utopia. Largely, these fantasies encompass “perfectly ordered cities that do not merely remain ‘on paper’, but that are endowed with the social power to transform reality in their image.”40 There is, however, often a communal, tangible fear that undergirds these utopias and their founders, such as the fear of insurrection or the devastation of climate change. The former being the fear beneath Le Corbusier’s utopian designs in the 1920s, the latter the task of sustainable architecture in the so-called eco-city. All society-building projects are embedded with certain strategies of denial or suppression to ensure their survival in the face of criticism and dissent, such that those who live in these societies are encouraged to be complicit in upholding the rhetorics of a status quo that must persist by any means. As Ross Adams argues regarding the ideologies of the eco-city, it should be rather evident to us that it functions as a BandAid solution and does not allow us to “confront the true terrors of ecological catastrophe,” since that would require confronting how global capitalism has, by and large, contributed significantly to the situation.41 Principally, this is a factor that technoutopianism and smart cities are apt to ignore, since their existence rests chiefly on the acceptance that we can solve our ecological crises by using innovation and “green” technologies, rather than scaling back our reliance on technological advancement altogether. There is an element of this in Superstudio’s Continuous Monument, such that the natural environment has been subsumed by the megastructure, but, inside, people are seen living rather simple lives without technology. The many failed utopian projects throughout history, from the socialist, communist, totalitarian, to the capitalist, show the difficulty that comes with asserting that there is somehow one conception of a society that is the right one. The smart city functions largely as capitalism’s most contemporary utopia, bringing to life the ideals of technological utopian thinking, attempting to save the world through technological mediation. While many societies have endeavoured to create their own utopias by designing closed societies that enforce adherence to prescribed behaviours with the threat of severe punishment or exile, capitalism has embraced the interconnectedness of globalization as a means of bringing opportunity and abundance to the world through trade and consumption. Though some claim that globalization ushers in the possibility for an equal distribution of rights, freedom, and market participation, we can see how that cannot possibly be true if capitalism necessitates sovereignty. It

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demands that some individuals “win” while others are made to hope they can eventually be winners as well. The smart city has not succeeded in solving issues like poverty and exploitation, as they often reproduce the very alienation they claim to be able to overcome. Large swathes of urban populations remain dispossessed when they were not the intended receivers of the “solution” in the first place. Planetary urbanization is sold as a solution while simultaneously obfuscating its purpose of maintaining a status quo, as well as eliding the real sources of the problems it claims to solve. Utopian fantasies are multifaceted, and in some cases seemingly contradictory, since there is little honesty about the real causes of the challenges that a utopian society would hope to overcome. Capitalism posits itself as the only system we have, given the failure of everything else. Various examples show us that the system is designed to subsume all utopian ideology into itself. Utopias and dystopias are always a tip-toe away from one another, and deciding which has been established is a matter of persuasion. Very often, in response to critiques of capitalism to diagnose the underlying causes of social problems, we are asked what prescriptions or solutions we would offer in its place. Given what is not just a tendency, but a key feature of capitalist ideology to neutralize the power of dissent or radical thinking, how enthusiastic can we really be to offer up more alternatives for positive projects that result in real structural reform? Anything that challenges or complicates a view of the situated world is often too radical, too optimistic, too unrealistic. Perhaps we should rework this concept of utopia altogether, given its myriad contradictions, and strive for the solutions that are truly people-centered, robust and nuanced, and aimed at doing the least amount of harm in both the short and long term.

Notes 1 Frederic Jameson, Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One (London: Verso, 2011), 7. 2 Martin Meyerson, “Utopian Traditions and the Planning of Cities,” Daedalus 90:1 (Winter 1961): 180. Available online: www.jstor.org/stable/20026647. 3 Ibid., 180–181. 4 Ibid., 184. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 185. 7 Lewis Mumford, The Story of Utopias (New York, Boni and Liveright, 1941), 248, quoted in Meyerson, 186. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future (London: Verso, 2005), 4–5. 11 Ibid., xi. 12 Patrick Hayden and Chamsy el-Ojeili, eds, Globalization and Utopia (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 6. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Patrick Hayden, “Globalization, Reflexive Utopianism, and the Cosmopolitan Social imaginary,” in Globalization and Utopia, 52–55. 16 Ibid., 55. 17 Ibid. 18 Slavoj Žižek, “Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism”, New Left Review 225 (September–October 1997): 36–37, quoted in Hayden and el-Ojeili, 185.

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19 Mark Wigley, “Network Fever,” Grey Room 4 (Summer 2001): 84. Available online: www.jstor.org/ stable/1262560. 20 Ibid., 86. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 97. 24 Amy Glasmeier and Susan Christopherson, “Thinking about smart cities,” Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 8:1 (2015): 3. Available online: doi:10.1093/cjres/rsu034. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 4. 27 Ibid., 5. 28 Ibid., 6. 29 Glasmeier and Christopherson, “Thinking about smart cities,” 8. 30 See www.bd.udnp.org/content/bangladesh/en/home/presscenter/pressreleases/2017/11/13/smartcity-week-2017-for-co-creating-smart-cities-in-bangladesh.html. 31 Ibid. 32 Ross K. Elfline, “Superstudio and the ‘Refusal to Work’,” Design and Culture 8:1 (2016): 56. Available online: doi:10.1080/17547075.2016.1142343. 33 Ibid., 57. 34 Ibid., 60. 35 Pier Vittorio Aureli, “Recontextualizing Tafuri’s Critique of Ideology,” Log 18 (2010): 89–90, quoted in Elfline, 60. 36 Ibid., 60–61. 37 Japhy Wilson and Manuel Bayón, “Black hole capitalism: Utopian dimensions of planetary urbanization” City 20:3 (2016): 350. Available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2016.1166701. 38 Ibid., 350. 39 Ibid., 355. 40 Ibid., 356. 41 Ibid.

Bibliography Elfline, Ross K. “Superstudio and the ‘Refusal to Work’.” Design and Culture 8:1 (2016): 55–77. Available online: doi:10.1080/17547075.2016.1142343. Glasmeier, Amy and Susan Christopherson. “Thinking about Smart Cities.” Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 8:1 (2015): 3–12. Available online: doi:10.1093/cjres/rsu034. Hayden, Patrick and Chamsy el-Ojeili, eds 2009. Globalization and Utopia: Critical Essays. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Jameson, Frederic. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso. Jameson, Frederic. 2011. Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One. London: Verso. Meyerson, Martin. “Utopian Traditions and the Planning of Cities.” Daedalus 90:1 (Winter 1961): 180–193. Available online: www.jstor.org/stable/20026647. Van der Veer, Peter. “The Future of Utopia.” History and Anthropology 27:3 (2016): 251–262. Available online: doi:10.1080/02757206.2016.1167051. Wigley, Mark. “Network Fever.” Grey Room 4 (Summer 2001): 82–122. Available online: www.jstor.org/ stable/1262560. Wilson, Japhy and Manuel Bayón. “Black Hole Capitalism: Utopian Dimensions of Planetary Urbanization.” City 20:3 (2016): 350–367. Available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2016.1166701.

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Chapter 6

The metaphor of the city as a thinking machine A complicated relationship and its backstory Sonja Hnilica

Introduction In the 1970s, Swiss architect Fritz Haller designed a city plan inspired by the photograph of a computer chip. A few years later, the American science-fiction-author William Gibson dreamed that “all the data in the world [were] stacked up like one big neon city”.1 These are but two examples that show the strong metaphorical connection between cities and computers. In fact, the term “smart city” is currently one of the most dominant metaphors in interpreting the postindustrial city, linking cities to thinking machines. While sometimes we think of hardware and other times of software, more often than not it remains unclear whether we should think of the city as a microchip or code, as there are numerous related phrases that have been coined, such as Digital City, Wired City or Programmable City.2 Cities, as I have shown in my previous work, can never be thought of without using metaphors.3 In the past, architects have thought of the city as a house of many rooms, a landscape, an artwork, a palimpsest, a theater or an organism with a heart, lungs and veins – to give just a few examples. In the book Metaphors We Live By (1980), George Lakoff and Mark Johnson claim that metaphors are not merely a linguistic matter but a crucial element of thinking. As such, they have demonstrated that metaphorical relations produce analogies that, inevitably, structure our realms of experience and, hence, construct reality. Furthermore, they claim that “[n]ew metaphors have the power to create a new reality,” which “can begin to happen when we

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start to comprehend our experience in terms of a metaphor, and it becomes a deeper reality when we begin to act in terms of it.”4 In this sense, metaphors can be selffulfilling prophecies. Thinking in metaphors is of special importance during creative processes. Max Black has suggested that “every metaphor is the tip of a submerged model.”5 It certainly makes a difference if we think about a squatter settlement as an ulcer (that might turn out to be terminal cancer for the city-organism as a whole), or if we imagine it as a natural habitat (whose fragile ecological balance is not to be disturbed). As metaphors always establish two-way relations, the “smart city” metaphor affects our concepts of “cities” as well as of “thinking” and “machines,” since it connects these three concepts: city – machine – living (and thinking) person. Therefore, while during the past 100 years all three concepts have undergone substantial changes due to the industrial and the digital revolution, there is reason to believe that we are facing another shift right now. This chapter traces the history of this complex threesome relation, as the critical evaluation of the metaphor might be helpful to untangle the long-grown and complicated relationship. The shifts and transfers of meaning will be presented in five steps: the city as a machine, the city as a living machine, the city as a thinking machine, intelligent systems and, finally, clouds.6

The city as a machine A machine is generally understood as a man-made technical system that converts, transports or stores either substances, energy or information. Mechanical machines convert energy into motion. Such machines were constructed long before industrialization. For example, Leonardo da Vinci invented water pumps and strange apparatuses that would fulfill the old human dream of flying. Machines have always been sources of metaphors, with the ancient philosopher Lucretius speaking of the machina mundi. In the Middle Ages, the cosmos as a machine became an important theological metaphor, motivated by the mechanical clockworks that had been introduced in the 14th century.7 The regularity of their gait and the seamless meshing of the cogs and springs predestined clockworks to be used as a metaphor for the divine universe. This metaphor permeated theological dogmas and emerging scientific views, thus only gaining in importance throughout the following centuries. The naturalist Robert Boyle found in 1686 that the universe was as cleverly designed by its creator as the clock of the Strasbourg Cathedral.8 Finally, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz took up the clockwork metaphor once again in 1715 by describing the “world clock” (Weltuhr) as a great city.9 Despite its prior use, the heyday of the machine metaphor in urban planning and design started with industrialization, as architects of the early 20th century commonly referred to steam engines, locomotives, cars and factories. The steam engine was the

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symbol of the industrial revolution par excellence, even if later being displaced by the combustion engine and electricity. Modern architects admired machines for their efficiency and strength – and for the function-derived form beyond the traditional artistic canon. The dramatically increased efficiency of these new machines did not only revolutionize the production of goods, it also went hand in hand with a profound transformation of society and massive city growth. The Berlin City Councillor Martin Wagner wrote in 1929: “This mass that we have to shape today in the form of residential houses […] wants to appear fatless, like an airplane, a locomotive, an engine, etc.”10 Le Corbusier developed paradigmatic designs combining grid plans with freestanding skyscrapers and highways like Ville Contemporaine (1922), which Stanislaus von Moos has interpreted as a “giant motor, an accumulator of sorts or an air-filtering device” and a “colossal industrial plant with a huge assembly line in its central axis.”11 Interestingly, despite this powerful reinterpretation of the machine metaphor, the much older theologically inspired movement association also survived. Le Corbusier wrote in Urbanisme (1925): “Men, in general, like the cogs of a wheel, appear to follow a path carefully marked for them. Their work is regular, […] their time-table is inexorable and exact.”12 Obviously, the newly introduced levels of meaning in traditional metaphors does not mean that the old meanings are extinguished completely at the same time. The metaphor of the city as a machine implies that instead of artistarchitects, it is engineer-architects who are necessary for the city. Most notably, in his famous book Space, Time and Architecture (1941), Sigfried Giedion approached the “City as a Technical Problem.”13 This formulation clearly expressed the conviction of modernity that a city – like every other problem – can be precisely defined scientifically and solved by technical means. The architect’s fascination with the metaphor continued, even as machines changed yet another time. In the 1960s, Swiss architect Fritz Haller, who is mostly known for his furniture designs, became fascinated by microchips and collected magnifications of fingernail-sized silicon platelets to admire their structure. He not only explained that the structure of a chip was like the structure of a house,14 but took those graphic-spatial arrangements as models for the construction of entire cities. Eventually, he developed a city for 120 million inhabitants (Figure 6.1) based on those structures titled “E4.”15 At the time when Haller was developing his vision, this idea was actually already quite controversial. In her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), journalist Jane Jacobs described Le Corbusier not as a bold technician who was solving humanity’s problems, but as a child who used technical toys to court his mother’s attention.16 Jacobs stressed that large cities were much more complex than the modern avant-garde intended them to be.17

The city as a living machine Just as Le Corbusier described Paris as an “engine which is seized,” in the same breath he compared urban transport systems to human blood circulation, referring to an

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Figure 6.1 City for 120 million inhabitants, Fritz Haller, 1968. © gta Archiv ETH Zurich

illustration from an anatomy book.18 His machine metaphor is thus overlaid by the notion that the city is a living being. The Bauhaus teacher Hannes Meyer became even more explicit in 1928 as he aimed to transform residential buildings into a “residential machinery, […] a biological apparatus for mental and physical needs.”19 Since it is generally understood that natural organisms grow by themselves, while technical apparatuses are man-made, is there an explanation for this crooked metaphor?

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Interestingly, the concept of a “biological apparatus” has been quite familiar also for physicians. In 1926 the physician Fritz Kahn published a series of very popular illustrated books entitled Das Leben des Menschen, visualizing biological processes as technical processes. One of his most famous plates, “Man as Industrial Palace” (Mensch als Industriepalast) explains human metabolism by depicting a human being as a factory in which loads of small oxygen balls are transported from cable cars to a piston engine (the heart). One must consider the reciprocity of the metaphor. Max Black has pointed out that strong metaphors do not simply reflect existing “similarities,” rather, they create them in the first place by relating different things to each other in a process of interaction (Black calls them “interaction metaphors” instead of mere “comparison metaphors”).20 Obviously, the connecting similarity between a living organism and a machine is the perfect coordination of a large number of individual parts. The origin of the word from the Greek organon (tool) makes it clear that living beings are thought of as a hierarchically structured system consisting of several organs which, like a perfectly constructed machine, form a whole that is more than the sum of its parts.21 There is much more to say about organisms, but that would go far beyond the scope of this chapter. We are now moving on to the last relationship in our metaphorical triangle: having started with city-machines, and discussed machine-bodies, we are now finally arriving at body-cities. The latter analogy has the longest tradition, being traced back to antiquity. Nearly 2,500 years ago, Plato compared the human body with a fortified city.22 Architect Francesco di Giorgio Martini formulated the idea more precisely in the 15th century, claiming that a city should be organized like the body of a man: the head (the castle) is governing the body (city). The cathedral is the heart and the market square is the navel, feeding the city (Figure 6.2).23 This idea of organic structuring remained important throughout the 20th century, as we can see, for example, in the famous Plano Piloto (1957) designed by Lucio Costas for Brasília. The plan looks like a flying bird with the civic center as a head and torso while the wings are the living quarters. (Or might it rather be an airplane? – I leave it up to you!) Anyway, the metaphor of the city as an anatomically structured body naturalizes hierarchical differences, especially if we think of the city as a polis, as a city-state. The head is ruling the limbs, and that seems quite logical. The city- or state-body analogy was updated in the medical world toward the end of the 19th century with the introduction of cell theory. Physician Rudolf Virchow imagined the body as a liberal state in 1858 in which the many cells of the human organism are, so to speak, the citizens, independent individuals, of which the “republic,” respectively the body, is composed.24 Virchow’s idea was soon reflected in urbanism: the image of a cell-organized city goes well with very large cities or urbanized regions without a clear center or clearly defined boundaries, consisting of many more or less independent neighborhoods or satellite towns. A good example is the Greater London Plan (1943), presented by Patrick Abercrombie who, inspired by the garden city movement, intended to decentralize people and industry within the region.25

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Figure 6.2 Anthropomorphic town plan, Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Trattati di architettura, ingegneria e arte militare, Cod. Saluzziano, 15th century. © Biblioteca Reale, Turin

The city as a thinking machine But we need to come back to the relationship between bodies and machines. I have emphasized the similarities so far, but there are also significant differences. When the philosopher René Descartes wrote about a “body machine” (la machine du corps

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humain) in 1641, he actually wanted to underline the difference between human beings and machines.26 Descartes was convinced that consciousness dwells in the human body, whereas a machine cannot think and has no will of its own. As such, a machine fully obeys the will of those who use it. Imagining the body as a machine is thus emphasizing the Cartesian separation between body and mind (whereby the mind is always thought to dominate the body). This understanding of body/machine and mind stayed more or less the same throughout the industrial age. But whether a city machine should or should not have a consciousness (or a soul), architects did not quite agree. At the turn of the century, many contemporaries complained about the “soullessness” of the huge modern city extensions. Egon Friedell, for example, praised the young and fast-growing Berlin as a “wonderful machine hall” and a “huge electric motor” which, however, still lacked the soul.27 In the urban literature of the early 20th century, the trope of a monstrous city machine that had gone out of control and suddenly developed its own will became common. This myth summed up the fear of the tremendous dynamism of the rapid city growth in the industrial age. Thea von Harbous’ novel Metropolis (the same-titled movie was directed by her husband Fritz Lang two years later, in 1927) is a prominent example, describing Metropolis as a “great, glorious, dreadful city,” a huge monster that “roars and proclaims that it is hungry for new human marrow and brain, and the living fodder rolls like a stream into the machine rooms.”28 Perhaps surprisingly, this notion is also important for the metropolitan machine metaphors of modern avant garde architects. Le Corbusier foretold: “The city which is to be will contain in itself a formidable mechanism, a powerful force, a workshop containing innumerable and precise implements, a harnessed tempest.”29 Eventually, for Le Corbusier to give shape to a growing city, meant to deliver a “formidable battle” in which decisions [were] reached in a sort of frantic haste in order, as it were, to hold a wild beast at bay. That BEAST is the great city. It is infinitely more powerful that all these devices. And it is just beginning to wake.30 A similarly combative metaphor had previously been used by Georges-Eugène Haussmann, whose urban design Le Corbusier greatly admired. Haussmann wrote in his Mémoires in 1893 that he had slashed the city’s “stomach” by means of a large, central corridor and, in his own words, “gutted” it.31

Intelligent systems The trope of the fascinatingly eerie city monster has been enriched in recent decades by the facet of cyborg city, referring to the idea of man as cybernetic hybrids of organisms and machines, as Donna Haraway formulated it in 1985.32 But this line of argument shall not be pursued here. However, talking about intelligent machines

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today, everybody thinks of computers or smartphones or swarm intelligence. “Intelligence” in this context means to recognize patterns and to adjust accordingly through algorithms. The perception of machines has changed so drastically that one does not even speak of “machines” anymore but of “technical systems”. As early as the end of the 1930s, the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy had demanded that, in view of the development of computers, it was necessary to start thinking in “systems.”33 Since then, “complex systems” described phenomena as diverse as the spreading dynamics of epidemics and social relations in large organizations. In 1947, Norbert Wiener coined the term “cybernetics” to describe information processing in adaptive systems that keep themselves in balance via feedback loops.34 In the information age, the thinking machine is no longer a contradiction in terms. On the contrary, the control of complex processes is no longer conceivable without intelligent machines. It is crucial for our concerns that the Internet, cities, and living organisms have been interpreted in terms of a system. The city became a metaphor for computer networking at a time when the World Wide Web was still a bold vision of the future. As previously mentioned, William Gibson dreamed in the 1980s that “all the data in the world [was] stacked up like one big neon city, so [one] could cruise around and have a kind of grip on it.”35 Gibson fits in to a long tradition of interpreting a city’s architecture as a memory-like storage medium. While this subject is far more complex, for our purposes it will suffice to discuss only some parts of it.36 Cities are able to pass on complex cultures from generation to generation thanks to their storage facilities in buildings, street patterns, monuments and so on.37 Conversely, philosophers since antiquity have used the city as a metaphor to describe cognitive aspects of memory.38 Cultural scientist Aleida Assman has stressed that memory – just like the city – is generally thought of in metaphors due to its complexity (e.g., as a wax tablet, archive, photographic film, book, or more recently as computerized). Typically, this notion is connected to the currently dominant storage technologies.39 Kirsten Wagner has emphasized that the desire to spatially arrange knowledge has also influenced actual urban designs, for example in the ideal cities of the Renaissance. Thus Johann Valentin Andreae’s design for Christianopolis (1619) displayed all existing knowledge encyclopedically in space in a strict geometric order, with the holy Bible as its center point.40 The basis for this is, on the one hand, the tradition of the ordered European city and, on the other hand, the idea that knowledge can be grasped in its entirety. In the early days of the Internet, the design of city-like computer-aided databases and communication networks were based on this tradition. Early examples include the Digital City Amsterdam (De Digitale Stad Amsterdam), an information network initiated by the municipality of Amsterdam in the mid-1990s (Figure 6.3), as well as an online service for Macintosh users.41 Program developers used the city as a model because it provided a set of generally understandable symbols and spatial arrangements to support an intuitive use, such as “squares” and “houses” or a “newsstand” and a “marketplace.”

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Figure 6.3 De Digitale Stad 3.0, Local Information Network for Amsterdam, 1995. © Hart, Amsterdammuseum, 2014, (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 NL)

The web hosting service GeoCities, developed at the same time, used a similar spatial system on a larger scale, which was remarkably successful. Users placed their websites in thematically appropriate cities or places, such as “Nashville” for country music or “Capitol Hill” for politics. Most of these experiments were relatively short-lived. One can assume that a well-ordered European small town was not too suitable as a model for the exponentially growing Internet, with a never-ending amount of information offered by countless sources. But that, however, did not mean the end of the metaphorical relationship. In fact, the very opposite was the case, as the big city jungle corresponds very well to the extension and dissolution of knowledge. While searching for information one can be lost like the flaneurs in the streets of fin-de-siècle Paris. In his novel Neuromancer, published in 1984, William Gibson coined the metaphor of the “Cyberspace” as “a consensual hallucination […] by billions of operators” that became crucial for the common understanding of the Internet.42 He imagines some kind of visualization that would formally group all the world’s data in such a way that users could move between them like in the streets of an endless megalopolis: “Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.” Gibson’s idea is supported by the visual similarity between computer code flickering across screens and citylights. The nocturnal skylines of American or Asian metropolises, composed of countless illuminated skyscrapers, have been aestheticized in many science fiction movies on artificial intelligence, from Blade Runner (1982) to Matrix (1999).

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Roads, public transport and other elements of a city’s infrastructure were, furthermore, interpreted as the connecting wires to the network city, while computer networks were seen as competing with architecture. In City of Bits (1995), William Mitchell expected that computer networks would change the very idea of a city, claiming that “[c]omputer networks become as fundamental to urban life as street systems. Memory and screen space become valuable, sought-after sorts of real estate. Much of the economic, social, political, and cultural action shifts into cyberspace.”43 Twenty years earlier, architects had been much more optimistic, dreaming of city buildings that worked like computer networks. The German architect Richard Dietrich developed the so-called METASTADT system. From a structural point of view, the METASTADT was a space grid made of precast steel parts from which large city-like structures could be constructed (Figure 6.4). The residents would be able to reassemble all elements by themselves. Dietrich explained his approach as follows: “Without major upfront investments, the urban construction system with all its load-bearing and expansion elements can be built up in an organism-like cellular growth process, expanded more and more, adapted to changing requirements and then continuously regenerated.”44 Architecture

Figure 6.4 Richard R. Dietrich, METASTADT Wulfen, photograph 1975. © Baukunstarchiv NRW

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is thus transformed into the technical part of a complex socio-technical system, formerly called “city”.45 As crazy as it sounds, Dietrich was one of the few architects who managed to realize a larger prototype. However, the daring experiment Metastadt Wulfen was demolished after only 12 years of service.46 Systems theory has paved the way for blurring more than ever the boundaries between the urban, machines, and organisms. Machine-cities would not be designed by one single architect, but “grow by themselves” like a living organism as a result of the individual activities of their numerous inhabitants. For architects, however, this poses a problem: strictly speaking, architects and planning experts would have abolished themselves with such a concept of self-construction. The nature of complex intelligent systems is that they are not organized hierarchically and do not respond to any external control, as they are by definition self-learning or adaptive.47

Fleeting clouds Apart from these architectural problems, however, it has become widely accepted among city planners that cities – especially from a sociological or economical perspective – can basically be interpreted as complex systems. The same can be said of the Internet. The debates among architects throughout the 1960s were not very different from the basic ideas of the early computer network communities. Back in the 1970s, many different individuals and small companies could work on it without any centralized authority, following the credo “rough consensus and running code.”48 This concept of dispersedness and flexibility is crucial for most of the socalled intelligent technologies of the 21st century: if today we think of computers, we think of smartwatches rather than mainframes. Smart devices need to be as mobile and as small as possible – engineers even work on tiny microsensors called smart dust.49 Back in 1991, computer scientist Mark Weiser coined the term ubiquitous computing and underlined how “[t]he most profound technologies are those that disappear.”50 Whereas in cyberspace human beings move into computer-generated settings (virtual reality), ubiquitous computing aims to integrate microcomputers into human reality. The image of dust and fog correlates with the relatively new but now omnipresent metaphor of cloud computing. Cloud technology seems to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time. (It should be noted here that cloud computing is, of course, not really an immaterial technology. It should only feel this way to its users. Smart watches, for example, require large technical infrastructures, but these material parts are usually hidden in remote places. The end devices are small, mobile, and their interfaces are easy to use, while the underlying technical infrastructure should remain obscured from its users.) Following the path of exploring metaphorical interactions of intelligent technologies and cities we have to ask if a city can be thought of as a data cloud? The Geographers Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift described cities in Cities. Reimagining the

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Urban (2002) as “a haze of software instructions.”51 What could that mean in technical terms? We might, for example, interpret cities as Internet of Things, where the urban environment is equipped with micro-sensors that translate all captured data available into a data cloud. Thus, a permanent interaction between city dwellers and the surrounding technology is created, in which city dwellers become part of the technical infrastructure of a city. From this perspective, all boundaries are blurring: the built urban space and even the bodies of the citizens are interpreted as components of an all-encompassing immaterial data network. This is a currently widespread notion of a “smart city,” but one that raises serious political problems. Do we really want citizens to have a purely passive role as data generators or wouldn’t it be much more desirable that they actively participate in the programming of their city (respectively their “cloud”)? Adam Greenfield has warned about the political implications of intelligent infrastructures: “Smart-city technologies mesh particularly well with an authoritarian government’s interest in monitoring dissenters, anticipating likely sources of resistance and forestalling or suppressing acts (or actors) perceived as challenging the government’s claim to legitimacy.”52 Conflicts of interest in which urban planning must take a political stand are obscured, as are economic interests. The first “intelligent” neighborhood of Toronto, Quayside, is built by the American Alphabet Holding Group. The future residents will generate gigantic amounts of data, worth billions of dollars, and their exploitation rights will probably lie with Alphabet – and its subsidiary Google. Siemens is working on its own greenfield smart cities such as Masdar City, as well as in the Viennese smart city district of Aspern, or in the “sustainable cities initiative” The Crystal in London. Leaving those considerations aside, the question still remains, can cloud computing be a model for the architecture of big cities? Clouds in the sky, with their complex geometric airiness and volatility, have been taken up by architects as a leading design metaphor quite often, even before the metaphor of cloud computing emerged.53 But it might be more than formal analogy that is at stake here. In an exhibition shown at TU Munich in 2017 titled “Does Permanence Matter? Ephemeral Urbanism,” the curators described ephemeral urbanism as the global form of settlement of the 21st century. Examples included religious festivals like the Qoyllur Rit’i Festival in the highlands of Peru (Figure 6.5), as well as informal trading places and refugee camps. Most of the examples were large agglomerations of temporary buildings without an overall design or a plan in the traditional sense. The means and methods of the Western tradition of urban design, which was the subtext, are no longer relevant for the development of megacities from a global perspective: “At a time, in which uncertainty is the new norm, urban attributes like reversibility and openness appear to be critical to a more sustainable form of urban development.”54 Rahul Mehrotra and Felipe Vera Cities pleaded for a more immaterial way of actually building cities when they underline that cities should “resemble and facilitate active fluxus in motion, rather than be limited by static, material configurations.” The metaphor of the intelligent cloud draws attention to the fact that in the age of digitalization, informal processes, in which an unmanageable number of unqualified people are involved, can be much more efficient than enterprises traditionally planned by experts. Projects such as Wikipedia, Google Earth, Uber, or Airbnb have shaken entire

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Figure 6.5 Temporal tent city for the Qoyllur Rit’i Festival in Peru, 2016. © AP Photo, Rodrigo Abd

industries. In planning, traditionally suspicious characteristics such as disorder, instability, improvization and above all the informal are turned into positives. The metaphor of the intelligent cloud surprisingly interrelates the latest smart technologies with the “low tech” shanty towns in the megacities of the global South, which have been usually marginalized in the West. In this way, the interaction initiated by the metaphor might contribute to the re-evaluation of the social and cultural capital of informal settlement structures. Actually, the interest in the informal urban condition has increased in a way in which it might be adequate to talk about a dawning paradigm shift.55 Certainly, the interest that some architects have recently developed in the cloud metaphor is first and foremost proof of their trust in so-called intelligent technologies. Perhaps it is of all things a high-tech fascination that leads to an interest in informal “low tech” urban planning, which could ultimately lead to a reformulation of smartness and urban norms in the global age. That might be a little bit ironic, but it would be also very typical for transfers of meaning via metaphorical interaction. Metaphors are rarely really logical and consistent, but that doesn’t make them any less effective.

Notes 1 William Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988), www.voidspace.org.uk/cyberpunk/monalisa.shtml. 2 See, for example: William J. Mitchell, City of Bits. Space, Place and the Infobahn, Cambridge, MA, 1995; Rob Kitchin, Martin Dodge, Code/Space. Software and Everyday Life, Cambridge, MA, 2011;

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3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

Anthony M. Townsend, Smart Cities. Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, New York, 2014; Antoine Picon, Smart Cities. A Spatialized Intelligence, Chichester, UK, 2015; Thérèse F. Tierney, Intelligent Infrastructure. Zip Cars, Invisible Networks, and Urban Transformation, Charlottesville, 2016. Sonja Hnilica, Metaphern für die Stadt. Zur Bedeutung von Denkmodellen in der Architekturtheorie, Bielefeld, 2012. George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, Chicago, 1980, p. 145. Max Black, “More about Metaphor.” In: Andrew Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and Thought, Cambridge, MA, 1993, pp. 19–41, p. 30. I would like to thank Veronika Stefanov for her helpful comments on the texts from the computer science perspective. This text is partly based on previous work: Hnilica 2012 and Sonja Hnilica, “Die Stadt als intelligente Maschine. Zum Eigenleben einer Metapher.” In: Common, 2015, No. 6, http:// commonthejournal.com/staedte-als-produzenten-von-geschichten/die-stadt-als-intelligente-maschinezum-eigenleben-einer-metapher. Vgl. Regine Kather, “Gottesgarten, Weltenrad und Uhrwerk. Bilder vom Kosmos,” 1995, www. forum-grenzfragen.de/downloads/kather_gottesgarten.pdf. Vgl. Robert Boyle, “A Free Inquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature.” In: The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, London, 1772, vol. 5, pp. 158–254, p. 163. Vgl. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, “Streitschriften zwischen Leibnitz und Clarke.” In: Hauptschriften zur Grundlegung der Philosophie, Hamburg, 1996, vol. 1, pp. 81–182, p. 87. Cf. Kather 1995. Quoted in Ludovica Scarpa, Martin Wagner und Berlin, Braunschweig/Wiesbaden, 1986, p. 42. Translation by the author. Stanislaus von Moos, “Le Corbusier, the monument and the metropolis.” In: Columbia Documents of Architecture and Theory: D, 1993, 3, pp. 115–137, p. 124f. Le Corbusier, The City of To-morrow and its Planning, New York, 1929, p. 46. Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, Cambridge, MA, 1974, p. 762. Haller 1978 in a lecture. Quoted in: Laurent Stalder, Georg Vrachliotis (eds), Fritz Haller. Architekt und Forscher, Zurich, 2015, p. 89. Fritz Haller, Bauten – Möbel – Forschung, Basel, 1989, p. 256. “His city was like a wonderful mechanical toy. […] It was so orderly, so visible, so easy to understand. […] No matter how vulgarized or clumsy the design, how dreary and useless the open space […] an imitation of Le Corbusier shouts, ‘Look what I made!’” Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, New York, 1992, p. 23. Cf. Jacobs 1992, S. 434, 376. Le Corbusier, The City of To-morrow and its Planning, New York, 1929, p. 94; Le Corbusier, Städtebau, Stuttgart, 1979, p. 259 (the illustration that is shown in the appendix of the German edition is not included in the American edition). Hannes Meyer, “Bauen.” In: Bauhaus, 1928, no. 2, pp. 12f. Emphasis in original. Translation by the author. Max Black, Models and Metaphors. Studies in Language and Philosophy, Ithaca, 1962, pp. 35–48. Cf. Hnilica 2012, p. 54ff. Cf. Platon, Timaios, 60a. Cf. Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Trattati di architettura, ingegneria e arte militare, Cod. Saluzziano, 148, fol. 3, Turin, Biblioteca Reale. Vgl. Kathrin Sander, Organismus als Zellenstaat. Rudolf Virchows Körper-Staat-Metapher zwischen Medizin und Politik, Univ.-Diss., Heidelberg, 2011. See Pauline van Roosmalen: “London 1944. Greater London Plan.” In: Koos Bosma, Helma Hellinga (eds), Mastering the City: North-European Town Planning 1900–2000, Rotterdam, 1997, pp. 258–265. René Descartes, Meditationes de Prima Philosophia. Meditationen über die Grundlagen der Philosophie, Meditation II, VI, 16. Egon Friedell, Ecce Poeta, Berlin 1912, p. 260. Translation by the author. Thea von Harbou, Metropolis, Frankfurt/M, 1984, p. 26. Translation by the author. Le Corbusier 1929, p. 64. Le Corbusier 1929, p. 164, 165. Georges Eugène Haussmann, Mémoires. Grands Travaux de Paris, Paris, 1893, p. 54. Matthew Gandy, “Cyborg Urbanization: Complexity and the Monstrosity in the Contemporary City.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2005, No. 29/1, pp. 26–49. Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory. Foundations, Development, Applications, New York, 1973, p. 3f. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Cambridge, MA, 1962. William Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive, 1988, http://www.voidspace.org.uk/cyberpunk/monalisa.shtml. Sonja Hnilica, “Gedächtnis Stadt. Eine schwierige Metapher.” In: Fakultät Architektur und Raumplanung (Hg.), Stadt: Gestalten. Festschrift für Klaus Semsroth, Vienna, 2011, pp. 10–15. See, for example, Lewis Mumford, Die Stadt. Geschichte und Ausblick, Cologne, 1963, p. 665.

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38 An ancient example is the mnemonics, the art of memory. Cicero recommended that the most important elements of a speech be presented as objects placed in a sequence of urban spaces. Around 1900, Sigmund Freud compared himself to an archaeologist who digs out buried memories like a buried city. Cf. Hnilica 2012, p. 210, 219. 39 Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses, Munich, 1999. 40 Cf. Kirsten Wagner, Datenräume, Informationslandschaften, Wissensstädte. Zur Verräumlichung des Wissens in der Computermoderne, Freiburg, Berlin, 2006, p. 349ff. 41 Cf. Wagner 2006, S. 335ff. 42 William Gibson, Neuromancer, 1984, http://vxheaven.org/lib/mwg01.html. Gibson coined the metaphor of cyberspace in 1982. The first half of the word refers to the term “cybernetics.” 43 William J. Mitchell, City of Bits. Space, Place and the Infobahn, Cambridge, MA, 1995, p. 107. 44 Richard R. Dietrich, “Metastadtprojekt 1 1965–66. Ein Beispiel.” Deutsche Bauzeitschrift, 1969, No. 1, pp. 18–21, p. 19. 45 Richard R. Dietrich, “Metastadt. Ein Versuch zur Theorie und Technik des Mensch-UmweltSystems.” Deutsche Bauzeitschrift, 1969, No. 1, pp. 4–17. 46 Cf. Sonja Hnilica, Der Glaube an das Große in der Architektur der Moderne. Großstrukturen der 1960er und 1970er Jahre, Zurich, 2018, pp. 158–162. 47 Cf. Hnilica 2018, pp. 162–175. 48 Townsend 2013, p. 109. 49 James Flint, “Smart Dust. Partikel, die Dich im Auge haben.” Telepolis, No. 8, September 1999, www.heise.de/tp/features/Smart-Dust-3444355.html. 50 Mark Weiser, “The Computer for the 21st Century.” Scientific American, September 1991, pp. 94–104. 51 Ash Amin, Nigel Thrift, Cities. Reimagining the Urban, Oxford, 2002, p. 125. 52 Adam Greenfield, Against the Smart City. The City is Here for You to Use, New York, 2013, p. 72. 53 Cf. Sonja Hnilica, “Urbane Gemische. Metaphorische Dimensionen des Vermengens.” Wolkenkuckucksheim, No. 35, 2016, pp. 51–67, p. 56, www.cloud-cuckoo.net/fileadmin/hefte_de/heft_35/ artikel_hnilica.pdf. 54 Rahul Mehrotra, Felipe Vera, “Ephemeral Urbanism.” In: Andres Lepik et al. (eds), Does Permanence Matter? Ephemeral Urbanism, Munich, 2017, p. 8. 55 Cf. Vyjayanthi Rao, “Slum as theory. Mega-Cities and Urban Models.” In: C. Greig Crysler et al. (eds), The Sage Handbook of Architectural Theory, Los Angeles, CA, 2012, pp. 671–686.

References Amin, Ash and Nigel Thrift. 2002. Cities. Reimagining the Urban. Oxford: Polity Press. Assmann, Aleida. 1999. Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses. Munich: Beck. Bertalanffy, Ludwig von. 1973. General System Theory. Foundations, Development, Applications. New York: George Braziller. Black, Max. 1962. Models and Metaphors. Studies in Language and Philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Black, Max. 1993. “More about Metaphor.” In: Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, pp. 19–41. Boyle, Robert. 1772. “A Free Inquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature.” In: The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, ed. Thomas Birch. London: J. and F. Rivington. Vol. 5, pp. 158–254. Descartes, René. 1992. Meditationes de Prima Philosophia. Meditationen über die Grundlagen der Philosophie. Hamburg: Felix Meiner. Dietrich, Richard R. 1969a. “Metastadt. Ein Versuch zur Theorie und Technik des Mensch-UmweltSystems.” Deutsche Bauzeitschrift. No. 1. pp. 4–17. Dietrich, Richard R. 1969b. “Metastadtprojekt 1 1965–66. Ein Beispiel.” Deutsche Bauzeitschrift. No. 1. pp. 18–21. Flint, James. 1999. “Smart Dust. Partikel, die Dich im Auge haben.” Telepolis, No. 8, September. www. heise.de/tp/features/Smart-Dust-3444355.html. Francesco di Giorgio Martini. 1967. Trattati di architettura, ingegneria e arte militare, Cod. Saluzziano 148. Milan: Il Polifilo. Friedell, Egon. 1912. Ecce Poeta. Berlin: S. Fischer. Gandy, Matthew. 2005. “Cyborg Urbanization: Complexity and the Monstrosity in the Contemporary City.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, No. 29/1, pp. 26–49. Gibson, William. 1984. “Neuromancer,” http://vxheaven.org/lib/mwg01.html. Gibson, William. 1988. “Mona Lisa Overdrive,” www.voidspace.org.uk/cyberpunk/monalisa.shtml.

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Giedion, Sigfried. 1974. Space, Time and Architecture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Greenfield, Adam. 2013. Against the Smart City. The City is Here for You to Use. New York: Do Projects. Haller, Fritz. 1989. Bauten – Möbel – Forschung. Basel: Birkhäuser. Harbou, Thea von. 1984. Metropolis. Frankfurt/M: Ullstein. Haussmann, Georges Eugène. 1893. Mémoires. Grands Travaux de Paris. Paris: Hachette. Hnilica, Sonja. 2011. “Gedächtnis Stadt. Eine schwierige Metapher. “In: Stadt: Gestalten. Festschrift für Klaus Semsroth, ed. Fakultät Architektur und Raumplanung. Vienna: Springer, pp. 10–15. Hnilica, Sonja. 2012. “Metaphern für die Stadt. Zur Bedeutung von Denkmodellen in der Architekturtheorie.” Bielefeld: transcript. Hnilica, Sonja. 2015. “Die Stadt als intelligente Maschine. Zum Eigenleben einer Metapher.” Common, No. 6, http://commonthejournal.com/staedte-als-produzenten-von-geschichten/die-stadt-als-intelli gente-maschine-zum-eigenleben-einer-metapher. Hnilica, Sonja. 2016. “Urbane Gemische. Metaphorische Dimensionen des Vermengens.” Wolkenkuckucksheim, No. 35, pp. 51–67, www.cloud-cuckoo.net/fileadmin/hefte_de/heft_35/artikel_hnilica.pdf. Hnilica, Sonja. 2018. Der Glaube an das Große in der Architektur der Moderne. Großstrukturen der 1960er und 1970er Jahre. Zurich: Park Books. Jacobs, Jane. 1992. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Vintage Books. Kather, Regine. 1995. “Gottesgarten, Weltenrad und Uhrwerk. Bilder vom Kosmos.” www.forum-grenzfragen. de/downloads/kather_gottesgarten.pdf. Kitchin, Rob and Martin Dodge. 2011. Code/Space. Software and Everyday Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Le Corbusier. 1929. The City of To-Morrow and Its Planning. New York: Payson & Clarke. Le Corbusier. 1979. Städtebau. Stuttgart: DVA. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. 1996. “Streitschriften zwischen Leibniz und Clarke.” In: Hauptschriften zur Grundlegung der Philosophie, eds. Artur Buchenau und Ernst Cassirer. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, Vol. 1. pp. 81–182. Rahul Mehrotra, Felipe Vera. 2017. “Ephemeral Urbanism.” In: Does Permanence Matter? Ephemeral Urbanism, eds Andres Lepik, Marcelo Della Giustina, and Chiara Ursini. Munich: Technical University of Munich, Architekturmuseum, pp. 8–23. Meyer, Hannes. 1928. “Bauen.” Bauhaus, No. 2, pp. 12f. Mitchell, William J. 1995. City of Bits. Space, Place and the Infobahn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Moos, Stanislaus von. 1993. “Le Corbusier, the monument and the metropolis.” Columbia Documents of Architecture and Theory: D, 3. pp. 115–137. Mumford, Lewis. 1963. Die Stadt. Geschichte und Ausblick. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. Picon, Antoine. 2015. Smart Cities. A Spatialized Intelligence. Chichester, UK: Wiley. Platon. 1994. “Sämtliche Werke,” vol. 4: Timaios, Kritias, Minos, Nomoi. Reinbeck/Hamburg: Rohwolt. Rao, Vyjayanthi. 2012. “Slum as Theory. Mega-Cities and Urban Models.” In: The Sage Handbook of Architectural Theory, eds C. Greig Crysler, Stephen Cairns, and Hilde Heynen. Los Angeles, CA: Sage, pp. 671–686. Roosmalen, Pauline van. 1997. “London 1944. Greater London Plan.” In: Mastering the City. NorthEuropean Town Planning 1900–2000, eds. Koos Bosma and Helma Hellinga. Rotterdam: Nai Pub, pp. 258–265. Sander, Kathrin. 2011. “Organismus als Zellenstaat. Rudolf Virchows Körper-Staat-Metapher zwischen Medizin und Politik.” PhD-Diss, Heidelberg. Scarpa, Ludovica. 1986. Martin Wagner und Berlin. Braunschweig/Wiesbaden: Vieweg. Smart City. 2015, Decmber 15. “Smart City” [definition], https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_City. Stalder, Laurent and Georg Vrachliotis (eds). 2015. Fritz Haller. Architekt und Forscher. Zurich: gta Verlag. Tierney, Thérèse F. 2016. Intelligent Infrastructure. Zip Cars, Invisible Networks, and Urban Transformation. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Townsend, Anthony M. 2014. Smart Cities. Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Wagner, Kirsten. 2006. Datenräume, Informationslandschaften, Wissensstädte. Zur Verräumlichung des Wissens in der Computermoderne. Freiburg: Rombach. Weiser, Mark. 1991. “The Computer for the 21st Century.” Scientific American, September. pp. 94–104. Wiener, Norbert. 1962. Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Part II

Agency and control

Chapter 7

Hyperwwwork Is Alexa our new chief happiness officer? IoT and the logics of soft-production Adrien Grigorescu and Romain Curnier

From machine to mocha: learning from Superstudio In 1971, the Italian architecture collective Superstudio published “Twelve Cautionary Tales for Christmas,” better known as “Twelve Ideal Cities,”1 in which 12 illustrated novels investigate the relationship between mankind and architecture as a tool of political and economic oppression. Through exaggerated portraits of our contemporary condition and a description of the consequences that derive from their absolute application, these “Ideal Cities” offer a critical analysis of architecture as an embodiment of power. Through their content and their format, these 12 parables question architecture and its practice in a time marked by the decline of modernist principles. The 12 cities are not mutually exclusive but are to be read in their globality. It is their juxtaposition which reveals space as an instrument of power, giving the publication a sense of awareness and call for action.2 Hyperwwwork is the Master of Architecture diploma project of the authors, defended in June 2018 in the Digital Knowledge Department at ENSA Paris Malaquais, under the supervision of Mario Carpo, Jeremy Lecomte and Christian Girard. Inspired by the caricatural approach of Superstudio which focuses on the internal contradictions of an entrenched system, this project invites one, through historical analysis and prospective fictional thinking, to take a step back so as to evaluate the consequences and the risks deriving from the implementation of smart technologies. Using architecture, Hyperwwwork thus extrapolates a social, technical and architectonic context, channeled by regulations, ideologies, and aesthetics, in which these

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technologies are embedded. In order to shed light on existing phenomena otherwise hardly perceived, the project seeks to reveal the role of architecture in this new paradigm. However, while Superstudio favored a mechanical, physically constraining interpretation of control – therefore turning architecture into a machinic complex – Hyperwwwork considers architecture as the support of a new type of production and control, qualified as “soft.”

Harder, better, faster, worker The constant improvement of automation, coupled with global neoliberal policies, have made work necessary to the survival of the individual, thus allowing it to become an instrument of order and control. However, the networking of physical objects in the smartness paradigm (Figure 7.1) and data monetization radically changes our organization principles and methods, lifestyles and desires, up to the point of challenging the very idea of “work” and “labor.” With the introduction of high-resolution devices harvesting large-scale data and algorithmic management systems using technologies such as the blockchain or machine learning, the workplace (if not every connected place) becomes a space where constant performance and behavior monitoring turn every aspect of one’s life into an optimizable quantity – commodifying the self while paradoxically seeming to bring more freedom and self-control. But more than a simple container of such technologies, the architecture of the workplace and its principles of spatial organization themselves act as mechanisms of value creation and control. Since its birth in the late nineteenth century, the whitecollar workplace has constantly improved its efficiency in response to specific ecosystems defined, among others, by technological innovations, workers’ struggle, and design principles. Indeed, the first office buildings answered the need to separate management and administrative activities from industrial production, helped by the First Industrial Revolution. While the invention of the elevator, air conditioning, and artificial lighting turned the Typical Plan – and its ideology3 – into the dominant typology of the white-collar workplace in the twentieth century,4 the counterculture movement of the 1960s infiltrated office buildings, thus giving birth to multiple experimentations aimed at simultaneously improving workers’ efficiency and well-being – from furniture design to new organization models.5 The development of information and communication technology in a globalized service economy, and especially the ubiquity of the network, progressively spread work outside of the office. Most manual labor turned into cognitive labor, radically changing workers’ methods, lifestyles, and skills.6 Recently, the ability to collect and store data at a reduced cost marked a shift in economic models. By incorporating the accumulation and analysis of massive amounts of user data, firms are turning into platforms, providing an infrastructure for others to operate on – such as Facebook, Amazon, or Predix.7 Despite their differences, each of these platforms share the same goal: to mediate and monetize every

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Figure 7.1 Samples of the IoT ecosystem. Selection by the authors

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aspect of our lives. Initially supposed to “augment” our capacities, they progressively became a necessary intermediary for all the activities and interactions of everyday experience. In this context, the Internet of Things (IoT), understood as the network of physical objects, facilitates the harvesting, the analysis, and the monetization of data coming from multiple sources. Any connected space and the data it produces can then be used by these platforms to improve their competitivity through a better understanding of their operating processes or users’ profiles. There is a tendency to systematically incorporate the IoT into any digital service, from the optimization of the body and its biological processes to the predictive analysis of urban phenomena in the “smart city.”8 It suggests the transformation of every action or interaction into a valuable resource, despite the ethical implications inferred by new forms of labor, the erosion of privacy, or the integration of control into everyday life.9

Twelve ideal offices The compilation of around 60 remarkable historical workplaces since the birth of the “white-collar” led us to highlight four types of perceptual spaces which compose the traditional workplace: haven-space, collective-space, society-space, and mobilityspace. Haven-space encompasses all the spaces with which the worker interacts at the scale of the body – such as their workstation, but also all the spaces traditionally exempted of any productive role, such as the home. Collective-space includes all the shared workspaces, in which a group of workers address individual or collective tasks, as well as all the spaces dedicated to workers’ interaction and socialization. Society-space inscribes the worker in a mental space defining their relation to the company employing them or to society at large. Finally, mobility-space involves all the spaces used to connect the three others, such as corridors or lobbies. Drawing from the technical, historical, and statistical research, the “Twelve Ideal Offices” series, part of the Hyperwwwork project,10 explores the new forms of value creation brought about by the smartness paradigm and the role of architecture as a tool of control. By focusing on the four perceptual spaces mentioned above, as well as on interactions or behaviors which are usually not associated with value creation or control, the 12 speculative projects make use of plan drawings as an expression of spatiality to investigate the spatial logics prone to maximize the implementation of a smart object or IoT system, all the while emphasizing the trends associated with “smartness,” such as the quantified self, information monetization, custom space experience, or 24/7 activity.

Haven-space The distinction between production and reproduction in the industrial era erected the household as a haven, a space exempted from any productive quality. Progressively corporations began leveraging its codes, elements, and aesthetics, therefore

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transforming the workplace and work itself. Popularized by the Knoll Planning Unit in the 1970s, and followed by various attempts to mimic the comfort of the home – from Hertzberger’s Centraal Beheer (Figure 7.2A) to Robert Propst’s infamous Action Office or Pixar Headquarters in Emeryville (Figure 7.2B)11 – this quest to domesticate the workplace and offer a customized experience to the worker culminates with the smartness paradigm. Indeed, by collecting and analyzing personal data, the workplace environment tends to become more and more personal, allowing space to adapt to the individuals in presence. The so-called “responsive” architecture (such as the one proposed by Carlo Ratti for the design of the Agnelli Foundation HQ in 2017 – Figure 7.3A), offers a renewed experience of space, far from the simulacra of the corporate beanbag. Contemporary smart objects such as lightbulbs, fragrance diffusers, and emotional response monitors tend to reproduce a complex sensory environment with high-fidelity. Domestic comfort, well-being, and mindfulness become tools to stimulate productivity and efficiency – a tendency confirmed by the increasing predominance of yoga classes and meditation initiations in the corporate environment. Besides partaking in the domestication of the workplace, new technologies do not constrain work to a precise geographic location. Paradoxically it has been relocated into spaces dedicated to family or friendship. The practice of teleworking, popularized with the emergence of mobile phones and laptops in the 1990s, still appears as an alternative to the hierarchical oppression and surveillance of the workplace. However, it has its own economic advantages – from the reduction of a company’s assets to the creation of new rental markets such as coworking and coliving spaces (Figure 7.3B). If these new models appear as an ideal in the mind of most workers, it is precisely because of this mental association of the home and the café as spaces detached from any productive activity. But beyond the relocation of work activities to traditionally non-productive spaces, the multiple smart devices populating our homes and their importance in the information economy affirm the productive aspect of the household. From personal assistants such as the Google Home or Amazon Alexa to smart ovens, toothbrushes, and toilets, they redefine the idea of intimacy and the significance of architectural elements traditionally marking the limits between productive and non-productive spaces. In the “measurable (work)place,” the household itself and the biological processes of the bodies composing it become part of value creation, accentuating the interchangeability of the individual in the global information economy by dispossessing them from their domestic know-hows.

Collective-space The first offices were marked by the influence of Taylorism and its hierarchical organization principles (Figure 7.4A). But progressively, the “boss office” and the “executive floor” were dismissed for a more open and flexible organization model (both spatial and managerial), such as the office landscape invented by the consulting group Quickborner Team in Mannheim, Germany, in 1960 and implemented in numerous projects afterwards (Figure 7.4B).12 An increasing importance was given to interactions, with more and more spaces dedicated to socialization. But the lack of privacy

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Figure 7.2 Floor plan drawings of workplaces attempting to reproduce the comfort of the home environment. Drawn by the authors

Figure 7.3 Floor plan drawings of work environments redefined by the emergence of IoT. Drawn by the authors

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and the homogeneity of the open plan quickly got supplemented by a multitude of spaces with various qualities: meeting rooms, partitions, inside streets,13 or even virtual offices.14 With the rise of the information economy, collaboration and exchange superseded individual efficiency.15 The spatial and managerial organization, affirming the logics of the network, became nebulous, project-oriented, and horizontal, using a multiplicity of individual and customizable spaces, as well as collective, convivial spaces with various visual, acoustic, and tactile variations (Figure 7.4C).16 The “Cool Office” popularized by Google is still praised by many as the ultimate workplace.17 Increasingly, importance is given to “the community,” as it is in itself a space of thinking, sharing – and working. Various activities of “team building” reinforce the cohesion of the group, and the value of its interactions. But there is a weird paradox in the way the smartness paradigm shapes our experience of reality. What we perceive through our various interfaces is not a consistent representation of a stable reality, and the juxtaposition of multiple virtual layers (from augmented to virtual reality) progressively discard the possibility of a shared and common experience.18 The increasing customization of services are facilitated by the IoT, for example by allowing for a more precise geolocation using smart objects as beacons,19 or by capitalizing on a user’s data to better match an individual’s tastes and desires. But, at the same time, the quest for a collective experience, necessary to value creation and building of a community, seeks to please the highest number of participants – as is the case with “smart” speakers creating musical playlists according to the preferences of the users around it. Like our Facebook feed, our experience of reality becomes ever more custom, but ever more flattened in a shared consensus determined by algorithms, reviews, and programmers. This tendency to decentralization is reinforced with technologies such as the blockchain, praised as a trusted and transparent system to facilitate transactions (of money, or, more generally, information). But beyond its problematic ideological supposition on human nature, collectivity, and freedom,20,

21

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tralized communities foresees a complete monetization of interactions, the value of which must be quantified and evaluated according to a predefined method,22 inscribing the so-called community in a reputation system and monitoring as much as possible to add trust and precision to the automated market – using all the means necessary, including smart objects.

Society-space Mirroring societal lifestyles, the relationship between a worker and its employer has drastically changed over time: it evolved from a paternalist model using pride, conformity, and the parental figure to stimulate productivity,23 into a model based on the respect of private life, learning, and flexibility, giving a feeling of freedom and fun through the blurring of leisure and work – think Casual Friday, nap rooms, and fully equipped campuses that would make employees feel well and keen to stay late at work (Figure 7.4C).24,

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Figure 7.4 Floor plan drawings highlighting spatial translations of managerial organizations. Drawn by the authors

Figure 7.5 Floor plan drawings highlighting different uses of transitional spaces. Drawn by the authors

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This weakening of the worker–employer bond is ultimately reinforced by the spreading of places and times of work, as indicated by the emergence of freelance workers who see their workspaces relocated to the home or to convivial spaces like Starbucks and coworking spaces (Figure 7.5A).27 Indeed, smart objects increase the delocalization potential of an individual by offering remote access and control to various commodities and services: the individual simultaneously occupies the whole (networked) territory. However, this delocalization ability, in addition to making every place a potential productive space, is increasingly pervaded by market logics. The development of the so-called “sharing economy,” coupled with the emergence of the blockchain and the IoT, announces the possibility to “rent, sell or share anything,”28 from a door knob to a coffee machine, thanks to the decreasing cost of transactions. While the rise of independency and permanent entertainment would make us think work is to be forgotten, it is actually just a manifestation of what is valued on the job market: human capital.29 With soft skills becoming more important than hard skills, the individual constantly seeks to improve their value by maximizing their experiences. Every social interaction, group activity, or cultural interests – such as morning dance parties at the office organized by our beloved Chief Happiness Officers – becomes an opportunity to prove one’s ability to work in a team or to participate in the elaboration of a pleasant work environment. In this context, the IoT appears as an ideal management tool by offering the possibility to quantify, measure, and analyze any interaction or activity – from steps walked in a day to the friendliness of an exchange. Through constant monitoring, IoT favors (self-)control, pushing an individual to adapt their behavior so as to become an ideal citizen, worker, and friend.

Mobility-space The hierarchical dismantlement that happened to the collective-space also happened to the mobility-space: while the corridor and circulation areas were introduced to isolate production and hierarchy from recklessness and unwanted distractions (Figure 7.5B),30 the importance of interactions over individual efficiency erected the corridor or the atrium (such as the one at Pixar’s headquarters in Emeryville – Figure 7.2B) as the place of impromptu encounters and innovative ideas.31 But the way we navigate the built environment is redefined by the smartness paradigm: because one has access through their phone to a dynamic map, actualized in real-time according to their geolocation, visual markers and signs tend to disappear from our environment, making us more and more dependent on the access to technology and the network.32 This is straightforward at an urban scale, but increasingly true at the architectural scale – some coworking spaces use their own app to locate and guide to an available workstation. As spaces are more and more optimized by algorithms and artificial intelligence (Figure 7.5C), we become deprived of the capacity to orient ourselves in a space thought by and for the machine. Here again, the IoT and the blockchain can be used as a geospatial infrastructure to precisely locate an individual in a secured – and monetized – manner.33 The

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omnipresence of smart objects, whose very functioning principles require them to be alert at all times (such is the case with Google Home or Amazon Echo), appear as a convenient way to extract the maximum from an unplanned interaction, offering the ability to record and analyze a number of physical measures, from speech to emotions.

The architecture of soft-production The multiplication of connected devices and communication technologies change the significance of traditional architectural elements which usually mark the limits of the perceptual spaces described above. The boundaries of such spaces are diluted in an omnipresent and reticular network. The constant functioning of markets and infrastructures inscribe us in a permanent cycle of work and consumption, characterized by the absence of place or temporality in which it is impossible to buy, produce, or browse the network.34 This annihilation foresees the homogenization of space and time: work, socialization, rest, and intimacy are not happening in distinct and separated places or temporalities. These phenomena forecast a new type of work, blurring the differentiation between workplace and domestic space, work and leisure, action and interaction. We are currently witnessing the rise of a new kind of space of indeterminate nature, a “neogeneric” space, in which the individual simultaneously engages their whole identity, leveraging at the same time their hard and soft skills, their producer and consumer status. Every action or behavior that can be recorded, analyzed, and used by third parties eventually creates value, consciously or unconsciously, in the name of efficiency and well-being. The individual is no longer a manual workforce, nor even a cognitive one. The IoT materializes information in space through their networked sensors and actuators, turning every connected place into a “soft-production” space, in which the individual becomes a “presence workforce” who creates value unconsciously or without mobilizing any specific abilities. But smart objects, by invoking a complex mesh of technical, social, and political actors, embody power relationships which surpass spatial or economic dimensions. Such phenomena are only the symptoms of the advent of a society of control, whose modulation mechanisms progressively set up in a dispersed manner a new regime of domination.35 Departing from the machinic discipline of Superstudio, it casually flirts with emancipation, using self-improvement, creativity stimulation, decentralized consensus or morality as a veneer of legitimacy. While consumer capitalism36 used architecture to showcase and glamorize commodities, the architecture of soft-production uses a familiar, domesticated, contemplative language which dissimulates the productive aspect of space and the labor it involves. Where the IoT and large-scale adoption of smart objects participate in the creation of a spatialized information economy, space itself creates value. More than ever in the information era, architecture as the design of spatial experience becomes closely related to value creation and mechanisms of control.

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Notes 1 Superstudio, “Twelve Cautionary Tales for Christmas (12 Ideal Cities),” Architectural Design, AD #12 (1971): 737–742. Available online: https://issuu.com/kozolec/docs/12cautionarytalesforchristmas. 2 Maria S. Guidici and Davide Sacconi, eds, The Supreme Achievement (Milan: Black Square, 2016). 3 Pier Vittorio Aureli, “The Barest Form in which Architecture Can Exist,” in A-TYPICAL PLAN: Projects and Essays on Identity, Flexibility and Atmosphere in the Office, ed. Jeannette Kuo (Zurich: Park Books, 2013), 152–157. 4 Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, “Typical Plan,” in S, M, L, XL (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995), 334–353. 5 Nikil Saval, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace (New York: Anchor Books, 2014), Kobo e-book. 6 André Gorz, L’immatériel: Connaissance, valeur et capital [The Immaterial: Knowledge, Value and Capital] (Paris: Galilée, 2003). 7 Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2017). 8 Adam Greenfield, Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life (London: Verso, 2017). 9 Justin McGuirk, “Honeywell, I’m Home! The Internet of Things and the New Domestic Landscape,” e-flux, April 2015. Available online: www.e-flux.com/journal/64/60855/honeywell-i-m-home-the-internetof-things-and-the-new-domestic-landscape. 10 The “Twelve Ideal Offices” series can be accessed in its entirety on www.hyperwwwork.life. 11 Saval, Cubed. 12 Saval, Cubed. 13 Such is the case of the SAS Headquarters in Frøsundavik, Sweden, designed by Niels Torp in 1987. 14 Such has been tried in the TBWA\CHIAT\DAY office of Los Angeles, designed by Frank Gehry in 1991. 15 Gorz, L’immatériel. 16 Julien Eymeri, “L’entreprise a-t-elle encore besoin d’un lieu de travail?” [Do Companies Still Need a Workplace?], in After-Office, ed. Philippe Chiambaretta (Paris: PCA, 2012). Available online: www. pca-stream.com/fr/articles/l-entreprise-a-t-elle-encore-besoin-d-un-lieu-de-travail-37. 17 Stream Lab, “L’ascension du cool office” [The Rising of the Cool Office], in After-Office, ed. Philippe Chiambaretta (Paris: PCA, 2012). Available online: www.pca-stream.com/fr/articles/l-ascensiondu-cool-office-42. 18 Greenfield, Radical Technologies, 20–27. 19 As is being developed by the FOAM protocol: www.foam.space/. 20 Greenfield, Radical Technologies, 115–181. 21 Andrew Osborne, “Chump Change: Decrypting Bitcoin & Blockchain,” Mute, October 27, 2017. Available online: www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/chump-change-decrypting-bitcoin-blockchain. 22 Alexandre Stachtchenko, “Décentralisation du travail et blockchain” [Work Decentralization and the Blockchain], Blockchain France, February 13, 2016. Available online: https://blockchainfrance.net/ 2016/02/13/decentralisation-du-travail-et-blockchain. 23 Saval, Cubed. 24 Stream Lab, “L’ascension du cool office.” 25 Eymeri, “L’entreprise a-t-elle encore besoin d’un lieu de travail?” 26 Lina Malfona, “The Circle: Geographies of Network vs. Geometries of Disjunction,” The Avery Review, issue 30. Available online: http://averyreview.com/issues/30/the-circle. 27 François Bellanger, “C’est quoi un bureau demain?” [The Office of Tomorrow], in Work in process. Nouveaux bureaux, nouveaux usages [Work in Process. New offices, new use cases], ed. François Bellanger et al. (Paris: Editions du Pavillon de l’Arsenal, 2012), 189–216. 28 As claimed by the crypto start-up slock.it: https://slock.it/. 29 Michel Feher, “Self-Appreciation; or, The Aspirations of Human Capital,” Public Culture, 21:1 (2009): 21–41. 30 Robin Evans, “Figures, Doors and Passages,” in Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays (London: Architectural Association, 1996), 55–91. 31 Saval, Cubed. 32 Greenfield, Radical Technologies, 20–27. 33 As is being developed by the FOAM protocol, intended to become “the standard protocol for decentralized, geospatial data markets”: www.foam.space/. 34 Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London: Verso, 2013). 35 Gilles Deleuze, “Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôles” [Postscript on the Societies of Control], in Pourparlers 1972–1990 (Paris: Les éditions de Minuit, 1990). 36 Ars Industrialis, “Capitalisme(s),” Ars Industrialis, 2012. Available online: http://arsindustrialis.org/ vocabulaire-capitalisme.

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References Ars Industrialis. 2012. “Capitalisme(s)”, Ars Industrialis. Available online: http://arsindustrialis.org/vocabu laire-capitalisme (accessed May 15, 2018). Aureli, Pier Vittorio. 2013. “The Barest Form in Which Architecture Can Exist.” In A-TYPICAL PLAN: Projects and Essays on Identity, Flexibility and Atmosphere in the Office, edited by Jeannette Kuo, 152–157. Zurich: Park Books. Bellanger, François. 2012. “C’est quoi un bureau demain?” [The Office of Tomorrow] In Work in process. Nouveaux bureaux, nouveaux Usages [Work in Process. New offices, new use cases], edited by François Bellanger, Raphael Menard, Pavillon De L’Arsenal, Sophie Nivet and Catherine Sabbah, 189–216. Paris: Editions du Pavillon de l’Arsenal. Crary, Jonathan. 2013. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. London: Verso. Deleuze, Gilles. 1990. “Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôles” [Postscript on the Societies of Control] In Pourparlers 1972–1990, 240–246. Paris: Les éditions de Minuit. Evans, Robin. 1996. “Figures, Doors and Passages.” In Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays, edited by Robin Evans, 55–91. London: Architectural Association. Eymeri, Julien. 2012. “L’entreprise a-t-elle encore besoin d’un lieu de travail?” [Do Companies Still Need a Workplace?]. In After-Office, edited by Philippe Chiambaretta, Paris: PCA. Available online: www. pca-stream.com/fr/articles/l-entreprise-a-t-elle-encore-besoin-d-un-lieu-de-travail-37 (accessed April 20, 2018). Feher, Michel. 2009. “Self-Appreciation; or, The Aspirations of Human Capital,” Public Culture, 21:1: 21–41. Gorz, André. 2003. L’immatériel: Connaissance, valeur et capital [The Immaterial: Knowledge, Value and Capital]. Paris: Galilée. Greenfield, Adam. 2017. Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life. London: Verso. Guidici, Maria S. and Davide Sacconi, eds. 2016. The Supreme Achievement. Milan: Black Square. Koolhaas, Rem and Bruce Mau. 1995. “Typical Plan.” In S, M, L, XL, edited by Jennifer Sigler, 334–353. New York: Monacelli Press. Malfona, Lina. “The Circle: Geographies of Network vs. Geometries of Disjunction.” The Avery Review, issue 30. Available online: http://averyreview.com/issues/30/the-circle (accessed May 28, 2018). McGuirk, Justin. 2015. “Honeywell, I’m Home! The Internet of Things and the New Domestic Landscape.” e-flux, April. Available online: www.e-flux.com/journal/64/60855/honeywell-i-m-home-the-inter net-of-things-and-the-new-domestic-landscape (accessed April 20, 2018). Osborne, Andrew. 2017. “Chump Change: Decrypting Bitcoin & Blockchain.” Mute, October 27. Available online: www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/chump-change-decrypting-bitcoin-blockchain (accessed April 20, 2018). Saval, Nikil. 2014. Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace. New York: Anchor Books. Kobo e-book. Srnicek, Nick. 2017. Platform Capitalism. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Stachtchenko, Alexandre. 2016. “Décentralisation du travail et blockchain.” [Work Decentralization and the Blockchain]. Blockchain France, February 13. Available online: https://blockchainfrance.net/2016/02/13/ decentralisation-du-travail-et-blockchain (accessed April 20, 2018). Stream Lab. 2012. “‘L’ascension du cool office’ [The Rising of the Cool Office].” In After-Office, edited by Philippe Chiambaretta. Paris: PCA. Available online: www.pca-stream.com/fr/articles/l-ascension-ducool-office-42 (accessed April 20, 2018). Superstudio. 1971. “Twelve Cautionary Tales for Christmas (12 Ideal Cities).” Architectural Design, AD #12: 737–742. Available online: https://issuu.com/kozolec/docs/12cautionarytalesforchristmas (accessed April 20, 2018).

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Chapter 8

Soft sibylations GPS navigation as urban speculation Benjamin William Tippin

Introduction Can sonic signals emitted by a mobile phone transform the flow of urban planning? Can simple vocal reconstructions move capital investment through neighborhoods ripe for speculation? Can we speculate a world where the small, soft, sibilant, sonic guidance cast from our GPS applications is also a tocsin of transformation, a sibyl of “community development?” This chapter looks to these questions as an important starting point for a speculative consideration of the “Smart City.” Taking one particular aspect of technologically interrelated urban development as its object of critical discussion, both as itself and as a stand-in for the “Smart City” as a project, this chapter appropriates concepts developed by Marc Couroux in his “Preemptive Glossary for a Technosonic Control Society” as strategies for addressing potential shortcomings of the present. Couroux’s concepts are invoked in circumspect response to the questions above—more as causes for speculation than as answers. Though Couroux arrives at these concepts through speculative meditation and not through empirical analysis, their descriptive correspondence to apparent social phenomena provide novel frameworks for speculation on forms of capital and urban development entangled with the Waze navigation app and as incitements to reflect on logics belying the unfolding development of the “Smart City” in metropolitan regions like Los Angeles.

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The “Smart City” is a technocrat’s dream. Designing urban spaces that respond and change to the needs of their inhabitants, it seems to earnestly take up Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s category of “perfectibility” in the 21st century, the capacity of humans to develop beyond, and thus transcend, nature and make it anew. “Smart Cities” seem to resurrect a form of bourgeois cosmopolitan ideal, albeit in administered form. It appears as a 21st-century iteration of social contract elaborated through sensors, wires, and data-analytics—technological, political, and social engines that divine the “general will” of its people. While projects constructing wholly new and original smart cities from bare earth do exist, they are few. The majority of “smart” initiatives take the form of retrofit transformations to existing “dumb” urban centers. This chapter approaches an example of such an initiative through the development of a transport-oriented “smart city” partnership between Waze and Los Angeles, California. Los Angeles is home to the third-largest metropolitan economy in the world and is perennially the most traffic congested. This drives its civic administration to institute “smart city” development policies in order to make rational an expensive, existential inconvenience. Beyond the ameliorative strategies of civic administrations, the venture capital response to these problems is of particular interest—especially considered through Couroux’s concepts that reflect on the interplay between perception, time, space, and memory; concepts that “fiction” a society dominated by capital and reinforced through sound. These concepts—technoablation and cyberaffordance—point to forces that control, interpret, and predict techno-mediated urban life. They frame a discussion of oblique reinforcements, futures emerging through conveniences rendered by existing “smart” urban travel, and alternative futures pre-emptively foreclosed upon.

Technoablation Marc Couroux’s Preemptive Glossary posits a battery of speculative sound techniques, strategies, and phenomena that produce forms of social control through technological, economic, and auditory channels. In the Glossary, Couroux introduces technoablation as a strategy and a method deployed to abduct the relations between people and technology as they are mediated through society in order to exploit these relations for the purposes of control. It operates through the intentional backgrounding of historical conditions that originate a(n audio) technology’s social expression. Acting through audio technics, technoablative stratagems exploit the passive partial activity created through “fetishistic categories” and “ossified” relations of reified social consciousness1 to open pathways that manipulate the margins of awareness in order to “occult the introduction of novelty.”2 It blunts the social recognition of technological incipience—inhibiting the recognition of new possibilities for techno-social action on and through society. In Couroux’s words, “Through the möbiusoidal occulting (backgrounding and subsequent disappearing) of a technology’s operant identity … certain valences are suppressed from conscious attention.”3 This “blunted”

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incipience presents technological forms as immanently graspable, fixed, and immutable. Technoablation masks novel changes in technological features through the appearance of inertia in their features, in order to preserve these capacities as vectors of influence and control. Technoablation also operates when technological developments are so new that the existence of their parameters is not common knowledge, let alone that they are exploitable. An example that Couroux presents is the correlation between audio speed and vocal pitch that existed in audio production. In previous eras, the material limits of sound processing made adjusting the playback speed of an audio track without simultaneously affecting its pitch impossible. Doing so foregrounds a novel technical process in action. In the background, computation power developed to the point where audio software could accomplish this previously impossible thing cheaply, easily, and portably. Because awareness of these new capacities took time to spread, these features became channels through which technoablative mechanisms could operate. Slowing down speech without also altering pitch encourages listeners to apprehend the speaker as less intelligent; the inverse effect appears with accelerated speech. By not pushing it too far, just enough is “subliminally remaindered.”4 The occluded technical operation manipulates a space for people’s other faculties, judgments, and expectations to assert themselves in guided form. As increases in computation power became more visible and social awareness of these audio possibilities spread, the window for implementing this particular form of technoablative subversion closed. A cursory overview of the recent history of human technical development reveals an orrery of technologies constantly rotating in and out of social comprehension. Rather than form a barrier for technoablative stratagems, they are reliant on this constant flow for their efficacy. These stratagems opportunistically function through historical contingency and exploit gaps and slippages in recognition that are in constant flux, even if the hypostasized social forms facilitating these slips are not. Consider Orson Welles’ 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast. The technology of radio was still in its infancy and the “glitch”—the interruption of audio information— was a signal of disconnect and failure. To the audience undomesticated to this technology, the manufactured transmission dropouts still bore the material history of the medium and its limitations; they signaled danger and disconnection. The producers merely had to apply them consciously to bridge the gap between simulated and real horror. These interruptions quickly became a standard part of the audio producer’s toolkit and were adopted as a part of the aesthetic, audio-visual lexicon. This last example provides an opportunity to examine the potential technoablative methods being employed through the navigation software Waze. In an examination of the openness of “Smart” technologies Rafael Pinheiro noted that, “[Waze] establishes a two-way relationship with its users, by measuring traffic speed data at the same time it distributes users through the fastest available route at any given time.”5 This “relationship” is nourished by a variety of audio notifications guiding users to their destinations. This auditory relationship underpins the app’s usage: guiding, warning, protecting, and soothing.

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Waze’s audio notifications, both verbal and non-verbal, are vehicalized in inverse and contradictory ways. In the first, these sounds serve as conditioners and palliatives. They create and sustain a cognitive inertia by backgrounding the functional dynamism of travel through meaningless but comforting repetition: “Let’s go,” “You are on the fastest route,” “There is an X minute slow-down on your route.” This sonic mechanism portrays Waze as a static form whose function is predictable and knowable, regardless of creeping change. The second way sound is used is as a constant stream of novelty. These notifications demand constant attention and break in on consciousness to arrest attention; “[They] foster a sense of newness amidst a generalized stasis.”6 These sounds are mechanisms that occult subliminal impositions that are infra-legibly introduced into the user’s commute. The ubiquity of digital engagement stands as a serious hallmark of contemporary society. American commuters don’t just use these services; they rely on them for accurate forecasting of departure, travel, and arrival times. About this reliance, Couroux writes, “the same trust in digital technology 1930s Americans invested in radio … makes possible other types of suppressions, in which the presumption of the same actually conceals slowly creeping change.”7 In Los Angeles alone, millions of commuters rely on Waze for transport planning and for time management: to scrape excess seconds and minutes from commutes so that they may be reappropriated at a later moment.

Cyberaffordance Cyberaffordance is a concept Couroux derives from American psychologist James J. Gibson’s Theory of Affordances. Where Gibson saw affordances as developing relationships between animals and their environment—opportunities for action that an environment and its constituencies provide, “either for good or for ill”—Couroux’s cyberaffordance is a system that describes preemptively curtailed possibilities for action.8 In Gibson’s Theory of Affordances, the environment originates all capacities, including the capacity to be, to act, and to maintain being.9 The “environment” here refers to the arrangement of the natural world and the disposition of objects and actors within it so that affordance describes the capacity of an animal to perceive/ move/interact as a function of this arrangement. These new affordances create opportunities for new forms of social being. For Couroux, cyberaffordance does not solicit new forms of sociality but shuts them down. It instead describes curtailed possibilities of action contrived by capitalist feedback mechanisms that actualize the future in the present, effectively (but stealthily) closing off any options the system cannot afford, pretending to openness (and convincing the subject of this) while operating within a set of clearly delimited boundaries.10

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Cyberaffordance emerged from the same historical processes that produced the current “just-in-time” phase of late stage capitalism.11 This phase marked a turn in the productive capacities of the market toward the minimization of stockpiles. To accomplish this austerity of production, new regimes of data collection, analysis, and prediction had to be conjured. Feedback systems were bent toward the “constant extraction of information from every domain of an individual’s life (that occurs most often in the background of daily activities) operated to pre-empt future outside initiative by constantly predicting her next consumptive move, thereby embedding her ever deeper.”12 These mechanisms’ aims were to allot future productive capacities to the needs anticipated in the present. This orientation short-circuits social processes that are not couched within these dynamics. It is an affirmative reinforcement of the crises of the present. It subtends the possibilities and potentials of the future at the level of meeting the projected needs of the present. As such, it affirms the present, not as a grounds on which new potentials are elaborated but an indefinite extension of the present with all of its crises merely reproduced in new forms. Thus, that the future cyberaffordance promises, and does in fact deliver, is merely a projection of the crisis-laden now reflected back in attenuated form. The cyberaffordant social apparatus is a product of cybernetic feedback circuits designed during the Second World War to facilitate the control of territories in the war effort. After the war, these military technologies were bent toward the control of social realms as ostensible brakes keeping “the death drive from exploding into actualization again.”13 The myriad crises of the 20th century produced new forms and orientations of these prediction engines. Through this process, what were initially cybernetic models of capital management became channels for the capital management of society. All forms of social living have become statistical representations in instant-feedback systems designed to anticipate our consumption. It is these self-same systems that form the basis of the “Smart City.” These systems also form the technical grounds for Waze. These systems are not just the networks and GPS satellites that aid navigation but cellular and wireless infrastructures as well as the development of smartphones in the mid-2000s. All these networked technologies are bent towards the production of the future, albeit in different ways. Furthermore, the development of Smart City partnerships, in particular the partnership between Waze and Los Angeles, California, is predicated on predictive models. Waze’s systems pretend toward open-access, visibility, and real-time information. However, its functionality, just the traffic computer systems in the heart of Los Angeles’ Bunker Hill, are immanent to the technological and economic milieu they were produced within. While Couroux has developed technoablation to describe an observed slippage between particulars within their historic orientation, i.e., awareness of specific technological identities, the principles of cyberaffordance occur as a complex social orientation. Even though Couroux takes this effect up as a historically emergent property of a particular stage of late capital, it reflects a deeper crisis at the core of society itself. Although Couroux’s own development points at capital only through the intentions of capitalists, cyberaffordance describes a long pre-existing technological

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breakdown of social life that is only further reified and reinforced under twentiethcentury regimes of technocratic management.14 What he describes as cyberaffordance is an emergent property of the administered society being made permanent through its own technological support systems that reproduce society and its capitalist apparatus—but only in those terms.

“Optimizing” urban movement Three companies—Google, Navteq, and Tomtom—dominated commercial GPS navigation in the early 2000s, sinking millions into developing their maps as capital investments. Waze is a community-based GPS navigation app started as a crowdsourced alternative to these capital-intensive, and thus expensive to license, resources. Founded as the open-source, community-oriented, and collaborative effort called FreeMap Israel, it was bought by Google in 2013. Its initial app launch in 2011 integrated active and passive data collection, crowdsourced map-building, traffic-pattern recognition, and social media options. It promised to predict travel times and alternative routes through traffic-pattern recognition that analyzed passive and active data sets drawn in those days from its users. While Waze has now made its mapping API (application program interface) open to developers, their traffic API, the technology’s operant core and judging engine, has not been released.15 Waze is secretive about its routes’ calculation and judgment.16 While Waze promises to “help people create local driving communities that work together to improve the quality of everyone’s daily driving,” it is unclear how the software makes and implements these decisions.17 Waze provides faster routes as traffic conditions change, but what triggers a route change? How does Waze choose “safe neighborhoods” for its users to drive through? These questions reveal implicit “visibility” gaps where Couroux’s technoablative processes occur. Sound forms the framework through which the driver and app interrelate. Notifications feel familiar and unchanging while also arresting the driver’s attention and forcibly disrupting the psychic act of travel. Sound grips the situation. It is how Waze appears to operate while hiding its operations. Soft dings guide drivers down new streets, but these sounds haven’t changed since the introduction of the app— even though the mechanisms through which Waze collects and uses data have. Vocal break-ins jarringly present new paths to take, yet this element of the app’s function is not particularly new. All the while, it promises its drivers saved time through efficient travel. As users navigate, notifications announce new possibilities of transit. What do these possibilities entail? What causes them? These sounds that guide users through developing communities do not provide a rationale but facilitate elision. These sounds decentralize and disorient through audible techno-spatial controls that correspond with new traffic patterns that disrupt urban planning and existing financial, economic, and spatial considerations. They disregard the desires of communities, while

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over time conditioning users to seek out these new paths. In the early days of the app, Waze was just as reliant on its users as they were on it to optimize their commute. Early on, Waze needed its user data to provide these services. When Waze launched its Connected Citizen Program (CCP) with cities across the globe it was a way to kick-start new global “smart city” initiatives. As a result, Waze ceased to need its users in the same way.18 Despite this, Waze continues to collect user data that it doesn’t need to function while maintaining the optics of needing it. The app’s audio-visual continuity obscures the new technical features it implemented. Meanwhile, this breakdown has increased users’ dependence on the app as its new function interfaces with gargantuan archival systems. Waze still presents its traffic API as able to optimize all travel possibilities and grant access to hindsight in the present. All the while it only can provide what its system was built to afford. A troubling public/private interplay that emerges from this partnership is that between Waze/Google’s CCP and Waze’s recently added “Avoid Dangerous Neighborhoods” functionality. The ostensible purpose of CCP partnerships is to increase the capacities of “smart” cities to manage increasing traffic density, or to Waze, “proof that we already have the answers to some of today’s mobility challenges.”19 The “Avoid Dangerous Neighborhoods” functionality was added in 2016 as a result of this partnership. It first launched in Brazil shortly before the Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games, partly in response to public reports of violence being perpetrated against its users. Using data sets representing historical and ambient crime levels, Waze implemented new pathfinding parameters in Rio de Janeiro, as well as in Los Angeles and New Orleans, to designate “dangerous neighborhoods.”20 With its initial Brazilian release, the app would visually and vocally warn drivers they are in an “area with risk of crime.” The since-updated API now just routes users around these “dangerous” areas without having to signal it is occurring. Waze has not made public how these designations are applied, nor how they prioritize these data sets. When urban centers are investing millions of dollars in “soft layers” of urban planning to reduce travel time, excising these neighborhoods and communities from possible solution sets skews civic considerations of already troubled regions. Despite all the pretenses towards openness, towards crowd-sourcing data, collaborative mapping, and data administrators drawn from volunteers in the online community, the operant mechanisms that give Waze its market share are hidden; they are a “black box” that spits out solutions “visually” divorced from their social origins. The intentional “infra-legibility” of its decisions obscures its genius and occults the particularities of its function to allow it to appear simply as the most efficient navigator rather than something else entirely. Examining its active data collection, aggressive rerouting, appropriation of not just main routes but vast swathes of the periphery, and global governmental partnerships, Waze ceases to appear as a passive translator of mapping systems. It is, instead, a series of cybernetic feedback systems actually refiguring flows of automobiles, flows of labor, and flows of capital— all in real time. What Waze affords, what it only can afford, is a reallocation of time, both in its concrete and abstract expressions. It moves time in differential frictions across

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Los Angeles’ urban fabric and creates an engine for reinforcing the machinic ethos of capitalist time: time discipline. It reinforces time in the abstract, time as a function of value.21 Wasted time is wasted value and squandered productive capacities. Waze trains its users to race the clock, to accrue time, to preserve it as value, and accrue this value as unexpended labor. Waze affirms the recognition of time management as economization. It secures this economization through affirmation. As Reza Negarestani puts it, “Affirmation does not make you open to the world but closes you more progressively through the gross domestications of economical openness.”22 That is, every trip, every turn along Waze’s route, reinforces its utility, its use, and its economic instrumentalization. Its parameters become your parameters of travel even as technical opacity and corporate secrecy make these parameters illegible. This unreadability is not apparent and encourages public misapprehension regarding the operative identity of the technology: a technoablative occurrence actively obscuring Waze’s technological incipience. In this process all Waze users, all Waze contributors, take part. This aggregated activity reinforces occult(ed) phenomena that reroute users in response to intensifying traffic conditions. Reroutes push all users traveling along the same path through the same detours, albeit through much smaller corridors. This is significant for three reasons. The first is the high number of users in the Los Angeles region— over two million as of 2015.23 This means that any region along a reroute will see significantly denser traffic.24 Second, these reroutes often occur in areas with insufficient infrastructure, forcing cities to reallocate road maintenance in unpredictable ways.25 Third, these reroutes usually occur in areas hosting small businesses and housing unfamiliar with dense traffic. The Los Angeles region has experienced systematically denser traffic patterns over the last decade, and now the conditions that trigger Waze reroutes are present for most of the day. This leads businesses along these reroutes to experience new influxes of customers, while residents of these communities witness greater disturbances to daily life. This often coincides with rising housing prices and decreasing quality of living. These three conditions point to the influence a decentralizing technology like Waze can have on urban development whose planners, according to Pinheiro, see Waze as an opportunity to “not only estimate actual time distances inside a city but the way these distances evolve over time.”26 Elysian Valley, also known as “Frogtown,” is a Los Angeles neighborhood remarkable for its “development,” particularly in the last six years. As the housing market rebounded following the global financial crisis, waves of outside homebuyers moved in. This growth took off at the end of 2012, coinciding with an increase in commuters using it as a detour between the nearby SR-2 and I-5 freeways—a time frame that also coincides with the explosive growth of Waze users in the LA region. In the last five years alone, housing prices in Frogtown have more than doubled, boasting a 30% year-over-year increase since 2013.27 While this is typical for some neighborhoods in Los Angeles recovering from the housing crisis at the end of the 2000s, Frogtown and neighborhoods like it—Silverlake, Echo Park, Los Feliz, and Highland Park—historically bucked Los Angeles’ high average housing

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costs. Since 2012, the growth in housing prices in these neighborhoods has far outstripped the regional average.28 These were historically mixed-race, low-income enclaves at the periphery (in the case of Highland Park) or intervening more populous and affluent neighborhoods. According to one Frogtown resident, “Waze killed us, telling people to come through here.”29 In Highland Park, it facilitated thriving merchant corridors for new “hip” businesses along previously little-used avenues into and out of neighborhoods. Waze has cracked these neighborhoods open. Los Angeles is a city of multiple centers, a quilt of neighborhoods sewn together through long corridors and giant, flying freeways. A recent focus on redevelopment of the collapsed Downtown area counters the popular invective against the city’s lack of “cityness.” Yet, Waze acts as a disruptor to this new development scheme. It drives growth along the paths that its API picks out, “a ‘soft layer’ of urban planning” that spreads the snarl of human movement.30 Waze’s occluded logic masks the judgment driving this growth. If being a detour becomes an injection of capital for a community, this occulting of analytics poses the serious question, “who controls the future?” For Brazil, whose “high crime” favelas were excluded from official maps until the 1980s, their exclusion through the “Dangerous Neighborhood” functionality reinforces existing stigmas of merely being in these neighborhoods.31 This system is also in use in Israel to “protect” Israeli users from entering “dangerous” Palestinian territories—a courtesy not extended in the other direction.32 Similarly designated American communities find themselves locked out of the benefits that increased traffic patterns might bring. This mirrors the destructive reorganization of American transit systems in the middle of the 20th century. The fate of 20th-century, small-town America is being replayed in communities at the heart of urban centers. Waze does bring the future to the present, both through subjective usage and the way “smart cities” are developing. The application does deliver what it promises. It accrues time for its users, allowing them to recoup and redistribute it according to cyberaffordant principles. Its partnerships with emerging smart cities are developing new policies that alleviate pressures contingent to urban life. These relationships are even producing possible futures that appear the most logical and sensible, possibly the most immediately desirable alleviations of the present. Such desire is reflected as a form of common sense deriving from empirical measurements of the world as it is. Yet, these understandings of the world—as a cramped and messy place that just requires the correct form of traffic management and the right number of garbage collectors—do not provide for thinking beyond it—for thinking toward the transformation of society. The transformation of society does not lie in its already existing institutions and formations. The cyberaffordant principles immanent to society-as-it-is curtail all possibilities but the continual reproduction of contradictory social forms. These soft

sybillations

of a

smartphone do

indicate

change,

but

perhaps

not

transformation.

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Notes 1 See Georg Lukács, “Reification and the consciousness of the Proletariat,” in History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 83–222. 2 Marc Couroux, “Preemptive Glossary for a Technosonic Control Society (with lines of flight),” in Volumes, eds Christof Migone and Martin Arnold (Toronto: Blackwood Gallery, 2015), 71. Available online: http://blackwoodgallery.ca/publications/volumes.html/ (accessed February 9, 2018). 3 Marc Couroux, “Preemptive Glossary for a Technosonic Control Society (with lines of flight),” 70. 4 Ibid. 5 Rafael L. Pinheiro, “Intelligence Is Open: Smart City versus Open City,” PlaNext–Next Generation Planning, 4 (July 2017): 15, accessed July 15, 2018, doi:10.24306/plnxt.2017.04.002. 6 Marc Couroux, “Preemptive Glossary for a Technosonic Control Society (with lines of flight),” 71. This refers to technointensification the inverse relation to technoablation. 7 Ibid., 61. 8 Ibid. 9 James J. Gibson, “The Theory of Affordances,” Ch.8 in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), 127. Available online: https://monoskop.org/images/c/c6/ Gibson_James_J_1977_1979_The_Theory_of_Affordances.pdf (accessed July 14, 2018). 10 Couroux, “Preemptive Glossary,” 61. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 62. 13 Ibid., 61 14 Couroux’s work is in conversation with the work of the CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit) and Nick Land. They coined the term hyperstition to describe “fiction making itself real.” Couroux draws on this to flesh out his speculative glossary and understand it as a real project. Hyperstition draws on one hand from the conception of an inhuman apparatus of capital at the heart of all human activity (society). It is an alien force that forms “cybernetic action wherein ‘reality’ and ‘fiction’ are both elements of a closed signaling loop that feeds change back into a system to regulate its constraints, potentials and tolerances.” Through hyperstition speculation, or “fictioning,” becomes real force; it takes on causal capacities. “Occulting” takes on its dual meanings: both hiding and relating to the Occult, to inhuman intelligences manipulating causality. The CCRU have four ways to describe it: (1) an element of effective culture that makes itself real, (2) a fictional quantity functional as a time-traveling device, (3) a coincidence intensifier, and (4) a call to the Old Ones. sPru, “To Make a Better Crease,” TheOcculture.net, January 26, 2013, www.theocculture. net/to-make-a-better-crease/(accessed February 9, 2013) and CCRU, “Polytics,” Hyperstition, July 7, 2004, http://hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/archives/006777.html (accessed February 9, 2013). 15 Just as a user interface acts as the connection between a user and the device’s software, an API serves as the interface between different softwares. In this case, a map API refers to the interface that a third-party program would use to access Waze’s maps. Waze accepts the program’s input and returns an output for the third-party’s use. That the traffic API has not been made available indicates a reticence towards a real openness that the availability of the map API would otherwise suggest. From ProgrammableWeb, “API University Series: What are APIs and how do they work?” www.programmableweb.com/api-university/what-are-apis-and-how-do-they-work (accessed September 15, 2018); and ProgrammableWeb, “Waze API,” www.programmableweb.com/api/ waze (accessed September 15, 2018). 16 Pinheiro, “Intelligence Is Open: Smart City versus Open City,” 14. 17 www.waze.com(accessed October 10, 2018). Wording from the front page of Waze.com. 18 CCP is a large-scale data sharing initiative between Waze and more than 250 cities and partnered agencies across the globe to mutually exchange Waze’s aggregated user and traffic data with nascent “smart cities” in exchange for their higher-resolution governmental resources. The smart city contributions refer specifically to the 2016 public release of Los Angeles’ Smart City data archives, the largest data sets yet released; all made available at high speeds (100 Gbps) to researchers and developers. [CENIC, “City of Los Angeles to Tap into CENICs CalREN, California’s High-Speed Research Internet Backbone,” news release, May 12, 2016, CENIC.org, accessed October 12, 2018, https://cenic.org/news/item/city-of-los-angeles-to-tap-into-calren.] 19 From Waze.com. www.waze.com(accessed October 10, 2018). 20 Stacy Liberatore, “Slower but safer: Waze navigation app adds ability to avoid crime hotspots,” The Daily Mail, June 17, 2016, www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3647262/Commuters-avoidcrime-hotspots-Waze-app-route-drivers-high-risk-areas.html. 21 “Time discipline” is a concept first elaborated by British historian E. P. Thompson. In “Time, WorkDiscipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Thompson poses time as a historical product of the growth of industrial labor. Pre-modern agricultural societies, argued Thompson, experienced time in a different and more contingent way. Time was measured by the task, not the hour. E. P. Thompson, 1967, “Time, Work-Discipline, Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present, Volume 38, Issue 1. Also of note is the approach to time taken by T. Adorno in his essay on “Free Time.” In this text, free time is an

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22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

emancipatory category. However, under capitalism, free time is attenuated as leisure—or time as the present absence of wage labor that still must be accounted for as value. Theodor W. Adorno, “Free Time,” in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (Routledge, 1991), 162–170. Reza Negarestani, “Test1,” Hyperstition (Abstract Dynamics), June 13, 2004, http://hyperstition. abstractdynamics.org/archives/003274.html. Brian K. Roberts, “Will Traffic NIMBYs Ruin Waze?” Los Angeles Times, May 4, 2015, www. latimes.com/opinon/op-ed/l-oe-0505-roberts-waze-critics-20150505-story.html (accessed July 14, 2018). Roberts, “Will traffic NIMBYs ruin Waze?” Los Angeles Times. One formerly quiet neighborhood now reports more than 600 vehicles per hour during peak commute times. Ibid. Pinheiro, “Intelligence Is Open: Smart City versus Open City,” 14. Trulia, “Real Estate Data for Elysian Valley,” www.trulia.com/real_estate/Elysian_Valley-Los_Angeles/ 174343/market-trends. Ibid. Justin Klocsko, “Can L.A.’s Frogtown Survive Gentrification?” Daily Beast, July 21, 2018, www.the dailybeast.com/can-las-frogtown-survive-gentrification (accessed July 24, 2018). Pinheiro, “Intelligence Is Open: Smart City versus Open City,” 14. Liberatore, “Slower but Safer: Waze Navigation App Adds Ability to Avoid Crime Hotspots,” The Daily Mail, June 17, 2016. Hunter Stuart, “Waze Lets Israelis Avoid Palestinian Areas, but Not the Other Way Around,” Motherboard, October 5, 2016, https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/jpgbg7/waze-lets-jewishisraelis-avoid-palestinian-areas-but-not-the-other-way-around (accessed October 15, 2018).

References Adorno, Theodor. 1991. “Free Time.” In The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, edited by J. M. Bernstein, 162–170. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. CENIC. 2016, May 12. “City of Los Angeles to Tap into CENICs CalREN, California’s High-Speed Research Internet Backbone.” News release. Available online: CENIC.org. https://cenic.org/news/item/city-oflos-angeles-to-tap-into-calren (accessed October 12, 2018). Couroux, Marc. 2015. “Preemptive Glossary for a Technosonic Control Society (with lines of flight).” In Volumes, edited by Martin Arnold and Christof Migone, 58–73. Toronto, ON: Blackwood Gallery. Available online: http://blackwoodgallery.ca/publications/volumes.html (accessed February 9, 2018). Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU). 2004, July 7. “Polytics.” Hyperstition. Available online: http:// hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/archives/006777.html (accessed February 9, 2013). Gibson, James J. 1979. “The Theory of Affordances.” Chapter 8 in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 127–137. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Available online: https://monoskop.org/images/c/c6/ Gibson_James_J_1977_1979_The_Theory_of_Affordances.pdf (accessed July 14, 2018). Klocsko, Justin. 2018, July 21. “Can L.A.’s Frogtown Survive Gentrification?” Daily Beast. Available online: www.thedailybeast.com/can-las-frogtown-survive-gentrification. Liberatore, Stacy. 2016, June 17. “Slower but Safer: Waze Navigation App Adds Ability to Avoid Crime Hotspots.” The Daily Mail. Available online: www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3647262/Com muters-avoid-crime-hotspots-Waze-app-route-drivers-high-risk-areas.html. Lukács, Georg. 1990. “Reification and the consciousness of the Proletariat,” in History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone, 83–222. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Negarestani, Reza. 2004, June 13. Hyperstition (Abstract Dynamics) [blog]. Available online: http://hypersti tion.abstractdynamics.org/archives/003274.html. Pinheiro, Rafael L. 2017. “Intelligence Is Open: Smart City versus Open City.” PlaNext–Next Generation Planning, 4, July: 8–26, doi:10.24306/plnxt.2017.04.002 (accessed July 15, 2018). ProgrammableWeb. “Waze API.” Available online: www.programmableweb.com/api/waze. ProgrammableWeb. “API University Series: What are APIs and How Do They Work?” Available online: www.programmableweb.com/api-university/what-are-apis-and-how-do-they-work. Roberts, Brian. K. 2015, May 4. “Will Traffic NIMBYs Ruin Waze?” Los Angeles Times. Available online: www.latimes.com/opinon/op-ed/l-oe-0505-roberts-waze-critics-20150505-story.html. sPru. 2013. “To Make a Better Crease.” TheOcculture.net. January 26. Available online: www.theoccul ture.net/to-make-a-better-crease (accessed February 9, 2013). Stuart, Hunter. 2016, October 5. “Waze Lets Israelis Avoid Palestinian Areas, but Not the Other Way Around.” Motherboard. Available online: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/jpgbg7/waze-letsjewish-israelis-avoid-palestinian-areas-but-not-the-other-way-around.

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TheOcculture.net. Available online: www.theocculture.net. Thompson, E. P. 1967. “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” Past & Present, 38, 1 (December): 56–97, doi:10.1093/past/38.1.56 (accessed March 17, 2019). Trulia. Available online: www.trulia.com. Waze.com. Available online: www.waze.com.

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Chapter 9

Intelligence and armament Kevin Rogan

In what ways does the smart city differ from the city as it has appeared throughout history? By using the work of Orin Halpern, Georg Lukács, Henri Lefebvre, and others, a provisional answer will be offered. Following a theoretical explication which defines the ways in which the smart city departs from the city as we have known it, a loose future history of the smart city will be speculated, with the techno-utopian dream giving way to the nightmare of weaponized intelligence, militarization, and border security. The smart city breaks down into several threads that are militated towards the construction of a cohesive grand narrative, or an ideology of intelligence. This ideology constructs itself along three axioms: the economic, the political, and the spatial. Let’s begin with the economic character of the smart city. Cities, as free market proponents love to point out, are massive economic engines by default—the task stands for leaders to simply “unleash the entrepreneurial power of their cities.”1 The city as we have known it in Europe and the United States has historically been presented as an industrial center, and therefore the home of industrial labor. An individual laborer is not an artisan within the capitalist mode of production, but rather occupies a discrete point in the overall continuum of production.2 The laborer’s contribution to production is not measured in material produced but in time given, or quite literally, labor-time expended in the production of commodities.3 The technological innovation of the clock allows for a revolutionary control of production at the point the

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human enters the process. These commodities are then sold and used in a process we will refer to as consumption. The arrival of the “smart city” may prove to be similarly epochal compared with the “invention” of the clock. The “first wave” of the smart city in which we currently find ourselves appears to us in the form of sensorial devices and other pieces of highly specialized instrumentation—water and air quality analyzers, smart lightbulbs, fitness trackers, digital assistants, and so on. The specific argument these sensorial devices make is not the usual “inducement to consume” but rather an inducement towards penultimate consumption—buy this device, they say, and all future consumption will be undertaken with a heretofore unseen level of rationality.4 All consumption can be assigned value, codified, and made sense of by virtue of it being turned into data at the point at which it is consumed. It is important to make this preliminary distinction: the world does not need to be replaced with computronium,5 nor does everything need to become intelligent; however, what is necessary is that there is sufficient intelligence that a perimeter of effective uplift can be established, wherein even “stupid” devices, persons, and spaces are made intelligent by proximity. For example, consider the Awair line of home air quality sensors, specifically the Awair Glow. The first Awair simply detected air quality and offered alerts via a smartphone app—a helpful, if limited application. The Awair did not actually produce its own effects, but rather provided “personalized recommendations to help you stay safe and healthy” and links to higher-level devices such as the Amazon Alexa, Google Home, or Google Nest.6 However, with the Awair Glow, the sensorial device gains the capacity to turn on and adjust “non-smart” devices (such as fans, humidifiers, and air conditioners) which are attached to it in response to changing environmental conditions in order to establish and sustain optimal air quality throughout its sensorial field.7 Though this is a relatively crude example, it remains instructive: the first wave of sensorial intelligence was simply a product like any other, with rudimentary abilities to report on its environment.8 The Glow, however, goes beyond this isolated, “blinded” intelligence without capacities and becomes instead a commodity which affects and controls a sphere of its own. Consumption departs from the individual (why would you turn on your own fan if the Awair Glow handles it for you?) and instead is placed “on the loop,” under the auspices of intelligence. Consumption becomes an activity done for you, not by you. Furthermore, these devices’ ability to track personal consumption—how much energy, how many calories, how many opportunities—is equally important. Through them, the tracking of consumption is now possible down to the merest quanta. It is from this basic premise that the smart city begins to take shape. Jennifer Gabrys and Shannon Mattern identify that increasingly tighter control of consumption is not something that happens to citizens, but has become a predicate to being considered a citizen in general.9 According to Gabrys, “[c]omputational materializations distribute power through urban spaces and processes.”10 This

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power is distributed by operationalizing citizenship as it moves through and engages with urban space. Citizenship as a question of identification—who belongs and who does not. In this formulation, those who belong are those who are computational. Friends are interlinked, that is, they offer up their data. Enemies are those outside the network.11 The friend/enemy distinction builds from a seemingly apolitical, socio-technological distinction to a resolutely political one as the technological distinction becomes a predicate for not just spreading power, but developing who its wielders are. The mediation of consumption appears to those in power as the ability to more acutely monitor behavior. There is not so much a question of “who is the smart city for?” We know the answer to that already: it retrenches existing structures, by punishing the poor and providing luxury options to those in control.12 The exact nature of the luxury option must be further explored. In Carl Schmitt’s terms, the real question lies in asking how the friend category benefits from the arrival of the smart city as a social-ideological entity. The real question to ask is “what is the smart city doing for political power?” For example: what does it mean, as in the case of Zaha Hadid Architects’ newly announced Rublyovo-Arkhangelskoye smart city district outside Moscow, when designers investigate “happiness” as a design principle,13 and at the same time, the residents of the Atlantic Plaza Towers rent-controlled apartment complex in Brooklyn, New York, are being forced to accept facial recognition scanning to enter their apartments?14 It means the smart city is by and for those who already consume with impunity, and would like the possibility to consume intelligently. Simultaneously, the smart city faces the poor and the powerless with a carceral lack of choice—the new regime of data offers precious little opportunity, and instead rehearses ideas of extraction and domination in a new sphere. If the individual becomes a friend through their participation in consumption, and a citizen through their participation in the administration of consumption, it stands to reason that after both stages have been achieved, consumption itself must continue to be increased. The person-citizen dissolves away in the smart city, having already been replaced by their quanta—an assemblage of sensors and data inputs that circumscribe the sum total of actions and effects that person has. Consider Sidewalk Labs’ (the overlord behind the Quayside, Toronto, smart city project) ad copy: “By combining people-centered urban design with cutting-edge technology, we can achieve new standards of sustainability, affordability, mobility, and economic opportunity.”15 The “people” may appear to be the ostensible “center” of this statement, but this is an intentional obfuscation of the individual’s reduction to technological means, that is, the means for the continued, sustained, and expanding development of technology in itself. Instead, through the eyes of Sidewalk, the people are a mere vehicle to “people-centered design.” The person is an emptiness around which the objects and data of the smart city are set in motion. This new arrangement signifies a crucial turn not only in terms of what may be called a consumptive cosmology but in terms of an individually based political program such as ours: subjecthood is in the process of being transferred from people to their prostheses. Thought itself is substituted for monitoring and organization, which is ported to devices beyond the body.

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Smartness begins by locating the citizens’ inputs and outputs and then amputating them. As a result, the citizen becomes alienated from themselves. This dissociative disorder, as theorized by Hungarian Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács in History and Class Consciousness as reification, is a specific effect of existence within technocratic capitalism.16 Reification actually goes far beyond the amputation as Lukács claims that “[r]ational mechanization extends right into the worker’s ‘soul’: even [their] psychological attributes are separated into specialized rational systems and their reduction to statistically viable concepts.”17 Rational systems, that is, the sum entire of sensorial devices delivering intelligence, reach into and recompose the soul of the individual in a grotesque vivisection of not just the body but the brain. The sensorial regime is a project of “ornamenting the façade of hell,” wherein the human is surrounded with—and luxuriates in—the instruments of their own dispossession.18 Increasingly, however, the driving mythology behind the application of sensorial intelligence is scaling up from the personal injunction to consume differently to an ecological argument that smuggles the smart city’s teleological efficiency in to the conversation. Much has been written about the ends of so-called “green capitalism”19 as a hegemonic permutation of capitalism in general that will not be discussed here; what is important to note now is that the pipeline which begins with the individual as they exist under the aegis of reification does not end at the smart city. Rather, the smart city itself is presented as a means to an environmental “perpetual peace” in which the environment is stabilized at the same time new markets open up.20 Primitive accumulation occurs in the privatization of untrammeled data collected by the massively organized penetration of sensorial technology at every scale. Devices, such as the previously mentioned Awair, make an obvious ecological argument that is bound inextricably to the argument to consume—and in doing so establish a direct conduit from the respiratory system of the body to the atmosphere of the planet which is mediated, managed, and governed via a technological armature with metabolic purpose. By the same token, intelligent consumption also becomes recomposed as a pseudo-political project in which participation in the sensorial regime is equated with participation in a coalition of sorts for planetary survival. Jennifer Gabrys has summarized the turn from the personal to the planetary, by stating that “sensor-based ubiquitous computing across urban infrastructures and mobile devices [will be used] to achieve greater sustainability.”21 Ecopolitics (a twisting of the machinery of politics toward the goal of transhistorical salvation) is the means of the smart city, but total reification is its end. The time of hell arrives wearing the mask of radical environmentalism. Reification splits persons from themselves, from the environment, from the planet itself. It is in the name of planetary survival that the smart city is truly born. Our lifeboat in the Anthropocene will be a synthesis of city cybernetic and city beautiful. This is the city as commodity. If smartness begins with the commodity, it soon graduates to commoditizing space, and urbanity itself. Having discussed how the birth of the smart city builds from a technologization towards reification, we should turn from “smartness” towards the city itself. What

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mutations does smartness catalyze in urban environments? Specifically, how does smartness take shape and distribute its effects in space? Amalgamated and executed on the scale of a street, a neighborhood, a district, or a city, the smart city operates on the principles of what Orit Halpern calls “test bed urbanism.”22 She describes the test bed as “a form of administration and a redistricting of bodies and information into new global configurations” which is evident in a shift from anthropocentric urban morphology to economocentric performance-based forms.23 The smart city does not answer to aesthetics, but rather a universal market imperative. This flip is described by John Scott in Corporate Business and Capitalist Classes as part of a broader historical shift from world-empires to world-economies, or from the personal to the impersonal.24 Order for order’s sake is dissolved for the sake of order that supports further retrenchment, development, and expansion. Though Halpern et al. applied the concept of the test bed in particular reference to Songdo City in South Korea, it can be generalized to nearly all smart projects. The urban test bed pulls urban space away from the state (the world-empire, or order for itself) and into the neutral sphere of the laboratory where all decisions are not made by fiat, it is claimed, but in a reasoned attempt to solve problems. The laboratory is the precondition of economics; it conditions the world and parcelizes it. What the smart city does, effectively, is to make a laboratory of spaces as well as individuals. Achieving a “laboratory effect” requires several theoretical leaps in the representation of space. The first step is relatively simple: the declaration of boundaries, but not in space. In the case of the smart city, smartness partitions itself in relation to the pre-existing stupidity. The instantiation of the laboratory plays out across space. But in order to laboratize space, space itself must first be prepared for its arrival—desacralized, rendered smooth, and most of all made abstract. Abstract space in this usage was first named by Henri Lefebvre as a dominant spatial representation in 20th-century Europe.25 Although he builds abstract space (and his underlying conceptualization of abstraction itself) off of alienation, extending Lefebvre’s abstract space through Lukács’ reification hones both models and updates them for a smart city context. Abstract space is the foundational myth of the urban as test bed, just as the atom is the model for a scientific universe. Both space and the atom in their abstract forms are stripped of any potential meaning in themselves, and instead obtain meaning by means of aggregative characteristics or a specific modification away from a baseline which remains, nevertheless, a steady state. To put it simply, both are delimited and quantified so that they may be emptied. This can take place in an extremely practical way: in a building that changes owners or falls suddenly under a different type of zoning. The spatial character of the building is cleared out and sold as a void that can be overwritten. Of course, other factors apply (such as location and various environmental conditions), but for the most part, spaces are not specialized nor specific; instead, they are thought to be universal and, perhaps more accurately, abstract. Abstraction in this sense provides cover for a deeper unknowability within urban space, despite it being thought of as a “living

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lab.” As Timothy Williams has stated in a recent New York Times article aptly titled “In High-Tech Cities, No More Potholes, but What About Privacy?” “some mayors acknowledge that they have yet to master the responsibilities that go along with collecting billions of bits of data from residents.”26 Ultimately, the construction of a vast laboratory of near-infinite capacity, predicated on a project which desires to understand all there is to know, nevertheless fails to know itself. Spatial abstraction is a vital component of the smart city given its faculty to essentially be anything—a tabula rasa upon which only power can write. This is the advantage of the laboratory. By standing in for the world, the laboratory model produces the notion that reality is malleable, and exists in its most “pure” form when completely quantified. Scientific, or rational, purity requires the judicious elimination of all aberrant irrationalities as a prerequisite for thought and action in a technocratic, rational process in the pursuit of instrumental reason. It is essential to keep in mind that technocratic rationalism was first historically applied to the natural world in order to reformat nature from an environment to a constellation of resources. Abstraction is a prerequisite for exploitation. When, as in the case of Saudi Arabia’s smart cross-border city NEOM,27 the project claims to be negatively identified with the world itself—“a place on earth like nothing on earth”— we should take pause.28 The entire earth is grist for the (intelligent) mill. The earth and the city are naturalized and enframed, appearing not as a lived world but as a “standing reserve” of raw material which only needs to be shaped by a magisterial hand.29 In other words, the city as we see it is reinterpreted by smartness to be a material that is then modified by labor, in the same way nature is. The regime of science, or technocratic rationalism, aggressively expands its model from the natural world to the lived one. This transvaluation of urban space is enabled by the emergence of abstract space as a Cartesian void—“a neutral thing into which disjointed things, people, and habitats might be introduced,” or “social space as an exploitable resource,” according to Japhy Wilson.30 Adding to this, computation itself is now something that can be poured into abstract space. The addition of computation, or the materialization of the consumption-rationalization regime in urban space, repositions absolute space not as the telos of spatial power, but merely a step to a greater reformatting of space itself. This narrative is enchanting; who hasn’t wished, for at least a moment, that the city wasn’t a bit more responsive, more sensuous, or even, more rational? The dream of rationalization has been a staple of urban thought throughout the 20th century. An acute summation of this spirit was already to be found in 1910, in Eugene Henard’s “The Cities of the Future.” Taking off from a consideration of “defects” to propose a streamlined, authorial efficiency, Henard claimed that while “[t]he adoption of the new industrial devices, previously described, would make it possible to ameliorate the conditions of modern life and to add to the health and comfort of the inhabitants,” he would “not dwell upon the improvements already effected and applied in some modern houses.”31 Now, as then, to “not dwell” upon the existing city, to proclaim it a substrate of the new tomorrow, is the precondition of making smartness a reality.

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All of this theorizing has been an attempt to take stock of the forces at work which are encapsulated and obscured by the concept of “smartness” within the city. The smart city should not be confused for utopia since utopia takes far greater stock of the world around it; however it should also not be confused for dystopia, since at the current stage it does not fundamentally offer a difference from the current status quo. However, it is worth investigating one chain of possibilities in a world sufficiently developed and entrained by the smart city. In The Two Marxisms, Alvin Gouldner has claimed that “[e]very theoretical system has another system inside it struggling to get out,” specifically, “every system has a nightmare: that the caged system will break out.”32 What is the nightmare of the smart city?

The first age of intelligent cities We are already in the first age of the smart city. Thus far, this era has been characterized by the piecemeal introduction of sensorial devices and the gradual seepage of technocorporate terminology. This has come to dominate the rhetoric of urban governance to the extent that, in 2015, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio could refer to “disruption” as positive, and no one batted an eye. In tech industry parlance, disruption describes an intentional destabilization of norms in favor of the opening of new markets, usually with massive consequences for labor. Probably the best example of disruption would be the effect of Uber and other ridesharing services on taxis—in this case, the taxi industry was essentially torpedoed by Uber’s disruption. It’s hard to imagine that this procedure, at the level of urban governance, would be without its casualties. At the current stage, though the groundwork is being laid piece by piece, there is, at the same time, a general tendency towards monopolization. If New York under de Blasio represents one approach, then Singapore represents another: state as sensorial monopoly. Singapore’s government is famously rolling out the “Lamppost-as-a-Platform” project to install 100,000 surveillance cameras throughout the city, linked to facial recognition software—all under the auspices of a governmental body known as GovTech.33 The presence (and legal status) of GovTech is illuminating, as Singapore’s government enjoys nearly complete control over not just the installation of sensorial devices, but also what is done with the data they collect—complete with the ability to requisition nearly anything under the loose terms of the Computer Misuse and Cybersecurity Act.34 The countervailing, dialectical moves—both towards and away from centralization—compose a fundamental contradiction which at this stage is only beginning to take shape. In addition, within this stage the mechanical process of reification, the fetish of the dumb commodity (which has existed since nearly the beginning of capitalism) is gradually replaced with an even more heightened fetish of the intelligent object— the one that knows you better than you know yourself. Within this age, it becomes easier and easier to identify the city itself as a service, a space of pure amenity, as a commodity in its own right (expect to hear the phrase “urban API” a lot more

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soon).35 At the level of policy, governments find themselves unable to adequately respond to an oncoming wave of intelligence coherently—a phenomenon which is already detectable in Toronto, where Sidewalk Labs’ smart city project has produced enormous jurisdictional ambiguity which threatens to leave Sidewalk with an enormous mandate of control.36 In this way, the advent of the smart city almost appears to be revolutionary, with change sweeping in from the ground up.37 Such revolution brings to mind Walter Benjamin’s On the Philosophy of History, in which he reports that, during the July Revolution in Paris, workers fired on the clocks.38 Does this act have an equivalent in the smart city?

The second age of intelligent cities There will come a point in which disruption is no longer tolerated. As David Harvey points out, there is at the heart of capitalism a “state-finance” axis.39 In this framework, the state retains the “monopoly of violence” while finance capital is generally left (in neoliberal states) to its own devices. However, when capital threatens to swamp the state, the state is obligated to tamp it down and force it to cooperate. The frenetic proliferation of smart commodities is a perfect example of one such imbalance. The data that these commodities generate is, of course, itself a commodity. The city (as a concretization of libidinal agency comes alive) with ever more novel ways of entrapping data and turning it to uses as defined as beneficial by established governmental structures—in other words the disruptive, fitful network already in place becomes animated with new purpose and pushed towards a greater rationalization which is dependent upon the existence of a controlling power.40 The state, or something like it (capable of wielding territorial power on an extensive scale), assumes control of the network directly. The methods by which this can happen—collusion or agreements between political and corporate entities, eminent domain takeover of sensorial network apparatus, or perhaps a sudden possession in the wake of a crisis—are nearly endless. This stage is dominated by the introduction of cohesive software packages (many of which in a nascent stage already exist) that are peddled by several transnational corporations specializing in the field. Rationalization, when it first arrives, needs a leg up. Linked by a vernacular mental framework, a global city begins to come into focus—a “territorial machine,” to borrow the phrasing of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, or a megamachine of interconnected intelligent urbanity.41 Cities can, at this stage, be thought of as more or less enantiomorphic, sharing the same base DNA. Though there may be slight differences on the ground, in cities around the world the controlling power will function similarly, as the functions of municipal power become integrated, centralized, and optimized—likely running variations of the same sensorial software API/dashboard packages that exhibit only minute aesthetic differences. Major ICT/IT corporations, such as Siemens, Cisco, and of course,

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Sidewalk Labs and its parent company Alphabet, are already moving to corner this market by offering packages to mayoral offices and municipal technology and infrastructure departments. However, this techno-semiotic unity will not last long. It is at this time that the smart city’s nightmare begins to come into being—the real identification of a coherent megamachine contains within it the elements of its own destruction. Whereas current cities cannot be said to compete with each other by any real metric, this will begin to change at the exact moment that a truly global urbanism becomes possible for the first time. If the city’s spaces and data are thought of as the commoditized substrate of universal software, that software must, before long, be modified to attend to specific local cases which arise—for example, dealing with coastal flooding, an explosion in crime, decaying material infrastructure—that fall outside the operational abilities of the template or are too small to register across the board. In this scenario, the universality of urban dashboards and sensorial networks must adapt to specific use cases. In Sidewalk’s Toronto project we can see the beginning of this trend—their promotional and planning materials prioritize localization and personalization, instead of technological development in its own right. At another level, urban intelligence deglobalizes and begins to deviate from the corporate dashboard baseline in favor of novel tuning solutions.

The third age of intelligent cities The involutionary speciation of smart cities is matched by an “explosion” in the territorial claims of smartness. Prior to this stage, the “smart city” is a misnomer, as smartness has appeared solely in enclaves and test neighborhoods, with only residual benefits from the underpinning template delivered to excluded zones. The scope of dashboards and sensorial networks is limited, even though they must pretend to holisticness. However, as smartness develops and specializes, isolated areas will no longer be enough. Smartness can never achieve a “climax state,” or an equilibrium point at which enough data is taken in and rationality is imposed. John Lorinc, quoting Pamela Robinson, succinctly describes this tendency with the maxim “[o]nce you build it, you want to feed it.”42 When paired, the desire to expand and the desire for total control turns into a procedure of colonization which simultaneously seeks to expand its territory while it fortifies and deepens complete control over that territory. Absolute rationalization and complete abstraction is the goal. After making the jump from smart districts to truly smart cities, we arrive at the smart region—a zone of influence in which algorithmic control is a maximalist imperative. Every smart city necessarily styles itself as a metropole exercising hegemonic control over everything it can. It is no longer enough to command and control enclosed “test areas” or “quantified zones”—the entire city, the entire region, must be uplifted and brought

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into the system. As this process can never be completed, there will always be a “digital frontier,” a periphery beyond its grasp, resulting in an uneven distribution of intelligence. This impossibility of total encoding will haunt the smart city. The terror of the remaining unknown, of the uncoded outside, is its ghost story. At the same time that outward expansion is frustrated, internal colonization continues apace, towards an asymptote of total computation.

The fourth age of intelligent cities The increasingly feverish development and consolidation of smartness at the local (city, regional) level produces at geopolitical level a sharply uneven topos of cities that can be thought of as urban “minds”—loci of concatenated, highly specialized strategies, tactics, technology, and operational procedures that essentially govern everyday life in their particular cities. Here, we see the fullest extension of intelligence in terms of the ability to communicate, as in Benjamin Bratton’s “The City Wears Us,” where the city becomes a “skin” of multiple intelligences in perfect interplay.43 Questions like: “how does this city think about this issue?” and “what is the way that city solves problems?” are vital questions of governance (and, perhaps more importantly, metagovernance). At this last stage, smartness in an urban area begins to look like an empire in freefall—overextended and vulnerable. Increased issues with hacks and takedowns in the more isolated frontier regions of the smart city requires these minds to develop and employ strategies of self-defense. The monopoly of the global city falls apart for good, devolving into a new regionalism as local smartness finds itself incompatible with its surroundings. Some strategies, and therefore minds, will be better than others. These strategies will function as the ultimate prize. Market principles select for intelligence—the smartest cities are the best for business, for living, for development. In this world, market decorum, the laws of circulation and trade, are no longer enough, because smartness has overwhelmed the logic of the commodity to become an operational advantage and thus an existential imperative. This tweaks Manuel Castells’ declaration—that the 1970s saw the rise of the “network society” in which “knowledge acting upon knowledge” becomes the primary source of value and wealth—and restates it in the negative; wealth cannot be the imperative, but the defense of the sensorial and spatial apparatus which makes wealth accumulation possible.44 To be not smart enough is to die—by disaster, or by military activity. A connected world is a vulnerable one—a sensorial environment can become oversensitive to the point of disorder, and become more vulnerable to assault. The possibility of attack cannot be allowed to exist as an unknown (or outside intelligence), and thus must be entered into the system as a possible scenario. War games become a part of the ways in which a city thinks, and are instantiated as a municipal pastime. Self-preservation becomes a governing instinct at an urban and regional level, the state of siege constant. Walls become necessary, both in digital and physical formats. The form of the city-state reappears, arms itself, and waits.

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The preceding is, of course, merely speculative. That said, what is depicted is less a revolution in content but in form. The fundamental character of the smart city already tends towards a future which, far from being one of total smoothness and limitless communication, is rather one which can only be divided and subdivided along the same lines of class, race, gender, and any number of other divisionary tactics the powers that be may deem useful. To paraphrase Jean-François Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition, despite how “smart” our cities and our citizenship may get, the decision makers remain who they have always been.45 It is unwise to blindly accept the invasion of smartness (or technological efficiency) into our lives, our minds, and our politics, as the anti-Sidewalk Labs activists in Toronto have known for a while now.46 By sketching out a possible nightmare scenario, this chapter aims to begin to concretize the unexplored territory of the smart city to come, and point to the smart city as an emergent tendency, which will not end in Toronto, or anywhere else, but has designs on a redesign of cities and urban life on a planetary scale.

Notes 1 Hwang, Victor W. “Are Cities Our New Economic Engines?” Forbes (2014, August 14), accessed April 3, 2019. www.forbes.com/sites/victorhwang/2014/08/14/cities-our-new-economic-engines. 2 This point can be contended, as various thinkers have posited that the disappearance of manufacturing in Europe and the United States has inaugurated a new or modified capitalism (such as Manuel Castells’ information age, Daniel Bell’s post-industrial society, Baudrillard’s semiocapitalism, and so on). For the purposes of this chapter, and to recognize that an overwhelming number of sensorial devices are produced cheaply in factories in Asia, this relationship of production to the city is considered to be relevant at a global scale. 3 Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume 1 (London, UK: Penguin Books, 1990). 4 Quote by Adolfo Natolini of Superstudio: “If design is merely an inducement to consume, then we must reject design.” Cited from Elfline, Ross K. “Superstudio and the ‘Refusal to Work’.” Design and Culture 8, no. 1 (January 2, 2016): 55–77, https://doi.org/10.1080/17547075.2016.1142343. 5 “Computronium” refers to the science fictional idea in which the building blocks of matter themselves become capable of computational processing, wherein the totality of a structure or object may be thought of as processing material. For more see Amato, Ivan. “Speculating in Precious Computronium.” Science 253, no. 5022 (August 23, 1991): 856–7. 6 Awair. “AWAIR 2nd Edition,” Awair, https://getawair.com (accessed December 27, 2018). 7 Awair. “AWAIR Glow,” Awair, https://getawair.com (accessed December 27, 2018). 8 By way of analogy, the Awair has relatively the same response capability that Gordon Pask’s tortoises did, and the same relation to the smart city that the tortoises did to cybernetics in general. Pask’s tortoises were small robots capable of responding to rudimentary environmental cues. In one of his famous experiments, Pask introduced multiple tortoise robots to a room with multiple light sources he could turn on and off, thus influencing the tortoise-swarm’s behavior indirectly. The Awair behaves similarly; having no “brain” of its own, it nevertheless can take action based on changing environmental conditions. And as the tortoises alluded to a larger field of cybernetics in terms of the way they played with novel forms of “cognition” and robotics, the Awair implies a sensorial network which we may think of as presaging the smart city. For more on Pask and his tortoises, as well as a thorough history of cybernetics in general, see Pickering, Andrew. The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 9 For more, see Mattern, Shannon. “Instrumental City: The View from Hudson Yards, circa 2019,” Places, April 26, 2016. https://doi.org/10.22269/160426. 10 Gabrys, Jennifer. “Programming Environments: Environmentality and Citizen Sensing in the Smart City,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32, no. 1 (2014): 12. 11 The friend/enemy distinction is borrowed from Carl Schmitt’s famous definition of politics in The Concept of the Political and other post-war lectures. The political dimensions of the friend/enemy binary are present throughout the book, but for a succinct overview, see Schmitt, Carl, Strong, Tracy B. and Strauss, Leo, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition, translated by George Schwab (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 26.

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12 Research group Data & Society has undertaken extensive research on the relation of privacy to poverty. For more, see “Privacy, Poverty and Big Data: A Matrix of Vulnerabilities for Poor Americans,” Data & Society (accessed April 3, 2019), https://datasociety.net/output/privacy-poverty-and-big-dataa-matrix-of-vulnerabilities-for-poor-americans/. 13 Block, India. “Zaha Hadid Architects designing smart city outside Moscow,” Dezeen (2018, November 13), www.dezeen.com/2018/11/13/moscow-smart-city-rublyovo-arkhangelskoye-zaha-hadid-architects (accessed January 3, 2018). 14 For more, see Bellafante, Ginia. “The Landlord Wants Facial Recognition in Its Rent-Stabilized Buildings. Why?” The New York Times, 2019, April 1, sec. New York. www.nytimes.com/2019/03/28/nyregion/ rent-stabilized-buildings-facial-recognition.html. 15 Sidewalk Labs, “Our Vision.” Sidewalk Labs, www.sidewalklabs.com (accessed December 27, 2018). 16 Lucáks, Georg. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 191. 17 Ibid., 191. 18 Benjamin, Walter. One-Way Street (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), Kindle e-book. 19 Heather Rogers has written a wonderful overview on the basic tenets and, more importantly, dramatic follies of “green capitalism” in “The Greening of Capitalism?” in International Socialist Review 70, March 2010. See also the broader work of Jason Moore and John Bellamy Foster. 20 The phrase “perpetual peace” is borrowed from Immanuel Kant, who defined the concept of total peace under international moral law in his treatise “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay”: Kant, Immanuel. Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay (London, UK: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1795), translated by Mary Campbell Smith, 2016, www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/50922?msg=welcome_stran ger. The usage of the term here should be taken as shorthand to denote a global, universally promoted cessation of hostilities in favor of a totalizing technological push towards environmental stability; in other words, perpetual peace through environmental positivism. 21 Gabrys, Jennifer. “Programming Environments: Environmentality and Citizen Sensing in the Smart City.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32 (2014, February 11): 30. 22 Halpern, Orit, LeCavalier, Jesse, Calvillo, Nerea and Pietsch, Wolfgang. “Test-Bed Urbanism.” Public Culture 25, (2013): 272–306, 10.1215/08992363–2,020,602. 23 Ibid., 275. 24 Scott, John. Corporate Business and Capitalist Classes (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997). Scott develops his account of the dialectic between competing schematics of power through a close reading of Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systems theory in the chapter “The Capitalist World-Economy.” 25 Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Hoboken, NJ: WileyBlackwell, 1992). Though the concept of abstract space is continuously developed throughout Lefebvre’s work, the definition used here is largely contingent to that in The Production of Space. 26 Williams, Timothy. “In High-Tech Cities, No More Potholes, but What About Privacy?” The New York Times, 2019, January 1. Available online: www.nytimes.com/2019/01/01/us/kansas-city-smart-technol ogy.html. 27 NEOM is a proposed smart city project with an intensive focus on both ecological stability and especially technological and economic growth. The city, proposed by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, is the beginning of a push to diversify the Saudi economy away from oil profits. 28 “Saudi Arabia Plans Futuristic City, ‘Neom’,” posted by ArchDaily, October 26, 2017, video, 2:00, www.youtube.com/watch?v=N53DzL3_BHA. 29 Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology (New York, NY: Harper Torchbooks, 2017). 30 Wilson, Japhy. “The Devastating Conquest of the Lived by the Conceived,” Space and Culture 16, no. 3: 368. 31 Henard, Eugene. “The Cities of the Future” (presentation, Royal Institute of British Architects’ Town Planning Conference London, London, UK, October 10–15, 1910). 32 Gouldner, Alvin W. The Two Marxisms (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1980), 386. 33 Aravindan, Aradhana and Geddie, John. “Singapore to Test Facial Recognition on Lampposts, Stoking Privacy Fears,” Reuters (2018, April 13). Available online: www.reuters.com/article/us-singaporesurveillance/singapore-to-test-facial-recognition-on-lampposts-stoking-privacy-fears-idUSKBN1HK0RV. 34 Law, Terence. “Singapore An Advanced Surveillance State, But Citizens don’t Mind,” Tech in Asia (2013, November 25). Available online: www.techinasia.com/singapore-advanced-surveillance-statecitizens-mind. 35 API stands for “Application Programming Interface” and refers to an invisible communication protocol that allows devices and platforms to communicate with each other. APIs are common in the programming world but their application to the urban environment is quite nascent and usually culminates in a type of dashboard that reduces and streamlines urban functions. Stae (https://stae.co) is one such example of an urban dashboard product built on API technology. 36 Bianca Wylie’s work on the digital governance ideology behind Sidewalk Toronto is indispensable on this topic; see Wylie, Bianca. “Sidewalk Toronto: Time to Take Data Governance Away from Sidewalk

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37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44

45 46

Labs *and* Waterfront Toronto,” Medium (blog), 2018, November 12, https://medium.com/@biancawy lie/sidewalk-toronto-time-to-take-data-governance-away-from-sidewalk-labs-and-waterfront-torontocf6325b32cc7. The extent to which this tendency can be separated wholesale from the revolutionary character of capitalism identified by Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto is debatable. Benjamin, Walter. On the Philosophy of History, accessed January 1, 2019, www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/ CONCEPT2.html. Harvey, David. Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (London, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017). Particularly, see Contradiction 3, “Private Property and the Capitalist State.” I should note here that the exact nature of this power (state, transnational corporation, or some fusion of the two) is irrelevant—this controlling power will for all intents and purposes occupy the role the state generally takes. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. Anti-Oedipus (New York, NY: Penguin Classics, 2009). Lorinc, John. “A Mess on the Sidewalk.” The Baffler, 2019, March 4, https://thebaffler.com/salvos/ a-mess-on-the-sidewalk-lorinc. Bratton, Benjamin. “The City Wears Us.” Glass Bead, 2017, accessed March 6, 2019, www.glassbead.org/article/city-wears-us-notes-scope-distributed-sensing-sensation/. Webster, Frank. “Is This the Information Age?” City 8, no. 2 (1997): 71–84. Webster’s short essay functions as a review of Manuel Castells’ immense The Information Age trilogy. This statement on the character of network society as defined by “knowledge acting on knowledge” comes from Castells, Manuel, The Rise of the Network Society. 2nd ed. The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture Volume I (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996). Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). Vincent, Donovan. “Newly Formed Citizens Group Aims to Block Sidewalk Labs Project,” thestar. com (2019, February 25), www.thestar.com/news/gta/2019/02/25/newly-formed-citizens-group-aimsto-block-sidewalk-labs-project.html (accessed April 4, 2019).

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Chapter 10

The right to the (smart) city, participation and open data Jonas Breuer, Nils Walravens, Shenja Van der Graaf and Ilse Mariën

Introduction Across the globe, cities are expanding their efforts to become ‘more digitalised,’ ‘more intelligent,’ and ‘smarter’, a powerful metaphor for the way contemporary society organises and understands itself (Van der Graaf, 2018). The current climate of austerity is placing additional pressure on public bodies to do more with less, particularly at the local level where government services have the greatest impact on people’s everyday lives. In this atmosphere, becoming ‘smart’ and data-driven is understood as key in the preparation of an efficient and cost-effective future. In addition to the seeming decisiveness of technologies and data, the role of citizens in making cities truly ‘smart’ is increasingly prioritised (Almeida, Doneda, & Monteiro, 2018; Ballon, Van der Graaf, & Walravens, 2017). Such a vision highlights human agency and multi-stakeholderism, and it complements the ubiquity of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) in urban environments. This uptake of a kind of humancentric ‘smart city’ also puts Henri Lefebvre’s ‘Right to the City’ (1968) back into focus. One way the ‘Right to the (Smart) City’ is supposedly claimed is in the concept of open data: by publishing all kinds of data about urban life, transparency and innovation can be fostered, and citizens participate in making and accessing new services and information (Anastasiu, 2019; Attoh, 2011; Barns, 2016). However, this potentially high democratic impact of open data is rarely achieved (cf. Walravens, Breuer, & Ballon, 2014). By analysing open data as one approach towards the ‘Right to the (Smart) City’, this chapter assesses the potential of and challenges for a new right to the city,

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and what is required to realise that potential in practice. It makes systematically explicit the need to understand the ‘reconfiguration’ of cities as a multi-stakeholder ecosystem through ICT; in terms of the city’s governance and representation, on the one hand, and ‘the right’, i.e., its mediated practices of production, consumption, and experience, on the other hand, thereby specifically focussing on how stakeholders need to be mobilised and engaged. Seen in the light of Lefebvre’s ‘Right to the City’, it is argued that, while theory is interesting, its applicability in practice remains challenging. Truly democratic participation in smart cities starts from defining future strategies and priorities for the city as a whole, and not solely for the technological solutions to be set in place. The remainder of this chapter is structured as follows. First, the concept of ‘smart city’ is unpacked and related to the ‘Right to the City’ as a way to assess citizen empowerment. Second, key aspects for multi-stakeholder involvement in practice are considered. Third, open data is discussed as one approach towards citizen participation, before the democratic deficit of open data and the discrepancy between theory and practice are discussed. This work concludes by outlining its significance in its contribution to the debate around this urban revolution and the needs of citizens and users of urban space.

The promise of a smart city Considering the centrality of the ‘smart city’ as a contemporary urban concept in various discourses within urbanism – from media studies, urban studies, geography, to architecture, and elsewhere – the ongoing role and application of associated ICT within future urbanisation seems inevitable. Despite its influence, the concept remains fuzzy and means rather different things to different people, from enthusiasm about efficiency, sustainability, economic growth, participation and generally a better world through technology to concerns about freedom/privacy (cf. Komninos & Mora, 2018; Mattern, 2017). ‘Smart cities’ are certainly partly digital, becoming places where ICT are combined with infrastructure, architecture, everyday objects, and our bodies to address social, economic, and environmental problems (Townsend, 2013). They are driven by promises of efficiency and productivity (Campkin & Ross, 2013), claimed as guarantors for sustainable development with the rationale that, to create a ‘better’ city, it should be turned into an ‘intelligent machine’ which both understands and manages complexities of urban life. Connectivity is thus a core feature, as are immense amounts of data collected, generated and analysed. Some scholars, therefore, speak of ‘data cities’ rather than Smart Cities (Powell, 2014). Increasingly, interpretations of the ‘smart city’ include a vision that highlights human agency and multi-stakeholderism in addition to the ubiquity of ICT (Walravens, Van Compernolle, & Waeben, 2018b). The 2018 Smart City Expo in Barcelona, for instance, called for a ‘Right to the (Smart) City’, demonstrating that this vision has

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gained influence beyond the realm of critical scholars (The Right to the Smart City at Smart City Expo World Congress, 2018). This human dimension to the smart city concept has thus far received inadequate attention (cf. Almeida, Doneda, & Monteiro 2018; de Waal & Dignum, 2017). The original ‘Right to the City’ was introduced by Henri Lefebvre in 1968, demanding a radical restructuring of social, political, and economic relations in the city, leaving behind the superiority of capital and approaching empowerment of urban inhabitants (Lefebvre, 1968). It signifies a right for every user of urban space to change conditions of life by being able to (re)produce that space, collectively and without being constrained by obtrusive forces from the outside. Importantly, citizens earn their belonging to a city by living and using it. It puts forward an idea of inhabitants as users, granted the status as contributors to lived experience and space, including ‘workers, immigrants [and] the marginal’ (Lefebvre, 1996, p. 34). Lefebvre thus considers the use value of urban space as the primary aspect for its production. This repositions the people into the heart of the urban. The ‘Right to the City’ goes far beyond the planning and installation of objects and infrastructure: it is the (re)production of all aspects of the urban (Lefebvre & Nicholson-Smith, 1991). The ‘smart city’, its connectivity, and the opportunities for participation and inclusiveness that arise thereof could indeed contribute to such re-arrangements of power constellations in line with Lefebvre. Open Data, as will be discussed subsequently, is one way the ‘Right to the (Smart) City’ is supposedly claimed in the smart city. To this point, however, logics of competitiveness, economic growth, and substantial revenue potential for companies have arguably been greater driving forces than the use value of urban space. Much of what ‘smart city’ has become stems from a rather narrow, top-down, techno-centric, and commercially driven vision of ‘what’ and ‘who’ the city is for (Ballon, 2016). Corresponding rhetorics of urban efficiency and productivity as well as economic growth can be seen in the light of an entrepreneurial approach to urban governance. It prioritises the marketing of a city by means of innovation, competition, or the provision of a good business climate. Comparative advantages (resources, geography, infrastructures, quality of life, and tax conditions) are created and exploited to access central positions in the global market and consumer power (Harvey, 1989). This often results in the merging of economic growth and business competitiveness with social well-being. A recent example is the multinational technology company Amazon’s search for new headquarters, highly coveted by city governments but entailing important questions of increasing rents, tax benefits, and potentially reduction of public space (Giridharadas, 2018). The entrepreneurial approach in urban decision-making, underpinning commodification of space and interurban competition (Harvey, 2008) has been linked to a neoliberal outlook on globalisation. ‘The long march of the Neoliberal Revolution’ (Hall, 2011) has brought about a situation where market logics are normalised and other policy aspects (such as environmental and social) subordinated to the economic realm (Peck & Tickell, 2002, p. 384). Swyngedouw argues that ‘a constellation of technocratic managerial practices of good governance within a generic neoliberal frame that remains uncontested’ produces a ‘de-politicized Post-Political and PostDemocratic city’ (ibid., 2011, p. 24), where market logics and the strive for efficiency dictate the development and use of urban space rather than requirements of citizens.

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This (ever-increasing) reciprocity between urbanisation, urban governance, and neoliberal market logics is not surprising given the strong dependency between cities and our economic system. Indeed, the city is most relevant in order to understand how the wealth of nations is created (Jacobs, 1985).

Participation in the smart city Cities are complex ecosystems of diverse agents, with power to affect the organisation of space, and with decisive mutually dependent interests. One might argue that, indeed, all those who use urban space should be in a position to guide, shape, and govern its development. The ‘smart city’ concept, becoming almost normative in facing difficult issues for cities in the future, has been shaped strongly by those that create, implement, and maintain the ‘smart’ infrastructure. Here, questions about democracy and inclusion of citizens in the making of their cities can be raised, and are ultimately about who decides what a ‘smart city’ is. Whether we want to live in a society that is anchored in the sort of city as promoted for example by SidewalkLabs1 in Toronto, which ignores citizen participation for the sake of the economic value especially of generated data (see Kofman, 2019), is something we must actively consider. The renewed interest in Lefebvre’s ‘Right to the City’ in this context seems to suggest that a more inclusive and participatory way in ‘city-making’ is increasingly on the agenda of civil society and decision-makers. However, assigning an active, coequal, and structural role to all actors in the complex multi-stakeholder setting of the ‘smart city’ has rarely been achieved. While ICT certainly can have an enabling effect, it is clear that efforts have to go beyond the technology in order to do so (cf. Attoh, 2011; Hatuka et al., 2018). This can be seen as a city that enables ‘smart’ citizens based upon an integrated technological framework that facilitates an intrinsic architecture of participation and collaboration. In fact, as urbanism is said to have the potential to enact deep societal transformations, such a city could exert a deep impact on society, on the condition that stakeholders can collaborate in productive and meaningful ways. However, participation and inter-actor collaboration are challenging in practice, burdensome, slow, and ineffective without clear procedural designs. Multi-stakeholder participation is fed by the ideology of creating a ‘smart city’ designed for all and to the benefit of all, reflecting the significance of the use value of urban space as the primary aspect for its production. This gives a voice to vulnerable and difficult-to-reach citizens within the city, and, hence, is put forward as a way of more democratic city development (Manzo & Brightbill, 2007). Especially in becoming ‘smart’, designed around ICT, the risk of developing a city that benefits the strong and not all is real (Mariën et al., 2017). Research by van Deursen and van Dijk (2013) points out that the internet and ICT are mainly to the benefit of the digitally savvy, whereas digitally vulnerable groups in fact experience additional barriers to their societal participation and wellbeing, and consequently see their precarious social position aggravated. Also, if not approached carefully, smart developments can be subject to the ‘digital

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inclusion panacea’ (Steyn & Johanson, 2011) as the optimistic and idealist idea that ICTdriven solutions are inclusive by nature and a solution to all societal issues within the city. These critical remarks imply that, when aiming for a democratisation of ‘smart city’ developments through participation, which truly serve the majority of the cities’ ‘users’, a number of key aspects need to be considered. Participation should go beyond mere co-creation and living lab methodologies. Both serve the development of user-driven technological solutions for societal problems within the city via one-on-one collaboration with users to design, develop, and test technological solutions. These solutions, and the goal they serve, however, are predefined by either the policy actors, the industry, or technology-driven research. Too often the foci of technological solutions are decided upon in a top-down manner by these actors, instead of being selected via the consultation of citizens and their challenges and needs in daily practices and routines. In practice, this means involving citizens via offline processes, such as large citizen panels and local consultation rounds, or online participation platforms such as Citizenlab.2 True democratisation only happens when there is a shift of the powers in place (Kesby, Kindon, & Pain, 2007). Within a city, this means that there needs to be a willingness and openness from the ‘board of directors’ – the ones with the power to define and decide on current and future actions in and for the city – to accept and implement unknown input of the quadruple helix actors; government, industry, academia, and civil participants. Too often, outcomes of participatory processes are set aside by the powers in place. Such processes, merely a tick of a box on a list of administrative obligations, are not considered as true participation and create disappointment and frustration among participants (Laenens, Van den Broeck, & Mariën, 2018). Transparency and openness about goals and next steps are key features of any participatory process, being at the start or end of a project, whether it is offline or online. Participation is also to be seen as an iterative process in which various stakeholders are informed, consulted, or involved at different stages of the decision-making process (McIntyre, 2008). The iterative character of multi-stakeholder participation is clearly shown in the sample case on Open Data, in which a participatory process with the 13 socalled centre cities in Flanders was set up to define and implement a common open data policy (see the next chapter). The sample case also shows how technology could underlie the ‘Right to the City’, how it can enable citizens to participate in generating value, in shaping their urban context, and in providing better public services. It also illustrates why the potentially high democratic impact of open data is rarely achieved (Walravens, Breuer, & Ballon, 2014). Seen in the light of Lefebvre’s theory, it must be realised that, while the theory is interesting, its applicability in practice remains challenging.

Open data in the smart city One way the ‘Right to the (Smart) City’ is supposedly claimed is in the concept of open data. Currently, city governments are exploring what the smart city concept can actually

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contribute to their daily practices and which role technology can play in providing better services to citizens. While data has always been important in running a city, the sheer amount that is becoming available today, as well as the combination of data sources from different domains, can provide new types of tools and insights. This can be data that comes from Internet of Things solutions (e.g., sensors in public parking garages), structured information in internal reporting systems, detailed data on the public domain (e.g., from satellite imaging), and so on. In order to fully unlock the potential of this data, however, it needs to become more easily available and accessible. This is where open data comes in; the idea is that governments are currently owning but not using a wealth of information related to divergent aspects of life in the city, data that is neither publicly available nor easily interpretable (Artopoulos, 2018). This has sparked a movement to encourage the opening of datasets in a structured and machine-readable way, under the ‘open data’ moniker, which has gained significant traction across local and national governments. The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) is one of the strong proponents of open data and has come up with what has become the generally accepted definition of open data: ‘Open means anyone can freely access, use, modify and share for any purpose (subject, at most, to requirements that preserve provenance and openness)’ (OKFN, 2015). This means that open data can be used for any goal at no cost, with the only (potential) exceptions being that re-users mention the source of the data and do not in any way prevent the data from being shared further on. It should be stated that clearly no other laws should be violated when publishing data, e.g., in the interest of privacy (GDPR), national security, public safety, and so on. The idea here is clear: public organisations open up all kinds of data related to their operations, with the goal of having external developers create new services and applications (‘apps’) based on this data. In principle, this can mean a cost reduction for the public organisations that open data, as they do not need to build and maintain their own services and apps, an activity that is generally accepted as being highly cost-intensive (Walravens, 2015). The benefit for citizens and users of the city is that a multitude of different services become available, which appeal to different target audiences and niches. In this way, a multitude of actors is potentially enabled to contribute to the production of urban space as defined in the ‘Right to the City’. In practice, however, a number of challenges remain and ‘merely’ opening up data has often not proven successful (see, e.g., Lee, Almirall, & Wareham, 2014; Peled, 2011). These challenges relate to properly communicating about the available data, ensuring high quality data remains available, following up on feedback provided by the community, tracking reuse, and so on. Opening up data even entails significant challenges to governments and public organisations before any data ‘leaves’ the organisation (e.g., setting up internal processes to safeguard internal data hygiene and quality control, or implementing new or updating existing database systems). Relevant data can also be distributed over different government organisations or levels of governance, and some data applicable to the public may be under the control of private players that are less inclined to open it. After data are made available, the role of government is not necessarily played out. Ensuring that data is actually reused and

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relevant applications are built should also be considered a concern for these public organisations and open data policy makers.

The Smart Flanders program In order to tackle some of the challenges listed above, the Smart Flanders program3 was initiated by the Flemish Government (Belgium) in early 2017. Smart Flanders is coordinated by IMEC, the largest non-profit technology research institute in Belgium, by an interdisciplinary team of researchers from communication sciences, organisational science, and computer science. The goal of the three-year program is to support the 13 so-called centre cities in Flanders (by and large the biggest cities) and a representation of the Flemish Community in the Brussels Region (referred to as the 13+1) with defining and implementing a common open data policy. The program is followed up by a steering group consisting of representatives of the cities, the cabinets of the Flemish ministers for Urban Policy and for Innovation, the Flemish agencies responsible for Interior Policy and Information, the Knowledge Centre Flemish Cities, the Organisation of Flemish Cities and Towns, and IMEC. To achieve the goal of defining and implementing a joint open data policy, these cities needed to find common ground and collaborate in ways and on themes that were quite new to them. While the program has yielded interesting results,4 the initiative has also demonstrated once more that making data available does not necessarily mean engagement, impact, or change when it comes to tackling complex urban challenges. As an implementation-driven program, Smart Flanders seeks to learn by doing, identifying challenges and bottlenecks along the way. The topics of the data pilots are chosen by the cities and the first theme to work on was data on off-street parking availability. These parking garages are very often run by commercial companies and cities have limited to no insight into how and when these garages are used, as the data is owned by the companies and nothing related to open data was included in the concession or contract. In this case, Smart Flanders negotiated with parking companies in an effort to publish the real-time (and historical) occupancy of the parking garages as linked open data. Due to the complexity of the contracts that were already in place or the sheer lack of any stipulations related to the data ownership or usage rights, the program only succeeded in opening up this information in four of the 13+1 cities. For these four cities a proof of concept5 was developed, visualising the real-time linked open data in a basic way and allowing the comparison of the historical data across cities. Trying to publish this data as open data taught a lot of relevant lessons and identified the need for more standardised clauses in contracts with third-party suppliers: building visualisations from a project perspective is one thing (see Figures 10.1 and 10.2 below) but, in the end, the goal is to have both popular and niche applications and services (e.g., Google Maps or OnWheels) to reuse this data. The next data pilot in the Smart Flanders program focusses on data about the physical accessibility of public buildings. Currently, this data is fragmented and managed by different organisations (regional government, cities, non-profits, and so on). Structuring, linking, and publishing this information was the next challenge for the

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Figure 10.1 Visualisation of real-time parking information based on linked open data in an online proof of concept (real-time occupancy in one garage). © imec-SMIT, Vrije Universiteit Brussel program (see Figure 10.3 below). This pilot resulted in another set of conclusions and recommendations delivered both to the cities and Flemish Government, but what is interesting is that in both cases these recommendations go far beyond technical challenges.6 Merely defining the pilots proved challenging. Finding a policy challenge that was within scope but would still have impact for citizens was not easy. This is related to the fact that the representatives of the cities in the steering group usually come from a strategic cell or from the IT department of the city and do not always have the full overview of potential interesting policy challenges where there is a lack of data. This is tackled by organizing thematic workshops with domain experts from the different cities, with the aim of scoping the challenges further and making sure the most relevant data is being pursued. However, it highlights the ‘chicken-and-egg’ nature of the topic and the fact that opening data does not automatically mean companies or citizens will reuse it. On the one hand, enough data need to be available before anyone will reuse them, while on the other, public organisations are only willing to invest in open data when there is a clear demand. This creates a fundamental challenge when considering open data in the context of a new right to the smart city; a democratic deficit if you will.

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Figure 10.2 Visualisation of real-time parking information based on linked open data in an online proof of concept (comparing garages across cities in relative numbers). © imec-SMIT, Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Figure 10.3 Visualisation of building accessibility information based on linked open data in an online proof of concept. © imec-SMIT, Vrije Universiteit Brussel

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Discussion: the democratic deficit of open data Open data as a concept triggers some reflections when seen in the light of establishing and sustaining a ‘Right to the (Smart) City’. The conception of the concept has evolved from Lefebvre’s summation of more traditional rights (leaving room for contestations such as what a right to the city may look like in practice or what happens when two or more traditional rights clash), to the current understanding that puts a radical openness forward (cf. Attoh, 2011). More specifically, not only does it seem to point to an individual right to access and to change urban resources oneself. It also matters in the way urban resources can be accessed. Accepting this, in its most basic operationalisation, the idea of opening up government data where possible holds thus a great deal of potential. It can give citizens more insight into how and why certain decisions are made at the political level. It can also stimulate innovation, with new services, apps, efficiency gains, jobs, and economic activity as a result. It can lead to more and better interaction between citizens and governments, and so on. Lastly, the technical requirements for open data can even have a positive impact on organisational structures of public organisations, fostering transparency, interdepartmental collaboration, and revealing shortcomings. Yet, it is questionable whether it actually does, or what the conditions should be for this to take place. This is made explicit in the political premise of the ‘smart city’ concept, in how politicians frame their view on open data: the concept is quite popular across the political spectrum, as it can be employed in very different rhetorics, as illustrated above: an argument for a smaller government (not building services and applications, but making sure data are available so that others can do so), or for more government effort (e.g., in relation to transparency, engagement with citizens, active participation, development of data-related software solutions, standardisation activities, and so on). Whatever viewpoint taken, a ‘right to the smart city’ should include, at the very least, access to data. However, as reuse of open data does not ‘just happen’ and requires interaction, stimulation, or incentives in some cases, the question becomes at which point the role of public officials is played out in this realm (Walravens et al., 2018a). It is clear that the government body providing open data has a role to play, but to what extent? In what forms should it make data easily available, but also understandable or interpretable for citizens? For which types of data or in which domains? How can open data be privacy-compliant? Herein lies the potential for a – perhaps counterintuitive – democratic deficit of open data: even if data are available in a smart city context, it does not mean they are ‘useable, useful or used’ (Open Knowledge International, 2019). One part of the answer seems to lie in avoiding a purely top-down or bottom-up approach (Shepard & Simeti, 2013), but rather aiming to bring together the relevant parties from the quadruple helix (government, companies, research, and citizens) as mentioned above. Engaging the quadruple helix, and particularly citizens – via truly participatory and inclusive means, in complex urban challenges with technical components like (open) data – remains a massive challenge, as illustrated in the Smart Flanders pilots discussed supra. Such an approach requires sufficient time and

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means to facilitate discussion, properly defining urban challenges, getting the roles of all involved stakeholders clear, and setting up a step-by-step approach to act. Only through such an approach can a more sustainable open data policy be developed, that further enables a ‘right to a smart city’.

Conclusion The human dimension to the typically commercial and technologically driven understandings of the smart city concept has thus far received sparse attention. Accepting this, an exploratory account of the ‘Right to the City’ has been introduced as a systematic means to consider power relationships and to address the common and (just) criticisms that revolve around the concept today. Despite its limits, the ‘Right to the City’ concept is very much in line with calls for more ‘human smartness’ in cities – for technology that is enabling, as a means to an end rather than the end in itself. It is important to emphasize that it centre-stages the call for production of urban space in the sense that urban space consists of its inhabitants as users and should serve their needs. It prioritizes human agency and multi-stakeholderism in urbanization, which is traditionally driven by economic logics. We invite therefore a research agenda that can generate and deliver the smart city implicit promise of empowerment. As discussed above, the potential is there, even more so with the connectivity that ICT affords. However, developing true participatory approaches is challenging – often associated with the political premise of the concept ‘du jour’ which have been shown to tend to subscribe to normative discourses (of those in power). This, in conjunction with the current open data trajectory which is also progressing with ‘twists and turns’, actively engaging with stakeholders through appropriate and targeted means and methods is, undoubtedly, most important. However, at the same time, such a necessity also is likely to require or involve a raising of skills and capabilities of citizens and civil servants in order for them to be able to participate in meaningful ways in the first place, and needs to be considered as a decisive factor. Put differently, truly democratic participation in smart cities starts from defining future strategies and priorities for the city as a whole, and not solely for the technological solutions to be set in place. It has been the aim of this chapter to prompt a critical debate about the ‘Right to the City’ made explicit by truly participatory principles, urging cities and governments, at minimum, to anticipate and mitigate (un)intended consequences in future city-making.

Notes 1 2 3 4

SidewalkLabs is a subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet. www.citizenlab.co. Available at: https://smart.flanders.be (Dutch only at the time of writing). These include an Open Data Charter, standard clauses on data city that administrations can use in contracts and agreements when procuring solutions from third-party suppliers, so-called data pilots

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publishing real-time open data on parking space availability and accessibility, an open data checklist, a set of technical resources, and so on. 5 https://smartflanders-poc.netlify.com/#/parkings. 6 More information on this pilot can be found on https://smart.flanders.be/piloten/toegankelijkheid.html (Dutch).

Acknowledgements This research was supported by different research projects conducted by imec-SMIT, a research centre attached to the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). The case study material was derived from the Smart Flanders program (available at: https://smart.flan ders.be), initiated by the Flemish Government (Belgium) in early 2017 and coordinated by IMEC. The project supports 13 Flemish cities with opening up data related to complex urban challenges.

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Komninos, N. & Mora, L. (2018). Exploring the big picture of smart city research. Scienze Regionali, 17, 15–38, ISSN 1720–3929. Laenens, W., Van den Broeck, W., & Mariën, I. (2018). Channel choice determinants of (digital) government communication: A case study of spatial planning in Flanders. Media and Communication, 6(4), 140–152. Lee, M.J., Almirall, E., & Wareham, J.D. (2014). Open data & civic apps: 1st generation failures – 2nd generation improvements. ESADE Business School Research Paper, (256). Barcelona, Spain: ESADE Business School. Lefebvre, H. (1968). Le droit à la ville. Paris: S.L.: SEUIL. Lefebvre, H. (1996). Writings On Cities. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Lefebvre, H. & Nicholson-Smith, D. (1991). The Production of Space (Vol. 30). Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Retrieved from: www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/theory/Lefebvre-Production-of-Space-excerpts-1.pdf. Manzo, L.C. & Brightbill, N. (2007). Toward a participatory ethics. In: Kindon, S., Pain, R., & Kesby, M. (Eds) Participatory Action Research Approaches and Methods: Connecting People, Participation and Place [Studies in Human Geography]. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, pp. 33–40. Mariën, I., Donders, K., Vanhaeght, A.-S., & Walravens, N. (2017). PAR4-P: Een shift in beleidsvorming voor een menselijke digitale stad. In: Ballon, P., Macharis, C., & Ryckewaert, M. (Eds) Humane stad: 30 voorstellen voor een stad op mensenmaat. Brussels, Belgium: ASP/VUBPRESS, pp. 221–237. Mattern, S. (2017). Code + Clay … + Data + Dirt: Five Thousands Years of Urban Media. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. McIntyre, A. (2008). Participatory Action Research. Qualitative Research Methods Series 52. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) (2015). Open Definition. Retrieved from: http://opendefinition.org. Open Knowledge International (2019). What is open? Retrieved from: https://okfn.org/opendata. Peck, J. & Tickell, A. (2002). Neoliberalizing space. Antipode, 34(3), 380–404, doi: 10.1111/1467–8330.00247. Peled, A. (2011). When transparency and collaboration collide: The USA open data program. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 62(11), 2085–2094. Powell, A. (2014). ‘Datafication’, transparency, and good governance of the data city. Digital Enlightenment Yearbook 2014: Social Networks and Social Machines, Surveillance and Empowerment, 215–224, doi: 10.3233/978–1–61499–450–3–215. Shepard, M. & Simeti, A. (2013). What’s so smart about the smart citizen? In: D. Hemment & A. Townsend (Eds) Smart Citizens. Manchester: FutureEverything Publications, pp. 13–18. Steyn, J. and Johanson, G. (2011). ICTs and Sustainable Solutions for the Digital Divide: Theory and Perspectives, Information Science Reference. Hershey, PA: IGI Global. Swyngedouw, E. (2009). The zero-ground of politics: Musings on the post-political city. NewGeographies (Harvard University Design School), 1 (After Zero Theme Issue): 52–61. The Right to the Smart City at Smart City Expo World Congress. (2018). [Youtube]. Barcelona. Townsend, A. (2013). What if the smart cities of the future are chock full of bugs? Retrieved March 4, 2014 from: http://places.designobserver.com/feature/smart-cities-buggy-and-brittle/38111. Van der Graaf, S. (2018). In waze we trust: Algorithmic governance of the public sphere. Media and Communication, 6(4), 153–162. van Deursen, A.J.A.M. & van Dijk, J.A.G.M. (2013). The digital divide shifts to differences in usage. New Media & Society, 16(3), 507–526, doi: 10.1177/1461444813487959. Walravens, N. (2015). Mobile city applications for Brussels citizens: Smart City trends, challenges and a reality check. Telematics and Informatics, 32(2), 282–299. Walravens, N., Breuer, J., & Ballon, P. (2014). Open data as a catalyst for the smart city as a local innovation platform. IDATE, 96(Special Issue Smart Cities), 10–15. Walravens, N., Van Compernolle, M., Colpaert, P., & N. Dumarey (2018a). Open data: Opportuniteiten en Uitdagingen voor Lokale Besturen. Politeia. Walravens, N., Van Compernolle, M., & Waeben, J. (2018b). Co-creating a practical vision on the smart city. Presented at the AHRA Architecture 2018 conference, Eindhoven, the Netherlands.

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Scenarios of interactive citizenship Renata Tyszczuk

Introduction Smart cities are often seen as the means for addressing the challenges of rapid urbanisation, promoting sustainable urban growth, creating socially inclusive societies and responding to climate change by increasing resilience. However, the utopian rhetoric of smart cities scenarios ignores the complexities of urban societies and the very diverse experiences of citizens across a transforming world. This chapter draws attention to the intersecting history of scenarios and smart city visions. It explores the potential of scenario-making vis-à-vis urban futures as a shared and necessarily contested cultural endeavour. The aim is to consider the possibilities for scenarios of interactive citizenship as an anticipatory mode for shaping collaborative infrastructures that can help equip societies to better cope with the prospect of uncertain futures.

Smart world The globe is on our computers. No one lives there. It allows us to think that we can aim to control it.1 We live in a smart world, where the disruptions to earth systems through human impacts, most notably climate change, are events that come into view through planetary computation. The technologically produced images that stem from Apollo missions

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have created an illusion of ‘whole earth’ as an artefact which could be managed, encoded into systems, and steered – that is – understood as ‘Spaceship Earth’.2 A planetary perspective is the basis for projects of ‘infrastructural globalism’3 that have forged an understanding of the planet not only as an artefact, but also as a system, albeit one defined by crisis, that could be controlled. We also live on an increasingly urbanising planet. In effect we inhabit ‘a planet of cities in planetary crisis’.4 And yet we have hopes of ‘a smarter planet’, at least according to IBM.5 Indeed there is a neat circularity to the fact that smart urbanism is often posited as the means for addressing the challenges of rapid urbanisation, promoting sustainable urban growth, socially inclusive societies, and responding to climate change by increasing resilience.6 Alongside the notion of a resilient urbanism, visions of smartness – comprising an infrastructure of ubiquitous computationally and digitally managed systems, from electrical grids, through sensing devices to building management systems that can learn, adapt, self-organise – are tied to ideas of crisis responsiveness and, with this, financial, ecological, and political security. The climate crisis is seen as necessitating the extension of smartness, and its self-regulating interacting systems of resilience and optimisation, and the ‘smartness mandate’ to all areas of life.7 In effect, promises of a smart planet, smart cities, and smart citizens are buoyed by a state of perpetual crisis management. This infrastructural imaginary, of smart, resilient, interacting cities ready to respond to any change, unexpected event, disruption, or crisis, is presented in scenarios. These can be visual or textual, and for actual or future cities. Indeed, according to Antoine Picon, ‘what seems at stake in the transition towards the smart city is the increased importance given to occurrences, events and scenarios as the basis for urban infrastructure regulation’.8 In these future-oriented visions, cities are increasingly ‘open-air computers’9 that promise an intelligent infrastructure, managing staggering amounts of real-time data from sensor networks, with citizens empowered to take better-informed decisions, around waste, safety, consumption, resulting in more liveable urban conditions for all. For example, Siemen’s ‘Scenario 2060: From Parking to Parkland’10 imagines a future city of streamlined infrastructure and relaxed citizens: Micha’s ringtone pulls him out his reverie: it’s the system that refills the cake shop’s cold store calling to tell him that the wholesaler’s autonomous supply vehicle has delivered all the ingredients for Karl’s wedding cake. Karl is a facility manager at C.O.S.Y. AG — and one of the family’s customers. Micha sighs. Despite the temptation to sit dreaming in the sun, a glance at the graphic on his smartphone tells him that the building’s energy system is fully charged. It’s an ideal time to get to work. The EU City Pulse project is developing a distributed framework for processing data from the Internet of Things and relevant social networks and to extract real-time information for sustainable and smart city applications. Information on its website states, ‘The smart city tool is a collection of (for now) 101 future scenarios of how cities can solve existing societal issues’.11 Smartness is evolving into a general strategy for perpetual and even just management of a complex world understood somewhat simplistically as about

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coordinating relationships between different data sets. Moreover, the utopian rhetoric of smart cities scenarios that assumes their ability to solve pressing urban challenges ignores the complexities of urban societies and the vastly different experiences of citizens. Smart cities rely on computational logic which ‘privileges quantitative data and managerial techniques that allows for the optimization and logistical management of populations and resources, over qualitative, intuitive, embodied and informal ways of knowing and acting on the city to that effect’.12 There is a tendency to assume that everything important to the smooth functioning of the city can be known through gathering and transmitting reliable and secure data, and that decisions about city futures can be rational and technical ones of efficiency and sustainability. In short, the smart city is reenvisioned as a rationally managed, stable, and digitally enabled corporate entity.13 It thereafter requires only the proper operational or monitoring activities of digitally enabled smart citizens for optimised functioning. According to a City Pulse scenario: ‘The council provides citizens and interested parties with a dashboard, so they can follow the “environmental heartbeat” of the city as well as their own impacts and contributions’.14 This chapter is concerned with how our imaginaries of the future of urban life are shaped by and are shaping urban infrastructures, be they digital, physical, social, spatial, or temporal. For these city scenarios tend to be banal impoverished narratives of post-crisis, cosy, efficient lives, shored-up by the promise of ubiquitous computing. Moreover, they are difficult to recognise as anything to do with the difficult realities of urban life, however alluring. And yet scenarios as stories could offer much richer routes to imagining urban futures. Following Donna Haraway, ‘It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories’.15 Tapping into the rich cultural potential of stories and speculative design fictions, scenarios could rather be explored as the space for alternative ways of engaging with an urban context in transition. Here they are considered rather as the anticipatory infrastructure for collaborative ways of dealing with the complexities of urban societies, including the sometimesirreconcilable differences, values, and priorities therein. The ‘Culture and Climate Change: Scenarios’ project has developed and tested creative modes of interactive citizenship and explored the potential for collaborative scenario-making in the context of urban transformations and climate-changed futures. This work responds to research on the wider ‘politics of experimentation’ through which ideas about urban sustainability are being approached. For example, research on ‘Urban Living Labs’, which represent a ‘particular form of governance innovation’ to sustainability challenges in the urban arena through ‘the ways in which they constitute, and are constituted by, social networks, expectations or visions, and forms of learning’.16 It also draws on insights from new approaches to citizen environmental sensing. Gabrys notes the indeterminate rather than fixed character of smart technologies and the possibility for more speculative encounters that may ‘offer up opportunities for creative and practical as much as analytical engagements’ for future environmental and political actions.17 Research on civic hacking and Free Software and Creative Commons practices reveals networks of human interaction to be locally grounded. These are ‘recursive publics’ that form open communities that are both a result of and generator of networks. They ‘can both express and “implement” ideas

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about the social and moral order of society’.18 As Christopher Kelty explains, ‘At an analytical level, the concept of a recursive public is a way of insisting on the importance to public debate of the unruly technical materiality of a political order, not just the embodied discourse (however material) about that order’.19 Cities, smart ones included, are far from static or controllable entities. As AbdouMaliq Simone observes, cities are rather worlds of ‘constant rehearsal and revision, improvisation and experimentation, planning and anticipation’.20 Complementing research on the provisional nature of cities and infrastructures, the ‘Culture and Climate Change: Scenarios’ project has engaged with relational and processual (in-the-making) perspectives. These include participatory design-oriented approaches inherent in modes of ‘collaborative infrastructuring’.21 Furthermore, in the context of global environmental change issues, urban futures thinking will need to acknowledge and respond to some of the particularities of the cultural politics of climate change – above all the shifting and contested responsibilities and vulnerabilities across space and time, and the inevitable societal transformations that this involves. The aim is thus to consider the possibilities for scenarios of interactive citizenship as an anticipatory mode of shaping collaborative infrastructures that can help equip societies to better cope and potentially thrive in the face of these challenges. This involves addressing the scenario mode of smart city projects and its twentieth-century antecedents. It also suggests experimenting with new modes of scenario-making to support thinking about the potential of new urban imaginaries and practices in the context of global environmental change and urban transformation.

Scenarios of plug-in, cyborg, and sensing citizens Scenarios are a common method of getting a better grip on the future, particularly when the future is understood to be in crisis, malfunctioning, or uncertain. Scenario thinking is a prominent strand in climate science and policy, where it draws on predictive scientific knowledge, based on computer models and simulations to present potential future climate risks. Scenarios are deployed by insurance and foresight industries, in contingency and adaptation planning for urban futures, in the backcasting and forecasting of business strategies, in the speculative design practices that engage with future technologies, products, lifestyles, and infrastructures, and in marketing urban potential and efficiency, especially in the context of smart cities. The ubiquity of scenarios in business and policy responses to urban transformations often obscures the fact that scenarios are fictions rather than predictions. In other words, scenarios are stories. Moreover, the origin of scenarios as a cultural form lies in the improvisations and storytelling of commedia del’arte street theatre in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, where the term scenario indicated the rough outline or synopsis of a play – a skeletal structure that was fleshed-out all’improvviso by the actors. In twentieth-century Hollywood, the term scenarios referred to screenplays and can be traced via the industry’s screenwriters to Herman Kahn’s strategic planning techniques at the RAND Corporation during the Cold War, which combined storytelling with game theory, nuclear war strategy, and systems theory.22

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The city conceived as a complex communication system managed through data flows also has its origins in the mid-twentieth century.23 The history of scenario planning intersects with new ideas about the city in the digital computation work of Jay W. Forrester’s Urban Dynamics (1969), which drew on the principles of cybernetics developed by Norbert Wiener24 and led to the feedback-based ‘world-models’ of World Dynamics (1971). The World Dynamics approach to scenarios established integrative long-term systems analyses in a computational model of the world.25 Forrester’s WORLD3 model was the basis of the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth report (1972). The metabolic circuit of inputs and outputs, resource requirements and waste, could make Earth programmable and thus optimally efficient. These model scenarios, whether at city or planetary scale, remained blind, however, to the cultural, social, and political dimensions – indeed anything deemed irrelevant or inadmissible to the computer’s calculations. At the same time ideas of ‘Spaceship Earth’, notably Fuller’s version (1969), conceived of planetary inhabitation as a super-consciousness – an intricate cybernetic machine, managing a complex of life-support and maintenance systems, and equipped with intelligent operators (its ‘astronauts’) with an inbuilt drive to learn and to optimise.26 The stakes were high. Steering away from perceived disaster meant developing programmes of efficiency, optimisation, and safety on board Spaceship Earth. The imaginary of smart cities was anticipated in the scenarios of Archigram and Superstudio, two radical architecture groups of the 1960s and 1970s. In 1965 Dennis Crompton’s ‘Computor City’, with its subtitle, ‘A synthesised metropolis with electronic changeability’, was published in the fifth issue of Archigram magazine, ‘Metropolis’.27 Computor City was linked to Archigram’s earlier project Plug-in City and ‘abstracted the sorts of monitoring systems – borrowed from radio-controlled taxis, ambulance services, and airports – that permitted Plug-in City to operate smoothly’.28 The text next to the diagram of Computor City proclaimed, ‘A METROPOLIS is situated at the point of maximum display of interactive energy and shows the most complex field of forces’.29 In effect Computor City described the digital infrastructure of a Plug-in City, providing a complete system of urban management and information flows. A data printout running across the top of the Computer City graphic indicated the vast range of city systems being simultaneously monitored and controlled: population, migration, temperature, transportation frequency, traffic, monorail, crane ways, construction, self-sufficiency levels, amenities (‘habitation area G387 add corner shop TP8C Floor level L over X point 37 CAP 112’), birth rate and death rate, food stock, consumption trends, leisure, and power supply. Computor City imagines the metropolis as a technological infrastructure of abstract ubiquitous systems and processes of control and information, which requires only the passive, if invisible, compliance of the plug-in citizen. Taking the idea of a city as computer even further were Superstudio’s 12 ideal cities in the December 1971 issue of Architectural Design.30 Superstudio’s ‘Cautionary Tales’ drew attention to the risks of an uncontrolled development of what were perceived as the technological tendencies of contemporary capitalist civilisation. The cities were a vehicle to critique contemporary production and consumption in

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response to the 1970s economic, political, and environmental crises. Superstudio present 12 ideal cities with perfectly engineered structures of control and yet with technology out of control. For example, in the ‘First City – 2000-Ton City’, we are told that the inhabitants live in cells equipped with electronic devices and automated systems that can satisfy all needs and desires. But we are also warned of the consequences of any thoughts of rebellion, in a city where malignant machines control the life cycle: ‘The ceiling panel descends with a force of two thousand tons until it reaches the floor. At this point, in this marvelous economy, another life is initiated’. In the ‘Fifth City – City of Hemispheres’ the sensory apparatus of the sensing city as a means of control is described: ‘The flat surface of the hemisphere contains its sensory organs … the sensations which these perceive are transmitted directly to the brain of the individual commanding the hemisphere’. In the ‘Tenth City – City of Order’ we discover a cyborgian dystopia of citizens who are replaced by machines governed by a mayor-machine: ‘The reason for his long stay in office is simple: he had an exceptionally good idea. Instead of trying to suit the city to its inhabitants, like everyone else, he thought of suiting the inhabitants to the city’. Drawing inspiration from contemporary sci-fi and counter-utopian literature,31 the negative emplotment of the Cautionary Tales comprises the telling and re-telling of a utopian future that must be avoided, time and time again. And as Felicity Scott has argued, Superstudio’s Tales could be interpreted neither as assimilation nor as cynical opposition to dominant ideologies, but instead as a strategy of occupying the ‘anachronistic interstices’ of technological systems and their distractions.32 Another kind of cautionary tale that anticipates the ideal or model nature of smart cities, as well as their promises of ubiquitous computing infrastructure, is the story of Nicholas Negroponte’s work with the Architecture Machine Group at MIT.33 Negroponte is credited with the development of responsive, self-regulating, and smart environments and was explicitly concerned with the human–machine dialogue.34 His scenarios conceptualised human–machine interactions in terms of conversation as the foundation for an integrated human–machine system. This was increasingly directed towards an imagined transformation in the management of human–machine life with computerised environments that could both monitor fluctuations in their environment and respond to change. Negroponte opined, ‘Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living’.35 As Orit Halpern has discussed, cybernetic ideals of feedback, data management, modularity, and control conspired in creating a conception of the city as an experimental ‘test-bed’ or ‘demo’: a selfreflexive and self-monitoring organism which was infinitely enhanceable, improvable, and mobile.36 The Architecture Machine Group’s model city installation ‘Seek’ was shown at the Software exhibition, Jewish Museum, New York, 1970. The ‘city’ consisted of a computer-controlled environment encased in Plexiglass, full of small blocks inhabited by four Mongolian gerbils. A robotic arm was programmed to correct any dislocations or disruptions and would ‘re-order’ or rearrange the blocks shifted by its proxy inhabitants. The experiment for this self-regulating, shape-shifting city failed, and, not surprisingly, not just because of malfunctioning hardware and software, but also because of the unruly, traumatised, and sick gerbils trapped in a micro-world not

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of their making. The experiment nevertheless underscored the concept of the city as a prototype, with its citizens – human, machine, or otherwise – as components in a conscious system. Although once imaginary, scenarios of a city of plug-in, cyborg, or sensing citizens, designed to perfectly fit a technological milieu, informed by systems theory, cybernetics, information theory, and urban dynamics, seem ever closer to present-day reality. And, as Gabrys notes, ‘sensing citizens are the necessary participants in smart cities – where smart cities are the foregone conclusion’.37 Gabrys further observes, The environmentalist aspects of the smart and sustainable city are not contingent on the production of an environmentalist or reflexively ecological subjectivity, and the performance of smart urban citizenship occurs not by expanding the possibilities of democratically engaged citizens but rather by delimiting the practices constitutive of citizenship.38 Nevertheless, what is of interest is how in the process of their operating, smart cities may yet give rise to ‘new practices of urban environmental citizenship’.39 A city is not a computer, and its citizens are not components in a model system. And yet we live in, and are adapting to, increasingly computational urbanisms with potential for new environmental inhabitations and new modalities of citizenship. The claims of smart cities that they can provide routes to democratic decision-making and sustainability benefits for all citizens needs further critical attention. Moreover, the scenarios and cautionary tales that anticipated smart cities might prompt us to interrogate the shaky political dimensions of smart-city endeavours in the present, with respect to uncertain futures that need to be always under question.

Culture and climate change: scenarios Stories, scenarios, and cautionary tales included, can be understood as imaginative spaces in which to consider responses to uncertain futures. The proposition is to move beyond the use of scenarios as a perfected vision, model, or narrative that might claim to describe the efficient, optimised, or digitally enhanced functioning of future cities in a complex, climate-changed world. Instead scenarios are understood as the anticipatory infrastructure for alternative ways of engaging with a messy urban context in transition, and in particular with the turbulent prospects of global environmental change. In other words, reclaiming the territory of scenarios involves moving away from the impoverished corporate narratives, abstracted modeling exercises, or projects of crisis management that claim to understand how to make cities better. Scenarios are rather considered as a mode of storytelling for the present, and in Haraway’s terms, a way of ‘staying with the trouble’.40 At the same time it is important to recall that the origins of scenarios lie in modes of dramatic improvisation and in collaborative practices that involve trial-anderror, and questioning assumptions rather than in the pursuit of definitive solutions.

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Scenarios rooted in improvised storytelling have the potential to cope with the complexities of climate change relations, understood as an ‘unruly mix’ of diverse knowledges, multiple framings, entanglements of human and non-human agencies, contested and shifting responsibilities and unsettling vulnerabilities.41 These are seemingly incommensurable and yet, as Latour has observed, ‘there they are caught up in the same story’.42 They are also caught up in the same city. When a democratic system is faced with a complex or challenging topic such as energy transitions, climate change, and urban transformations, the quality of public debate can be improved by anticipating and providing for citizens’ needs to hear their own and others’ diverse ideas and concerns represented in public narratives.43 The potential of collaborative scenarios of urban futures is thus as both a shared and necessarily contested cultural endeavour. This requires the development of strategies for interactive scenariomaking that does not simply deliver future city visions, but instead is recognised as an interactive practice that can inhabit the space between everyday matters of concern and more speculative infrastructures. The ‘Culture and Climate Change: Scenarios’ project has explored the potential of collaborative scenario-making in opening up civic space in the face of the high levels of uncertainty, global risks, and collective action problems associated with climate change and uncertain urban futures. This experimental project proposed scenarios of climate change as the discursive context for developing an understanding of the capacities and capabilities of interactive citizens. The ‘Culture and Climate Change: Scenarios’ project was launched in Paris at the UNFCCC COP 21 in December 2015 with the ambition of bringing greater cultural depth to public conversations about future climate scenarios. The project had two overlapping strands. In the first, it convened a community of researchers interested in climate change scenarios from across a broad range of disciplines, and drawing on a variety of professional experience from the arts, industry, and policy. In the second strand it also piloted a new model of arts-science residency – a ‘networked residency’, which explicitly sought to both mirror and engage with the distributed but interconnected nature of climate research. The artists that took part in the year-long residency were challenged to explore and open up thinking on climate scenarios in the wake of the Paris Agreement.44 The experimental and co-productive elements of the Scenarios project centred on the structuring of a sequence of hybrid and experimental encounters with different researchers and between different modes of climate change knowledge-making and sharing. The artists on the networked residency engaged with a range of approaches to climate scenarios – including the models of research scientists, the projections of urban planners, and the forecasts of policy makers. At the same time, working with moving image, photography, installation, theatre and performance, they explored and extended the ways in which society might reimagine scenarios of climate change. The improvisational and reflexive intentions inherent in scenarios served as a touchstone for the project. Scenario-making when understood as improvising, or ‘constructing for the unforeseen’, acknowledges the root of the word improvise in the Latin improvisus, ‘unforeseen’.45 The framing for the Scenarios project was one of ‘collective improvisations’. This referred both to the origins of scenario-making in improvised street theatre and to the ‘collective experiments’ of climate change. It drew on Latour’s observation that laboratories had turned ‘inside out’ to become

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‘the world wide lab’ such that, ‘we are all engaged in a set of collective experiments’ in the ‘confusing atmosphere of a whole culture’.46 The outputs of the Scenarios project have been varied, ranging from collaborative scenario-making, game playing, and ad hoc performance in workshops with climate researchers, through academic seminars and writing, to more focussed and long-term projects oriented to engaging wider publics involving interactive documentary, film, and theatre work. One of the artists on the project, theatre maker Zoe Svendsen, used the residency to develop WE KNOW NOT WHAT WE MAY BE (WKNWWMB),47 an interactive installation at the Barbican, London, in September 2018, that invited its audiences to work out who we might be in an alternative future.48 Svendsen was drawn to the economic and related social and cultural consequences of a climate-changed future in an urban context. The installation was developed through a series of ‘research in public’ conversations with economics, politics, business, architecture, and social science climate researchers who were asked to imagine what it might feel like to live in a society, and economy, designed in the best possible way to respond to climate change. The interactive installation involved audiences exploring possible city scenarios for London in a ‘parallel near present of the 2020s’, through conversations about various economic measures (e.g., universal basic income, carbon tax), ideas about the future of energy, food, land, transport, the commons, the impact of robotics, AI and changing relationships to work, and the many possible interactions with an urban, smart, digitally mediated environment. In Svendsen’s account, the scenario mode was ‘a tacit invitation to imagine the change as already having happened, and to make the leap, imaginatively, into considering what it might be like to live under those conditions’.49 Various scenarios were discussed and ratified for implementing in the 2040s, leading to the creation of alternative futures where, ‘impacts, outcomes, events, places, life roles, job titles, city transformations, energy transitions could be imagined’.50 The quotidian practices of future city making were then tested in the ‘Collaboratory’ area of the installation. This was the space for a series of improvised performances, radio chat shows, tours of the city, all exploring life in the 2040s. WKNWWMB is presented here as an example of the potential of hybrid modes of interactivity that mix digital with analogue, research and performance, in collaborative scenario-making. The interactive installation and its multiplicity of performance modes revealed that the future city is something that is practiced through the interactions of its citizens. Moreover it is the quality of the interactions between citizens, and how they realise new kinds of capacities and capabilities that is important, regardless of the technologies involved. The ambition of the Scenarios project as a whole was to explore knowledgemaking in climate research in collaboration with others and to support future imaginings that might reveal a world where multiple, differentiated, and uncertain futures were possible. The ‘collective improvisations’ of the Scenarios residency initiated ways of expanding the ethical, material, and imaginative registers that living with uncertain climates might mobilise. Its experimental modes of scenario-making drew on democratic theory, the relationship between citizenship and sustainability, and participative modes of actionon and engagement-in urban futures. Such collaborative scenarios made through unanticipated interactions might provide the space for rehearsing urban futures. This mode of rehearsal and preparedness is distinct however from the smart cities logic of

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Figure 11.1a and b WE KNOW NOT WHAT WE MAY BE Interactive Installation by Zoe Svendsen/METIS, The Barbican, London 5–9 September 2018 © Photo: Renata Tyszczuk, 2018

constant demo-ing, testing, updating, and prototyping which, as Halpern discusses, evacuates contextual specificity, temporality, and difference and where all perturbations to the system are dealt with in the same manner, be it crowd or traffic control, or response to geological, meteorological, or terrorist events.51 Instead the ‘rehearsal space’ of future scenarios involves debate about alternative ways of living and might provide more robust and considered responses in the near term to the prospect of surprising urban and societal transformations that are inevitably part of climate-changed futures.52

Scenarios as infrastructures of interactive citizenship Just because a space on a grid is shared intends nothing about the affective and material substance or even the fact of membership.53 In the context of increasing planetary computerisation and global environmental change, engaging with the future of cities asks important questions about citizenship, democracy, participation in civic life, and decision-making, whether on or off the grid. Cities are not made up of plug-in citizens, smart citizens, digital citizens, or even connected citizens. They are rather provisional, in the making, and characterised by situated contingencies, unruly practices, and divergent perspectives. AbdouMaliq Simone extends the notion of infrastructure to encompass people’s activities in the city through ‘complex combinations of objects, spaces, persons and practices – a platform providing for and reproducing life in the city’, along with its propensity for unexpected interactions.54 Interactive citizenship calls for urban experimentation with future sustainability or resilience to go beyond thinking in terms of efficiency and management of computational or smart environments. It involves practising living within networks and making the most of the messy and hybrid encounters with entities, relations, atmospheres, and collectives that are brought about through human–technological entanglements.

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The ‘Culture and Climate Change: Scenarios’ project has explored the potential for interactive citizenship, worked out in civic storytelling and rehearsal. Scenarios were here understood neither as visions or improved narratives of the future, nor demos, but instead as collaborative exercises in improvising an uncertain future. This was an experiment in ‘collaborative infrastructuring’, drawing on its definition as ‘an ongoing design process that highlights participation and co-construction, as well as the complex relationships between the long-term, data, participants, collaborations, information systems, and infrastructure’.55 I am suggesting here that scenario-making gives shape to infrastructures – where infrastructure is understood in Berlant’s terms as ‘“the lifeworld” of structure’. And in times of ‘infrastructural breakdown’, as Berlant argues, an infrastructural analysis helps us see that what we commonly call ‘structure’ is not what we usually call it, an intractable principle of continuity across time and space, but is really a convergence of force and value in patterns of movement that’s only solid when seen from a distance.56 For Berlant, the concept of the ‘commons’ is thus ‘a powerful vehicle for troubling troubled times’ and a route to ‘learning to live with messed up yet shared and ongoing infrastructures of experience’.57 In other words, infrastructures as commons are neither pre-existing or delivered to citizens through expert data analysis, but come about rather as a result of developing relationships and practices for a politics of everyday life. Scenarios offer routes to the everyday making of infrastructures through questioning the present and identifying and improvising desirable and alternative futures. Interactive scenario-making as a mode of societal learning and unlearning recognises also the diversity of perspectives, views, and approaches. This diversity is essential not just for sense-making, but also to support meaningful debate and decision-making, particularly within democratic systems in unsettled times. Scenarios when considered as infrastructures of interactive citizenship mediate between the speculative and the everyday, and go beyond techno-determinist binaries that are either overly optimistic or pessimistic about the future projected impact of situated digital technologies on city futures. They are rather about the possibilities for citizens to develop more open-ended speculative engagements. These collaborative endeavours are inevitably messy, inconvenient, and difficult. In spite of, or perhaps even because of this, they offer a provisional way of inhabiting, shaping, and sharing both the malfunctioning world of the present and future urban transformations.

Acknowledgements The ‘Culture and Climate Change: Scenarios’ project is based at the School of Architecture, University of Sheffield. It has been funded by the Jerwood Charitable Foundation, The Ashden Trust, The University of Sheffield, The Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures at the University of Sheffield and The Open University’s Open Space Research Centre. It has also been supported by a wider network of collaborators and participants

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interested in climate research and sustainable urban transformations. The most recent work on ‘Collective Scenarios’ has been supported by a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship [MRF-2018-015].

Notes 1 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2005); p. 72. 2 See Renata Tyszczuk, Chapter 5, ‘Bounded Planet’ in Provisional Cities, Cautionary Tales for the Anthropocene (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2017). 3 Paul Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), p. 25. 4 Renata Tyszczuk, Provisional Cities: Cautionary Tales for the Anthropocene (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2017), p. 5. 5 Orit Halpern, Robert Mitchell and Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, ‘The Smartness Mandate: Notes Towards a Critique’, Grey Room 2017. 6 See, for example, European Commission (EC) (2013) European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities: Strategic Implementation Plan. European Commission, available at: http:// ec.europa.eu/eip/smartcities/files/sip_final_en.pdf; Andres Luque-Ayala and Simon Marvin, ‘Developing a Critical Understanding of Smart Urbanism?’ Urban Studies Vol. 52(12) 2015: 2105–2116; Simon Marvin, Andres Luque-Ayala and Colin McFarlane (eds) Smart Urbanism: Utopian Vision or False Dawn? (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2016). 7 Orit Halpern, Robert Mitchell and Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, ‘The Smartness Mandate: Notes Towards a Critique’, Grey Room (2017). 8 Antoine Picon, ‘Urban Infrastructure, Imagination and Politics: from the Networked Metropolis to the Smart City’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (2018). 9 See Interview with Carlo Ratti 20 October 2017, ‘Data Can lead to Behavioural Changes’, available at: www.siemens.com/innovation/en/home/pictures-of-the-future/infrastructure-and-finance/smartcities-interview-carlo-ratti.html; see also ‘Open-Air Computers’, The Economist 27 October 2012, available at:www.economist.com/special-report/2012/10/27/open-air-computers. 10 Siemens. Pictures of the Future. Scenario 2060: From Parking to Parkland. June 7, 2015, www.sie mens.com/innovation/en/home/pictures-of-the-future/infrastructure-and-finance/smart-cities-scenario2060.html. 11 See EU City Pulse project, available at: www.ict-citypulse.eu/page. 12 Simon Marvin and Andres Luque-Ayala, ‘Urban Operating Systems: Diagramming the City’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research Vol. 41(1), January 2017: 84–103. 13 Simon Marvin and Andres Luque-Ayala, ‘Urban Operating Systems: Diagramming the City’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research Vol. 41(1), January 2017: 84–103. 14 See www.ict-citypulse.eu/scenarios/scenario/3. 15 Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). 16 H. Bulkeley et al., ‘Urban Living Labs: Governing Urban Sustainability Transitions’, Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability Vol. 22, 2016: 13–17, 14; See also Simon Marvin, Harriet Bulkeley, Lindsay Mai, Kes McCormick and Yuliya Voytenko Palgan, Urban Living Labs: Experimenting with City Futures (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2018). 17 Jennifer Gabrys, Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 272. 18 Christopher Kelty, Two Bits: the Cultural Significance of Free Software (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 19 Christopher Kelty, Two Bits: the Cultural Significance of Free Software (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). 20 AbdouMaliq Simone, ‘Ghostly Cracks and Urban Deceptions: Jakarta’ in Mohsen Mohstafavi (ed.) In the Life of Cities (Zurich, Switzerland: Lars Muller Publishers, 2012), 105–119. 21 Helena Karasti and Karen S. Baker (2004). ‘Infrastructuring for the long-term: Ecological information management’. In: Proceedings of the 37th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences IEEE, 1. 22 See Renata Tyszczuk, ‘A Brief History of Scenarios’ in RenataTyszczuk and Joe Smith (eds) Culture and Climate Change: Scenarios (Cambridge, UK: Shed, 2019a), forthcoming. 23 Simon Marvin and Andres Luque-Ayala, ‘Urban Operating Systems: Diagramming the City’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research Vol. 41(1), January 2017: 84–103. 24 Wiener, Norbert, Cybernetics: Or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965).

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25 Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers and William W. Behrens III, The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind (New York, NY: Universe Books, 1972). 26 See Renata Tyszczuk, Chapter 5, ‘Bounded planet’. In Provisional Cities: Cautionary Tales for the Anthropocene. (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2017). 27 Dennis Crompton, ‘Computor City’, Archigram (5) 1965: n.p.; The Archigram Archival project, available at: http://archigram.westminster.ac.uk. 28 Simon Sadler, Archigram: Architecture without Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 20. 29 Dennis Crompton, ‘Computor City’, Archigram (5) 1965: n.p. 30 Superstudio, ‘Twelve Cautionary Tales for Christmas: Premonitions of the Mystical Rebirth of Urbanism’. Architectural Design 42, December 1971: 737–742. The Italian version was originally published by the magazine Casabella in the January issue of 1972 with the title Premonizioni della Parusia Urbanistica. 31 Peter Lang and William Menking, Superstudio Life without Objects (Skira, 2003). 32 Felicity D. Scott, Architecture or Techno-Utopia: Politics after Modernism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 262. 33 The Architecture Machine group was founded by Nicholas Negroponte and Leon Groisser in 1967. It later transformed into MIT Media Lab. 34 Nicholas Negroponte, The Architecture Machine: Toward a More Human Environment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970). 35 Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (London, UK: Hodder and Stoughton, 1995), 6. 36 Orit Halpern, ‘The Trauma Machine: Demos, Immersive Technologies and the Politics of Simulation’ in M. Pasquinelli (ed.) Alleys of Your Mind: Augmented Intelligence and Its Traumas (Luneburg: Meson Press, 2015), 53–67, 62–63. See also Orit Halpern, Jesse LeCavalier, Nerea Calvillo, and Wolfgang Pietsch, ‘Test-bed Urbanism’ Public Culture 25(2) 2013. 37 Jennifer Gabrys, Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 200. 38 Jennifer Gabrys, Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (Minneapolis. MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 204. 39 Jennifer Gabrys, Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 204. 40 Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). 41 Renata Tyszczuk and Joe Smith, ‘Culture and Climate Change: Experiments and Improvisations – An Afterword’ in Giuseppe Feola, Hilary Geoghegan, and Alex Arnall (eds) Climate and Culture: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on a Warming World (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019b), forthcoming. 42 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 43 Joe Smith, Robert Butler, Rosie J. Day, Axel H. Goodbody, David H. Llewellyn, Mel Rohse, Bradon T. Smith, Renata A. Tyszczuk, Julia Udall, and Nicola M. Whyte, ‘Gathering Around Stories: Interdisciplinary Experiments in Support of Energy Transitions’, Energy Research and Social Science, 31 2017: 284–294. 44 The four artists that took part in the networked residency between July 2016–June 2017 were Teo Ormond-Skeaping, Lena Dobrowolska, Emma Critchley, and Zoe Svendsen. See: www.cultureandcli matechange.co.uk/projects/#. 45 Renata Tyszczuk, ‘On Constructing for the Unforeseen’ in Robert Butler, Eleonor Margolies, Joe Smith, and Renata Tyszczuk (eds) Culture and Climate Change: Recordings (Cambridge, UK: Shed, 2011). 46 Bruno Latour, ‘Atmosphere, Atmosphere’ in Susan May (ed.) The Weather Project (London, UK: Tate Publishing, 2003), 29–41. 47 The title refers to the sentence, ‘We know what we are but know not what we may be’, spoken by Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. 48 We Know Not What We May Be, The Barbican Centre, 5–9 September (2018), available at: www. barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2018/event/metis-we-know-not-what-we-may-be; see also https://meti sarts.co.uk/projects/we-know-not-what-we-may-be. 49 Zoe Svendsen, ‘Epic not Tragic: We Know Not What We May Be’, in RenataTyszczuk and Joe Smith (eds) Culture and Climate Change: Scenarios (Cambridge, UK: Shed, 2019), forthcoming. 50 Zoe Svendsen, ‘Epic not Tragic: We Know Not What We May Be’ in RenataTyszczuk and Joe Smith (eds) Culture and Climate Change: Scenarios (Cambridge, UK: Shed, 2019), forthcoming. 51 Orit Halpern ‘Demoing unto Death: Smart Cities, Environment, and Preemptive Hope’, The Fibreculture Journal (29) 2017. 52 R. Tyszczuk and J. Smith, ‘Culture and Climate Change Scenarios: The Role and Potential of the Arts and Humanities in Responding to the “1.5 Degrees Target”,’ Current Opinion on Environmental Sustainability 31 2018: 56–64. 53 Lauren Berlant, ‘The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34(3) 2016: 393–419, 395.

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54 AbdouMaliq Simone, ‘People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg’, Public Culture 16(3) 2004: 407–429. 55 Helena Karasti and Karen S. Baker (2004). ‘Infrastructuring for the long-term: Ecological information management’. In: Proceedings of the 37th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, IEEE, 1. 56 Lauren Berlant ‘The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34(3) 2016: 393–419. 57 Lauren Berlant, ‘The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34(3) 2016: 393–419.

References Berlant, L. ‘The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34(3), 2016: 393–419. Bulkeley, H., Coenen, L., Frantzeskaki, N., Hartmann, C., Kronsell, A., Mai, L., Marvin, S., McCormick, K., van Steenbergen, F., and Palgan, Y.V. ‘Urban living labs: Governing urban sustainability transitions’. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 22, 2016: 13–17. Butler, R., Margolies, E., Smith, J., and Tyszczuk, R. (Eds) Culture and Climate Change: Recordings. (Cambridge, UK: Shed, 2011). City Pulse. www.ict-citypulse.eu/page. Crompton, D. ‘Computor city’. Archigram 2(5), 1965: n.p. ‘Culture and climate change: Scenarios’. www.cultureandclimatechange.co.uk/projects/#. Edwards, P.N. A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). European Commission (EC) European Innovation Partnership on Smart Cities and Communities: Strategic Implementation Plan. European Commission (2013). Available at: http://ec.europa.eu/eip/smartcities/ files/sip_final_en.pdf. Forrester, J.W. Urban Dynamics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969). Gabrys, J. Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Halpern, O., Mitchell, R., and Geoghegan, B.D. ‘The smartness mandate: Notes toward a critique’. Grey Room 68, 2017: 106–129. Halpern, O. ‘The trauma machine: Demos, immersive technologies and the politics of simulation’. In Pasquinelli, M. (Ed.) Alleys of Your Mind: Augmented Intelligence and Its Traumas (Luneburg: Meson Press, 2015), pp. 53–67. Halpern, O. ‘Demoing unto death: Smart cities, environment, and preemptive hope’. The Fibreculture Journal 29, 2017. Halpern, O., LeCavalier, J., Calvillo, N., and Pietsch, W. ‘Test-bed urbanism’. Public Culture 25(2), 2013: 272–306. Haraway, D.J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). Karasti, H. and Baker, K. S. (2004). ‘Infrastructuring for the long-term: Ecological information management’. Proceedings of the 37th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, conference: Big Island, HI, USA, 5–8 January 2004, IEEE. Kelty, C. Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). Lang, P. and Menking, W. Superstudio Life without Objects (Milan: Skira, 2003). Latour, B. We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). Latour, B. ‘Atmosphere, atmosphere’. In May, S. (Ed.) The Weather Project (London, UK: Tate Publishing, 2003), pp. 29–41. Luque-Ayala, A. and Marvin, S. ‘Developing a critical understanding of smart urbanism?’. Urban Studies 52 (12), 2015: 2105–2116. Marvin, S., Bulkeley, H., Lindsay, M., McCormick, K., and Voytenko Palgan, Y. Urban Living Labs: Experimenting with City Futures (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2018). Marvin, S. and Luque-Ayala, A. ‘Urban operating systems: Diagramming the city’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 41(1), January 2017: 84–103. Marvin, S., Luque-Ayala, A., and McFarlane, C. (Eds) Smart Urbanism: Utopian Vision or False Dawn? (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2016). Meadows, D.H., Meadows, D.L., Randers, J., and Behrens III, W.W. The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind (New York, NY: Universe Books, 1972). Negroponte, N. The Architecture Machine: Toward a More Human Environment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970). Negroponte, N. Being Digital (London, UK: Hodder and Stoughton, 1995).

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Picon, A. ‘Urban Infrastructure, Imagination and Politics: From the Networked Metropolis to the Smart City’. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 42(2), 2018: 263–275. Sadler, S. Archigram: Architecture without Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). Scott, F.D. Architecture or Techno-utopia: Politics after Modernism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). Siemens. Pictures of the Future. Scenario 2060: From Parking to Parkland. June 7, 2015, www.siemens.com/ innovation/en/home/pictures-of-the-future/infrastructure-and-finance/smart-cities-scenario-2060.html. Simone, A. ‘People as infrastructure: Intersecting fragments in Johannesburg’. Public Culture 16(3), 2004: 407–429. Simone, A. ‘Ghostly cracks and urban deceptions: Jakarta’. In Mohstafavi, M. (Ed.) In the Life of Cities (Zurich, Switzerland: Lars Muller Publishers, 2012), pp. 105–119. Smith, J., Butler, R., Day, R.J., Goodbody, A.H., Llewellyn, D.H., Rohse, M., Smith, B. T., Tyszczuk, R.A., Udall, J., and Whyte, N.M. ‘Gathering around stories: Interdisciplinary experiments in support of energy transitions’. Energy Research and Social Science 31 2017: 284–294. Spivak, G.C. Death of a Discipline (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2005). Superstudio. ‘Twelve cautionary tales for Christmas: Premonitions of the mystical rebirth of urbanism’. Architectural Design 42, December 1971: 737–742. Svendsen, Z. We Know Not What We May Be. Cambridge, UK: METIS. www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/ 2018/event/metis-we-know-not-what-we-may-be;metisarts.co.uk/projects/we-know-not-what-wemay-be. The Archigram Archival project. http://archigram.westminster.ac.uk Tyszczuk, R. Provisional Cities: Cautionary Tales for the Anthropocene (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2017). Tyszczuk, R. and Smith, J. ‘Culture and climate change scenarios: The role and potential of the arts and humanities in responding to the “1.5 degrees target”’. Current Opinion on Environmental Sustainability 31, 2018: 56–64. Wiener, N. Cybernetics: Or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965).

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Part III

Materialities and spaces

Chapter 12

The IdIoT in the smart home Delfina Fantini van Ditmar

‘Smartness’: from industrial applications towards the domestic space Internet of Things (IoT) technology, as defined as a system in which everyday objects are digitally identifiable, programmable, and connected to the Internet, emerged in the nineties in the context of industrial applications. These connected objects are able to send (and often, but not always, receive) data, pair with other devices, and respond to the algorithms that command them. Based on developments in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), these algorithmic processes particularly draw on Big Data and Machine Learning. The term ‘Internet of Things’ was coined in 1999 by MIT researcher Kevin Ashton. According to Ashton, it was first used in the title of his presentation made at US consumer goods corporation Procter & Gamble in 1999, where he described how wireless (RFID) tags could link products in P&G’s supply chain to the Internet.1 The evolution of the technology lead to a multiplicity of rhetorical terms. As the science fiction author Bruce Sterling describes in his book The Epic Struggle of Internet of Things, “Microsoft call its efforts at the Internet of Things ‘The Internet of Your Things’. That slogan was deliberately to insinuate that Google’s Internet of Things is, in fact, a sinister mass of Google’s things. Cisco is the ‘Internet of Everything’, GE is ‘Industrial Internet’, and so on.”2 Since the nineties there has been a substantial growth of the IoT market. In statistical terms, Gartner has estimated that 25 billion connected ‘things’ will be in use by 2020, while Cisco projected that, in

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2020, 50 billion objects would be connected.3 This disparity in the figures advocates how rapidly the field is developing, and the uncertainty that comes with that rate. Due to their role in aiding optimization, convenience, efficiency, tracking (e.g., via RFID), managing resources, and reducing costs, IoT applications have been successful in the industry. Following this vision, IoT technology started to colonize the domestic space. Currently the ‘smart’ home market is a fast-growing business: it is forecasted that by 2022 a typical family home will contain as many as 500 networked devices.4 As Rem Koolhaas suggests, architecture has entered into a new engagement with digital culture and capital—which amounts to the most radical change within the discipline since the confluence of modernism and industrial production in the early twentieth century […] for thousands of years, the elements of architecture were deaf and mute—they could be trusted. Now, many of them are listening, thinking, and talking back, collecting information and performing accordingly.5 ‘Smartness’ is starting to inhabit the domestic space, consequently a new architectural narrative is beginning to emerge. By offering services such as automation, control, monitoring, and prediction of user behaviours, current applications of IoT technology in the home include security, heating control, lighting automation, and smart home hubs, fused together by the large market of ‘smart’ appliances. In the ‘smart’ home this quantitative behavioural approach has been translated into a specific language. Objects are marketed as being ‘thoughtful’ and even ‘conscious’. Nest’s founding CEO Tony Fadell states: “We’re about creating the conscious home [ … ] From the beginning, our vision was to create a conscious home. A home that is more thoughtful, intuitive—and nice to look at.”6

The figure of the idiot When it comes to ‘smartness’ integrated within the domestic space, the figure of the idIoT—based on Stengers’ figure of the idiot in the context of IoT technology (ID: identification + IoT technology)—plays a crucial role. Through this figure, by slowing down assumptions, it is possible to examine ‘smart’ home technology by reflecting on the problems and challenges of introducing this technology into our domestic space. The figure of the idiot described by Stengers is based on the conceptual character of the idiot proposed by Deleuze, who in turn borrowed it from Prince Myshkin, the fictional character in Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot (2003).7 Considering, as Stengers suggests, that the idiot creates an interstice, “a space for thinking,” it thus becomes important to ask, “What are we busy doing?” Stengers describes this as “a proposal to ‘slow down’ reasoning and create an opportunity to arouse a slightly different awareness of the problems and situations.”8 As Stengers indicates, her proposal is intended not to say what is, or what ought to be, but to provoke thought; one that requires no other verification than the way in which it is able to

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“slow down” reasoning and create an opportunity to arouse a slightly different awareness of the problems and situations mobilizing us.9 Through data collection, data aggregation, and automation, ‘smart’ technology is redefining the relationship between the dweller and the home. The IdIoT in the context of the ‘smart’ home is a critical methodological approach for revealing ‘smart’ oversimplifications and analyzing interdependences between non-neutral algorithms and the domestic space. In this context, the idIoT observes the scenario of the ‘smart’ domestic space by analyzing who is at the door. As Koolhaas points out in relation to ‘smart’ technologies and architecture, “this shift has gone largely unnoticed because it has not taken the form of a visible upheaval or wholesale transformation. To the contrary, it is a stealthy infiltration of architecture via its constitutive elements.”10

‘Smart’ home expedition Already from the outside, you are being observed by exterior cameras. With the support of a ‘smart’ doorbell, which captures the exterior view and notifies the dweller of a visitor’s arrival, it is possible to enter the home without human intervention. As the August Doorbell Cam Pro motto indicates, “Home, even when you’re not.” It is also possible to encounter ‘smart’ thermostats, which are embedded in the walls of the house and used to control the indoor temperature. By registering its user’s habits, the device claims to decrease the amount of energy used on heating: it knows when you are at home. To make sure your home is safe 24/7, ‘smart’ CO2 and smoke detectors are connected. A ‘smart’ fan can be found hanging from the ceiling, one which has the ability to communicate with the ‘smart’ thermostat. Lighting is not exempt from the phenomenon of ‘smartness’; not only is it possible to illuminate the home, but users can also regulate the light source. Natural light can also be controlled remotely, thanks to the ‘smart’ shades placed over the windows. Light, whether natural or artificial, can be effortlessly controlled with the use of a mere app. Several ‘smart’ appliances permeate the kitchen; ‘smart’ washing machines, ‘smart’ ovens, ‘smart’ toasters, to name but a few. The ‘smart’ coffee maker, which allows you to make coffee from your bed, promises to give users a stress-free start to the day. The ‘smart’ bin will notify you when the container needs emptying. A remarkable IoT product is the ‘smart’ fridge; this particular ‘smartness’ means that the fridge can manage groceries by monitoring fridge contents, suggest recipes based what is available, and even directly order food online. The interface for such functions is often a tablet computer integrated into the fridge door, and for this reason, the screen is a very important element: it allows the user to listen to music, access a calendar, notes and cooking apps. The screen on Samsung’s Family Hub Refrigerator is of considerable size, at 21.5 inches. Other functions of ‘smart’ fridges include design features in the interior, such as a ‘pizza drawer’ or ‘infinity shelves’, which can be moved to make room for taller items placed below. It is already possible to see commercial alliances emerging in the domain of ‘smart’ fridges; Samsung’s Family Hub Refrigerator, for example, comes connected to Mastercard, which is in

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turn linked to FreshDirect and ShopRite delivery services and has a potential relationship with Amazon’s Alexa voice control service. ‘Smart’ fridges can also be connected to other IoT devices, as can be seen with Whirlpool’s French Door Refrigerator, which is linked with the Nest thermostat. WiFi-enabled buttons, such as Amazon’s Dash, are also present throughout the ‘smart’ home. These buttons can be placed around the house to automatically order specified household products; a wide range of goods, from Doritos to detergent, can be bought at the touch of a ‘smart’ button. Toilets can now be flushed using an app. Beyond that, music can be played, the toilet lid can be controlled, the bidet activated, and the room deodorized. ‘Smart’ toothbrushes, which store and analyze your brushing behaviour, complete the composition. The bedroom is also equipped with a ‘smart’ mattress. Advertised as ‘sleep consultants’, ‘smart’ mattresses are able to monitor your sleep. The children’s bedroom has ‘smart’ monitors and ‘smart’ toys. But the protagonists of the ‘smart’ home are the speakers, which have spawned the concept of the ‘personal assistant’ for the domestic daily tasks. As they can connect to other ‘smart’ devices (brand dependent), ‘smart’ speakers are most likely to be found in the kitchen, the living room, and in the bedroom. Critical for the interconnection of devices are ‘smart’ home hubs. These objects are responsible for making ‘smart’ devices work together; crucially, a single app promises to provide total user control. This category includes ‘Mother’, a data hub in the shape of a Russian matryoshka which comes with ‘motion cookies’ sensors and is advertised to be “like a mom, only better.” Moving through the home, you can encounter a Roomba, an automated robot vacuum cleaner hoovering the floor. In the living room you can spot ‘smart’ innovations that allow users to create a ‘smart’ environment for their pets. Such is the case of Petzi, a ‘smart’ treat dispenser that allows you to check on your pet remotely. Why not give your puppy a treat remotely? As the producer describes, “by a simple tap, you can see, speak, snap, or treat.” User enthusiasm for this device can be estimated by reading the product’s Amazon reviews:11 We have tried EVERYTHING and this is the only thing that has relieved his anxiety/bad behaviors…. Now I can actually leave him home all alone & talk to him while at work or running errands. Micki One of my favorite things to do nowadays is go out to a bar with my husband and turn the Petzi cam on, enjoying my dog’s company remotely with a margarita in hand. Our dog, Yukon, appreciates the treats this little contraption shoots out. Jessica In the garden or the terrace, devices such as Refuel, a ‘smart’ Tank Gauge Monitor for your grill, will remind you when the barbecue has run out of gas.

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The interstice After the ‘idIoTic’ home safari, it is possible to spot several domestic issues. The ‘smart’ home requires numerous switches and applications, some of which can be incompatible, while others can appear unnecessary, over-complicated, time-consuming, and many, it can be argued, seem absurd. Communicating and controlling with so many objects can quickly become tiresome and tedious; ‘smartness’ potentially can become a constant source of domestic irritation. Now that ‘smart’ objects have taken up residence in the domestic space, the figure of the idIoT interrogates the datafication of the home. The idIoT traces the elements of architecture that have been affected by the tenancy of IoT devices, and by “slowing down” it detects ‘smart’ nuances providing valuable insights. The IdIoT realizes that ‘smartness’ is not neutral. Regarding the algorithmic objectionable objectivity and regulation, Adam Greenfield notes in Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life that “it’s supremely difficult to believe that any such findings would ever be encoded in public policy, and applied transparently, dispassionately and in a manner free from politics.”12 The ‘smart’ home creates a particular dynamic, establishing a new set of behaviours. The enthusiasm for convenience comes hand in hand with extensive domestic behavioural data extraction, which is afterwards harvested and analyzed by big technological companies. The dweller has no control of the extrapolation of the data, no awareness of the third-party endpoint, nor the unforeseen commercial and socio-political costs. The idIoT asks: is it worth the potential control asymmetry of the home in the interest of ‘smartness’? By envisioning ‘smart’ devices constantly sensing and sending data integrated into the interior and exterior of millions of homes, the idIoT problematizes the ambiguities of ‘smart’ technology in the domestic space and asks: is the home ‘smart’ enough to share personal data with a third party (big tech company, or even the government)? How much control would be in their hands? How will the quantified paradigm affect our behaviour when applied to the home? With this interconnectivity, can the home still be considered a private space? How is the integration of IoT technology in the home affecting the concept of domestic space? An algorithmic undertone is starting to become tangible when it comes to domestic territory. Architecture operates as a source of governmentality which can lead to the control of the domestic space. As Antoinette Rouvroy points out: “The impacts of the computational turn on governmentality are far from trivial. The constant ‘adaptation’ of environments to individual and collective ‘profiles’ produced by ‘data intelligence’—be it called ‘personalization’ or ‘technology of security’—is an unprecedented mode of government.”13 This relates to Evgeny Morozov’s analysis of the internet and its filters, These new filters might be faster, cheaper and more efficient, but speed, cost, and efficiency are only peripherally related to the civic roles that these filters and algorithms will be playing in our lives. Without subjecting these faster, cheaper, and more efficient filters to the close ethical scrutiny they deserve, we risk committing one of the many fallacies of solutionism

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and celebrating improvements related to less important problems while completely neglecting more burning, more less obvious, issues.14 In addition, the idIoT sees the commercial potential of the ‘connected’ home: corporations would be able to offer a broad range of products and services once they have access to a detailed representation, not only of the home, but also of the inhabitants’ behaviour. Greenfield characterizes the commercial ‘smart’ home push as, “Simply the latest version of this: a conscious, coherent effort to enlist our intimate spaces as a site of a continuous technological upgrade, subscription-based services and the perpetual resupply of consumables.”15 To increase profits ‘smart’ devices must mine more data. Architecture has now the potential to operate as a data trader. An example of this aperture can already be seen with Roomba: while it cleans, it maps the home. As Astor notes, “Roomba may be vacuuming up more than you think.” According to the article, “high-end models of Roomba, iRobot’s robotic vacuum, collect data as they clean, identifying the locations of your walls and furniture. This helps them avoid crashing into your couch, but it also creates a map of your home that iRobot could share with Amazon, Apple or Google.”16 The ‘smart’ home is equipped with technology that has the potential of exposing a vast amount of information about the house and the life of its dwellers. A consequence of this spatial disclosure of information (home maps combined with other ‘smart’ home data), is that now companies have detailed knowledge of the domestic space without owners having control of who is it shared with and with no clear understanding of the potential outcomes of this leakage. Referring to the potential exposure of the connected home the journalist and architect Niklas Maak points out, “Theoretically, the home today is already better at spying on its occupants than any spying technology from outside with directional microphones.” Maak continues: “The next step as part of this bottom-up monitoring, which involves assessing digital traces left by residents, rather than spying from the outside, is the analysis of data generated by sensors and devices inside the home – the interpretation of the digital shadow a resident leaves on his own four walls.”17 It is important to note that corporations and governments might not be the only ones interested in winning control through data. ‘Smart’ technology can also lead to internal power struggles, resulting in a form of domestic abuse. ‘Smartness’ is becoming a frightening feature in the home. Could the ‘smart’ home betray you? An article recently published by The New York Times registered that there is a growing number of domestic abuse cases related to the rise of smart home technology. Smart, thoughtful, and conscious IoT devices are now also tools for “harassment, monitoring, revenge and control.”18 The article describes how, via apps, smart home abusers remotely “watch, listen, and manipulate certain objects to spy, scare, or show power.” Smart home abuse has been reported to the National Domestic Violence Hotline. According to the article: “Callers have said the abusers were monitoring and controlling them remotely through the smart home appliances and the smart home system.” According to The New York Times article, one of the affected women said “her husband, an engineer, ‘controls the thermostat. He controls the lights. He controls the music.’ She said, ‘Abusive relationships are about power and control, and he uses

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technology’.”19 The article emphasizes that ‘smart’ home connections are mainly done by men and “all of the interviewed people harassed through smart home gadgetry were women, many from wealthy environment where this type of technology has taken off.”20 In response to digital abuse is a deep desire for eliminating ‘smartness’. The article describes how a victim fantasised about exterminating smart devices: “one of my fantasies is to be able to say: ‘O.K. Google, play whatever music I want’,” she said. Her desire for the smart thermostat was to “pull it out of the wall.”21 There is a danger of our intimate space being commodified so effortlessly. As the idiot demonstrates in Dostoevsky’s novel published in 1886: “if we understand too quickly, we may not understand well.”22 By asking “what are we busy doing?” the idIoT questions the socio-political implications of embedding the domestic space with ‘smart’ devices. The idIoT detects that surveillance, control, abuse, vulnerability, and business are by-products of ‘smartness’. At times the ‘smart’ home can be seen as unnecessary and humorous, but it can quickly turn tragic. The idIoT realizes the danger posed by the ‘smart’ home and reflects on the consequences of having ‘smart’ objects not only sensing your behaviour, observing you, and listening to your conversations, but also offering ‘smart’ replies, be they verbal or a decision. Through an analysis of the ‘smart’ home, the idIoT poses a series of questions relating to the consequences of the datafication process of domestic space: in what ways could ‘smartness’ betray you? Who designs ‘smartness’? What mechanisms are used? To what end? All these questions relate back to ethics. The impact of ‘smartness’ in architecture is a contemporary issue that must not be overlooked; an analysis of its ethical implications is needed. As described by Stengers, “We need a space for thinking in such a fast-paced field where assumptions about progress and desirability often go unchallenged—a space for hesitation regarding what it means to say ‘good’.”23 Enthusiasts and companies argue that ‘smartness’ and surveillance bring convenience and efficiency. In contrast, the idIoT reminds us of the effects of the ‘smart’ paradox.

Notes 1 Ashton, Kevin. 2009. “That ‘Internet of Things’ Thing”. RFID Journal. Available online: http://www. rfidjournal.com/articles/view?4986 (accessed October 29, 2018). 2 Sterling, Bruce. 2014. The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things. Moscow: Strelka Press. 3 Gartner. “Gartner Says 4.9 Billion Connected “Things” Will Be in Use in 2014”. Press release, November 11, 2014. Available at:www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2905717 (accessed December 2018). Evans, Dave. “The Internet of Things: How the Next Evolution of the Internet Is Changing Everything.” Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG), April 2011. Available at: www. cisco.com/c/dam/en_us/about/ac79/docs/innov/IoT_IBSG_0411FINAL.pdf (accessed December, 2019). 4 Gartner, “Gartner Says a Typical Family Home Could Contain More Than 500 Smart Devices by 2022,” www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2839717 (accessed October 31, 2018). 5 Korody, Nicholas. “Rem Koolhaas on the Smart Landscape and Intelligent Architecture.” Archinet, April 1 (2015). Available online: http://archinect.com/news/article/124276402/rem-koolhaas-on-thesmart- landscape-and-intelligent-architecture. (accessed October 29, 2018). 6 Nest. “Welcome home.” Nest Blog, https://nest.com/blog/2014/01/13/welcomehome/(accessed October 31, 2018). 7 Stengers, Isabelle. 2005. “The Cosmopolitical Proposal.” In Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 994–1004. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. 1994. What is Philosophy? London: Verso.

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8 Stengers, “The Cosmopolitical Proposal”, 994. 9 Stengers, “The Cosmopolitical Proposal”, 994. 10 Koolhaas, Rem. “The Smart Landscape: Intelligent Architecture.” Artforum, April, (2015). Available at: www.artforum.com/print/201504/the-smart-landscape-intelligent-architecture-50735 (accessed October 31, 2018). 11 Petzi treat cam. SMILE! Petzi just got adopted by the Wagz™ family smart pet products. Available at: www.wagz.com/petzi(accessed October 31, 2018). 12 Greenfield, Adam. 2017. Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life. London: Verso, 57. 13 Rouvroy, Antoinette. 2012. “The End(s) of Critique: Data-Behaviourism vs. Due- Process.” In Hildebrandt, M. & De Vries, E., eds, Privacy, Due Process and the Computational Turn (Philosophers of Law Meet Philosophers of Technology). London: Routledge, 1. 14 Morozov, Evgeny. 2013. To Save Everything Press Here: Technology, Solutionism and the Urge to Solve Problems that Don’t Exist. London: Allen Lane,149. 15 Greenfield. Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life. 38. 16 Astor, Maggie. “Your Roomba May Be Mapping Your Home, Collecting Data That Could Be Shared.” New York Times, July 25, 2017, Technology section. 17 Maak, Niklas. 2015. Living Complex: From Zombie City to the New Communal. Munich: Hirmer, 74–75. 18 Bowles, Nellie. “Thermostats, Locks and Lights: Digital Tools of Domestic Abuse.” New York Times, June 23, 2018, Technology section. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Stengers, “The Cosmopolitical Proposal,” 995.

References Ashton, Kevin. 2009, June 22. “That ‘Internet of Things’ Thing.” RFID Journal. Available online: www.rfid journal.com/articles/view?4986 (accessed October 29, 2018). Astor, Maggie. 2017, July 25. “Your Roomba May Be Mapping Your Home, Collecting Data That Could Be Shared.” New York Times, Technology section. Bowles, Nellie. 2018, June 23. “Thermostats, Locks and Lights: Digital Tools of Domestic Abuse.” New York Times, Technology section. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. 1994. What is Philosophy? London: Verso. Dostoevsky, Fyodor M. 1886/2003. The Idiot. New York: Vintage Classics. Evans, Dave. 2011, April. “The Internet of Things: How the Next Evolution of the Internet Is Changing Everything.” Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG). Available at: www.cisco.com/c/dam/ en_us/about/ac79/docs/innov/IoT_IBSG_0411FINAL.pdf (accessed December, 2019). Gartner. “Gartner Says 4.9 Billion Connected “Things” Will Be in Use in 2014”. Press release, November 11, 2014. Available at: www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2905717 (accessed December 2018). Gartner. “Gartner Says a Typical Family Home Could Contain More Than 500 Smart Devices by 2022.” Available online: www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2839717 (accessed October 29, 2018). Greenfield, Adam. 2017. Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life. London: Verso. Koolhaas, Rem. 2015. “The Smart Landscape: Intelligent Architecture.” Artforum, April. Korody, Nicholas. 2015, April 1. “Rem Koolhaas on the Smart Landscape and Intelligent Architecture.” Archinet. Available online: http://archinect.com/news/article/124276402/rem-koolhaas-on-the-smartlandscape-and-intelligent-architecture (accessed October 29, 2018). Maak, Niklas. 2015. Living Complex: From Zombie City to the New Communal. Munich: Hirmer. Morozov, Evgeny. 2013. To Save Everything Press Here: Technology, Solutionism and the Urge to Solve Problems that Don’t Exist. London: Allen Lane. Nest. “Welcome home.” Nest Blog, https://nest.com/blog/2014/01/13/welcomehome (accessed October 31, 2018). Rouvroy, Antoinette. 2012. “The End(s) of Critique: Data-Behaviourism vs. Due- Process.” In Hildebrandt, M. & De Vries, E. eds, Privacy, Due Process and the Computational Turn (Philosophers of Law Meet Philosophers of Technology),143–167. London: Routledge. Stengers, Isabelle. 2005. “The Cosmopolitical Proposal.” In Latour, B. & Weibel, P., Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, 994–1004. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Sterling, Bruce. 2014. The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things. Moscow: Strelka Press.

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Chapter 13

Five strategies of socially smart cities Geeta Mehta, Shreya Malu and Merlyn Mathew

Introduction The term smart cities has evolved from being a buzzword to a sizeable market opportunity of high tech industries, and is driving significant investments today. But smart is not always wise. The definition of what smart means varies widely, but mostly misses the long range and philosophic thinking about the end goals of this gold rush, which has great promise as well as perils. Meanwhile, in the race to become smart, many cities around the world are busy installing smart communication and digital media technologies, while the really big challenges of financial and social injustice, vulnerability due to climate change, and looming job losses for the restless youth remain unanswered. In fact, technology is likely to further intensify the alienation, surveillance, and segregation of marginalized people in society, whose choices may get narrowed to the exploitative gig economy with few labor rights and a poor quality of life. Planning socially just cities and regions is smart. Figure 13.1 shows an example of how safety and incomes improved in Medellin, Colombia, in direct proportion to the public transportation and social infrastructure built in informal settlements during the past decade. Social injustice is a form of violence and robs the marginalized communities of their Right to the City1, 2 and opportunities to contribute to the culture and economy of the city. Spectators and perpetrators of the injustice also suffer from a less safe and an unhappier city. Slash and burn neo-liberal economic models of development are segregating and excluding the poor across the world. The sole focus on financial capital is exploiting and depleting the social and ecological capital of communities, and the global commons are at

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Figure 13.1 Urban safety and incomes in Medellin, Colombia, increased in direct proportion to the public transportation and social infrastructure built in informal settlements during the past decade.3 © Ninoshka Henriques, forthcoming

risk at a time when the world does have the collective resources to solve major issues of poverty and environmental degradation. With over half of the world’s population expected to become urbanized by 2050, it is imperative that cities prepare to meet new challenges, and to serve all. From the concept of the Right to the City, we now need to transition to the Right to the Smart City. Technology and big data may soon begin to run many systems in our cities. However, the future of cites depends upon what data is collected, by whom, and why. This is also an opportunity for designers and decision makers to collaborate across professional silos to use user-generated data, the internet of things, and artificial intelligence to develop direct communication channels with users to create people-centered infrastructure and cities. The strength and efficiency of these networks will have a direct impact on the resilience and wellbeing of communities. Technologies can then be harnessed to win the race to retrain people before deploying technologies that render them jobless. A few engineers developing self-driving cars can render millions of truck and taxi drivers jobless, who will then need subsidized lifelong learning and retraining facilities. Simply resorting to direct payments to jobless people who no longer have the skills to compete with robots and artificial intelligence is being proposed by some, but it is not a solution that can deliver dignity and wellbeing to people, which comes from a sense of purpose, achievement, and community. This chapter will propose and illustrate concepts of holistic designs and projects from around the world that are smart as they benefit the triple bottom line of financial, social, and ecological capital of communities.

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Smart social urbanism Urban planning and design are social acts, so they must have a social purpose. Going from urbanism to social urbanism entails equitable provision of urban services and amenities to all. Access to these resources is good for middle income and wealthy people, but transformative for low income communities, who can then be empowered to begin improving their lives and their city. Smart technologies can facilitate social urbanism. Smart cities can utilize big data and multiple technologies to improve the performance of health, transportation, energy, education, and water services. This can result in reduced costs and resource consumption in addition to more effective engagement with all citizens, and wellbeing of all.4 However, buildings have lately become an investment tool of capitalism, and not the public service endeavor to fulfill existing needs as they have been through history. The alarming trend is that many governments around the world are abdicating their role as protectors of social good, and simply monetizing public land and participating in speculative urbanism in the neo liberal frenzy. This in turn leads to privatization of public assets, and avoidance of their legally required social responsibility in the name of efficiency. However, by doing so they are marginalizing those that need help the most. Poor communities are often ripped apart from city centers simply because that land can be put to its “highest and best financial use,” disregarding the social costs to the cities of such actions. Eviction in 2017 of nearly 30,000 very poor people in Lagos from their waterfront dwellings to make space for a luxury development is just one example.5 It is worth remembering the adage that the free market can ensure that bread is made in the most efficient way possible, but it cannot ensure that every one who needs it gets it. Displacing and dispersing communities which have historically been together destroys the inherent social capital of the city which has lasting negative effects on the entire city and ironically also hurts every one, the rich and the poor. Social capital is the glue that holds societies together and without which there can be no economic growth or human well-being. The World Bank, Social Capital Initiative,6 1998 Bringing in concepts of social urbanism into governance and design is now more important than ever due to the corporate capture of cities, and the profit motive of the big developers who are currently shaping our cities. Some examples of how social urbanism can succeed include developments in Medellin in Colombia in the recent past, shown in Figure 13.2, under its two mayors Luis Perez and Sergio Fajardo, who committed to making conditions in slums better in order to bring down the rate of violent crime and social deprivation.7 The murder rates reduced and incomes increased in direct proportion to the investment in infrastructure for these communities. Public transportation, including tramways connecting hard-to-access favelas, and social infrastructure including libraries, schools, and community buildings were built to enable people in informal settlements to participate in the economic and

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Figure 13.2 Medellin Escalator: transporting communities to the city center. © Peter Stratton, 2017 via Steven Winter Associates, Inc.

cultural life of the city. From being the world’s most violent city in 1993, Medellin transformed to receive The Most Innovative City Award in 2012, along with several other honors.8 New forms of smart tenuring can be an alternative to age-old rigid systems of property ownership and rentals. Enabled by smart technologies, smart tenuring can help cities, especially in the developing world, accommodate the influx of people. This could be a result of rural urban migration, or refugees escaping wars, poverty, or climate change. Time-based ownership and rentals that are affordable, and connected to information about jobs, education, and healthcare, could give newcomers a foothold in the city, with opportunities to improve their wellbeing and contribute to the city. The existing property rights systems were designed for people who rarely moved and derived their livelihoods and power from being rooted to land. Now people, especially millennials, earn their livelihoods and power from moving, and hence more fluid forms of property ownership are needed. The Airbnb and other shared economy models could be used to provide alternatives to the static tenures of today. Hernando de Soto, the well-known Peruvian economist, refers to “dead capital,” worth $9.3 trillion, which is currently not usable to help lift the poor out of poverty, because the poor do not have tenure. If more flexible and responsive tenure systems could be developed, they could remove major inefficiencies in cities and could release much more financial capital than his estimate, and immense social capital for deep development on top of that. Amaravati, the new capital of Andhra Pradesh in India being designed by Sir Norman Foster and others, is branding itself to be a Happy City. Chandrababu Naidu,

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the progressive Chief Minister, invited experts9 and mayors from around the world for Happy City Summits to provide inputs into making it so. Measuring development by a happiness index, not GDP, was a concept initiated by the 4th King of Bhutan in 1972, but has since been embraced by urbanists and economists including Jeffrey Sachs and the UN Habitat. But Amaravati is also positioning itself to be a smart city. The 100 Smart Cities Mission of the Prime Minister makes Indian cities compete for funds set aside for developing smart areas within the city, hoping that the smartness will then spread to the remaining areas. However, as in many smart city projects around the world, the definition of this smartness is limited to smart real estate with building management systems and other high tech paraphernalia. The examples above show that smart technologies can play a big role in facilitating social urbanism. They can also help in making the urban processes that have been opaque so far, more transparent. This transparency can strengthen the demand for social urbanism, thereby also strengthening the political will towards it.

Smart housing and social justice Market-based housing is not affordable for a majority of people in the developing world. Growing squatter settlements and often dismal labor camps are glaring signs of injustice in housing and the infrastructure of cities. This problem is also severe in cities in developed countries where land values have become too high. Over 5 million low-income households in the United States avail subsidies to rent modest housing.10 In 2016 49.7% of American renter households spent 30% or more of their income on rent, putting them at risk for homelessness.11 Households burdened with spending more than 50% of their income on rental housing and those living doubled up with friends and family are rendered at-risk for becoming homeless – a number amounting to 11.5 million in the United States in 2016.12 The New Urban Agenda rightly proposes linking of adequate and affordable housing not just to the markets, but to human rights.13 Meanwhile, the trend in the US and other countries is to move away from public housing and increasingly depend on the market to provide housing for lowincome people. This is irresponsible as it has been proven time and again that the market cannot fulfill this need. As an example, there are over 75,000 homeless people in New York alone according to a recent US Department of Housing and Urban Development report,14 and the demand for low income rentals is more than double the supply. As Figure 13.3 shows, the numbers for the entire USA show a similar disparity. Lack of housing security has severe consequences on a family’s health, livelihood, children’s education and future potential, often resulting in chronic poverty and detriment to the society at large. Trust that the government is trying to help may soothe the marginalized populations works for some time. After that, the results can be irresponsible voting even in the most well-heeled democracies, or even a rise in social unrest and crime

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900,000

979,142 Households 700,000

500,000

300,000

100,000

424,949 Units Rental Units Affordable to Extremely Low Income and Very Low Income Households

Extremely Low Income and Very Low Income Renter Households

Figure 13.3 Mismatch between demand for, and supply of, housing. © US Census 2011 via NYC Housing15

rates. Márcio França, governor of São Paulo in Brazil, estimated that in May 2018, 150 downtown buildings in the city were illegally occupied by squatters. Figure 13.4 shows some of them. These buildings include former luxury hotels, offices, and residential buildings. Homeless people target empty buildings and organize armed guards to attack and occupy the buildings overnight. The city is unable to get these buildings

Figure 13.4 Buildings in Sao Paulo occupied by squatters. © Geeta Mehta, 2014

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vacated as the unmet need of housing for the homeless is a big political issue. In May 2018 a blaze that burned down one of the illegally occupied former police buildings in Sao Paulo highlighted the problem.16 Socially smart alternatives exist for equitable housing production, but need political will to be executed and scaled up. The “Communities Over Commodities: People Driven Alternatives to an Unjust Housing System”17 report suggests four models of decommodified housing, i.e., housing that is a place to live, not an investment vehicle. These models have proven to provide stability to families struggling to afford a place to live.18 While these suggestions have been made for the United States, they draw on successful examples in Europe, and their suggestions are also relevant in other geographies: • Limited Equity Cooperatives (LECs), where member-residents jointly own and live in their building, which has been collectively purchased with a low-interest mortgage, often with the assistance from the government or a nonprofit.19 • Community Land Trusts (CLTs), where a nonprofit purchases part of the land or buildings and places them in community ownership. Using both public and private funds or a combination of the two, CLTs work closely with LECs to maintain the affordability of both the land and buildings. • Tenement Syndicate Model, where member buildings are owned and managed by two entities: the tenants from each housing project who go about fixing the rent and tackling everyday maintenance, and an overall syndicate comprised of members of each project as well as external legal support which supervises and provides organizational support. • Mutual Aid Housing Cooperatives (MAHCs), a model in which residents band together to muster community support and form a cooperative. They build and maintain their own housing on the land they either purchase or get via a grant. Housing for the economically weaker sections of the society should be so designed that it can evolve into lively neighborhoods and does not become an eyesore or an urban liability over time. Smart housing should be able to accommodate “upgrades” as the financial and tenure situation of the residents improves. Labor camps in Dubai were built as temporary housing for cheap foreign labor, and access to the rest of the city and its amenities for the people in these camps was prohibited. However, since the need for foreign labor is ongoing in Dubai, these have become a permanent dark spot of shame on the glittering façade that Dubai wants to be known for. Slum redevelopment housing in Mumbai’s Maharashtra Nagar area, while responding to an urgent need, is designed without adequate ventilation and public areas as shown in Figure 13.5. Lack of social spaces has resulted in less interaction among residents, weakening their inherent social capital. People were moved there from one- or twostorey slum areas, where social networks typically help people survive and thrive in otherwise difficult situations. So, in this case, sprawling slums have been re-designed as a vertical slum which is likely to become worse over time. Burdening cities with perpetually discriminated areas is also unfair to future generations.

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Figure 13.5 Slum redevelopment housing in Maharashtra Nagar, Mumbai. © Geeta Mehta, 2016

The Sites and Services Housing program, which was started in India in 1972 with 20,000 “sites” by the Tamil Nadu Government and spread by the World Bank to many countries, was a successful alternative to “warehousing” the poor in poorly designed and built buildings.20 People in that program started with a minimal house and added to it as their needs and means improved, resulting in vibrant neighborhoods over time. However, this strategy has not been popular because big contractors do not make money from it and they lobbied for mass housing construction instead. Building with local technologies and with local participation, while it might not use smart new materials and technologies, enables future occupants to ensure that the homes are as well built as possible, and also provides local livelihoods, builds local skills, local leadership, and social capital. Residential towers inside a gated mega-block is the predominant building typology in the hyper-speculative building scene in China, India, and many other developing and developed countries. The much better alternative to towers in gated communities is the time-tested street-based urbanism. Manhattan residential towers with their doormen and concierges are in effect vertical gated communities, but they open directly onto inclusive streets, which they share with people from all walks of life and income groups. Streets are the ultimate public spaces, and the backbone of an equitable, liveable, and thriving city. Super blocks, in contrast, are divorced from the urban context, impacting both the city and residents of the super blocks in negative ways.

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Once built, this typology is hard to reconnect to the city and its vitality, while segregating populations results in long-term depletion of social capital and wellbeing of cities. Hudson Yards, the elite new development in Manhattan in New York being built atop a slab over the Penn Station railroad yard, is in fact a sort of super block for the super rich, not conforming to the street grid of Manhattan that lends the city its vitality.21 With $2.2 billion of direct costs to the city, an additional $3.5 billion in bonds, and considerable tax breaks, this development comes at a hefty price to New York, merely for a promise to bring in more jobs which may be simply pulled from other parts of the city.22,

23

Initially dodging the requirement of 30% affordable

housing, it has now been obliged to build 10% of its 4,000 apartments as affordable within the development, while the remaining 20% has been or will be built off site.24 Better public awareness of these issues can ensure that cities do not abdicate their role as keepers of social good just to grow their city.

Triple bottom line accounting for reversing corporate capture of cities Edmund Phelps, a Nobel laureate, has proposed that corporatization is the antithesis of free market capitalism and results in structural income inequality.25 The fact that in the US the top 1% of the people hold more of the wealth than the bottom 90% is a good illustration of that.26 Economist Jeffrey Sachs describes the United States as a corporatocracy,27 but the rising influence of corporations in government is also true in many other countries now. In India, 100 billionaires hold 440 billion of its three trillion economy.28 Corporate capture of real estate, healthcare, and retail is a fact of life in most cities today. Profits from real estate developments and appreciation mostly go to big corporations that are in the driving seat, while also negotiating their way out of land use regulations, guidelines, affordable housing, or public space requirements laid down by local governments. In greenfield suburban developments, especially in developing countries, big developers often get away without adequate contribution to the infrastructure, leaving cash-strapped municipalities to fund basic necessities like roads, water supply, and sanitation. Most of the big developers also do not pay their fair share of taxes, hiding their money in tax havens, further impoverishing the municipalities they benefit from. Real estate industry worldwide is known for among the highest corruption rates of any industry. Passed after the 9/11 terrorist attack in New York, the Patriot Act required banks to implement customer identification programs so that illicit flows of funds to the US could be tracked.29 The real estate lobby got an exemption to the rule for real estate investments by foreign nationals, with the result that illicit flows of money from Russia, the Middle East, and other places have continued to find a safe place in US real estate, distorting prices out of reach for the local people. Gurgaon, or Gurugram as it is now called, the swanky new business and residential hub was built 50 kilometers out of Delhi. Farmland was acquired at

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nominal prices and then re-zoned for urbanization, reaping the developer DLF 3–400% profit by some estimates before a single building was built. Each gated community of tall buildings in Gurugram uses water from fast-depleting aquifers in the region, and dumps its sewage near its site, since no comprehensive infrastructure plan was required or built when the permission for urbanization was given. Monsoons flood a large part of Gurugram, since the natural drainage has been blocked by super blocks of gated towers built without concern for the overall ecology. According to the IQAir AirVisual 2018 World Air Quality Report, Gurugram was the most polluted city in the world in 2018, with the highest PM2.5 levels.30 DLF, which has reaped billions in this city, has no responsibility for the social and ecological cost of this pollution, or for the perpetual traffic jams, lack of public infrastructure including sidewalks, the flood risk, and the ground water loss. Real Estate Investment Trusts (REIT) now enable even small investors to play the real estate speculation market and contribute to the corporate capture. This increases land prices beyond what is affordable for affordable housing, even for the middle-income families. An example of corporate capture of cities in the US is the large tax concessions big corporates demand from cities on a promise of bringing in jobs. Amazon’s plan for bringing its headquarters to New York followed a long drawn out “competition” process of having cities vie with each other to offer the largest benefits to Amazon. Soon after New York won, it became apparent that taxpayers would bear the brunt of the $3 billion in incentives that Amazon would get from the city, without any plan to address the resultant impact on the over-stressed transit systems, rising housing prices, gentrification of a highly segregated area, and worsening of air quality.31 In another example, Washington State awarded the Boeing Co. a $8.7 billion tax break handout in 2013, the largest ever given by any state to a corporation, to grow its workforce within Washington. Since then the company has cut 12,655 jobs, or more than 15% of its local workforce, and more layoffs are expected.32 While the cases of Amazon and Boeing have attracted much attention, many cities have businesses silently creeping in with large tax breaks and accelerating gentrification without contributing their fair share to the physical or social infrastructure of the cities. Corporate capture of the affordable housing market in Brazil and Mexico is another case in point. Brazil’s much celebrated building of 4.5 million homes through its Minha Casa Minha Vida program is indeed a tribute to the government’s will to solve the large deficit in low income housing. The program set up a financing facility for developers to access low interest loans to build low cost housing. However, with profit making as their sole objective, developers have built thousands of homes on cheap farmland inaccessible to the cities to which the poor must now commute in order to work.33 Public spaces and amenities that would help new residents form communities and social capital are missing in these developments. The case of Infonavit Housing in Mexico is also similar.34 The same money invested in infill housing and projects within cities would have had a much more positive social and ecological impact, but would have made less money for the corporations. While Environmental Impact Statements are required for large projects in many countries, a requirement

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for Social Impact Statements could have changed the outcomes in these cases, and can improve outcomes in future such projects.

Triple bottom line accounting to counter corporate capture One way to deal with corporate capture is to require corporations to report the financial, social, and ecological bottom line for all projects and products, including in their annual reports. This knowledge can be made available to consumers who can then make their purchasing and voting decisions accordingly. It is this insistence that will eventually change corporate culture based on greed alone. Measuring everything just by money, and even the development of countries by GDP, is rightly being questioned now. In the often quoted example, when a woman marries her butler, the GDP goes down but the social capital rises, so money is clearly an insufficient indicator for people or our planet. Another way out of the corporate capture gridlock is to require transparency in the externalities or life cycle costing of each project, product, or process in the smart city/ region. Singapore includes the cost of roads, pollution, congestion, and eventual recycling in the pricing of cars, rendering them nearly twice as expensive as in other countries. Companies selling plastic products or packaging could be required to include the life cycle cost incurred in the manufacture, transportation, eventual disposal, and environmental cost of the products. Based on the value of marine life and corals that get destroyed due to pollution, a plastic water bottle should cost between $60–$100. Would this then dissuade irresponsible consumer habits? The triple bottom line is essentially an accounting framework that incorporates three dimensions of performance: social, environmental, and financial. It is possible to evaluate an organization, a project, or determine the outcome of a policy or regulations in this holistic way. Governments requiring this accounting practice of all corporations and of their own actions can contribute greatly towards making the cities truly smart. However, this system has its challenges. Profits are measured in dollars, but what should environmental or ecological health be measured in? What about social capital? A community with good networks, even if it unexpectedly loses its sources of income and wealth, is likely to rebound by crowdsourcing its recovery through its social networks. However, a community with no such social capital will be far less resilient. This was evident in the difference in physical and emotional recovery of people hit by the super storm Sandy in New York and by the tsunami in Fukushima. However, the mainstream economic discussion does not have ways to measure this resilience, or the value of either human or social capital. Although ways to change this are emerging. There is a need for metrics that can be tailored to local situations and 35

needs.

For instance, a car manufacturer could measure its progress toward produ-

cing less-polluting vehicles but a government project to expand public transit should measure the reduction in surface road congestion. There are three possible ways to construct such metrics. In the first method, all its dimensions can be expressed in

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financial value. However, questions on valuing the lost wetlands or endangered species will remain. The second solution is to calculate ecological and social capital through an index that resolves the issue of incompatible units. However, getting consensus for a universal index may be hard or even unwise. A combination of the above methods would be more satisfactory, where target goals are set, and progress measured towards them. The resultant matrix can be measured in terms of dollars or any other currency if needed. Politicians are also taking note of the new ways to measure development. Jacinda Ardern, the prime minister of New Zealand, during the 2019 Davos discussion on “More than GDP,” said that “We need to address the societal well-being of our nation, not just the economic well-being.” She has introduced her Treasury’s Living Standards Framework that includes societal indicators to show a more rounded measure of success of her country and her government.36 In 2005, Grand Rapids, Michigan, combined their efforts related to “environmental quality, economic prosperity, and social capital and equity” to create a sustainable environment true to the triple bottom line concept as shown in Figure 13.6.37 The region employs 14 major indicators related to the region’s quality of life and environmental factors. Rather than create an index, target goals were established for each indicator including alternative and traditional fuel usage, the number of air pollution ozone action days, personal income per capita, unemployment rate, public transportation ridership, crime statistics, educational attainment, and voter participation. The city has since added a fourth pillar, governmental accountability, to explain the impact of policies and programs on their people, planet, and prosperity. For urban planning and policy projects such as creating smart cities, the matrix of indices should be both comprehensive and meaningful and include social, environmental, and spatial aspects. Adding the element of governance is also important when the government is the driver of the project, allowing cities to define their own targets as a response to their respective context. However, there is potential to standardize the list of variables to draw effective comparisons between different urban regions. Social variables could include measurements of education, equity, and access to social resources, health and wellbeing, and quality of life.39 Measurements could be in terms of unemployment rates, education received, female labor force participation, median household income, relative poverty, average commute time, violent crimes per capita, health-adjusted life expectancy, etc. Environmental variables could measure natural resources and help create a baseline to evaluate impact and create focus areas for interventions. The variables could incorporate long-range trends and current data on air and water quality, energy consumption, natural resources, solid and toxic waste, and land use, forest cover, etc. Some specific examples could be concentration of various pollutants (SO, NO, etc.), electricity consumption, fossil fuel consumption, solid waste management, change in land use, forest cover, etc. Spatial variables can be project specific and can help evaluate success or failure of the transit network, open spaces, components of social infrastructure, etc. Data from social media, maps of foot traffic, usage intensities, time-based usage distribution, qualitative data (reviews) of various services, etc., can be used to determine

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Figure 13.6 Quadruple Bottom Line (QBL) showing Grand Rapids’ four sustainability pillars.38 © City of Grand Rapids Office of Energy & Sustainability, 2016

areas of interventions and reveal user patterns. There are no standardized indices for such spatial variables. However, using best design practices as a baseline, big data can be used to create indices for open space usage evaluation, social infrastructure efficiency, etc.

Smart citizenship Socially equitable cities are smart cities, and good social infrastructure triggers smart citizenship. This is because social infrastructure involves coordinated actions of different type of services, the institutions who provide them, the governments who regulate them, and the users. The success of these networks builds people’s trust in their institutions. As smart social infrastructure is also about community engagement, it encapsulates the concepts of culture, i.e., the values, shared beliefs, customs,

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behaviors, and identity that underpin the way society works and that help to shape and define communities. Smart cities must also be resilient and able to face the shocks related to climate change, loss of a major employer, or acts of terrorism. For this smart citizenship is critical. Closer-knit communities fared better in the aftermath of the super storms in New York in 2012 and in New Orleans in 2005. The same was true of the tsunami in Fukushima in 2011, and in Aceh, Indonesia, in 2004. It is the strength and patterns of the relationships of the people within the community and with each other as individuals that give rise to social resilience. This is another reason that urban policy focus on social infrastructure and citizenry is smart. Social resilience is also about people’s abilities to tolerate, absorb, cope with, and adjust to environmental and social threats of various kinds.40 These include slowly increasing environmental threats such as environmental pollution and soil degradation, rapid-onset hazards such as hurricanes, and also deep-seated social threats such as racial discrimination. Resilience depends upon physical systems and social systems.41 The strength and quality of social infrastructure is just as vital as the physical infrastructure to how a city will recover. Social infrastructure includes “hard” or built infrastructure like health facilities and centers, education facilities, community centers/gathering areas etc., and “soft” or service-based infrastructure like the programs, resources, and services for cultural and community development. The “hard” components of social infrastructure have been traditionally distributed from the perspective of space allocation according to population density and best design practices. However, “need based” distribution, based upon smart demographic data and usage patterns of services, can inform smart distribution. Harnessing existing social infrastructure could help to deliver programs more effectively as they build on the networks already present in the community. A European example of social urbanism incited by proactive citizens is in Buiksloterham, Amsterdam, where the global financial crisis of 2008 spurred a unique model of real estate development. Rather than a top-down approach of a master plan process, this development was initiated by individuals and groups who wanted to build their own housing. This citizen-led district development, using simple finances available to a group of like-minded people, enabled the latest technology such as renewable energy generators and prefab construction techniques to be used, and afforded greater coordination and diversity in design than the traditional master plan approach.42 In his book, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, C. K. Prahalad makes an economic case for including all segments of society in the free market.43 However, in marginalized communities, social capital and networks are needed to provide ladders for people to connect to the free market and to fulfill their role as smart citizens. Strong communities also result in more interactions and transactions, thereby resulting in better economic growth. In his book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam posits that governments are more successful in places rich in social capital.44 He links social capital to civic engagement, political equality, solidarity, and tolerance. Despite this

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understanding, there is a lack of political will and action for nurturing the social capital of cities. Meanwhile, the disconnects along economic and social fault lines in cities from New York to Shanghai and Mumbai are depleting that social capital that exists, and have the potential to undermine economic growth, public safety, and peaceful co-existence of citizens. URBZ: User generated cities,45 is an organization based in Mumbai, India. For the past nine years it has worked alongside communities to implement participatory planning, which they call the new form of democracy. Much of their work is in Dharavi, where their Mumbai office is located. Erroneously called one of Asia’s largest slums, it is in fact a craft village which was outside the city till the city grew around it. It contributes over a billion US dollars to Mumbai’s economy annually, and recycles 70% of the city’s recyclable waste. URBZ was one of the organizations that helped Dharavi resist a top-down plan that would have rehoused Dharavi residents in tall buildings on part of its land, while making the rest available for market rate development by the Slum Redevelopment Authority. However, the new plans had no input from the residents or space for their workshops and micro enterprises that are an integral part of Mumbai’s economy. In 2019, Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava of URBZ also conducted a participatory planning project in Lausanne, Switzerland, to re-envision its largest public squares, Riponne and Tunnel.46 Figure 13.7 shows one of the meetings held during this project. According to them, the more diversified a neighborhood, in terms of its uses, its composition and its physical expressions, the more efficient it is in terms of economic and cultural dynamism. Participatory planning

Figure 13.7 People planning their public spaces: democracy in action in Lausanne, Switzerland. © URBZ: User Generated Cities, 2019

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has already become a legal requirement in some Swiss towns, acknowledging that voting is a limited mode of expression and can’t capture user expertise and creativity. Another organization, Pukar, also located in Mumbai, trains local young people in research techniques and data analysis, so that they can survey water availability and other public services and needs in their communities, to map social networks and other data. Sheela Patel, founder of the Society for Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC) and co-founder of Slum Dwellers International, articulates the sentiments of her constituency when she says “nothing for us without us.” The OBSERVE program of The Center for the Living Cities trains school children to read their neighborhood and city in the way Jane Jacobs wanted people to see it, and to brainstorm solutions to their local issues.47 All these efforts have sprung up to develop and harness the social capital of communities, not just because the governments in these places do not have adequate resources, but because people-led planning is more responsive to real needs. Once people see a project or process as their own, they help maintain and improve it the way a top-down process cannot. To provide all the citizens, especially the marginalized, with a voice in planning and decision making to improve plans, decisions, service delivery, and overall quality of the environment is a smart strategy to bring about positive change in the urban environment. Social Capital Credits (SoCCs),48 innovated by Asia Initiatives,49 a New Yorkbased nonprofit and think tank, provides a possible way to leverage Social Capital using the tools and accountability of the market economy. SoCCs is a community currency for social good which acts as a catalyst for development without reliance on money, as shown in Figure 13.8. SoCCs promote community-led neighborhood improvements and empower people to collaborate in building and improving their own housing, neighborhoods, and cities in transformative ways. This methodology of crowdsourcing true development makes rich as well as poor people active participants in the urban improvement process. Just as carbon credits encourage and reward environmental responsibility using market mechanisms, SoCCs encourage and reward social responsibility using market mechanisms and help price community values into the economy at a premium to values of individual greed on which current economic systems are based. This methodology has been successfully used in India, Ghana, Kenya, and the United States. Participatory planning of hard as well as soft elements is a process and not a product, in which the planner gets to know the people well enough to offer him/ herself as a resource. It is an expression of and commitment to people’s right to be involved in matters that concern or affect them. One could simply say, it is a departure from planning “for” the people to planning “with” the people.

Nature- and people-based infrastructure is smart Building ecological resilience is smart. Nature-based infrastructure for water management, waste water remediation, energy, mitigating threats of seawater rise, and floods can be more resilient, have fewer detrimental externalities, be multi-functional, and

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Figure 13.8 Diagrams showing the Social Capital Credits methodology. © Asia Initiatives

create ongoing jobs. Forested areas, adaptive and regenerative landscapes, bioswales for phyto-remediation, rain water harvesting, and holding ponds are all examples of this, but often get pushed aside by short-term technological fixes. Pune, the 8th largest city in India, looking to mitigate the flood risks from the dams built upstream on the Mula Mutha River, is considering a plan to channelize the river and create bunds to hold water in parts of the river even in dry season, and to provide recreational space along it in the center city area. While a similar plan in Ahmedabad along the Sabarmati River has devastated the ecology of that river and displaced many poor people living along it, it has been a real estate success. The same designer has been invited to design the Mula Mutha proposal. While a naturebased holistic plan that could accommodate the expected flood waters in revitalized nallahs (streams) that are part of the river system would be superior,50 an engineering solution that will further degrade the natural system is being considered in the name of efficiency and modernization of the city. The possibility of nature-based infrastructure is also being pushed aside in Can Tho, the third largest city in the Mekong River Delta in Vietnam. This area is experiencing the dual challenge of sea water level rise and drought that is causing aquifer depletion and land subsidence. The World Bank is currently building a wall around its center city areas, which is likely to solve the problem for some of the areas for some of the time, but will probably cause long-term harm to areas outside the wall, as well as changing the resilient water-based lifestyle of the local people. This wall may also result in the “bathtub effect” experienced in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina. Sometimes the definition of what is smart also must change as the externalities of a once smart idea prove not so smart over time. A solution of centralizing water management through engineering in Varanasi, one of the holiest cities in India, was considered smart in 1822 when it was built by James Prinsep, a brilliant British orientalist and engineer. Under this plan, many talabs (ponds) on the Varanasi bluff were drained by pipes into the Ganges River, on the justification that

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stagnant water is detrimental to public health. Many talabs were then filled up to create sites for buildings. This disrupted the age-old method of rainwater holding and social stewardship of water resources once integral to the city.51 This loss is now in part responsible, along with a rapidly increasing population, for the water scarcity in Varanasi and the increased flooding in the Ganges. Similar loss of traditional but smart water-holding systems is resulting in water stress across many Indian cities. Climate change, biodiversity loss, and the ecological shifts are the deep underlying trends facing cities around the world today. Smart collaborative and crosssectoral approaches for leveraging the synergy between nature and urbanism are needed to respond to these ecological shifts and threats. Regenerative nature-based infrastructure that is not only responsive to the social context but also leverages public participation can build social as well as ecological resilience. SCAPE, a New York-based landscape architecture practice founded by Kate Orff, aims to bring positive change in communities by combining regenerative living infrastructure and new forms of open space.52 They do this by integrating natural cycles and systems into environments across scales, from urban pocket-parks to the regional ecological plans with the goal of creating dynamic and adaptive landscapes that are sustainable and resilient. For example, a watershed-scale design is being implemented in neighborhoods in Norfolk, Virginia, to make them more resilient to storm surge, sea level rise, and stormwater flooding.53 Another project called Living Breakwaters is a community-based reef rebuilding project for the Gowanus Bay in New York that uses oyster-tecture to create a living reef of intertwined “fuzzy rope” that supports aquatic life and has diminished water currents and cleaned the water body by harnessing biophilic design characteristics of oyster mussels and eelgrass as shown in Figure 13.9. The East Kolkata Wetlands is another example of how nature-based infrastructure can not only be cheaper and better than centralized engineering solutions, but can also benefit the city and its economy in powerful ways. This 12,500-acre wetland, declared a Ramsar site of international importance,54 treats nearly one third of

Figure 13.9 Oyster-tecture park in New York will restore the reef and coastal ecology. © Scape Studio

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the 759 million litres of wastewater produced in Kolkata each day. The waste water is processed by phyto remediation into nutrients for fish and fresh produce at no operational cost to the city. It is the world’s largest sewage-fed fish and agriculture system which, through its system of waterways, paddy fields, vegetable plots, and fish ponds, supports over 50,000 farmers and fishermen. Importance given to community participation and interactive governance in nature-based infrastructure in cities like New York, San Francisco, and Amsterdam to name a few, indicates that an increasingly nuanced understanding of nature, community, political power, and social capital is beginning to permeate the field. There is a need to build on this momentum and bring this discussion within policy, design practice, and academic discourse.

So what makes the city smart? Many smart city projects around the world are using a definition of smartness limited to smart real estate with smart building management systems and other high tech products. While there is little doubt that smart infrastructural systems – power, water supply, and waste management and transportation networks – can indeed lead to better management of our planet’s limited resources, the truly smart cities should aim higher. They should aim to ensure the Right to the Smart City for all. Big data, new technologies, and artificial intelligence can be effectively used to bring about social, ecological, and financial justice if their development is used and guided with wisdom. The thought leaders in politics, science, academia, and civil society will need to realize this vast opportunity, and also its peril. They must choose wisely, but chose they must.

Note 1 Lefebvre, Henri. 1996. Writings on Cities. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. 2 Butler, Chris (Chris Adrian). 2012. Henri Lefebvre: Spatial Politics, Everyday Life and the Right to the City. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. 3 Mehta, Geeta, Ninoshka Henriques, and Shreya Malu. Forthcoming. Building Social Capital by Design. 4 Al Nuaimi, Eiman, Hind Al Neyadi, Nader Mohamed, and Jameela Al-Jaroodi. 2015. “Applications of Big Data to Smart Cities.” Journal of Internet Services and Applications 6 (1): 25, doi: 10.1186/ s13174-015-0041-5. 5 Kazeem, Yomi. 2017. “Lagos Wants to Be a Modern Mega City so It’s Forcing Thousands of Slum Dwellers from their Homes.” Quartz Africa, March 22, 2017, https://qz.com/africa/936761/lagoswants-to-be-a-modern-mega-city-so-its-forcing-thousands-of-slum-dwellers-from-their-homes. 6 World Bank. 1998–2002. Social Capital Initiative, working paper series. Washington, DC: World Bank. 7 Muggah, Robert. 2015. “Four Ways Fragile Cities Can Avoid Becoming Failed Cities.” Seguridad Ciudadana (blog), February 6, 2015, https://blogs.iadb.org/seguridad-ciudadana/en/fragile-cities-canavoid-becoming-failed-cities. 8 Swope, Christopher. 2014. “How Medellín Revived Itself, Part 4: The Road to ‘Most Innovative City’,” Citiscope, April 11, 2014, http://archive.citiscope.org/story/2014/how-medellin-revived-itselfpart-4-road-most-innovative-city.

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9 Authors 1 and 2 are advisors to Andhra Pradesh Capital Region Development Authority for Amaravati the Happy City project. 10 Center on Budget & Policy Priorities. 2017. “United States Fact Sheet: Federal Rental Assistance.” Washington, DC: Center on Budget & Policy Priorities. 11 Salviati, Chris. 2018. “2018 Cost Burden Report: Despite Improvements, Affordability Issues are Immense.” Rentonomics (blog), September 21, 2018, www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/costburden-2018. 12 Based on analyses by the National Alliance to End Homelessness of the U.S. Census Bureau, 2016, American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates. 13 “The New Urban Agenda.” n.d. Habitat III, accessed March 18, 2019, http://habitat3.org/the-newurban-agenda. 14 United States. 2018. The 2018 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress. Part 1: Point-in-Time Estimates of Homelessness. Washington, DC: U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Community Planning and Development, www.hudexchange.info/resources/ documents/2018-AHAR-Part-1.pdf. 15 NYC Housing. n.d. “Problem – NYC Housing Plan” [website], accessed March 19, 2019. www1. nyc.gov/site/housing/problem/problem.page. 16 The Telegraph. 2018. “Brazil Fire: Burning Tower Block Collapses in Sao Paulo,” May 1, 2018, www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/05/01/brazil-fire-burning-tower-block-collapses-sao-paulo/. 17 Homes for All Campaign of the Right to the City Alliance. 2018. “Communities Over Commodities: People-Driven Alternatives to an Unjust Housing System.” Community-Wealth.org [website], https://com munity-wealth.org/content/communities-over-commodities-people-driven-alternatives-unjust-housingsystem. 18 Anzilotti, Eillie. 2018. “4 Radical Real Estate Ideas to Fix Our Broken Housing System.” Fast Company, March 23, 2018, www.fastcompany.com/40547215/4-radical-real-estate-ideas-to-fix-ourbroken-housing-system. 19 Ehlenz, Meagan M. 2014. Community Land Trusts and Limited Equity Cooperatives: A Marriage of Affordable Homeownership Models? Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. 20 Shah, Nadia. 2018. “Housing for All in India and Its Future in Sustainable Development.” Journal of Global Initiatives: Policy, Pedagogy, Perspective 13 (1): 7. 21 Williams, Keith. 2016. “The Evolution of Hudson Yards: From ‘Death Avenue’ to NYC’s Most Advanced Neighborhood.” Curbed NY, December 13, 2016, https://ny.curbed.com/2016/12/13/ 13933084/hudson-yards-new-york-history-manhattan. 22 Fisher, Bridget, and Flávia Leite. 2018. The Cost of New York City’s Hudson Yards Redevelopment Project, no. 2, Working Paper Series 2018. Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis and Department of Economics, The New School for Social Research. 23 Haag, Matthew. 2019. “Amazon’s Tax Breaks and Incentives Were Big. Hudson Yards’ are Bigger.” The New York Times, March 11, 2019, sec. New York, www.nytimes.com/2019/03/09/nyregion/ hudson-yards-new-york-tax-breaks.html. 24 Kimmelman, Michael. 2019. “Hudson Yards Is Manhattan’s Biggest, Newest, Slickest Gated Community. Is this the Neighborhood New York Deserves?” The New York Times, March 14, 2019, sec. Arts, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/03/14/arts/design/hudson-yards-nyc.html. 25 Phelps, Edmund S. 2009. “Capitalism vs. Corporatism.” Critical Review 21 (4): 401–14, https://doi. org/10.1080/08913810903441344. 26 Ingraham, Christopher. 2017. “Analysis: The Richest 1 Percent Now Owns More of the Country’s Wealth than at Any Time in the Past 50 Years.” Washington Post, December 6, 2017, www. washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/12/06/the-richest-1-percent-now-owns-more-of-the-coun trys-wealth-than-at-any-time-in-the-past-50-years. 27 Sachs, Jeffrey. 2011. The Price of Civilization : Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity. New York, NY: Random House. 28 Bhattacharya, Ananya. 2019. “India’s Billionaires Added $308 Million a Day to Their Wealth in 2018.” Quartz India, January 20, 2019, https://qz.com/india/1528973/indias-billionaires-added-308-mil lion-a-day-in-2018-says-oxfam. 29 United States. 2001. “The USA PATRIOT Act: Preserving Life and Liberty: Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism.” Washington, DC: U.S. Dept. of Justice, http://purl.access.gpo.gov/GPO/LPS39935. 30 “2018 World Air Quality Report: Region & City PM2.5 Ranking.” 2019. IQAir AirVisual; Greenpeace Southeast Asia [website], www.iqair.com/blog/press-releases/IQAir-AirVisual-2018-World-Air-QualityReport-Reveals-Worlds-Most-Polluted-Cities. 31 Fitzsimmons, Emma G. 2018. “Amazon is Coming. Can New York’s Transit System Handle It?” The New York Times, November 21, 2018, sec. New York, www.nytimes.com/2018/11/20/nyregion/ amazon-new-york-subway-queens.html. 32 Hiltzik, Michael. n.d. “Boeing Got a Record Tax Break from Washington State and Cut Jobs Anyway. Now the State Wants to Strike Back.” Latimes.Com, accessed March 19, 2019, www. latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-boeing-washington-20170503-story.html.

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33 Linke, Clarisse Cunha. 2018. “Shortcomings of Brazil’s Minha Casa, Minha Vida Programme.” Urbanet [blog], September 27, 2018, www.urbanet.info/brazil-social-housing-shortcomings. 34 Herbert, Christopher Edward, Eric S. Belsky, and Nicholas DuBroff. 2012. The State of Mexico’s Housing: Recent Progress and Continued Challenges. Cambridge, MA: Joint Center for Housing Studies, Harvard University. 35 Slaper, Timothy F. and Tanya J. Hall. 2011. “The Triple Bottom Line: What Is It and How Does It Work.” Indiana Business Review 86 (1): 4–8. 36 Parker, Ceri. 2019. “New Zealand Will Have a New ‘Well-Being Budget’, Says Jacinda Ardern.” Agenda, World Economic Forum, January 23, 2019. 37 “Triple Bottom Line (TBL).” n.d. [definition] Investopedia, accessed March 18, 2019, www.investo pedia.com/terms/t/triple-bottom-line.asp. 38 Office of Energy & Sustainability. 2016. Grand Rapids’ Sustainability Plan FY 2017–FY 2021. Grand Rapids, MI: Office of Energy & Sustainability, www.grandrapidsmi.gov/files/assets/public/depart ments/office-of-sustainability/reports-and-documents/office-of-sustainability/sustainability-plan-fy17fy21.pdf. 39 The University of Scranton Online. 2016, March 8. Ideas for Creating an Index to Measure Triple Bottom Line [website]. Scranton, PA: The University of Scranton, https://elearning.scranton.edu/ resource/business-leadership/ideas-for-creating-an-index-to-measure-triple-bottom-line. 40 Keck, Markus and Sakdapolrak, Patrick. (2013). “What Is Social Resilience? Lessons Learned and Ways Forward.” Erdkunde 67: 5–18, 10.3112/erdkunde.2013.01.02. 41 www.100resilientcities.org/how-social-resilience-can-save-your-city. 42 Hill, Dan. 2016. “The Social and the Democratic, in the Social Democratic European City.” Medium [blog], May 23, 2016, https://medium.com/dark-matter-and-trojan-horses/the-social-and-the-demo cratic-in-social-democratic-european-cities-31e0bc169b0b. 43 Prahalad, Coimbatore K., and Stuart L. Hart. 2002. “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid.” Strategy and Business 26, 54–54. 44 Putnam, Robert D. 2001. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. 45 Author 1 is the co-founder of URBZ: User Generated Cities. 46 Srivastava, Rahul, and Matias Echanove. 2019, March 16. “Citizen Planners: A Public Brainstorming Session.” The Hindu, ePaper edition. 47 The Center for the Living City. n.d. “Observe!” accessed March 19, 2019, https://centerfortheliving city.org/observe-merit-badge-overview. 48 Asia Initiatives. n.d. “Introduction to SoCCs (Social Capital).” Asia Initiatives [blog], accessed March 19, 2019, http://asiainitiatives.org/soccs/introduction-to-soccs/. 49 The authors of this chapter are all colleagues at Asia Initiatives. 50 Author 1 is currently the co-faculty for Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture Planning & Preservation’s Spring 2019 Urban Design Studio. The studio along with the Center for Resilient Cities and Landscapes (an initiative of the Rockefeller Foundation) is working in Pune, India, and Can Tha, Vietnam, on water urbanism. 51 Columbia GSAPPP. 2018. Water Urbanism Varanasi. New York, NY: Columbia University, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, www.arch.columbia.edu/books/reader/331-waterurbanism-varanasi. 52 SCAPE. n.d. SCAPE [website], accessed March 19, 2019, www.scapestudio.com. 53 SCAPE. n.d. Ohio Creek Watershed Resilience Project. New York, NY: SCAPE, accessed March 19, 2019, www.scapestudio.com/projects/ohio-creek-watershed. 54 A Ramsar site is a wetland site designated to be of international importance under the Ramsar Convention.

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Politics of sensing and listening Dietmar Offenhuber and Sam Auinger

Introduction Sound sensing is one of the low-hanging fruits of smart city applications. Technically, it is relatively easy to accomplish: measuring loudness is computationally cheap, transmitting the results requires low bandwidths and the minimum hardware specifications are relatively modest. Noise sensing is considered a solved problem by most urban engineers; a black-boxed solution just waiting to be deployed. Sound sensing is also pertinent from an application perspective. Noise is a common urban nuisance with consequences for public health and well-being. As a central dimension of the urban experience, the sound reflects all kinds of human activities, cultural or economic.1 At the same time, there is an urgency to explore new tools and methods. Within a predominantly visually oriented culture of urbanism, the soundscape is still a neglected topic. It is poorly understood by designers and policymakers who lack the necessary skills and tools to adequately consider the phenomenon in their work. Contrary to these seemingly simple premises, we argue that, from a social perspective, sound sensing is far from being a trivial problem. Since the soundscape is fundamentally entangled with human activity, its measurement is shaped by political interests. The circumstances of measurement often become the site of public controversies. The soundscape does not stop at property lines; creating “zones of interference” with considerable potential for conflict fueled by a multiplicity of diverging perspectives and stakeholder interests.2

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Despite this multiplicity of perspectives, the metrics defined in most regulations and consequently used in most devices are highly reductive. The unifying umbrella of the dBA metric used in most smart city projects masks conflicting auditory perceptions that erupt in controversies around airport extension projects, traffic conditions, restaurant outdoor seating spaces, weekly markets, cultural customs, or the use of leaf blowers and ventilation units. As a result, protocols of measurement frequently turn into an embattled proxy site of public controversies. In this chapter, we discuss six sites of such controversies that coalesce around distributed sound sensing with regards to what is measured, how, and why it is measured. First, we will provide an overview of the whys and hows of soundscape measurement in the smart city context, followed by a discussion of the potential political conflicts connected to each of these dimensions. We will conclude with a comprehensive vision for planning cities and neighborhoods with consideration of the soundscape.

The whys, whats, and hows of sound mapping Approaches to measurement and categorization are never just technicalities, they embody a perspective on the world. They give shape to different assumptions about what the problem is, how it should be measured, and what consequences might arise as a result of the measurement.3 Prefacing the subsequent discussion, we provide a brief overview of sound mapping strategies with regards to their underlying whys, whats, and hows. With respect to the whys, the motivations, we distinguish two groups. The first and largest group employs sound mapping for the purpose of environmental noise assessment. Typically, this involves audio sensors that collect sound pressure values without recording audio or analyzing more complex aspects of the soundscape. The second group uses the soundscape as a source of information; for sensing auditory signatures, rhythms, and events. Applications in this group may be focused on capturing the soundscape itself but are often also motivated by non-auditory phenomena that can be registered through sound. These can include the detection of events, the presence of particular animals, or the detection and localization of gunshots4 or aggressive speech.5 Apart from this broad distinction, the conditions and the context of sensing are relevant. In this respect, we can differentiate sensing applications along three dimensions: 1.

The first dimension concerns the question of who is conducting the measurement – a public authority or a self-selected group of volunteers. Traditionally, noise measurements are conducted by public authorities under strictly controlled conditions, usually limited to a small number of locations. This practice is challenged by initiatives that take advantage of the sensing capabilities of ubiquitous technologies such as

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smartphones to address this limitation and cover areas not covered by official sensors. 2.

The second aspect differentiates whether quantitative or qualitative aspects of the soundscape are the focus of the sound mapping effort. Traditional measures are sparse and quantitative, but with the rise in cheap computing power, increasingly complex qualitative characteristics move into the focus of attention.

3.

The last dimension finally distinguishes whether sound is directly measured by microphones or indirectly inferred from the subjective perceptions of citizens expressed in surveys, on social media, or in citizen complaint data.6

Sound mapping – six areas of contention Each of the modalities described brings its own challenges and controversies; some examples are listed in Table 14.1. In the following section, we will discuss the political implications of these approaches, organized in six areas. The non-exhaustive list includes the following areas of existing and potential conflicts connected to soundmapping and sensing: 1.

The authority of sensing

2.

The politics of metrics and thresholds

3.

The politics of display

4.

Surveillance and accountability

5.

Sonic commons and the right to emit

6.

Interventions in the soundscape.

Table 14.1 Overview/Summary Goals Noise abatement Sound as a source of information Methods Authoritative or participatory

Quantitative or qualitative

Direct or indirect

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Implications of identifying affected areas (property values). Sonic commons, surveillance, and control.

Who is allowed to measure, who can be trusted? Public authorities vs activists, accountability and transparency. What is the appropriate protocol of measurement? Different outcomes support the interests of different parties. How should subjective perceptions be compared? What are their implicit biases?

Politics of sensing and listening

In each of these areas, concerns about health, aesthetic norms, and social perceptions are deeply intertwined and impossible to separate. In analogy to the role of sanitation in public policy during the 19th century, which commingled fear of contagious diseases, the aesthetics of urban space, and the stigmatization of social groups, a similar concept of an “aural hygiene” encompasses concerns for health and wellbeing with ideas of normative social orders.7

The authority of sensing Current EU regulation requires states to produce maps of noise exposure every five years.8 Despite the considerable level of detail represented, however, the creation of most of these maps involves very little measurement. Most cities maintain only a small number of noise sensors, from which noise maps are derived using complex simulation models. Such models have been developed since the 1950s and have reached a considerable level of sophistication – considering architecture, topography, and frequency distributions.9 Citizen initiatives have challenged such official models as incomplete and questioned the siting decisions of official sensing nodes. Professional calibrated sensing equipment, however, remains unaffordable for most private citizens. Using smartphones or low-quality sensors as a substitute, participatory sensing initiatives aim to provide a more fine-grained picture and capture the soundscape in the sites of their daily life.10 These initiatives have sparked controversies around the authority over collecting noise data. While the initiatives argue for a democratization of data collection, they receive pushback regarding the accuracy of the uncalibrated equipment and doubts that volunteers may only report data that supports their concerns. Nevertheless, studies find participatory sensing to be sufficiently accurate if done correctly.11

The politics of metrics and thresholds The quantification of noise emissions follows a number of conventions informed by findings from physics, acoustics, human medicine, and psychology. The metric had to be both “objective” and easily implementable. The commonly used A-weighted dB measure considers that the loudness of a signal registered by the human ear depends on its frequency and volume, following the shape of the Fletcher-Munson curve developed at the Bell Laboratories.12 Since the ear is less sensitive to very low or very high frequencies, these frequencies are penalized in the model. The A-weighted loudness and its various derived time-dependent metrics13 are useful to describe the average noise exposure in a directly exposed environment and provide actionable evidence for noise reduction measures. It also addresses the audibility of a place by describing the noise-floor that must be exceeded by a signal to be audible.

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A basic limitation of the dBA metric is connected to its original purpose for optimizing speech recognition in telephony under relatively quiet conditions. In other words, it reduces noise impacts to what is heard by the ear. However, humans perceive sound not only with their ears – the entire body hears, and is filled with cavities that resonate in their own frequencies. We feel bass in our stomachs and highpitched sounds in our craniums. In a noisy urban environment with a large proportion of low-frequency components, the dBA no longer serves as an adequate metric to estimate the impact of environmental noise on health and wellbeing – besides loudness, the frequency distribution of noise needs to be taken into account.14 Lowfrequency noise has an especially negative effect not captured by the A-weighted metric.15 An experiment with a sensor network in Los Angeles revealed a large amount of low-frequency noise that goes unnoticed in the standard metrics.16 NoiseScore, a Boston-based participatory sensing project, involves a smartphone app that differentiates between different frequency bands and contextualizes the findings with citizen perceptions captured by community surveys.17 Apart from frequencies, thresholds of magnitude, duration, and temporal distribution of exposure are equally contestable. Based on a reductive model of noise, noise metrics do not address the annoyance and disruptions based on sound characteristics other than loudness and frequency. They do not capture location- and situation-specific aspects of the soundscape including the rhythms of social, economic, and cultural interrelationships. From a human perspective, noise is a complex phenomenon that is influenced by physiological and cultural issues; its perception is formatted by personal knowledge and individual history.

The politics of display By under-reporting harmful and disruptive low-frequency bands, the characteristics of the dBA metric can favor groups with an interest in reported noise values to stay below thresholds. This group may not only include public authorities but ironically also the affected communities. Conducting participatory sensing experiments with communities located around Heathrow Airport, artist and researcher Christian Nold found that communities may be interested in investigating community noise, but are often reluctant to have the results publicly displayed or publicized.18 This observation is consistent with other examples from the field of environmental justice, where the interests of communities affected by pollution may be aligned with a polluter they economically depend upon. In the case of noise, communities may choose to publicly downplay exposure to avoid the stigmatization of living in a tainted environment, and may justifiably fear possible penalties in life insurance policies or negative impacts for their property values. In this sense, official noise maps can have the perverse consequence of actually becoming a driver of gentrification and reinforce spatial inequalities by introducing

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the “sonic capital” of a place as an economic factor.19 The public display of noise data has potentially unintended effects that ought to be considered in discussions around the publication of sensor data on open data portals. The concept of data sovereignty may apply here, demanding that affected communities have a say in how data concerning their group is collected and used.

Surveillance and accountability Concerns about privacy and surveillance are among the most discussed issues pertaining to smart cities.20 Projects deploy a wide array of sensors mounted on light poles, in kiosks, park benches, and other urban infrastructure. Such sensors may, for example, collect Bluetooth and WiFi addresses of mobile devices, which allows an estimation of pedestrian activity throughout the day, but can also be used to identify individuals. To address privacy concerns and save bandwidth, many sensors analyze images and audio onboard without saving or transmitting the footage. However, privacy concerns arise also from the combination of different sensor readings, for example through matching with Bluetooth addresses tied to an individual.21 This is a particular concern in noise-sensing applications that go beyond the simple quantification of noise levels and record or interpret sound samples. Among the burgeoning field of smart policing, existing commercial systems claim to be able to detect aggressive speech patterns to enable law enforcement to detect violence and aggression.22 In combination with other existing applications such as face recognition systems, license plate readers, or Bluetooth sniffers, the claimed anonymity of data can disappear. Issues of privacy protection, the accountable management of collected data, or the governmentality of social control through surveillance are intensely discussed.23 What is less discussed is the relationship between the perceived breach of privacy of a particular sensory modality and its actual surveillance potential. Sound plays a special role in this regard: even applications that only measure long-term averages of environmental noise are subject to intense public controversy, while other kinds of environmental sensors or the more potent combination of various data sources do not receive such scrutiny.

Sonic commons and the right to emit Sound mapping approaches that go beyond average noise levels and aggressive speech patterns and instead use machine learning for a detailed analysis of the soundscape and its wide range of qualitative phenomena are technically possible even if currently not implemented. Such approaches could allow a narrowing of the gap between seemingly objective quantitative noise measures and the multifaceted, subjective perceptions of the auditory environment. These approaches would allow characterizing the atmosphere of a place, reflecting the properties that are meaningful or disruptive for inhabitants.

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Along the same lines, such techniques would also allow the identification of mobile and stationary sources based on their auditory signatures and quantify their relative contributions to environmental noise exposure. Knowing how much a motorcycle or a helicopter contributes to noise pollution could inform a public discourse on the sonic commons, a perspective that understands the soundscape as a fundamentally limited resource under the custodianship of its occupants. As Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger explain, the sonic commons is any shared acoustic space where many people can hear the results of each other’s activities and limit the shared auditory space and its communicative possibilities through their actions. They remind us that “certain things like air, water and humane sonic environments should be considered basic human rights.”24 On a more subtle level, the sonic commons also reflects the power relationships in a given society. Explicitly, this is manifest in signals and soundmarks such as police sirens, the sound of church bells, or prayer calls, and implicitly in the keynote sounds of a place, to use Murray Schaefer’s terminology for the dominant auditory background texture.25 While it is thinkable and perhaps desirable to computationally capture and describe the soundscape in all its nuances and assemble these individual signals into a coherent picture, such an approach also hold potential dangers. If unsupervised, machine learning algorithms that characterize the soundscapes of places and atmospheres will likely reproduce the same implicit biases and racial prejudices that have been observed in sentiment analysis of texts or the classification of search results.26

Interventions in the soundscape As a final point, sound mapping cannot be separated from active interventions into the soundscape which it would likely inform. Sound is already used to shape and control public space and exclude certain groups or animals. Examples are ultrasonic deterrents for dogs or mice, but also insidious devices such as the Mosquito, emitting high-pitched sounds to keep teenagers, who can still hear these frequencies, away from public spaces.27 Teenagers, in turn, have appropriated the same principle and use 17kHz ringtones for their phones which their teachers cannot hear.28 Train stations in Copenhagen and Hamburg play classical music at high volume on their premises, reportedly based on the assumption that this would keep away junkies, while keeping travelers moving.29 Beyond such direct and intentional interventions, however, almost every intervention in urban space changes the soundscape intentionally or unintentionally: every construction project, every group of trees planted, each choice of facade materials or architectural geometry. Such changes are part of a feedback loop; they lead not only to direct acoustic consequences but also to adaptations in the social use of the space. It can be assumed that crude tactics of intervention can be made more effective if they are informed by a real-time analysis of the soundscape and the feedback-effects instigated by sonic interventions.

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Conclusion At the present moment, most official noisemaps are still the result of simulations rather than measurements, and therefore signal a granularity and objectivity that is not justified by underlying observations. Participatory and distributed sensing methods by “smart cities” and “smart citizens” promise ways to overcome this issue. However, as the proliferation of ubiquitous technologies that can be used for sensing the soundscape generate more data, it should not be expected that this new wealth of data will settle the underlying disputes. To understand these disputes, it is crucial to not only consider external aspects, such as how technologies are deployed or who has access to them, but also internal aspects concerning the choice of sensing metrics and communication protocols embedded in these devices. Noise metrics and sensor characteristics often appear black-boxed in the sense of a technology that has become accepted as uncontroversial.30 While the first generation of citizen sensing projects has emphasized the democratization of measurement while often uncritically accepting the data generated by sensors of dubious quality. More recent initiatives, however, explicitly focus on questions of data quality and the appropriate methods of measurement. Mapping the soundscape requires a broader discussion between engineers, and that not only includes scientific abstractions of auditory phenomena, but also the rich layers of meaning and tracing their cultural, personal, economic, and, ultimately, power relationships. “Nothing essential happens in the absence of noise,” Jaques Attali observes: Among birds a tool for marking territorial boundaries, noise is inscribed from the start within the panoply of power. Equivalent to the articulation of a space, it indicates the limits of a territory and the way to make oneself heard within it, how to survive by drawing one’s sustenance from it. And since noise is the source of power, power has always listened to it with fascination.31

Notes 1 Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter, Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? Experiencing Aural Architecture (The MIT Press, 2009). 2 Gascia Ouzounian and Sarah A. Lappin, “Soundspace: A Manifesto,” Architecture and Culture 2, no. 3 (November 1, 2014): 305–16, 10.2752/205078214X14107818390559. 3 Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out (MIT Press, 1999); Rob Kitchin, The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences (SAGE Publications Ltd, 2014). 4 See the shotspotter system for outdoor detection www.shotspotter.com; the amberbox system for indoor detection https://amberbox.com. 5 See the company website www.soundintel.com. 6 Yu Zheng et al., “Diagnosing New York City’s Noises with Ubiquitous Data,” in Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (ACM, 2014), 715–725. 7 Samuel Llano, The Sacred in Madrid’s Soundscape: Toward an Aural Hygiene, 1856–1907 (2016), 10.1057/978-1-137-60020-2_1.

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8 See the EU Environmental Noise Directive 2002/49/EC. 9 Richard H. Bolt, Leo L. Beranek, and Robert B. Newman, Handbook of Acoustic Noise Control. Volume I. Physical Acoustics (Defense Technical Information Center, December 1952); Enda Murphy and Eoin King, Environmental Noise Pollution: Noise Mapping, Public Health, and Policy (Elsevier, 2014); Naveen Garg and Sagar Maji, “A Critical Review of Principal Traffic Noise Models: Strategies and Implications,” Environmental Impact Assessment Review 46, no. Supplement C (April 1, 2014): 68–81, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eiar.2014.02.001; Alfredo Calixto, Fabiano B. Diniz, and Paulo H.T. Zannin, “The Statistical Modeling of Road Traffic Noise in an Urban Setting,” Cities 20, no. 1 (2003): 23–29; Campbell Steele, “A Critical Review of Some Traffic Noise Prediction Models,” Applied Acoustics 62, no. 3 (March 1, 2001): 271–87, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0003-682X (00)00030-X. 10 Nicolas Maisonneuve et al., “NoiseTube: Measuring and Mapping Noise Pollution with Mobile Phones,” in Information Technologies in Environmental Engineering (Springer, 2009), 215–228; Erica Walker, “Noise Score,” (2015), http://noisescore.com/. 11 Ellie D’Hondt, Matthias Stevens, and An Jacobs, “Participatory Noise Mapping Works! An Evaluation of Participatory Sensing as an Alternative to Standard Techniques for Environmental Monitoring,” Pervasive and Mobile Computing 9, no. 5 (2013): 681–694; Enda Murphy and Eoin A. King, “Testing the Accuracy of Smartphones and Sound Level Meter Applications for Measuring Environmental Noise,” Applied Acoustics 106 (May 1, 2016): 16–22, https://doi.org/10.1016/j. apacoust.2015.12.012. 12 Harvey Fletcher and Wilden A. Munson, “Loudness, Its Definition, Measurement and Calculation,” Bell System Technical Journal 12, no. 4 (1933): 377–430. 13 Including the day-night level (Ldn) and the Day-evening-night level (Lden); the Community Noise Equivalent Level (CNEL), the Energy equivalent noise level (Leq). For reference, see www.eea. europa.eu/help/glossary/eea-glossary. 14 Erica D. Walker et al., “Spatial and Temporal Determinants of A-Weighted and Frequency Specific Sound Levels – An Elastic Net Approach,” Environmental Research 159 (November 1, 2017): 491–99, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envres.2017.08.034. 15 H. Geoffrey Leventhall, “Low Frequency Noise and Annoyance,” Noise Health 6, no. 23 (April 2004): 59–72; Erica D. Walker et al., “Cardiovascular and Stress Responses to Short-Term Noise Exposures – A Panel Study in Healthy Males,” Environmental Research 150 (October 1, 2016): 391–97, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envres.2016.06.016; Christos Baliatsas et al., “Health Effects from Low-Frequency Noise and Infrasound in the General Population: Is It Time to Listen? A Systematic Review of Observational Studies,” The Science of the Total Environment 557–558 (July 1, 2016): 163–69, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2016.03.065. 16 Dietmar Offenhuber et al., “Los Angeles Noise Array – Planning and Design Lessons from a Noise Sensing Network,” Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, August 8, (2018), https://doi.org/10.1177/2399808318792901. 17 Walker, “Noise Score.” 18 Christian Nold, Device Studies of Participatory Sensing: Ontological Politics and Design Interventions (London, UK: UCL (University College London), 2017). 19 Yukio King, “Sound Urban Planning: Community Development Durch Klangorientierte Stadtplanung” (Master’s Thesis, University of the Arts Berlin, 2008). 20 Rob Kitchin, “The Ethics of Smart Cities and Urban Science,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 374, no. 2083 (December 28, 2016): 20160115, https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2016.0115; Orit Halpern et al., “Test-Bed Urbanism,” Public Culture 25, no. 2 70 (2013): 272–306; Adam Greenfield and Nurri Kim, Against the Smart City (The City Is Here for You to Use) (New York, NY: Do Projects, 2013); Alberto Vanolo, “Smartmentality: The Smart City as Disciplinary Strategy,” Urban Studies 51, no. 5 (April 2014): 883–898; Adrien Bartoli et al., “Security and Privacy in Your Smart City,” in Proceedings of the Barcelona Smart Cities Congress, 292, (2011). 21 Saskia Naafs, “‘Living Laboratories’: The Dutch Cities Amassing Data on Oblivious Residents,” Guardian, March (2018). 22 Wojtek Zajdel et al., “CASSANDRA: Audio-Video Sensor Fusion for Aggression Detection,” in 2007 IEEE Conference on Advanced Video and Signal Based Surveillance, (2007), 200–205. 23 Vanolo, “Smartmentality: The Smart City as Disciplinary Strategy”; Greenfield and Kim, Against the Smart City (The City Is Here for You to Use). 24 Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger, “Reflections on the Sonic Commons,” Leonardo Music Journal (December 1, 2009): 63–68, https://doi.org/10.1162/lmj.2009.19.63. 25 R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World, 1st ed. (Random House Inc., 1977). 26 Svetlana Kiritchenko and Saif M. Mohammad, “Examining Gender and Race Bias in Two Hundred Sentiment Analysis Systems,” May (2018). 27 See the controversy around the Mosquito mounted outside a public library in the UK. https://you.38 degrees.org.uk/petitions/remove-mosquito-device-audio-weapon-from-milford-haven-library. 28 See https://metro.co.uk/2006/05/24/pupils-perform-alarming-feat-155361/.

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29 Mads Schmidt, “We Asked Drug Addicts to Rate the Music at Copenhagen Central,” Vice, August 7, (2014), www.vice.com/en_us/article/kwppae/copenhagen-central-station-is-annoyingaddicts-with-marching-music. 30 Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, “Unscrewing the Big Leviathan: How Actors Macro-Structure Reality and How Sociologists Help Them to Do So,” in Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Toward an Integration of Micro-and Macro-Sociologies (1981), 277–303. 31 Jacques Attali and Susan McClary, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 16) (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).

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Murphy, Enda and Eoin A. King. Environmental Noise Pollution: Noise Mapping, Public Health, and Policy. New York, NY: Elsevier, 2014. Murphy, Enda and Eoin A. King. “Testing the Accuracy of Smartphones and Sound Level Meter Applications for Measuring Environmental Noise.” Applied Acoustics 106, (May 1, 2016): 16–22, doi: 10.1016/ j.apacoust.2015.12.012. Naafs, Saskia. “‘Living Laboratories’: The Dutch Cities Amassing Data on Oblivious Residents.” Guardian, March 2018. Nold, Christian. Device Studies of Participatory Sensing: Ontological Politics and Design Interventions. London, UK: UCL (University College London), 2017. Odland, Bruce and Sam Auinger. “Reflections on the Sonic Commons.” Leonardo Music Journal (December 1, 2009): 63–68, doi: 10.1162/lmj.2009.19.63. Offenhuber, Dietmar, Sam Auinger, Susanne Seitinger, and Remco Muijs. “Los Angeles Noise Array— Planning and Design Lessons from a Noise Sensing Network.” Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science (August 8, 2018), doi: 10.1177/2399808318792901. Ouzounian, Gascia and Sarah A. Lappin. “Soundspace: A Manifesto.” Architecture and Culture 2, no. 3 (November 1, 2014). 305–316, doi: 10.2752/205078214X14107818390559. Schafer, R. Murray. The Tuning of the World. 1st ed. New York, NY: Random House Inc., 1977. Schmidt, Mads. “We Asked Drug Addicts to Rate the Music at Copenhagen Central.” Vice, August 7, 2014. www.vice.com/en_us/article/kwppae/copenhagen-central-station-is-annoying-addicts-withmarching-music. Steele, Campbell. “A Critical Review of Some Traffic Noise Prediction Models.” Applied Acoustics 62, no. 3 (March 1, 2001): 271–287, doi: 10.1016/S0003-682X(00)00030-X. Vanolo, Alberto. “Smartmentality: The Smart City as Disciplinary Strategy.” Urban Studies 51, no. 5 (April, 2014): 883–898. Walker, Erica. “Noise Score,” 2015. http://noisescore.com. Walker, Erica D., Anthony Brammer, Martin G. Cherniack, Francine Laden, and Jennifer M. Cavallari. “Cardiovascular and Stress Responses to Short-Term Noise Exposures—A Panel Study in Healthy Males.” Environmental Research 150 (October 1, 2016): 391–397, doi: 10.1016/j.envres.2016.06.016. Walker, Erica D., Jaime E. Hart, Petros Koutrakis, Jennifer M. Cavallari, Trang VoPham, Marcos Luna, and Francine Laden. “Spatial and Temporal Determinants of A-Weighted and Frequency Specific Sound Levels—An Elastic Net Approach.” Environmental Research 159 (November 1, 2017): 491–499, doi: 10.1016/j.envres.2017.08.034. Zajdel, Wojtek, Johannes D. Krijnders, Tjeerd Andringa, and Dariu M. Gavrila. “CASSANDRA: Audio-Video Sensor Fusion for Aggression Detection.” In 2007 IEEE Conference on Advanced Video and Signal Based Surveillance, 200–205, 2007. New York, NY: IEEE. Zheng, Yu, Tong Liu, Yilun Wang, Yanmin Zhu, Yanchi Liu, and Eric Chang. “Diagnosing New York City’s Noises with Ubiquitous Data.” In Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, 715–725. New York, NY: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 2014.

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Recoupling soft and hard Engaging data as an immaterial practice Maya Przybylski

Introduction The technological shift towards smartness, with manifestations occurring across scales ranging from regional systems, with implementations such as of transportation networks with real-time reporting, to a household object, such as a fridge that manages a family’s grocery list, has foregrounded the dominant role data plays in shaping the way we use and organize the built environment. Innovations such as these, building on developments in the Internet-of-Things, sentient environments, high-speed mobile data networks, and automation, have reinforced data, its collection, transmission and processing, as an essential centrepiece of our time. In this context, data is typically perceived as an immaterial entity, lacking a physical dimension – a form of ephemera that lives in the cloud and moves around the world through carefully choreographed pulses of light. Countering this dominant view of data’s immateriality, this chapter motivates the reconceptualization of data as a material practice. This reframing is explored as a means for architects, who are increasingly employing various elements associated with smartness (such as data and algorithms), to more fully understand, engage, and manage the effects of these elements as active mediators in their work. The first section, software embedded design, examines the increasing degrees with which architects are engaging the information communication technologies (ICTs) associated with smartness. Complementing a general survey of these practices, the section offers a more robust account of how architects are directly

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engaging computation, through the production of custom software, in their pursuit of a citizen-oriented implementation of the smart city. The second section, data as an material entity, elaborates on the reconceptualization of data as material and presents a discussion of two approaches used in the pursuit of materially focussed engagements with data. The first approach presents data’s material footprint as one such avenue, whereby attention is drawn to the undeniably physical instantiations of smartness – such as the data centres and resource extraction sites supporting the entire enterprise. The second approach directly challenges the very idea of data’s immateriality and recasts data, as well as other elements associated with smartness such as algorithms and code implementations, as material entities in and of themselves. Elaborating on the second approach, the section goes on to present a case for these newly recast material entities, identified as soft materials, to not be decoupled from a project’s physical dimension and instead be thought of as constituting part of the project’s material assembly. The third section, towards critical computational literacy, presents the implications of how the reconceptualization of soft materials elevates the socially minded and ethically aware obligations which architects have towards their project’s computational components and, in turn, calls for the development of an expanded form of design-oriented computational literacy. The fourth and final section, towards new methods, responds to the call for a critical computational literacy: it presents preliminary developments in designeroriented methods for achieving more complete engagement with both the sociocultural agency and technical capacity of the computational components embedded within data-driven design work.

Software-embedded design Interest in exploring the inversion of data from an immaterial entity into a material one is driven by the increasing degrees with which architects, and allied designers, are engaging information communication technologies (ICTs). In a general sense, architects now take an active role in creating technology by engaging in new project types which include “digital tool-making, robot wrangling, and ubiquitous computing.”1 These activities mark an expansion to the modes through which architects engage digital technology whereby, while continuing their well-established role as consumers of digital technology – using software packages for supporting computer-aided drafting, building information management, digital modelling, and visualization – architects have also become producers of technology and, through the help of new platforms, are directly crafting their own digital tools, processes, and products. The numerous extensions to familiar CAD packages, such as RhinoScript, Grasshopper, and Dynamo, paired with standalone designoriented coding platforms, such as Processing, have supported the development of designers’ skills and reinforced the recasting of the architects’ role as a producer of technology.

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For the most part, these advanced engagements with computation are directed at design development phases – they can help define forms by optimizing geometry to support efficient fabrication for example. Yet, in the context of examining smartness, it is fitting to examine a branch of computationally oriented design work that moves its computational elements, such as data and coded algorithmic sequences, out of the studio environment and into the real world by embedding them as active elements in digitally driven architecture – a built form that can be controlled, actuated, and animated by digital means.2 Within this context of digitally driven projects, several agendas are being pursued under various terms including kinetic, adaptive, responsive, intelligent, interactive, and smart. In projects such as the Al Bahar Towers Responsive Facade by Aedas Architects,3 which uses physical actuation of façade elements as a way to reduce solar gain and glare, digitally driven architecture engages building performance and environmental issues head on. Another type of engagement, which serves as the focus for this chapter moving forward, stems from more social and civic concerns whereby architects and allied designers use digitally driven architecture in their pursuit to counteract dominant smart-city implementations, which emphasize top-down centralized operations, with ad hoc bottom-up projects which foreground a citizenoriented sensibility.4 Smart cities promise a resilient future for the built environment where the needs of citizens will be balanced with the sustainable consumption of resources. Originally conceptualized as an open-ended and multifaceted conglomeration of data streams and feedbacks informed by broad-ranging citizen interests, the smart city ideal is threatened by powerful corporate actors. Since 2008, global corporations, such as IBM and Cisco Systems, have been diversifying their business activities by shifting their focus to municipal services and city operation. Resulting initiatives, epitomized by the IBM Rio de Janeiro Operations Center – which provides a centralized control room from which to manage city services such as water reserves, garbage collection, and electricity consumption rates – threaten to reduce the promise of the smart city to top-down, centralized operations privileging the optimization and management of municipal services. Counteracting this dominant smart city model, by working at smaller scales and in a decentralized fashion, architects are empowering citizen groups to voice and act on local issues. Amphibious Architecture by the Living Architectural Lab and collaborators5 presents a water-based network of sensors and light beacons designed to support collective interests in the environment by celebrating and promoting datacollection by way of an eye-catching dynamic light display installed in New York City’s East and Bronx rivers. Another project, Benchmark by Civic Data Design Lab,6 combines the design of benches and sensor systems into tools for improving understandings of how public spaces are used. Benchmark seeks to move beyond simple metrics such as counters, to include nuanced issues around the social operation of the public space and its ability to influence and encourage interactions. Lastly, OnTheLine7 (Figure 15.1), developed by DATAlab at the School of Architecture at the University of Waterloo, presented a suite of physical installations and digital interfaces

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Figure 15.1 OnTheLine. © DATAlab, 2015

along a transit line aimed at recording and sharing a collective identity of the region serviced by the route. In each of these cases, alongside numerous others, architects are actively exploring the potential relationships, afforded by new computational capacities, between material, form, data, algorithms and their joint capacity to organize and mediate the built environment. These Software-Embedded Design (SED) projects directly engage computation by integrating custom software through code/data bundles, to actively mediate project outcomes and behaviours through time and space in order to empower individuals in creating new inclusive ways to organize, use, and shape the places they live. As suggested through the examples, SED projects are wide-ranging and engage a variety of opportunities found in things like immersive experiences, participatory platforms, and responsive architectures. In each case, physical and virtual worlds are connected and new forms of civic engagement are made possible. The strength of these projects lies in their fostering of a symbiotic relationship between physical and virtual realms where designers explicitly engage stakeholders, situated physical contexts, and related sociocultural or sociopolitical conditions to conceive and develop citizen-oriented, context-specific works.

Data as an material entity Thinking about the relationships between data, algorithms, and a material world can unfold in numerous ways. For one, we can consider the physical impacts of the various manufacturing and extraction sites and the physical infrastructures that serve both in the production of necessary hardware and support the collection, processing, and distribution of the data upon which digitally driven smartness depends. In this regard, Paul Barford, a professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin Madison, offers a valuable resource via his work on Internet Atlas8 – a repository of geospatial maps

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documenting physical internet infrastructure: the locations of buildings where the hardware that transfers data are housed, and also the physical conduits that connect those buildings together. This work plays a critical role in identifying one aspect of the physical footprint, namely the new building types and infrastructural nodes and links, of smartness – at least from the perspective of the internet’s operational reality. From a production- and manufacturing-oriented perspective, Edward Burtynsky’s evocative photographs documenting lithium mines in the Atacama Desert, Chile,9 among other human impacts on the earth, direct our attention to another set of concerns around smartness’ physical impact. These types of physical impacts of our digitally driven smartness are undeniable: the resource extraction, supporting things like the manufacture of long-lasting batteries and powerful microchips (Figure 15.2), and operational infrastructure, supporting efficient and reliable data transfer and storage, demand substantial human-led impacts on the physical world. In both of the above cases, the physical impacts of smartness are contextually dissociated and physically dislocated from where the supported ‘smartness’ is experienced first-hand. In other words, rather than focussing on the moment of interface – at a transit stop where a bus rider plans her way home with the help of an interactive screen or at the park where she sits on a bench to eat her lunch – attention is drawn to

Figure 15.2 Chemetall Foote Lithium Operation. © Doc Searls, 2010. Licenced under Creative Commons by 2.010

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contextually detached locales, to places such as the Google datacenter in Hamina, Finland, sometimes hundreds (or even thousands) of kilometres away. Contrasting this approach, it is interesting to consider the interactions between data, algorithms, and the material world in closer relationship to the site of interface or experience (i.e., at the bus stop or at the park). As a means of examining this further, the elements used by SED architects to achieve smartness, such as data, algorithms, and code implementations, should not be decoupled, through their perceived immateriality, from a project’s physical dimension and instead be thought as soft materials, materials in and of themselves, and thus constituting part of the project’s material assembly (Figure 15.3). This recoupling brings the custom computational

Figure 15.3 Soft Materials. Reconceptualizing data, algorithms, code implementations, and hardware configurations as constituting part of a project’s material assembly. By materializing these digital components, they fall back to being clearly in the scope of the designer and, thus, require careful, thoughtful execution, not only from a technical perspective but also in terms of their social, political, and ethical agency. © DATAlab, 2019

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elements back into the domain of the designer and explicitly managing their effects becomes part of the design solution. This proposed practice of projecting immaterial elements, such as data and software, as material agents in physical space is well supported by key offerings from the field of Software Studies which position software – its actual lines of code and data, not just its effects – as a material practice with both social and spatial outcomes.11 Work done in this arena has successfully defined software as a spatial, social, and material practice with profound influence on everyday life. Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge’s concept of code/space is particularly useful in trying to understand how architects can establish relationships between immaterial project components, such as data and algorithms, and real-world project outcomes – be they material, formal, or socio-cultural.12 Code/space captures the idea that “spatialities and governance of everyday life unfold in diverse ways through the mutual constitution of software and geo-spatial practices.”13 Through code/space, which the authors define as space dependent on software-driven technologies to function, they position software as a spatial agent by foregrounding the work that software does as a product of people and things in time and space. To illustrate this concept, the authors point to a modern supermarket as a prototypical example: when its software-enabled checkout system goes offline, the supermarket immediately ceases to have the ability to make transactions and is (temporarily) transformed into a warehouse until the checkout functionality goes back online. In this case, the intended functionality of the physical space as a locale for commercial transactions is inextricably linked and dependent upon functional code. Further, any space that has the latent capacity to be transduced14 by code constitutes a code/space at the moment of conversion. A useful example here is a café offering an accessible Wi-Fi network that can be transduced into a work space by a patron. Using Kitchin and Dodge’s definition, SED environments clearly qualify as code/spaces and, while many of the technical challenges of SED are being addressed, it is mostly unrecognized that the software/code/data bundles driving such projects have, in and of themselves, direct sociocultural agency; an agency that, if neglected, could be operating independently from, or even counteracting, the effects planned for in the design of the physical project components.

Towards critical computational literacy This recasting of the relationship between soft materials, physical materials, and project outcomes elevates the obligations architects have towards their project’s computational components. Architects are responsible for creating a built environment capable of enhancing certain values while downplaying or rejecting others;15 traditionally, these responsibilities manifest themselves in decisions around things like spatial effects, programmatic support, technical performance, and, to an increasing extent in recent years, ecological and ethical considerations. If we accept soft materials as an

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integral part of the assembly, having their own capacity to support, enhance, and undermine values, SED architects are charged with ensuring that they engage the computational elements in their work with the same level of criticality as they engage the physical elements of a project. On one hand, dimensions of this criticality can be understood in terms of technical execution, performance, and economy. On the other hand, architects should engage these elements from alternative perspectives and form critical responses to issues around experience, civic and cultural value, access and equity. This second set of perspectives is particularly relevant when the technology is ingrained with SED’s goal of supporting an inclusive vision of smartness. The set of lenses through which a project’s digital components are understood needs to be expanded beyond the technical realities of implementation to include social, cultural, political, and ethical effects. In order to better grasp how misalignments between physical and virtual project components can translate into undesired outcomes, we can look, as a cautionary example, to Boston’s SteetBump app, which uses the motion-sensing capacity of smartphones travelling in cars to passively report GPS locations of potholes that need repair. The app worked well technically and is well-reviewed by its users yet is problematic. Entire groups, perhaps the most in need of new services, either don’t have smartphones or the disposable bandwidth needed to participate and, as a result, are not only excluded from the process but are at risk of having their services diverted elsewhere.16 The software’s failing is due, not to a coding error, but to a misalignment between the values embedded in its soft materials and its broader goals to improve access to municipal services. With examples such as these we see that without a balanced set of lenses, combining technical and socially minded perspectives, physical and virtual project components have the potential to be misaligned, counter-productive or even contradictory, resulting in undesirable project outcomes. Research projects explore how this shifting awareness of the soft materials’ agency, through both reflections on applied projects and through more theoretical explorations as outlined above, could shape digitally focussed architecturally situated research activities. A recent survey of the body of research defining the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) was conducted to verify disciplinary efforts towards advancing socially aware, ethically minded issues.17 The survey reports that only 0.4% of papers included ethically related thematic terms in either the title, keywords, or abstract texts, suggesting a disciplinary blind spot exists around some of these themes. These findings don’t take away from ACADIA’s contributions to digitally oriented architecture, which have had great impacts in favour of technically focussed and skill- and craft-based agendas, rather, they open up new avenues for research and support the inclusion of a more diverse set of voices in computational design research. As this research community intently heads towards scaling-up, by moving the work out of the test bed environments of labs, studios, and temporary installations and into real-world deployments, richer engagements with context, stakeholders, and impacts are necessary.

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Through this survey work and the theoretical underpinning of the concepts behind soft materials, it becomes clear that we are in need of new ways for architects to better understand and more effectively work with computational elements embedded in their work. In short, what’s called for is a new way for architects to read and write the soft materials within their work. This in turn demands a new form of critical computational literacy charged with expanding the lenses through which architects engage their projects’ digital components, to include social, cultural, political, and ethical effects in addition to the technical realities of implementation.

Towards new methods Another aspect of ongoing research is working to develop new designer-oriented methods aimed at achieving greater levels of synchronicity between projects’ physical and digital components, ensuring that they are working towards the same set of values, objectives, and outcomes. The shared intentions behind many SED projects in their pursuit of a citizen-oriented smart city paired with the likelihood that many of these projects will scale-up to real-world deployments with real-world impact in the near future, highlight the need to synchronize the effects of soft materials with their more physical counterparts. These forms of engagements with soft materials call for a broad assessment of potential areas in which critical computational literacy can be applied. This form of literacy requires that we recognize that, through writing software, designers are simultaneously making critical ontological and epistemological decisions with respect to the world they are engaging.18 From an ontological perspective, designers are deciding how to translate the physical world into a conceptual model upon which to operate by making decisions around what to capture, categorize, and represent. Epistemological decisions are made when designers define the relationships and processes that translate the conceptual model into actions that operate in the real world. Matthew Fuller, a key contributor to Software Studies, has summarized these thoughts by proposing that software can be understood as a form of subjectivity – the software constructs sensoriums, that each piece of software constructs ways of seeing, knowing and doing in the world that at once contain a model of that part of the world it ostensibly pertains to and that also shape it every time it is used.19 This inherent subjectivity calls on us to be explicit in the assumptions and biases embedded by us in the models used in our projects’ software. These biases may arise for numerous reasons including: technical limitations – coders’ ability is limited so simplifications to context are made to match coding ability, resource limitations – time and other resources dedicated to examining the problem from stakeholder perspectives and socio-cultural impacts is minimal, and limited self-awareness – default

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decisions made by coders because of assumptions from their own socio-cultural background or the general culture of the environment around them. These forms of bias point to three areas that should see the development of architecturally situated critical computational literacy. Specifically, designers need to integrate questions and criticality around (1) data (sources, format, and selection), (2) algorithms (design, implementation, deployment) and (3) coding culture itself. Each of these areas demand their own conceptual and methodological frameworks in order to unpack their relationships to project outcomes. Work has recently addressed the area of critical computational literacy with respect to data-use in SED work by focussing on the discovery and articulation of methods for expanding the degree to which designers relate to the data used in their computationally oriented projects from socio-cultural and ethical perspectives.20 In particular, the concept of data quality has been identified as one avenue for building these richer engagements. Data quality, an established topic in information science, geography, sociology, and computer science, has adopted fitness-for-use as a core principle21 – implying that quality is relative: its assessment depends on its use, and data appropriate for one use may not be appropriate for another.22 Thus, data quality calls on designers to carefully and actively consider the values of their project as a whole and then to interrogate the data used in their work across a range of criteria or dimensions. These dimensions should span both technical and socio-cultural concerns and could capture issues around accuracy, objectivity, inclusivity, completeness, timeliness, among many others. Breaking out data attributes in this way allows architects to test how well the properties exhibited by their data across relevant dimensions correspond to objectives found in the project as a whole. Through this type of process, architects are reminded that “raw data is an oxymoron”23 and the decisions around sourcing, selecting, and formatting data are inextricably linked to designed-for project outcomes. The goal of engaging data in this way is to help SED architects identify misalignments and minimize contradictory effects (such as those already discussed by way of the StreetBump app) between a project’s digital and physical components.

Conclusion Outlined above is an argument supporting a reconceptualization of digital components embedded in software-embedded design work, identified as soft materials, in order to foreground their spatial and social agency. This reframing, which encourages a material reading of the code/data bundles driving SED work by considering them as part of a project’s material assembly, subjects soft materials to a broader set of concerns, including socio-cultural and ethical ones, typically reserved for more physical project aspects. This, in turn, necessitates an expansion of knowledge and methods that can be used by architects to engage these issues in their SED work. This expansion, for which preliminary research has been presented, should include consideration

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across numerous dimensions of a project, not only for the built form but also for immaterial components such as data and algorithms that work together alongside physical materials to mediate our experiences in the built world. By materializing the digital components in SED work, they fall back to being clearly in the scope of the designer and, thus, require careful, thoughtful execution not only from a technical perspective but also in terms of their social, political, and ethical agency. This is not a responsibility that should be outsourced or resisted; rather, this reframing suggests that architects are perhaps uniquely suited to engage the complex intersection of virtual and physical realms essential to the smart city. Architects’ distinctive combination of expertise in spatial, material, and, increasingly, computational design practice should elevate these designers to the forefront of delivering an inclusive, citizen-oriented smart city. The challenges that remain are, first, to not lose sight of architecture’s inherent disciplinary grounding in connecting and engaging human values, opportunities, and experience, and, second, to make sure designers are equipped to manage the agency of hard and soft materials simultaneously through advancements in critical computational literacy.

Acknowledgements This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

Notes 1 Nick Puckett, “If Material is the New Software, Then How Do I Write It?” in Paradigms in Computing: Making, Machines, and Models for Design Agency in Architecture, edited by David Jason Gerber and Mariana Ibañez (New York, NY: eVolo Press, 2014), 289. 2 Henriette Bier and Terry Knight, “Digitally-Driven Architecture.” FOOTPRINT 6 (2010): 2. 3 Karen Cilento, “Al Bahar Towers Responsive Facade/Aedas.” ArchDaily, www.archdaily.com/ 270592/al-bahar-towers-responsive-facade-aedas/ (accessed August 16, 2018). 4 Antoine Picon, Smart Cities: A Spatialised Intelligence (Boston, MA: John Wiley & Sons, 2015), 24–26. 5 Chris Woebken, “Amphibious Architecture, 2009, in collaboration with xClinic (NYU) and the Living (GSAPP).” https://chriswoebken.com/AMPHIBIOUS-ARCHITECTURE (accessed October 15, 2018). 6 Civic Design Lab. “Benchmark.” Cambridge, MA: Civic Design Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). http://civicdatadesignlab.mit.edu/#projects/BENCHMARK (accessed October 15, 2018). 7 OnTheLine was developed by DataLAB at the School of Architecture at the University of Waterloo in 2014. Project Leads: Mona El Khafif and Maya Przybylski. Student Design Team: Zak Fish, Lea Koch, Daniel Malka, Thomas Nouissis and Jake Read. http://datalab.uwaterloo.ca/#overlay=project/ ontheline. 8 Ramakrishnan Durairajan, Subhadip Ghosh, Xin Tang, Paul Barford, and Brian Eriksson. “Internet Atlas: A Geographic Database of the Internet,” in Proceedings of the 5th ACM workshop on HotPlanet (New York, NY: ACM Press, 2013), 15–20. 9 Elizabeth Pagliacolo, “Anthropocene: The Human Epoch is Edward Burtynsky’s Devastating Call to Action.” Azure, www.azuremagazine.com/article/anthropocene-documentary-edward-burtynsky (accessed September 12, 2018). 10 File is accessible at: www.flickr.com/photos/docsearls/4875189381 and its use is governed by Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) which is described here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/. 11 Key readings include: Matthew Fuller, Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software (New York, NY: Autonomedia, 2003); Matthew Fuller, ed., Software Studies: A Lexicon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge, Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).

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12 Kitchin and Dodge, Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life. 13 Kitchin and Dodge, Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life, 16. 14 Kitchin and Dodge understand space as constantly being in a state of non-deterministic becoming, operationalized through the process of transduction. They offer an expanded genealogy of thinking about space to position their specific appropriated view (Kitchin and Dodge, Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life, 65–80). 15 William M. Taylor and Michael P. Levine, Prospects for an Ethics of Architecture (Routledge, 2012), 19. 16 Kate Crawford, “The Hidden Biases in Big Data.” Harvard Business Review, https://hbr.org/2013/04/ the-hidden-biases-in-big-data (accessed February 12, 2018). 17 Maya Przybylski. “Critical Computational Literacy: A Call for the Development of Socially-Aware, Ethically-Minded Research within ACADIA,” in ACADIA 18: Re/calibration: On Imprecision and Infidelity [The Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference of the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA)], (ACADIA, 2018), 30–35. 18 Kitchin and Dodge, Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life, 247. 19 Fuller, Behind the Blip, 19. 20 For a more detailed discussion on the development of these methods see Maya Przybylski. “A Framework to Establish Data Quality for Software Embedded Design,” in Learning, Adapting and Prototyping: The Proceedings from the 23rd International Conference of the Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA) (Hong Kong: CAADRIA, 2018): 267–276. 21 Richard Y. Wang and Diane M. Strong, “Beyond Accuracy: What Data Quality Means to Data Consumers.” Journal of Management Information Systems 12.4 (1996): 5–33. 22 Giri Kumar Tayi and Donald P. Ballou. “Examining Data Quality.” Communications of the ACM 41.2 (1998): 54–7. 23 See Lisa Gitelman, Raw Data is an Oxymoron (MIT Press, 2013).

References Bier, Henriette and Terry Knight. 2010. “Digitally-Driven Architecture.” FOOTPRINT January (6): 1–4. Cilento, Karen. 2012, September 5. “Al Bahar Towers Responsive Facade/Aedas.” ArchDaily. www.archda ily.com/270592/al-bahar-towers-responsive-facade-aedas. Civic Design Lab. “Benchmark.” Cambridge, MA: Civic Design Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). http://civicdatadesignlab.mit.edu/#projects/BENCHMARK. Crawford, Kate. 2013, April 1. “The Hidden Biases in Big Data.” Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/ 2013/04/the-hidden-biases-in-big-data. Durairajan, Ramakrishnan, Subhadip Ghosh, Xin Tang, Paul Barford, and Brian Eriksson. 2013. “Internet Atlas: A Geographic Database of the Internet.” In Proceedings of the 5th ACM workshop on HotPlanet, 15–20. Hong Kong, China — August 16, 2013. New York, NY: ACM. Fuller, Matthew. 2003. Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software. New York, NY: Autonomedia. Fuller, Matthew. 2008. “Elegance.” In Software Studies: A Lexicon, edited by Matthew Fuller, 87–91. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gitelman, Lisa. 2013. Raw Data is an Oxymoron. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kitchin, Rob and Martin Dodge. 2011. Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Tayi Giri Kumar and Donald P. Ballou. 1998. “Examining Data Quality.” Communications of the ACM 41 (2): 54–57. Pagliacolo, Elizabeth. 2018, September 10. “Anthropocene: The Human Epoch is Edward Burtynsky’s Devastating Call to Action.” Azure. www.azuremagazine.com/article/anthropocene-documentary-edwardburtynsky. Picon, Antoine. 2015. Smart Cities: A Spatialised Intelligence. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons. Przybylski, Maya. 2018a. “Critical Computational Literacy: A Call for the Development of Socially-Aware, Ethically-Minded Research within ACADIA.” In Recalibration: On Imprecision and Infidelity: The Proceedings Catalog of the 38th Annual Conference of the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA), edited by Phillip Anzalone, Marcella Del Signore and Andrew John Wit, 30–35. Mexico City: ACADIA. Przybylski, Maya. 2018b. “A Framework to Establish Data Quality for Software Embedded Design.” In Learning, Adapting and Prototyping: The Proceedings from the 23rd International Conference of the Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA), edited by Tomohiro Fukada, Weixin Huang, Patrick Janssen, Kristof Crolla, and Suleiman Alhadidi, 267–276. Hong Kong: CAADRIA.

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Puckett, Nick. 2014. “If Material is the New Software, Then How Do I Write It?” In Paradigms in Computing: Making, Machines, and Models for Design Agency in Architecture, edited by David Jason Gerber and Mariana Ibañez, 286–294. New York, NY: eVolo Press. Taylor, William M. and Michael P. Levine. 2012. Prospects for an Ethics of Architecture. New York, NY: Routledge. Wang, Richard Y. and Diane M. Strong. 1996. “Beyond Accuracy: What Data Quality Means to Data Consumers.” Journal of Management Information Systems 12 (4): 5–33. Woebken, Chris. “Amphibious Architecture 2009, in Collaboration with xClinic (NYU) and the Living (GSAPP).” Chris Worbken [website] accessed October 15, 2018, https://chriswoebken.com/AMPHIBI OUS-ARCHITECTURE.

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Moving in the metropolis Smart city solutions and the urban everyday experience Vesa Vihanninjoki and Sanna Lehtinen

Introduction Urban environments all over the world are becoming saturated with a variety of technologies, giving rise to a whole range of unforeseen possibilities and challenges. Proponents of smart city thinking emphasize the increase in practicality, safety, and efficiency that new technologies bring about, perhaps understating the complex questions of values and meanings involved. Technologies are, however, never mere neutral means to an end, but they make the world appear to us in certain ways, and often technologies allow us to conceive a particular end as an end in the first place. Promoting “smartness” also means defining the city and the urban lifeform anew. Traditionally cities have been regarded as cultural “melting pots” manifesting diversity. Accordingly, the multitude of urban experiences has been conceived as a major source of value. The adoption of a new technological tool, such as mobile navigation or a route-planning system, might provide some information about how changes in experiencing various urban values start taking place. In order to analyze the experiential change, the focus should be on the actual everyday experience instead of an idealized experience which by necessity directs the development of new technologies. Developing new technology relies on speculation and creating scenarios, as it requires imagining how it will ultimately change the everyday experience of urban dwellers.1 However, the realm of the everyday experience in the urban environment is marked by unanticipated moments and irregularities to the extent that the actual effects on everyday experience are very difficult to assess in advance.2

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In this chapter we take a look at how technological change in urban environments can be understood through current developments in philosophical urban aesthetics. The aim more precisely is to describe how the technology-induced processes within the experiential sphere are affecting urbanites and their relationship with the city in which they live their everyday lives. The main case study comes from urban mobility: we show how the urban experience is essentially affected by more established rail-based infrastructure systems – such as the metro – as well as by more contemporary

representations

of

urban

transportation

by

portable

wayfinding

technologies.

Smart urban aesthetics? In order to get an overall picture of the urban experience that contemporary cities give rise to, it is necessary to focus on how technology contributes to it. The everyday experience of increasingly smartening cities consists of technological solutions that function in ways that go well beyond the perceptual capacities of regular urban dwellers. Interconnected technologies have already been proven to change the way urban environments are used and experienced.3 It is possible to acquire a firmer grasp of this theme through urban aesthetics, a recent strand of philosophical aesthetics. When it is introduced into the discussion on urban technologies, it is easier to conceptualize the various ways they affect the experience and use of contemporary cities. There is still a common misunderstanding that philosophical and applied aesthetics concern only the visual appearance of different types of phenomena, most notably those within the sphere of art. However, aesthetic concerns are equally present in understanding multisensory, embodied, and otherwise more engaged levels of different types of experience. This more comprehensive notion of aesthetics as a field of interest offers a chance to delve deeper into the experiences that are constituted by the urban lifeform itself. Philosophical and applied aesthetics is thus also a relevant approach for studying the experiential repercussions that result through the implementation of different types of new and emerging technologies. Urban aesthetics, in this sense, is not only a tool for evaluating the visual cues or formal qualities of a city, but it provides an overall framework for discerning and evaluating the qualitative changes that technologies set in motion in the urban environment. The look and feel of cities affect their inhabitants in various ways. It is thus necessary to assess the aesthetic factors that are formative in the urban lifeworld.4 Philosophical urban aesthetics is used here as a framework for assessing both what the material conditions of the urban experience are and how human experience processes these conditions and is also formed by them. The effect on the sphere of human action is also of interest: how the city as a technologically organized structure conditions the scale of possible behaviours and activities. This way of understanding aesthetics in relation to the urban experience is also intertwined with selected approaches from everyday aesthetics: the urban lifeworld comprises coming into

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contact with different components (e.g., material, social, and symbolic) of an urban environment mostly in the context of the everyday. The everyday is “an essentially contested concept,” but it also helps to distinguish how different functions of cities have been planned according to traditional planning paradigms.5 The concept of the everyday is thus central when discussing how cities are used and experienced: “The everyday attitude is coloured with routines, familiarity, continuity, normalcy, habits, the slow process of acclimatisation, even superficiality and a sort of half-consciousness”.6 Many elements of urban environments “make sense” only when mirrored by how they become used in the context of the everyday. It would even be impossible to think about these elements without the dimension of everyday life. For example, the intended temporal rhythms of the city and the locations for different types of functions result from this. Different technologies and how they are implemented have a shaping effect on how the everyday experience will take form. It is thus difficult to separate the role of technology from the very goals that one has within one’s everyday life. New technologies, when successfully adopted, merge with older, previously existing ways of acting and thinking. Technologies that are implemented within already existing structures and uses of the urban environment reinforce and realign those experiences that are based on existing networks of affordances.7 New technologies are thus very rarely adopted in an experiential vacuum, but their use is by necessity affected by already existing practices.

The experiential effects of smart city solutions The intertwining of experiential layers affects and constitutes the currently prevailing conditions of the urban lifeworld. These layers are essentially related to the physical features of objects in the environment, but they are also more or less mediated by the used technologies. GPS and location-based mobile applications are one good example of this. Many uses of these technologies are also based on the material features of the built environment. These include built spaces and other natural or human-made objects that form the cityscape. Navigation technologies make relations of these perceivable elements visible and create new, advanced forms, eschewing more archaic wayfinding practices. It is worth paying attention to the fact that the habitual use of mobile applications brings forth other layers of experience: creative and strategic variations in the use of the city or the layers of memories and imagination related to familiar places are examples of this. The experiential analysis of urban technologies begins by recognizing the fundamental role that various practices and routines have in the constitution of the urban everyday experience. This type of thinking relies on the Heideggerian approach to the human condition as the “focal point” of countless functional – or, to be exact, equipmental – relations between human beings and their environment.8 It is crucial to note that the “essence” of various technological “things” – their functionality or equipmentality – can never be completely understood via a traditional, instrumental view of technology, according to which technologies are basically neutral connectors

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between pre-defined (subjective) intentions and verifiable (objective) causal effects. In short, such instrumentalism states that technologies are mere means-to-an-end. A postphenomenological philosophy of technology9 points towards how technologies essentially open up and make comprehensible new possibilities of use and action. These particular uses and actions, in turn, give rise to new ways of experiencing reality and our position in it. Without the concrete technology of, say, a smartphone, we could not conceive all the possibilities – and the responsibilities – that such a device might bring forth: only with the aid of such technology is one able to send e-mails effortlessly on the go, and only with the aid of such technology is one supposed to be reachable by e-mail almost around the clock. Our everyday experience is thus essentially mediated or structured by the technologies we make use of, and it is often the various technologies that we rely on that allow us to conceive our pursued ends as ends in the first place. How new urban technologies are adopted affects several functions of the city at the same time. The gravity of these effects is dependent on what is considered to be the normalized and, on the other hand, the aspired technological level of a particular city. New technologies also raise new questions regarding the status of the elements that are most affected by the implementation of these technologies. Conservative versus techno-optimist approaches have an influence on whether and to what extent the existing features of the urban environment should or could be changed. Traditionalist perspectives range from emphasizing the “precious quality of human continuity” to the extremity of preserving urban environments for the sake of their museum value.10 Smart city and innovation emphasize assessing the old through its relation to that which is new or emerging. Interestingly, both of these value discourses tend to be rather limited in the way they focus on some strong interpretation of the current situation and thus neglect the potentiality of the environment: to put it in a pointed way, the conservation perspective is overly suspicious of change, whereas the futurist perspective idealizes change led by new and emerging technologies. If technology is seen as an agent of change in the context of urban environments, technological development or increasing technologization could be understood to drive a “culture of change” even more widely. The desired smoothness of the everyday urban experience is subject to variation in quantity and quality, depending on the quality and quantity of technological mediation. This development is driven further by multiple overlapping and interlaced technologies. Traditional objects in the urban environment are by no means fixed either, yet technologies have expanded the range and amount of these changes and objects significantly.

Technology-induced mobility and the continuity of urban experiences Contemporary wayfinding tools: increased freedom of movement or spatial illiteracy? In a contemporary city, moving between places is a complex and technologically mediated everyday necessity. Thinking of change and innovations, it is interesting to examine

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how the emergence of new technologies gives rise to certain unforeseen, movementrelated environmental affordances and promotes them, but at the same time may displace or erode some existing ones. For example, the GPS-based navigation applications that enable us to find our way and move freely without the fear of getting lost both in familiar and strange urban environments have already significantly changed our relationship to our surroundings and how we move within them. Finding one’s way is easier than ever, as almost everyone has access to a localizable smartphone. Most often these devices are carried along all the time when moving in the city. Hence, the easy and common access to navigation applications provides an average urbanite with a new level of sense of security. It is possible to “get lost safely” occasionally, as one can check one’s whereabouts from the application when needed. The recent rise of technological navigation aids has opened up numerous new environmental affordances, as previously out-of-reach places are now made more effortlessly and safely accessible. In a way, technology has democratized an average urbanite’s relation to the city, as people are not so bound to the local neighbourhoods they happen to inhabit. Besides this, the triumph of navigation applications has had a remarkable effect on which environmental affordances are actually utilized. The way people make use of affordances in the course of their everyday life, in turn, essentially affects or even defines their experience of the environment. In other words, as people learn to utilize certain affordances, they learn to perceive the environment according to these particular potential uses and actions: people see what they have learned to look for. These mechanisms of habituation operate automatically, without much reflection. As Erik Rietveld and Julian Kiverstein put it: “What the skilled person has learned to do over the years feeds back into the way the meaningful world appears to her in perception.”11 Navigation applications are effectively transforming the way we perceive and interpret our environment – they change our experiential relationship to our surroundings. This means that the applications alter the way we distribute our attention and make sense of the environment by constructing various “mental maps” in order to orientate. They even make us “blind” to many such environmental qualities and properties that we would otherwise notice and pay attention to. As Henry Grabar has pointed out: “With their small screens and egocentric perspectives, mobile navigation systems function like blinders, reducing the landscape to the width of a street. They narrow the world.”12 Similarly, as people are able to learn new skills, they are able to forget their existing ones. It may be that due to recent wayfinding applications, more traditional navigation skills become useless. If such skills are no longer needed, they will slowly but surely diminish, changing effectively the way we conceive our environment. This tendency has already been verified empirically, and the outcomes of the research may even appear to be of concern: “users of navigation tools have poorer memory of surrounding scenes and less accurate configurational knowledge of travelled routes, compared with people who use maps or directly experience the routes.”13 This has evident implications for the possibility of experiencing the city aesthetically, for the aesthetic judgement of an urban environment by and large relies on

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perceiving, interpreting, as well as memorizing and remembering certain concrete features that make the surroundings distinguishable and identifiable. It is exactly these kinds of features that comprise the character and the idiosyncratic experiential quality of a local environment. If one has no memorable conception of the look and the feel of a particular environment – due to the fact that one has worn “blinders” – this means that the related urban aesthetic values are practically ignored. The “narrowed world” is thus essentially poorer, judged from an aesthetic point of view. Moreover, if traditional navigation skills become obsolete, it has remarkable implications for a whole branch of urban design that has focussed precisely on the questions of legibility and continuity in cities.14 If cities no longer have to be designed to be legible and experientially continuous, this will most likely affect the general requirements for understandability of the cities quite drastically. More analysis is needed in order to tackle some questions of contingency. It would be of interest to know, for example, in which ways people actually end up using the navigation applications. These new wayfinding tools can be mere introductory “early stage” tools when one is trying to make sense of a new environment. Or, they might also be used on a more regular basis even in familiar surroundings. The detailed answers to these questions define the depth of environmental relationship in terms of bodily engagement, which ultimately forms the basis for prominent types of urban aesthetic experience. Despite the fact that the emergence of specific technologies – such as mobile wayfinding applications – may pose challenges to our possibility of experiencing the aesthetic values and meanings of our urban environments in their full richness, they also open up various new and uncharted ways of using and experiencing everyday surroundings. Such unforeseen environmental affordances are likely to involve remarkable aesthetic potentialities, so that their realization may notably improve the quality of our urban experience. For example, the increased freedom of movement and the possibility of “getting lost safely” may provide us with a new kind of aesthetic sensitivity or openness to aesthetic potentialities inherent in urban environments. When one does not continuously have to locate oneself on the basis of various environmental cues, one is able to approach the urban landscape and its elements with increased attention. This, in turn, may help one to discover and also create new urban aesthetic values – both at the level of detail, and in terms of conceiving the city as a complex systemic whole.

Rail-based public transportation: from commuting to exploring? The general level dynamics regarding the potential and actual environmental affordances – and their “experiential correlates” – is not bound merely to present-day mobile technologies: postphenomenological analysis is also applicable to more tangible and established technologies and technology-laden urban infrastructures. It is possible to ask, for example, how the emergence of public transportation systems – such as the metro and other rail-based solutions – has shaped the way urban

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environments are conceived at a more abstract level, as well as how they are experienced more concretely in the course of quotidian life. In general, mass rapid transit systems have remarkably transformed the relations of space and time, redefining the connections between different places and changing the prevailing conceptions and experiences of distance.15 Among the widespread and far-reaching economic and societal implications, such transportation systems are groundbreaking in providing urbanites with the possibility of commuting. No longer do people have to work only in the immediate vicinity of their housing neighbourhoods, but they can access previously out-of-reach areas relatively easily – or at least in a reasonable amount of time. The rise of rail-based mass rapid transit has had a remarkable effect on conceiving the city increasingly as a system of dynamic flows, instead of a system of static objects.16 At the level of urban experience such an evolution has given rise to a totally new kind of lived urban reality: the everyday of a “commuting working power.”17 Being a part of commuting working power means being a part of a pulsating, fluctuating, and never-resting city that has certain machine-like characteristics. Grahame Shane describes the specific function that urban railways have in the constitution of the “city machine” of New York as follows: “In New York the construction of Grand Central Station represented the embodiment of […] machine-age and futurist’s dreams. […] It was a multi-layered microcosm of the larger City Machine of mass consumption and production.”18 As Peter Madsen has pointed out, railway-related urban constructs such as Grand Central Station are not only important functioning parts of the “machine,” but they also have a crucial role in structuring the mundane experience of the “machine”: Grand Central Station is “not only organising the everyday, but it is also organising the understanding of the everyday.”19 Following an objective logic and technological rationality of its own, a “city machine” and its concrete representatives may engender experiences of vastness, anonymity, and radical otherness that may be considered either positive, pleasant, and thus desirable, or negative, unpleasant, and thus undesirable. This kind of ambivalence also characterizes the experience of the sublime – combining elements of both terror and awe, “mingling exhilaration with a threat to selfhood”20 – that comprises a classic subject of study in philosophical aesthetics. David Nye has called this particular experience “technological sublime”:21 “a new aesthetics of the industrial sublime [that] presented urban space as having the same awe-inspiring and uplifting qualities that in the eighteenth century had been attributed to natural phenomena such as mountains and spectacular sites such as Niagara Falls.”22 Certain urban sublime experiences are to be viewed essentially as technology-induced: they cannot be understood thoroughly without paying substantial attention to the concrete technological solutions that shape everyday life. The approach of a postphenomenological philosophy of technology thus also gives rise to a new materially oriented perspective on the essence of a modern city that is often “explained” with a rather ambiguous metaphor of a machine. As well as having experiential repercussions at a general level, the emergence of the metro and other urban railway systems has had a remarkable effect on

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how the city and its spatial relations are conceived in the course of everyday life. For example, the structure of a typical rail-based system forces us to think of the city as a network of interconnected nodes and hubs: certain places are more connected to other places and thus more accessible, while some other places remain peripheral. Accordingly, the environs of a station automatically gain central status, whereas the areas between the stations tend to be of less importance. This can be verified easily by examining property prices and the locations of various services. Although the ability to move between places in person comprises only one form of connectedness,23 the described paradigm of mobility is also characteristic of present-day “smart” urbanism – not merely its modern interpretation that emphasizes the essence of a city as a system of monitorable and manipulable flows. Mobility itself may gain completely new forms as it becomes represented and visualized in an unforeseen way in the “era of smartness.” Such a transformation takes place by the aid of new technologies and applications such as GPS-based route planners that effectively combine the features of traditional wayfinding services with real-time information about traffic flows – even down to the level of a single identifiable vehicle. This may give rise to new possibilities of exploring and experiencing the metropolis, especially if other factors than mere quantifiable travel time become embedded in the algorithms. One can imagine an application in which, instead of choosing just the “preferred transport mode” and the “amount of walking,” one could preference quiet, green, interesting, or beautiful routes.

Conclusions Experiential factors are proving to be increasingly important in understanding what types of urban environments enable people to flourish and enjoy genuine well-being. The experiential consequences of technological change in the urban environment necessarily affect the lived relation with the city. A portable, always online, navigator encourages one to get lost safely, knowing that information about the exact location in a city can be retrieved at any moment. While there is no acute necessity to observe the environment solely for navigation purposes, the aesthetic qualities of the environment become more prominent and they are potentially observed with more conscious attention. Also the subtle nuances in the characteristics of the city are thus more readily paid attention to. Even features that are characteristic of urbanity itself can be observed more freely. In a way, this also applies to other technologies and technology-laden urban infrastructures, as the new wayfinding-related applications open up unforeseen ways of experiencing them. The two technology-induced modes of experience described in this chapter through case examples are, indeed, deeply intertwined and interconnected. The metro system is a large, complex system developed over an interpretation of the city and an estimation of its most efficient use. The more recent layer of the navigation system is based on the transportation system and based on yet

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another estimation of how the system becomes used. This interconnectedness makes the two systems merge and converge in experience, and they bring forth the experience of the city as a complex system. One key characteristic of complex urban form is the perceptual inexhaustibility of a city: there is always more to a city than can be observed or experienced from the vantage point of one person. It is fair to state that “in some respects the city remains a perpetual mystery, just as great art remains a mystery – extending beyond our capabilities.”24 Smart city solutions rearrange our relation to the existing urban technologies and thus augment the human capabilities for certain types of experience, while suppressing other types of experience. From the perspective of a philosophical approach to urban aesthetics, it is an interesting question as to whether new urban technologies expand or limit the possibilities of experience and action within the sphere of quotidian life. The experiential effects of so-called smart city development depend on whether and in which cases technology becomes an intensifying “booster” or an inhibiting “filter” for different types of experience: this would have to be studied further in different contexts. In this chapter, we have been building a general theoretical framework for this type of further work by bringing philosophical and applied urban aesthetics together with a postphenomenological analysis of urban technologies. The focus in our examples has been on urban wayfinding practices that use and apply the latest technologies. These new practices have been mirrored in the radical change in the urban experience caused by the metro system, which is a complex technological system in itself. Focussing on the analysis of the aesthetically mediated urban experience emphasizes that urban life as such requires many perceptual and interpretative skills that are based on a complex network of environmental affordances and learned in practice in the course of living one’s everyday life.

Notes 1 See, e.g., Sanna Lehtinen and Vesa Vihanninjoki, “Aesthetic Perspectives on Urban Technologies: Conceptualizing and Evaluating the Technology-Driven Changes in the Urban Everyday Experience,” in Technology and the City: Towards a Philosophy of Urban Technologies, eds Michael Nagenborg, Margoth González Woge, Taylor Stone, and Pieter Vermaas (Dordrecht: Springer, 2020). 2 Ossi Naukkarinen, “What Is ‘Everyday’ in Everyday Aesthetics?” Contemporary Aesthetics 11 (2013). 3 See, e.g., Toru Ishikawa, “Maps in the Head and Tools in the Hand: Wayfinding and Navigation in a Spatially Enabled Society,” in Community Wayfinding. Pathways to Understanding, eds Rebecca H. Hunter, Lynda A. Anderson, and Basia L. Belza (Switzerland: Springer, 2016). 4 Peter Madsen and Richard Plunz, eds, The Urban Lifeworld: Formation, Perception, Representation (London & New York: Routledge, 2002). 5 Yuriko Saito, Aesthetics of the Familiar: Everyday Life and World-Making (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 6 Naukkarinen, “What Is ‘Everyday’.” 7 Sanna Lehtinen and Vesa Vihanninjoki, “Aesthetic Perspectives on Urban Technologies.” The notion of “affordance” originates in the Gibsonian ecological psychology, see, e.g., James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1979). 8 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927), trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978).

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9 See, e.g., Don Ihde, Technology and the Lifeworld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); Postphenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993); Heidegger’s Technologies. Postphenomenological Perspectives (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010); Peter-Paul Verbeek, What Things Do. Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005). 10 Arnold Berleant, “Cultivating an Urban Aesthetic,” in The Aesthetics of Human Environments, eds Arnold Berleant and Allen Carlson (Toronto: Broadview, 2007), 81. 11 Erik Rietveld and Julian Kiverstein, “A Rich Landscape of Affordances,” Ecological Psychology, 26, no. 4 (2014): 341. Emphasis added. 12 Henry Grabar, “Smartphones and the Uncertain Future of ‘Spatial Thinking’,” Citylab, www.citylab. com/life/2014/09/smartphones-and-the-uncertain-future-of-spatial-thinking/379796 (accessed September 15, 2018). 13 Toru Ishikawa, “Maps in the Head and Tools in the Hand.” 14 See, e.g., Michael R. King and Elise de Jong, “Legibility and Continuity in the Built Environment,” in Community Wayfinding: Pathways to Understanding, eds Rebecca H. Hunter, Lynda A. Anderson, and Basia L. Belza (Switzerland: Springer, 2016). 15 For a more thorough account of the role that railways have had in the development of (European) cities as well as in changing the conceptions of what a city is or could be, see, e.g., Ralf Roth and Marie-Noëlle Polino, eds, The City and the Railway in Europe (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). 16 See, e.g., Antoine Picon, “Urban Infrastructure, Imagination and Politics: from the Networked Metropolis to the Smart City,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 42, no. 2 (2018): 263–275. 17 Peter Madsen, introduction in The Urban Lifeworld: Formation, Perception, Representation, 38. 18 Grahame Shane, “The Machine in the City,” in The Urban Lifeworld: Formation, Perception, Representation, eds Peter Madsen and Richard Plunz (London & New York: Routledge), 227–228. 19 Peter Madsen, introduction in The Urban Lifeworld, 38. Emphasis added. 20 Christophe Den Tandt, “Masses, Forces, and the Urban Sublime,” in The Cambridge Companion to the City in Literature, ed. Kevin R. McNamara (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 21 David Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994). 22 David Nye, “The Sublime and the Skyline,” in The American Skyscraper, ed. Roberta Moudry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 23 See, e.g., Philip Brey, “Space-Shaping Technologies and the Geographical Disembedding of Place,” in Philosophy and Geography III: Philosophies of Place, eds Andrew Light and Jonathan M. Smith (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998). 24 Arto Haapala, “The Urban Identity. The City as a Place to Dwell,” in Place and Location III, eds Virve Sarapik and Kadri Tüür (Tallinn: Estonian Academy of Arts, 2003), 21.

References Berleant, Arnold. 2007. “Cultivating an Urban Aesthetic.” in The Aesthetics of Human Environments, edited by Arnold Berleant and Allen Carlson, 79–91. Toronto: Broadview. Berleant, Arnold and Allen Carlson, eds. 2007. The Aesthetics of Human Environments. Toronto: Broadview. Brey, Philip. 1998. “Space-Shaping Technologies and the Geographical Disembedding of Place,” in Philosophy and Geography III: Philosophies of Place, edited by Andrew Light and Jonathan M. Smith, 239– 263. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Den Tandt, Christophe. 2014. “Masses, Forces, and the Urban Sublime,” in The Cambridge Companion to the City in Literature, edited by Kevin R. McNamara, 126–137. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gibson, James J. 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin. Grabar, Henry. 2014. “Smartphones and the Uncertain Future of ‘Spatial Thinking’.” Citylab. www.citylab. com/life/2014/09/smartphones-and-the-uncertain-future-of-spatial-thinking/379796. Haapala, Arto. 2003. “The Urban Identity. The City as a Place to Dwell,” in Place and Location III, edited by Virve Sarapik and Kadri Tüür, 13–24. Tallinn: Estonian Academy of Arts. Heidegger, Martin. 1978 [1927]. Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Hunter, Rebecca H., Lynda A. Anderson, and Basia L. Belza, eds. 2016. Community Wayfinding. Pathways to Understanding. Switzerland: Springer. Ihde, Don. 1990. Technology and the Lifeworld. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ihde, Don. 1993. Postphenomenology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Ihde, Don. 2010. Heidegger’s Technologies. Postphenomenological Perspectives. New York: Fordham University Press.

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Ishikawa, Toru. 2016. “Maps in the Head and Tools in the Hand: Wayfinding and Navigation in a Spatially Enabled Society,” in Community Wayfinding. Pathways to Understanding, edited by Rebecca H. Hunter, Lynda A. Anderson, and Basia L. Belza, 115–136. Switzerland: Springer. King, Michael R. and Elise de Jong. 2016. “Legibility and Continuity in the Built Environment,” in Community Wayfinding. Pathways to Understanding, edited by Rebecca H. Hunter, Lynda A. Anderson, and Basia L. Belza, 61–79. Switzerland: Springer. Lehtinen, Sanna and Vesa Vihanninjoki. 2020. “Aesthetic Perspectives on Urban Technologies: Conceptualizing and Evaluating the Technology-Driven Changes in the Urban Everyday Experience,” in Technology and the City: Towards a Philosophy of Urban Technologies, edited by Michael Nagenborg, Margoth González Woge, Taylor Stone, and Pieter Vermaas. Dordrecht: Springer. Light, Andrew and Jonathan M. Smith, eds. 1998. Philosophy and Geography III: Philosophies of Place. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Madsen, Peter and Richard Plunz, eds. 2002. The Urban Lifeworld: Formation, Perception, Representation. London & New York: Routledge. McNamara, Kevin R., ed. 2014. The Cambridge Companion to the City in Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nagenborg, Michael, Margoth González Woge, Taylor Stone, and Pieter Vermaas, eds. 2020. Technology and the City: Towards a Philosophy of Urban Technologies. Dordrecht: Springer. Naukkarinen, Ossi. 2013. “What Is ‘Everyday’ in Everyday Aesthetics?” Contemporary Aesthetics 11, www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=675. Nye, David. 1994. American Technological Sublime. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Nye, David. 2005. “The Sublime and the Skyline,” in The American Skyscraper, edited by Roberta Moudry, 255–270. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Picon, Antoine. 2018. “Urban Infrastructure, Imagination and Politics: From the Networked Metropolis to the Smart City.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 42, no. 2: 263–275. Rietveld, Erik and Julian Kiverstein. 2014. “A Rich Landscape of Affordances.” Ecological Psychology 26, no. 4: 325–352. Roth, Ralf and Marie-Noëlle Polino, eds. 2003. The City and the Railway in Europe. Aldershot: Ashgate. Saito, Yuriko. 2017. Aesthetics of the Familiar: Everyday Life and World-Making. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sarapik, Virve and Kadri Tüür, eds. 2003. Place and Location III. Tallinn: Estonian Academy of Arts. Shane, Grahame. 2002. “The Machine in the City,” in The Urban Lifeworld: Formation, Perception, Representation, edited by Peter Madsen and Richard Plunz, 218–236. London & New York: Routledge. Verbeek, Peter-Paul. 2005. What Things Do. Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

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Part IV

Networks and nodes

Chapter 17

Standing out in a crowd Big data to produce new forms of publicness Silvio Carta, Rebecca Onafuye and Pieter de Kock

New production of space The study underpinning this chapter stems from the notion of Lefebvre’s production of space whereby social space is comprised of a network of objects and relationships (Lefebvre and Nicholson-Smith 1991:77). In examining how social space is being reinterpreted and updated by recent technological advancements, we argue that the notion of space production should be reconsidered with more attention given to the role of the individual. The argument for reframing the role played by the individual is based on the way our existing public realm has been intrinsically characterised, and in many ways altered, by the presence of our digital environment and big data. We collected and analysed studies that substantiate the increasing role played by individuals in space making, through their presence and interaction in the digital environment. In this chapter, we present a reflection on the extent to which individuals, through their individual data, actively contribute to the production of public space. This work is intended to add to the on-going research into the idea of code/space (Kitchin and Dodge 2011); transduction (Mackenzie 2002); and mediated spaces (Kitchin et al. 2017).

Standardisation vs individual: n=all Complex systems are generally approached through various models that are underpinned by the use of approximation and standardisation. The same inductive method is based on

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the assumption that observations common to several phenomena can be described by the same behaviour. By this logic, societal trends are studied by means of statistical methods, on the assumption that a relevant number of individuals would represent the trend of the totality observed. However, the notion of sampling in a context where the amount of available data per each individual is increasingly larger and more accurate seems to be today under scrutiny and, by a certain degree, subject to a significant shift. Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier (2013) argue that the idea of sampling loses its raison d’être in the age of big data (2013:26), wherein a large dataset can be gathered about practically everybody. They utilise the formula n=all as an indicator of the possibility for considering a large number of samples in statistical approaches that are extremely close to the actual number of elements (2013:26). Comprehensiveness becomes one of the distinctive features of possible definitions of big data. Kitchin holds that big data are characterised, amongst others, by being “exhaustive in scope, striving to capture entire populations or systems” (Kitchin 2013:262). The fact is that possessing precise information about any fact or person eliminates the need for approximation in the observation and analysis of phenomena; thereby avoiding the “risk of blurriness,” as described by Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier (2013:30). This idea has been challenged by a series of authors (Crawford et al. 2014; Leonelli 2014), including Harford (2014), who claims that n=all, although a seductive idea, is practically unrealistic. In his article Hartford recalls a series of authors who are, to some degree, sceptical about the success of big data as an utterly comprehensive approach to statistics, including Wolfe (2013); Fung (Walker and Fung 2013); and Crawford et al. (2014). Contra, Hildebrandt (2013) offers a more impartial view on big data as a vehicle for reaching all information about virtually every individual, where both potentials and pitfalls are discussed together. Hildebrandt evaluates two camps: on the one hand there are Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier who advocate for an increase of quantity (of data) leading to a supremacy of data in the creation of information and knowledge (Hildebrandt 2013:5–6); in opposition to this Hildebrandt places Boyd and Crawford (2012), who claim that the quantity of data does not necessarily induce their quality (2012:668). Perhaps Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier’s standpoint of n=all is true only in theory today, and this would partially justify the detractors of this theory; however, the fast-paced growth of computing technologies undoubtedly promises an increased probability of success. It is not unrealistic to imagine that, in the near future, the amount of data that will be globally available and computable by complex networked systems will reach a quantity much closer to the totality. This will eliminate what Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier defined as the blurriness of information generated by sampling. In this scenario, individuals will be considered separately and discretely as single and unique units of a giant computational system governed by highly automated systems and artificial intelligence. Lev Manovich (2011) provides a clear account of the difference between using samples and the exact information about, for instance, individuals. He uses the example of a digital image which, when rescaled to a larger resolution (in pixels), does not provide any extra information about the picture, only “larger pixels” (Manovich 2011:462). A number of experiments mentioned by Manovich, including Eagle and

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Pentland (2003, 2006, 2009), epitomise the use of individual data (not sampled) to describe, investigate, and predict social activities and behaviours. Individuals have unique identities in the digital environment. Matthias Bode and Dorthe Brogård Kristensen (2016) used the term doppelgängering to define the relationship between the physical and the digital self. In particular, this relationship is the combination of three elements: enactment (the generation of the form of the doppelgänger), existence (the combination of the two selves into one recognised entity), and entanglement (the act of negotiation between the two selves) (Bode and Brogård Kristensen 2016:119). Our digital doppelgänger is as unique as our physical self. As such, any contribution to the digital environment from each of our digital selves is not sampled and generalised as it is in a statistical approach. Conversely, it is exclusive to those individuals and through its accuracy contributes in a granular manner to what will then form part of a broader public opinion. Within this perspective, it is plausible to consider that the validity of broad definitions such as people’s opinion, the general public, common interest, and the like is ceasing. In a scenario characterised by big data and such a high level of informational granularity, every individual has a unique voice; therefore the people’s opinion would be better described through a quantitative account. Although an exact datum for each individual is difficult to collect in practice using the current technologies, Bizer et al. (2012) explain that “more challenging […] elements that describe aspects […] at different level of abstraction” are available. These may include descriptors such as “physiology, social network membership, salary, education” for each individual. Projects carried out to observe the mobility of individuals, like Nokia’s Mobile Data Challenge (Laurila et al. 2012) and others (De Montjoye et al. 2013; Yue et al. 2014), provide an example of how unique tracking of individuals results in accurate information about a plethora of social aspects, including behaviour, and current and future locations of individuals while using smart mobile devices. In particular, Nokia’s Mobile Data Challenge demonstrates the extent to which individual and granular data about each of the participants can be gathered and simply analysed. This is achieved mainly through GPS tracking of any physical movement in space, and its interpolation with relational data gathered through the analysis of the 1:1 interactions amongst users (Laurila et al. 2012).

Individual data What is perhaps one of the most significant characteristics of the digital environment is the granularity with which phenomena can be observed and its scalability. Particularly in the social context, individuals can be studied at a very granular degree, whereby idiosyncrasies of each individual can be easily captured, stored, and analysed. Several studies have produced compelling evidence of this. For example, City Scanner (Anjomshoaa et al. 2018) or Trash Track (Phithakkitnukoon et al. 2013), where the impact of the individual trace left by each person in his/her day-to-day life

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Figure 17.1 Waymo, connectedness and individuality. © Rebecca Onafuye, 2018

becomes unequivocally evident. In this scenario everything we do, produce, use, and discard, carry with them a form of own inherited biography (De Waal 2011:194). Generalising at a broader urban scale, Waymo, the independent self-driving technology company that originated as the Google self-driving car project in 2009, represents a case in point and provides an interesting example where individual data is used to reshape the public realm. Data produced by each car are combined to understand the built environment around it; including the presence of buildings, the pedestrians, other vehicles, and pavements. Autonomous cars use a combination of LiDar and 3D scanning technologies to scan everything they encounter and recreate a digital representation of the built environment (Figure 17.1). These data are then categorised in three ways: technical data (inside-out), community data (the outside-in), and personal data. The first set of data is analysed by the car’s machine-learning algorithms. The second is sourced by traffic and driving conditions, while the third set is data collected from individual preferences, for example driving locations, in-car entertainment, and indoor temperature. All data are consolidated into technical and community data in order to allow it to make split-second decisions whilst driving. “Our sensors and software detect and predict the behaviour of not only the cyclist, but of all the road users around us” (Waimo 2018). This creates an experience (which is what makes it possible to function the way it does because it is constantly learning from everything it does and observes) for the users inside and outside the car through the smart recognition of traffic signals, user and inhabitant comfort, and the behaviours around it.

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Individuals as unique entities What is the role of the individual in these spaces and how does the individual contribute to the production of public space? Space is produced by the dynamic interrelationships between the perceived space, lived space, and the conceived space (Lefebvre and Nicholson-Smith 1991). In the context of this study, the perceived space is the technical data (inside-out), the lived space is the community data (outside-in) and the conceived space is the combination of the personal data and user experience. The role of the individual in this hybrid of spaces acts as a connection between the car and the environment. Without the presence of individuals, there would be no experiential factors and therefore no meaning for machines to scan the surrounding space. Lefebvre argues that the body perceives space initially through our physical reaction to our surroundings, through our senses. The theory of axialities in space syntax theory offers us insights into how we exist in a fourth dimension (Abbott 2008). Since the environment and people’s daily routines are being mixed in with smart technologies and big data to create smart cities, people as individuals have become a product of that space. Both product and production. Both container and contained; inside-out, and outside-in. Individuals can be said to act as proxies of meaning in the production of space in both physical and digital worlds. Our interaction is interface-dependent. It mediates the relationship of the individual, reconciling both worlds. Idiosyncrasies of the individual in digital space suggests that n=1 takes on a different meaning through the concept of doppelgängering, which reinforces the uniqueness of our existence in the digital world. For not only is n=1 true, but sampling at an individual level there can only be one n=1. No two samples are alike. Each can be differentiated in an instant. Analogous to the structure of a water molecule, each n value is split, differentiating the two selves (with n as the enactment). The two selves represent an individual’s physical and digital existence. We thus exist as unique entities, leaving our individual trace perhaps more certainly than if we walked down the street.

The fourth dimension How do we prove our existence beyond mere traces, in an ontologically subjective domain such as the digital world? Yet we do exist, and space is being produced whether we like it or not. The question is: do we grasp the opportunity, or do we resign ourselves to becoming mere proxies of someone else’s imagination? Read (2005) makes the case for a centrality in spatial integration through Space Syntax theory. In a similar manner to Space Syntax theory, we may perceive the world through the proxy of a virtual grid. Inferred by Read, through the fog alluded to by Abbott (2008), the concept of a virtual grid functions as a communications matrix laid over the physicality of super grids and local grids. A virtual matrix draped over the public realm, connecting physical with digital and digital with digital, and thereby allowing the individual to function in both worlds.

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This then introduces the concept of a fourth dimension: “Whenever you open your eyes, you see a Plane (which is of Two Dimensions) and you INFER a Solid (which is of Three); but in reality you also see (though you do not recognize) a Fourth Dimension” (Abbott 2008). The fourth dimension introduces the concept of the unknown; of dark matter comprising up to 95% of the content of the universe that we know nothing about (CERN, 2019). The fourth dimension connects the individual and digital to the public realm. In this realm we can hypothesise endlessly about the scientific truths that can be reached for in fantasy; that private domain of the individual; that fount of endless inspiration that seeks to quantify the unquantifiable. The concept of centrality in the fourth dimension is key to the concept of individuality. The fourth dimension exists as someone’s fantasy but also presents an opportunity. We reconcile left and right hemispheres of the brain as the logic conscious state iteratively draws for validation on the fantasy world of the unconscious, our dreams (Jung et al. 1964; Peterson 2017). In fantasy and now through the advances in technology we inhabit the grids identified by Read, as well as the digital grid: as both observer and participant. We co-exist, as well as co-locate in this hierarchy of spaces. This existence, it can be hypothesised, has zero-dimension. We exist as points. As points, we can transform ourselves from point A to point B in the physical world, along sideway planes in a constrained two-dimensional existence of XY, YZ, XZ. A gravitational pull orbits us around through the concept of centrality. Through centrality, we merge into a collective force constrained in space by way of triangulation along the XY plane confirmed and by Z. In this respect individuals are grounded but in the digital world individuals can be anywhere at any time in any space. In Abbott’s fantasy tale Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, we may hypothesise about the crippling limitations of our understanding about how we validate ourselves in space. Our individuality is limited by physical objectification, by isolated objects in space. As if threatened by a summons; “as if I were the maddest of the mad!” (Abbott 2008) do we also fail to comprehend the existence of a fourth dimension? Technology is slowly revealing the possibilities of the existence of an insane level of individuation: “How shall I make clear to you the extreme difficulty which we in Flatland experience in recognizing one another’s configuration?” (Abbott 2008). The fourth dimension may also be time itself manifest through technology: x, y, z, and t. Like neurons in a brain firing up, technology allows us to inhabit the virtual grid, that ephemeral permutation of local and super grid. Mapping at a universal scale, we are able to relocate instantaneously along the local or super grid, and yet we remain constantly centralised by the gravitational pull of technology. We have had a taste of new realities through the internet, connecting as individuals through technology. We exist in centralised nodes that appear and disappear in flashes of existence. We do not die as the flash of activity does, we simply relocate, a rebirth of sorts.

The virtual grid Constantly moving in time and space, we inhabit a technological utopia of the mind. The virtual grid is a constant manifestation of the individual. We can control where

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we want to be and when we want to leave, where we go next, and how we get there. The virtual grid lights up when we all gather as individuals. The walls that bound these ‘piazzas in space’ are multi-level iterations of meaning. Like a human face, no one instance of the grid is ever the same. We socialise through our IP address. Our IP address that promises to form part of a blockchain open ledger system that authenticates rather than alienates. We transact across domains of relevance. In the virtual grid, concentrations of activity form unbounded centralities themselves, scattered throughout the universe. Shifting centralities in time and space. Like magnets, they attract and repel, fire up, or fade away. Yet each centrality is a nanosecond away from the physical centrality that holds us in place, as points in space. Lefebvre’s spatial triad (Lefebvre and Nicholson-Smith 1991), producing social space from absolute space can be extended to include the virtual grid. A vertical virtual world of individuality is draped over the layers “of communicative shells” providing “continuity between the ‘virtual’ and ‘physical’ urban worlds” (Read 2005:356–357). As individuals, we can simultaneously access the virtual grid from either super grid or local grid. We have begun “to see the urban itself as a technology” (Read 2005:356), where “space is the machine” (Hillier 2015; Westin 2011:229). For Hillier, “it is the syntax of our understanding of the city that [Hillier is] interested in, not the syntax of the city” (Westin 2011:236). The syntax of our understanding can be found in the fourth dimension, if we know where to look. Our relationship to the fourth dimension can be summarised by comparing the limitations of inhabiting the world of the line: “For your Space is not the true Space. True Space is a Plane; but your Space is only a Line” (Abbott 2008). Yet we all know about the third dimension. But not the fourth.

Proxies in the physical world In the physical world individuals play a central role: as proxies encoding and decoding digital messages. Carlo Ratti claims that “a smart city isn’t made by people just responding to inputs, but by citizens performing an essential role: … data collection and sharing” (Carlo Ratti Associati 2013). How can a city then best “engage citizens in monitoring the state of the city” (Lee et al. 2015)? How has progress been made and what are some of the key advancements in public participation in the public realm? Existing research highlights the need for a shift from process to goal-directed performance, requiring “new interfaces and policies for contracting services” (Lee et al. 2015). Real-time capture and knowledge of how people use the city is essential to align service providers, possibly even predicting and pre-empting needs (demand) or bottlenecks in supply. What prevents the implementation of a smartphone app like CityEye, “linking individual citizens, workers, and officials” (Lee et al. 2015)? A system of “virtual dashboards” that transcend physical space and make data available from anywhere through smart device technology (Lee et al. 2015). How do these apps overcome the inflexibility of delivery of information? A metaphorical one-way street where technical data is dispersed in a technical

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format in a top-down manner. Cities should seek at all costs to extend their capabilities beyond virtue signalling. Until then the data that gets shown off remains illegible and unresponsive to ordinary citizens. One reason for this may be that the technology is not advanced enough yet to fully engage each citizen in a nontechnical manner. The power of data within the perspective of social practices is that data should be iterative and responsive. A user should be able to take incoming information and combine usage to solve a specific problem local to their location or intention. In response, these actions should be able to feed back into the system to provide contextual readings of physical movements. Technology should iterate continuously, building layers of meaning throughout the city to directly reflect citizen’s needs. The key takeaways are inflexibility and unintelligibility. Cities should be looking at validating the individual citizen in a bottomup process, whilst the conversation needs to take place in the street. The methodologies adopted by Santander and Barcelona are uniquely different (Lee et al. 2015), yet have failed to activate citizens. The concept of a dashboard and a lens advocated by Lee et al. in “CityEye” is a strong concept. The lens, however, may best function by looking the other way, back at the incoming data. Users engage because they want a problem related to an infrastructural or social event to be solved. This must be the key methodological aim or strategy: providing an accessible, responsive app that can be used to solve the people’s problems as citizens. In the contemporary urban context “cities are data factories” (Anjomshoaa et al. 2018), and citizens need to perform an essential role: to solve a problem they have, as Ratti suggests (Ratti 2013). Smart and sensing technologies play a leading role in urban environments. They add a new layer to the overall production of space (Figure 17.2), which creates a new experience and a new leading role for the individual within these spaces.

Discussion The new role of individuals in the production of space should be considered through a number of viewpoints. First, individuals are the main element observed by our advancing technology; driven by computers that continuously scan the physical world in order to generate an increasingly fine-grain version of the digital world. Second, individuals are the main driver for existence of the digital world. Not only are digital spaces made for people (consider any online social platform), but they are in a constant state of configuration through people’s daily actions. It is through the constant iteration and interaction produced; through each individual choice, indecision, error, or success, that public space is shaped. Third, individuals play an active role in configuring the new digital world. As individuals become aware of the impact and significance of their actions in public space, their contribution to how that space is formed becomes a conscious act. In

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Figure 17.2 Enabling a new paradigm of connectivity of individuals and big data. © Rebecca Onafuye, 2018. Image based on: Curitiba, Brazil. © Flickr: Cris Valencia. Licence CC BY 2.0

the absence of this conscious contribution people’s actions, while active, remain unintentional and deeply hidden within the shared role of the public (intended here as a generic “catch-all” societal category). The continuous pervasion of digital technologies in all aspects of human activity provides individuals with increasing opportunities to participate and fulfil a new active role in digital space-making. This can only be fully realised if actors are fully aware of their role and impact in this process. The opportunity technology offers us all is the promise of a doorway into the fourth dimension: into a heuristic world of possibility anchored by centrality but free from gravity. If we fail to take advantage of this opportunity, then we will remain actors on the fringe of a new collective social world, non-player characters (NPCs), or worse, as non-playable characters; merely observers in a world that has characterised much of the production of space until now, especially in modern times. This study shows that the pervasive presence of technology is to be considered an opportunity for individuals; to take their place and inhabit the digital world; exchange information and adopt new roles and responsibilities in the making of the social life and space. Technological advancements are not to be considered positively or negatively per se. They should rather be regarded as tools through which people can enhance their way of seeing the urban life. If individuals are to be successful in contributing more actively in the making of the public life, changes in the appearance of the built environment would likely be meaningful yet imperceptible. Pervasive

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technologies like the Internet of Things or Ubiquitous Computing change the nature of relationships that individuals have with themselves and with the built environment. However, these changes are ingrained in the relational dimension and their extent is not physical.

References Abbott, E.A. (2008) Flatland: A romance of many dimensions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Anjomshoaa, A., Duarte, F., Rennings, D., Matarazzo, T.J., de Souza, P., and Ratti, C. “City scanner: building and scheduling a mobile sensing platform for smart city services.” IEEE Internet of Things Journal 5.6 (2018): 4567–4579. Bizer, C., Boncz, P., Brodie, M.L., Erling, O. “The meaningful use of big data: Four perspectives–Four challenges.” ACM Sigmod Record 40.4 (2012): 56–60. Bode, M. and Kristensen, D.B. (2016) “The digital doppelgänger within. A study on self-tracking and the quantified self movement.” In: Assembling consumption: Researching actors, networks and markets, eds R. Canniford and D. Bajde, 119–134. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Boyd, D. and Crawford, K. “Critical questions for big data: Provocations for a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon.” Information, Communication & Society 15.5 (2012): 662–679. Carlo Ratti Associati (2013) “Smart city: Smart citizen” [website], https://carloratti.com/project/carlo-rattismart-city-smart-citizen, accessed 27 October 2018. CERN (2019) “Dark matter.” Available from https://home.cern/science/physics/dark-matter [accessed 9 January 2019]. Crawford, K., Gray, M.L., and Miltner, K. “Big Data: Critiquing Big Data: Politics, ethics, epistemology. Special section introduction.” International Journal of Communication 8 (2014): 10. De Montjoye, Y.A., Hidalgo, C.A., Verleysen, M., and Blondel, V. “Unique in the crowd: The privacy bounds of human mobility.” Scientific Reports 3 (2013): 1376. De Waal, M. (2011) “The urban culture of sentient cities: From an internet of things to a public sphere of things.” Sentient city. Ubiquitous computing, architecture, and the future of urban space, ed. M. Shepard, 190–195. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Eagle, N. and Pentland, A.S. (2003) “Social network computing.” International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing. Berlin: Springer. Eagle, N. and Pentland, A.S. “Reality mining: sensing complex social systems.” Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 10.4 (2006): 255–268. Eagle, N. and Pentland, A.S. “Eigenbehaviors: Identifying structure in routine.” Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 63.7 (2009): 1057–1066. Harford, T. “Big data: A big mistake?” Significance 11.5 (2014): 14–19. Hildebrandt, M. “Slaves to big data. Or are we?” IDP 17 (2013): 27–44. Hillier, B. (2015) Space is the machine: A configurational theory of architecture. London, UK: Space Syntax. Jung, C.G., Franz, M.-L. and Freeman, J. (1964) Man and his symbols. New York, NY: Anchor Books. Kitchin, R. and Dodge, M. (2011) Code/space: Software and everyday life. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Kitchin, R. “Big data and human geography: Opportunities, challenges and risks.” Dialogues in Human Geography 3.3 (2013): 262–267. Kitchin, R., Lauriault, T.P., and Wilson, M.W., eds (2017) Understanding spatial media. London, UK: Sage. Laurila, J.K., Gatica-Perez, D., Aad, I., Blom, J., Bornet, O., Do, T.-M.-T., Dousse, O., Eberle, J., Miettinen, M. “The mobile data challenge: Big data for mobile computing research.” Pervasive Computing no. EPFL-CONF-192489 (2012). Lee, D., Felix, J., He, S., Offenhuber, D., and Ratti, C. (2015) “CityEye: Real-time visual dashboard for managing urban services and citizen feedback loops.” In: Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Computers in Urban Planning & Urban Management. MIT, Cambridge, MA, July 7–10. CUPUM. Lefebvre, H. and Nicholson-Smith, D. (1991) The production of space. Nachdr. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Leonelli, S. “Data interpretation in the digital age.” Perspectives on Science 22.3 (2014): 397–417. Mackenzie, A. (2002) Transductions: bodies and machines at speed. London, UK: A&C Black. Manovich, L. “Trending: The promises and the challenges of big social data.” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2 (2011): 460–475. Mayer-Schönberger, V. and Cukier, K. (2013) Big data: a revolution that will transform how we live, work, and think. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Peterson, J.B. (2017) “2017 Maps of Meaning 1: Context and Background” [video]. Available at: www.you tube.com/watch?v=I8Xc2_FtpHI&list=PL22J3VaeABQAT-0aSPq-OKOpQlHyR4k5h&index=1 (accessed 22 August 2018).

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Phithakkitnukoon, S., Wolf, M.I., Offenhuber, D., Lee, D., Biderman, A., and Ratti, C. “Tracking trash.” IEEE Pervasive Computing 12.2 (2013): 38–48. Read, S. (2005) “Flat City: A space syntax derived urban movement network model.” Paper presented at the 5th Space syntax international symposium, Delft, The Netherlands. In: Proceedings of the Space Syntax International Symposium, 2. Amsterdam: Techne Press, 341–358. Waimo. “Technology” [website]. Available at: https://waymo.com/tech (last accessed 28 October 2018). Walker, D. and Fung, K. “Big data and big business: Should statisticians join in?” Significance, Volume 10.4 (2013): 20–22. Westin, S. “The life and form of the city: An interview with Bill Hillier.” Space and Culture, 14.2 (2011): 227–237. Wolfe, P.J. “Making sense of big data.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110.45 (2013): 18031–18032. Yue, Y., Lan, T., Yeh, A.G., and Li, Q. “Zooming into individuals to understand the collective: A review of trajectory-based travel behaviour studies.” Travel Behaviour and Society 1.2 (2014): 69–78.

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Chapter 18

Operationalizing smartness From social bridges to an urbanism of aspirations, affordances and capabilities Shin Alexandre Koseki

The operationalization of social knowledge In an opinion article, Alex Pentland1, a leading computer scientist at MIT and special advisor to the United Nations on data science, explains how a new type of segregation led to a greater polarization of political attitudes between right-conservative and leftliberal voters. Following the thesis of “Social Physics,”2 he argues that contemporary cities reduce social interaction between local communities, resulting in real-world “echo chambers.” To prevent the rise of ideological conflict, he suggests that, using big data, smart city planning should aim to facilitate, if not encourage, the face-to-face interaction of distant communities. More specifically, planners and policy makers must facilitate face-to-face interactions between local populations, especially to connect neighborhoods with contrasting political, cultural, and economic characteristics. From a similar standpoint, Cesar A. Hidalgo and colleagues3 insist that face-to-face interactions between members of distant communities create some sort of “social bridges” at the metropolitan scale. These bridges then have the potential to boost the economic growth of impoverished urban areas, thus allowing for a fairer distribution of wealth and opportunities. In an attempt to “evaluate policies not based on short-term winners and losers, but on their ability to contribute to collective learning,”4 they argue that improving transportation between highly educated communities and impoverished regions result in the economic and social development of the latter. Yet, because central cities tend to concentrate economic as well as cultural capital, planners and policy makers ought to control the direction and the density of these flows with proper incentives.

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In these essays, Pentland and Hidalgo point at the necessity to operationalize a growing body of research using machine learning and big data to investigate the relationship between individualized behaviors (mobility, spending, social interactions, etc.) and macroscopic social, political, and economic outcomes. Their research and that of others have received increasing attention over the last decade under the label “computational social science.” In their studies, they focus on the digital traces individuals produce on social media and other digitally recorded behaviors, such as banking transactions, energy consumption, and transportation use.5 Unfortunately, the operationalization of “social bridges” remains a barren solution to contemporary urban and regional planning. In this chapter, I discuss one ontological problem that hinders the operationalization of social bridges among many other concepts put forward by computational social science and social theory: the problem of agency. In what follows, I show how computational and critical social sciences develop the notion of human agency differently from one another and from the one that still prevails across practices of urban planning and urban governance. By exposing this problem, I wish to better operationalize computational social science’s contribution to city planning and policy making. To this end, I also use this chapter as an opportunity to present a transdisciplinary model of agency intended to harmonize languages between urban planning and policy making, critical social science, and their recent computational counterparts.6 This theoretical model articulates three concepts shared by these fields: aspirations, affordances, and capabilities. By exposing their coherence, I intend to open up new ways of truly achieving the smart city.

What is computational social science? Computational social science is a field of research practices that seeks to predict macroscopic social, economic, and political outcomes by processing the massive amount of “digital traces” people produce daily.7 For at least a few decades now, humans and non-humans have been leaving such traces behind by interacting with computers, by connecting to the Internet, and by allowing their presence and movements in cities to be digitally recorded. Growing in number and types, these traces now constitute a series of global “digital ecosystems” from which corporations, states, and scientists can extract data and metadata about individuals or groups of individuals. Security concerns, marketability, and scientific curiosity led to the recent development of new tools and techniques to make sense of the otherwise apparent noise of big data. In the late 1990s, the development of new algorithms that could describe the complex networks of relationships between social entities was conductive to establishing a computational social science. Models that could mathematically describe the connections and interactions found in large-scale group interactions8 and the Internet9 paved the way to the field’s inception at the intersection of computer science and social science.

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Although geographers had already advanced the notion of a “computational social science” in the 1990s,10 it was not until much later that the field gained enough momentum (and computational power) to claim its own existence. In 2009, a group of American researchers published an article in Science arguing that the study of digital traces would “transform our understanding of our lives, organizations, and societies.”11 The authors, who specialized in applying network theory to human behavior, noted the risk that tech giants and national security services already carry on such research behind closed walls. With scientific backgrounds in business, management, sociology, history, human behavior, politics, and network and computer research, they argued that a new epistemological and ontological paradigm may emerge from the acute tracking of every single behavior and the unparalleled attempt to map society as a holistic network.

The urban shift In the last decade, computational social science has shifted its focus from the digital space of social media to the analog space of cities and metropolitan regions. The increased digitalization of urban practices, fueled by ubiquitous connectivity and an abundance of connected services, has fostered this transition. Setting aside most of the legacy from critical social science, researchers have transposed the tools, methods, approaches, and habits developed for analyzing social behaviors online, to the urban “digital ecosystem.” Like online platforms, cities ensure a constant and thick flow of information that outperforms other types of social and material environments. The density and diversity of urban societies might well resemble those of social media, with the added complexity of combining multiple dimensions and functions of society simultaneously. Where a number of functionalities constrain online behaviors, urban space offers more opportunities for individuals to express their aspirations, desires, and preferences. Cities therefore offer a better “platform” than social media to collect data and even conduct experiments with their “users.” In this context, skills in gathering, managing, and analyzing data from the Internet give tech giants and computational social scientists a head start when researching the behaviors of an unprecedented number of individuals. It is not surprising to find that online service providers—such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon— have increasingly invested in the city by using their platform to directly produce data on human behaviors. But, unlike online platforms, the city is produced by a multitude of social agents—private individuals, corporations, businesses, institutions, organizations, groups, and communities—whose diverse aspirations and constant wayfaring shape the dynamics of metropolitan regions. Critical social sciences provide a long genealogy of models that describe how city life fosters distinct forms of socialization behaviors and interactions.12 Over the last decade, computational social science has maintained an ambiguous relationship with the classical literature in urban studies and its human-

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centered legacy. Many critique the field’s limited interest in social theory as well as its weak critical stance.13 While it has a clear motivation to better understand the complexity of human behaviors in order to solve economic, social, and political feuds, computational social science seldom references social theorists. When it does, it is to anchor technical exploits in a socially charged narrative. Findings are not discussed, nor do they support or refute the theory. For example, many publications in computational social science refer to “strength of weak ties” to promote the idea that the diversity and density of social relationships create affordances that fuel economic growth and innovation.14 Unfortunately, authors rarely discuss this work past the introduction section of their paper. From the perspective of sociology, geography, and economics, which already provide empirically validated models for the phenomena on which computational social scientist thrive, many findings thus appear anecdotal. There is, however, one exception that shows computational social science can contribute to social theory.

Searching for innovation, from social learning to social bridges Pentland presents one of the very few exceptions to the lack of theory in computational social science. In a series of publications he gives his own account of a theory of innovation, which he bases on empirical studies he has been conducting since the mid-1990s. This research posits that the social world is governed by an intrinsic set of rules based on face-to-face interactions and the transmission of “honest signals”: an unconscious level of communication between individuals that drives group and collective dynamics and decision-making processes.15 In an attempt to enlarge the scale of those interactions and their role in urban social dynamics, he develops the idea of a “social physics.” With the goal to “revolutionize our understanding of cities and development,”16 social physics uses data to “sense” how social interactions create outcomes at the levels of the community, the city, and the region. In its operationalization, the author argues that social physics should improve health, safety, and efficiency in cities. The key is to focus on how ideas circulate from one person to another, and from one place to another, to harvest the potential of these innovation vectors by creating “social bridges” between distant communities. Despite being the focus of little research, the notion of “social bridge,” which is put forward in computational social science, shows promising explanatory power for collective human behaviors.17 While it does not yet hold an established definition, a social bridge usually refers to something or someone that connects individuals that belong to distinct communities. The distinction can be spatial, economical, ethnic, political, etc. According to these authors, the notion of social bridge therefore provides an entry point for planners and policy makers to maneuver economic redevelopment and channel a just redistribution of capital flows. Xiowen Dong and colleagues18 offer the first empirical validation of the notion in studying the role of social bridges in purchasing behavior. Using credit card records, the researchers look

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at millions of banking transactions in Istanbul. They found that the share of people from different areas of the city that work near each other better explains the similarities in purchase behaviors than traditionally considered factors, such as income and sociodemographic variables. Using a similar approach, they also show how spatial behavior explains the political orientation of certain areas in metropolitan regions. For the researchers, this phenomenon points to the “effect of co-location and face-to-face interactions on individuals’ behavior.”19 The study also refers to previous work in computational social science on the effect geographic proximity and co-visits has on online

friendship

relationships.

21

attitudes,20

and

on

face-to-face

conversations

and

offline

Even though social scientists study similar topics, the authors refrain

from referring to past or recent social science studies or models of social theory. One notable exception is the pivotal work of psychologist Albert Bandura, which offers an underlying rationale to the social bridge theory. In his Social Learning Theory (SLT), Albert Bandura22 argues that a large part of an individual’s behavior results from their exposure to the people who surround them (see Figure 18.1). This “environmental” take on human cognition proposes a new set of mechanisms to explain a person’s attitudes, preferences, as well as skills. According to SLT, humans learn mostly by imitating the behaviors they are exposed to. However, in this process, people mediate these behaviors through a series of conditions: attention, retention, reproduction, and motivation. In the 1980s and 1990s, scientists tried to build a mathematical model of this learning process. Today, artificial intelligence technology relies on these “social learning algorithms” to solve optimization problems. By providing an alternative to mainstream social theory, SLT offers computational social science—and its notion of social bridges—a new anchor to the social world. As Dominique Boullier argues, this could eventually push social science towards a new paradigm of human behavior where habits and beliefs, having their own agency, replicate among individuals.23 Still widely referred to in

Figure 18.1 Social Learning Theory. Created by the author

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computer science, especially for research on swarm computing, SLT is notably absent from the literature in social science, and especially in fields preoccupied with space, cities, and planning.24 This situation illustrates how scientific fields that raise similar concerns over common topics build forms of knowledge that can become incompatible over time. Today, this incompatibility limits our capacity to use scientific knowledge in smart city planning. At the core of this issue lies the various definitions of “agency.”

The problem of agency So far, I have explained how computational social science arose over the last few years. The necessity to operationalize its models is an undeniable step towards “smartness” in city management and governance. In what follows, I discuss the underlying issue that limits a more efficient cooperation between urban planning, social science, and computational social science: the problem of agency. In the present context, I refer to agency as the process that leads to action. Broadly, it describes the process that relates individual action to macroscopic social pattern. The operationalization of social science towards urban planning is a common practice, given the fields’ intertwined genealogy. This mutually beneficial relationship could still be improved by considering new ways of conceiving how agency shapes urban dynamics. The planning and governance of cities have not changed much over the last 100 years. While urban places and societies have evolved drastically across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, tools and strategies to manage them have remained particularly consistent. This is especially noticeable in how planners and policy makers “measure” city life. Censuses and administrative documents provide the primary source data to assess the physical as well as the social components of urban places. Although GIS and participatory approaches may have replaced land surveys and public assemblies, the underlying principles behind these data collection techniques remain the same: social and material space obeys a set of laws, among which continuity and contiguity are driving mechanisms.25 In this framework, individuals should express little agency of their own. Instead, they are the “product” of the economic, social, and cultural contexts in which they evolve. I associate such current practices with what Dominique Boullier26 describes as a “first-generation social science,” which is coherent with the pivotal development of urban planning and governance alongside the foundational work of sociology, economics, and political science. In contrast, contemporary social science focuses on individual characteristics as factors of agency. Following the downfall of ecological analysis,27 the rise of cognitive approaches pushed social science towards a “methodological individualism.”28 Experiments, surveys, and polls constitute the main source of information on urban activities and dynamics, giving researchers a stronger grip on data collection and management. As I have discussed above, new types of data, modeling techniques, and computational power are now changing this research landscape. Today, computational

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social science offers a third alternative by which researchers look at the digital traces produced by social activities. For Boullier,29 the nascent field allows us to place agency not in humans, but in the bits of information they produce and exchange through their interactions. In this framework, humans act as mere vehicles to ideas, values, competences, and desires. The scholar invites us to rethink who can act, or rather what can act on the world, pointing out that we should focus on “waves and propagation” rather than on items themselves.30 Carriers are less important than what they carry, they are “acting objects” with an agency of their own. In order to make sense of this paradigm shift, while maintaining a certain coherence with dominant practices in research, planning, and governance, I propose a new conceptual framework to describe agency. Put together, the concepts I describe in the following section easily relate to the three fields I have so far addressed. These concepts also refer to widespread ideas in social science, which provide some theoretical as well as ontological background to the model of agency.

Towards a transdisciplinary model of agency The rise of computational social science, and the inevitable operationalization of the field’s outcomes, calls for us to rethink conceptual tools that might help planners and policy makers to conceive cities and society from a shared standpoint. The need for such a model follows a series of paradigm shifts in how we see and wish to address society as a system of actors that develop and transmit social, political, and cultural bits of information. Among those paradigm shifts, the global rise of an urban digital ecosystem holds most risks and opportunities for planners and policy makers to harness digital traces into city smartness. Through their history, critical social science, computational social science, and urban planning have each developed different definitions of agency, which limits the interoperability of their knowledge. Inheriting from early social science, urban planning relies on a definition of agency as the result of contextual constraints. This contrasts with today’s mainstream social science approach, which posits that individuals conduct actions based on the information that is available to them. Finally, computational social science suggests that the agency belongs not to the individuals that form society but to the bits of information that flows among them, and which relies on individuals to be transmitted. The model I propose here concurs with all three fields, and perhaps much more. I came about this model through a series of studies on the effect of urbanization on political and moral behavior.31 It entails many hypotheses that need to be tested in order to become a ground on which inter- and transdisciplinary projects can flourish. Ultimately, the model posits that agency is a dimension of society that results from aspirations, affordances, and capabilities, and that can be expressed into an action unto the world32 (see Figure 18.2). It provides a series of concepts and ways to relate them. Urban planners and policy makers can use the model as an

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Figure 18.2 Agency as the product of aspirations, affordances and capabilities. Created by the author

analytical framework and a roadmap to identify the nature of various actors: individuals, groups, organizations, institutions, ideas, cultural artefacts, trends, etc. Because it fits with all three definitions of agency that dominate urban planning, social science, and computational social science, the model helps urban planners and policy makers to make sense of scientific and technical knowledge. In a context where big data and AI are becoming the new frontier of knowledge, such a model becomes key for a new generation of planning and governance practices to operate in today’s society.

Aspirations A desired state of personal, collective, or societal situation. Ideal social or material situations that motivate us to act. They may be centered on oneself or on others. Aspirations may be complementary, contradictory, combined, alternatives, or neutral to one another. Aspirations are what people want for themselves, for others, as well as for society in general. Getting a raise, meeting new friends, making somebody happy, or attaining equal rights are examples of aspirations. Entities like companies, communities, and states also produce Aspirations that guide agency. These Aspirations can be distinct from those of the people that constitute such entities.

Affordances Social or material spatial configurations that allow the actor to actualize their aspirations. Actual or virtual situations used to act. Affordances may be simple, multiple, positive, or negative. Affordances consist of the people, objects, and situations in our environment that we use to achieve our Aspirations. They can be finite, such as resources,

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or infinite, such as common goods. The community by which we define ourselves, the stranger who points us the right way, our teachers who taught us to read, or that acquaintance who tells us about an open position, are examples of social Affordances. The bench on which we sit to rest, the bridge we take to pass a river, the 4G waves that connect us to the Internet are examples of physical Affordances.

Capabilities Embodied or extended competences that the actor develops. Personal or collective aptitudes that enable us to act on affordances in order to actualize aspirations. Capabilities consist in the skills that individuals develop in order actualize their Aspirations by making use of the Affordances. The Capability to read a sign or to navigate a neighborhood, to remember where things are situated, to parallel park, to develop one’s professional network, or to address a larger public allow us to attain small and large aspirations daily.

Example The relationship between Aspirations, Affordances, and Capabilities largely defines the actor’s agency and, by consequence, their actions. Each component of the model feeds into the two others. Aspirations force us to look for Affordances, but also to develop the necessary Capabilities that will actualize them. Capabilities allow us to invent Aspirations for ourselves while revealing the Affordances we can use. Affordances define the Aspirations which we can realistically actualize, and frame Capabilities. In principle, the model should be applied holistically, considering that urban planners and policy makers are themselves actors with agency. For example, urban planners may identify Aspirations of a local community in relation to the Capabilities it develops and the Affordances it motivates. In a context where urban planners themselves aspire for more spatial justice, their project reveals Affordances that fabricate the Capabilities and frame the Aspirations of this community. Today, new technologies frame a plethora of Aspirations for those who have the Capabilities to invent them. Ideally, the operationalization of big data and AI by urban planners fabricates Capabilities for a community, allowing it to invent new Aspirations. When this is not the case, these technologies likely frame the Aspirations of other actors. Because Affordances only frame Aspirations of those who have the necessary Capabilities to reveal them, urban planners must be especially attentive to the conditions they create and for whom they are created. Individuals who compose the community may have divergent, and even contradicting Aspirations. Old planning techniques mostly suited homogeneous groups. Today, new technologies like big data and AI can help urban planners make better sense of the diversity and intersectionality that characterizes urban society. These technologies also allow urban planners to conceive Affordances that are responsive to each and everyone’s Aspirations. Therefore, big data and AI provide the necessary Affordances to urban planners who aspirate for more spatial justice.

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Conclusion The operationalization of big data and artificial intelligence into design and planning strategies represents a challenge for contemporary urban development. While a greater number of individuals live in so-called “urban places,”33 new technologies enable us to better scrutinize their human dynamics at an unprecedented scale and accuracy.34 At the crossing of these two transitions, new practices in city development and governance have risen under the label “smart cities.” Today, tech giants such as Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple take an active role in driving the development of urban places, putting local populations at risk of new forms of social injustice.35 Yet, I do believe that big data and artificial intelligence have the potential to truly change our understanding and planning of urban places in a way that can benefit individuals and communities. But to do so, researchers and practitioners must find ways to better integrate new forms of computation-driven knowledge to a critically informed understanding of urban society and the know-how of planning and governance. To me, the difficulty in reconciling scientific knowledge and the planning of metropolitan regions results from their different ontological conceptions of the human– space relationship. More specifically, I reckon that this difficulty arises from the way critical social science, computational social science, and urban planning depart from a different definition of “agency,” as the possibility for someone or something to act unto the world. This problem limits the capacity of urban planners and scientists to create transdisciplinary collaborations. Yet, these are a necessary step towards a fully operational science of cities that generates sustainable “smart” solutions to metropolitan challenges. In this chapter I describe how a transdisciplinary model of human agency could operationalize future research in social science and computational social science for urban planning and policy making. Looking at the recent development of the urban digital ecosystem and new methods of analysis, I trace back the rationale that underlies a growing body of research concerned with operationalizing big data and machine learning to solve urban challenges: computational social science. I then build on Boullier’s generational classification of social science36 to highlight how urban planning, critical social science, and computational social science could engage more directly were they to conceive human agency in the same way. To resolve this problem, I propose conceiving agency as resulting from the interaction between three classifiers: Aspirations, Affordances, and Capabilities. This definition offers a conceptual solution to solve the current discrepancy between social science, computational social science, and the operational practice of urban planning and policy making. Future research should help solidify this definition and provide a better overall view of its application.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank C.M. Schwartz, N. Baya-Lafitte, S. de Maat, and S.M. Jameson for their reading of previous versions of the manuscript and their generous and insightful comments.

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Funding This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation [grant number IZSEZ0_185117].

Notes 1 Alex Pentland, “To Rescue Democracy, Go Outside,” Nautilus, October 13, 2016, http://nautil.us/ issue/41/selection/to-rescue-democracy-go-outside. 2 Alex Pentland, Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread – The Lessons from a New Science (New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2014). 3 César A. Hidalgo et al., “The Principle of Relatedness,” in Unifying Themes in Complex Systems IX, ed. Alfredo J. Morales et al., Springer Proceedings in Complexity (Springer International Publishing, 2018), 451–57, doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96661-8_46. 4 Hidalgo et al., 455. 5 David Lazer et al., “Computational Social Science,” Science 323, no. 5915 (February 6, 2009): 721–23, doi.org/10.1126/science.1167742; R. Conte et al., “Manifesto of Computational Social Science,” The European Physical Journal Special Topics 214, no. 1 (December 5, 2012): 325–46, doi .org/10.1140/epjst/e2012-01697-8. 6 I briefly discuss this model in the conclusion of my doctoral dissertation and have previously presented an overview of this model in a lecture I gave at the Université de Montréal in the Fall of 2017 and again at the Annual Conference of the Architectural Humanities Research Association in Eindhoven in the Fall of 2018: Shin Alexandre Koseki, “Moral Matrices: Space Through the Unfolding of Direct Democracy in Switzerland” (Doctoral dissertation, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, 2017), doi:10.5075/epfl-thesis-7078; Shin Alexandre Koseki, “Gouverner la métropole intelligente” (Guest university lecture, October 5, 2017); Shin Alexandre Koseki, “Hypertypes: From Social Bridges to an Urbanism of Aspirations, Affordances and Capabilities” (Smartness? Between Discourses and Practices, Eindhoven: Architectural Humanities Research Association, 2018), http:// infoscience.epfl.ch/record/261198?&ln=en. 7 Nicolas Baya-Laffitte and Benbouzid Bilel, “Présentation. Imaginer la sociologie numérique.” Sociologie et sociétés 49, no. 2 (2018): 5–32. 8 Duncan J. Watts and Steven H. Strogatz, “Collective Dynamics of ‘Small-World’ Networks,” Nature 393, no. 6684 (June 1998): 440–42, doi.org/10.1038/30918. 9 Albert-László Barabási and Réka Albert, “Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks,” Science 286, no. 5439 (October 15, 1999): 509–12, doi.org/10.1126/science.286.5439.509. 10 W.R. Tobler, “Three Presentations of Geographical Analysis and Modeling,” Technical report (Santa Barbara, CA: University of California Santa Barbara, February 1993). 11 Lazer et al., “Computational Social Science,” 721. 12 Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (1973): 1360–80, doi.org/10.1086/225469; Emile Durkheim, De La Division Du Travail Social, 11th ed., Quadrige 84 (1893; repr., Paris: PUF, 1986); Claude S. Fischer, “Toward a Subcultural Theory of Urbanism,” American Journal of Sociology 80, no. 6 (May 1, 1975): 1319–41. 13 Baya-Laffitte and Bilel, “Présentation. Imaginer la sociologie numérique.” 14 Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties.” 15 Alex Pentland and Tracy Heibeck, Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010). 16 Pentland, Social Physics, 153. 17 Alfredo José Morales-Guzman, “Analyzing and Modeling the Emergent Dynamics during the Information Diffusion Process on Internet Social Network” (Doctoral dissertation, Universidad politécnica de Madrid, 2014), https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/33174156.pdf. 18 Xiaowen Dong et al., “Social Bridges in Community Purchase Behavior,” (2017). 19 Xiaowen Dong et al., “Purchase Patterns, Socioeconomic Status, and Political Inclination,” The World Bank Economic Review, (2016), 4. 20 L. Sun et al., “Understanding Metropolitan Patterns of Daily Encounters,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. 34 (August 20, 2013): 13774–79, https://doi.org/10.1073/ pnas.1306440110; Eunjoon Cho, Seth A. Myers, and Jure Leskovec, “Friendship and Mobility: User Movement in Location-Based Social Networks,” in Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining – KDD ’11 (the 17th ACM SIGKDD international conference, San Diego, California, USA: ACM Press, 2011), 1082, doi.org/10.1145/ 2020408.2020579. 21 Danny Wyatt et al., “Inferring Colocation and Conversation Networks from Privacy-Sensitive Audio with Implications for Computational Social Science,” ACM Trans. Intell. Syst. Technol. 2, no. 1

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22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36

(January 2011): 7:1–7:41, doi.org/10.1145/1889681.1889688; Alvin Chin et al., “Linking People through Physical Proximity in a Conference,” in Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Modeling Social Media. (3rd international workshop on Modeling social media, Milwaukee, WI, 2012), 13–20, doi.org/10.1145/2310057.2310061. Albert Bandura, Social Learning Theory (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1977). Dominique Boullier, “Vie et mort des sciences sociales avec le big data,” Socio. La nouvelle revue des sciences sociales, no. 4 (April 25, 2015): 19–37, doi.org/10.4000/socio.1259. For example, the notion appears nowhere in Progress in Human Geography, and only appears in three articles of Environment and Planning, and in Urban Studies (status on December 31, 2018). W.R. Tobler, “A Computer Movie Simulating Urban Growth in the Detroit Region,” Economic Geography 46 (1970): 234–40, doi.org/10.2307/143141. Boullier, “Vie et mort des sciences sociales avec le big data.” W.S. Robinson, “Ecological Correlations and the Behavior of Individuals,” American Sociological Review 15, no. 3 (1950): 351–57, doi.org/10.2307/2087176. Jennifer Nicoll Victor, Alexander H. Montgomery, and Mark Lubell, “Introduction: The Emergence of the Study of Networks in Politics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Political Networks, eds Jennifer Nicoll Victor, Alexander H. Montgomery, and Mark Lubell, Oxford Handbooks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 2, doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9,780,190,228,217.001.0001. Boullier, “Vie et mort des sciences sociales avec le big data.” Boullier’s analyses of agency openly rely on new models of social theory such as the Actor-Network Theory, which he comments on extensively in his work. Koseki, “Moral Matrices.” Social science and the humanities have long developed, questioned, and commented on the three concepts I present here, as well as on agency itself. I do not discuss such genealogies in the present chapter, although I am currently carrying out such a task. Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid, “The ‘Urban Age’ in Question,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38, no. 3 (May 1, 2014): 731–55, doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12115. Nazer et al., “Computational Social Science.” Linnet Taylor, “What Is Data Justice? The Case for Connecting Digital Rights and Freedoms Globally,” Big Data & Society 4, no. 2 (December 1, 2017), doi.org/10.1177/2053951717736335. Boullier, “Vie et mort des sciences sociales avec le big data,” 201.

References Bandura, Albert. Social Learning Theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1977. Barabási, Albert-László, and Réka Albert. “Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks.” Science 286, no. 5439 (October 15, 1999): 509–512, doi.org/10.1126/science.286.5439.509. Baya-Laffitte, Nicolas and Benbouzid Bilel. “Présentation. Imaginer la sociologie numérique.” Sociologie et sociétés 49, no. 2 (2018): 5–32. Boullier, Dominique. “Vie et mort des sciences sociales avec le big data.” Socio. La nouvelle revue des sciences sociales no. 4 (April 25, 2015): 19–37, doi.org/10.4000/socio.1259. Brenner, Neil and Christian Schmid “The ‘Urban Age’ in Question.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38, no. 3 (May 1, 2014): 731–755, doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12115. Chin, Alvin, Bin Xu, Hao Wang, and Xia Wang. “Linking People through Physical Proximity in a Conference.” In Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Modeling Social Media, 13–20. Milwaukee, WI, 2012, doi.org/10.1145/2310057.2310061. Cho, Eunjoon, Seth A. Myers, and Jure Leskovec. “Friendship and Mobility: User Movement in Location-Based Social Networks.” In Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining - KDD ’11, 1082. San Diego, California, USA: ACM Press, 2011, doi.org/10.1145/2020408.2020579. Conte, R., N. Gilbert, G. Bonelli, C. Cioffi-Revilla, G. Deffuant, J. Kertesz, V. Loreto, S. Moat, J.-P. Nadal, A. Sanchez, A. Nowak, A. Flache, M. San Miguel, and D. Helbing. “Manifesto of Computational Social Science.” The European Physical Journal Special Topics 214, no. 1 (December 5, 2012): 325–346, doi. org/10.1140/epjst/e2012-01697-8. Dong, Xiaowen, Eaman Jahani, Alfredo Morales-Guzman, and Burçin Bozkaya. 2016. “Purchase Patterns, Socioeconomic Status, and Political Inclination” [conference paper]. Annual Bank Conference on Development Economics 2016: Data and Development Economics, June 20–21, Washington, DC, The World Bank. Dong, Xiaowen, Yoshihiko Suhara, Burçin Bozkaya, Vivek K. Singh, and Alex Pentland. Social Bridges in Community Purchase Behavior. 2017. Durkheim, Emile. De La Division Du Travail Social, 11th ed. Quadrige 84. 1893. Reprint. Paris: PUF, 1986.

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Fischer, Claude S. “Toward a Subcultural Theory of Urbanism.” American Journal of Sociology 80, no. 6 (May 1, 1975): 1319–1341. Granovetter, Mark. “The Strength of Weak Ties.” American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (1973): 1360– 1380, doi.org/10.1086/225469. Hidalgo, César A., Pierre-Alexandre Balland, Ron Boschma, Mercedes Delgado, Maryann Feldman, Koen Frenken, Edward Glaeser, Canfei He, Dieter F. Kogler, Andrea Morrison, Frank Neffke, David Rigby, Scott Stern, Siqi Zheng, and Shengjun Zhu. “The Principle of Relatedness.” In Unifying Themes in Complex Systems IX, edited by Alfredo J. Morales, Carlos Gershenson, Dan Braha, Ali A. Minai, and Yaneer Bar-Yam, 451–457. Springer Proceedings in Complexity. New York, NY: Springer International Publishing, 2018, 10.1007/978-3-319-96661-8_46. Koseki, Shin Alexandre. “Moral Matrices: Space Through the Unfolding of Direct Democracy in Switzerland.” Doctoral dissertation, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, 2017, doi:10.5075/epflthesis-7078. Koseki, Shin Alexandre. “Hypertypes: From Social Bridges to an Urbanism of Aspirations, Affordances and Capabilities.” Eindhoven, the Netherlands: Architectural Humanities Research Association, 2018, http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/261198?&ln=en. Koseki, Shin Alexandre. “Gouverner la métropole intelligente.” Guest university lecture presented at the Guest Professors Lecture Cycle, Montreal, Canada, October 5, 2017. Lazer, David, Alex Pentland, Lada Adamic, Sinan Aral, Albert-László Barabási, Devon Brewer, Nicholas Christakis, Noshir Contractor, James Fowler, Myron Gutmann, Tony Jebara, Gary King, Michael Macy, Deb Roy, and Marshall Van Alstyne. “Computational Social Science.” Science 323, no. 5915 (February 6, 2009): 721–723, doi.org/10.1126/science.1167742. Morales-Guzman, Alfredo José. “Analyzing and Modeling the Emergent Dynamics during the Information Diffusion Process on Internet Social Network.” Doctoral dissertation, Universidad politécnica de Madrid, Spain, 2014, https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/33174156.pdf. Pentland, Alex. Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread – The Lessons from a New Science. New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2014. Pentland, Alex. “To Rescue Democracy, Go Outside.” Nautilus, October 13, 2016, http://nautil.us/issue/ 41/selection/to-rescue-democracy-go-outside. Pentland, Alex and Tracy Heibeck. Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010. Robinson, William Sydney. “Ecological Correlations and the Behavior of Individuals.” American Sociological Review 15, no. 3 (1950): 351–357, https://doi.org/10.2307/2087176. Sun, Lijun, Kay W. Axhausen, Der-Horng Lee, and Xianfeng Huang. “Understanding Metropolitan Patterns of Daily Encounters.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. 34 (August 20, 2013): 13774–13779, doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1306440110. Taylor, Linnet. “What Is Data Justice? The Case for Connecting Digital Rights and Freedoms Globally.” Big Data & Society 4, no. 2 (December 1, 2017), doi.org/10.1177/2053951717736335. Tobler, W.R. “A Computer Movie Simulating Urban Growth in the Detroit Region.” Economic Geography 46, (1970): 234–240, https://doi.org/10.2307/143141. Tobler, Waldo Rudolph “Three Presentations of Geographical Analysis and Modeling.” Technical report. Santa Barbara, CA: University of California Santa Barbara, February 1993. Victor, Jennifer Nicoll, Alexander H. Montgomery, and Mark Lubell. “Introduction: The Emergence of the Study of Networks in Politics.” In The Oxford Handbook of Political Networks, eds Jennifer Nicoll Victor, Alexander H. Montgomery, and Mark Lubell, 2. Oxford Handbooks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190228217.001.0001. Watts, Duncan J. and Steven H. Strogatz. “Collective Dynamics of ‘Small-World’ Networks.” Nature 393, no. 6684 (June 1998): 440–442, doi.org/10.1038/30918. Wyatt, Danny, Tanzeem Choudhury, Jeff Bilmes, and James A. Kitts. “Inferring Colocation and Conversation Networks from Privacy-Sensitive Audio with Implications for Computational Social Science.” ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology 2, no. 1 (January 2011): 7:1–7:41, doi.org/ 10.1145/1889681.1889688.

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New sensorial vehicles Navigating critical understandings of autonomous futures Fiona McDermott

Intentional capture, a sensibility primer In the early 1970s, the architect Alison Smithson documented her experience of several car journeys as she travelled from London to her Wiltshire cottage in the English countryside. The resultant publication AS in DS: An Eye on the Road, is an illustrated diary featuring the texts, photographs, and sketches of the surrounding environment as observed by Smithson (AS) from the front seat of her Citroën DS 19 (DS).1 The documentation featured in the book is an embodied attempt to capture detailed impressions of a modality that had been so seamlessly adopted by the generation at that time that few had stopped to consider the spatial and environmental changes as well as the new behaviours which were unconsciously developed as a result. By recording the journeys, Smithson wanted to uncover the lost ability to observe the multivariate changes wrought by the car. Peter Smithson describes what he believed to be the contribution of the book: This is a diary of car-movement recording the evolving sensibility of a passenger in a car to the post-industrial landscape … In the last quarter of the twentieth century, we have inherited a literature of man and machine in nature but there is as yet no equivalent of the eighteenth century’s understanding which penetrated to all levels of society through the work of writers, artists, landscape designers, and architects. This primer is a document reaching out towards such an understanding.2

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With AS in DS, Smithson developed new notions about the role of the car in architecture and town planning, as seen from the motorway, the road, the street, the parking lot, and right up to the entrance of the house. But beyond changes to the physical environment, she also sought to parse the ways by which the car had fundamentally changed human behaviour: The mobility that the car has given to everyone has helped to change our social patterns and progressively, our social needs; for example, we no longer need to go to the centre we move to many centres … and out of the city … and out of the country altogether. Our social activity has adjusted; instead of sitting in a public auditorium or walking a city street, we are as other people in a similar vehicle: social contact is by implication … we are told about it; watch it, occasionally read about it; but our physical experience of community adhesion is that “we drive it”.3 Years earlier, in 1968, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour, and a group of students from the Yale School of Art and Architecture, took a trip to Las Vegas to study the architecture and form of a city that was regarded as a “non-city,” the outgrowth of a “strip,” along which were placed parking lots and singular frontages for gambling casinos, hotels, churches, and bars. The aim of the study was twofold. They sought, first, in an unbiased manner, to begin to understand the recently emerged physical form and, second, to start to develop analytical methods to deal with these new forms and spaces. Overlooked by other architects at the time, the group believed that the study of the architecture of commercial strips and the types of spaces created as a result of the car was as significant as that of ancient and medieval cities had been for previous generations of architects and urbanists.4 The research group carefully defined the components of strip and sprawl and considered the factors that caused the form and the aesthetics of the built environment to be as they were—primarily the car, the geometry induced by its motion, and the ability of the human brain to react to communication from the environment while the body is travelling at approximately 35 miles per hour. Famously, they “saw and collected things that others had missed in their haste to get out of the ‘ugly’, debased commercial environment.”5 By looking coldly and analytically at their subject matter, they were able to demonstrate the strip’s logic and validity as a system, taking a pointed acceptance of American sprawl and vernacular architecture, as well as accounting for the human activities and interactions it created.

What the car did—and what it might do After a century during which the car dramatically reordered city streets, urban form, and land use, not to mention society at large, it became increasingly obvious that it was not

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the future of urban mobility. As the physical and social impacts of widespread car ownership unfolded, the costs of environmental pollution, public health issues, social isolation, and congestion began to outstrip the benefits. From the early 1980s onwards, many cities and urban regions were quickly overwhelmed by the downsides of car-centric mobility. It seemed as if the motor had reached the end of the road. But now the car, with the help of a technological reboot, has been steered toward a fantastical future, as fresh speculation abounds as to how autonomous vehicles (AVs) might reconfigure urban spaces and produce new modes of mobility and inhabitation.

Contemporary speculation According to members of the world’s largest technical professional organization, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), by 2040, three out of four vehicles will be autonomous.6 A report entitled Taming the Autonomous Vehicle: A Primer for Cities jointly published by Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Aspen Institute on the future of AVs in cities, claims that the adoption will not primarily benefit rural areas but instead cities. This, it claims, is due in part to the “new opportunities to right-size vehicles for urban use,” liberating cities from the past struggle with the car’s demands for space.7 The global consultancy firm McKinsey, too, purports that the onset of AVs will herald a great spatial liberation, claiming that by 2050, the uptake of shared AVs will cut parking needs by some 1.4 million acres in the US.8 Aside from freeing up space for better uses, many believe that AVs will be the answer to a whole host of wicked problems, including significantly improving road safety, increasing road capacity, reducing commuting times, increasing gender equality, as well as reducing vehicle insurance and labour costs, and improving mobility for underserved user groups including the disabled, the elderly, and children.9 When Mercedes-Benz announced its fully autonomous multipurpose vehicle earlier this year, the company proclaimed it “enables on-demand, sustainable and efficient movement of people and goods” and will “reduce traffic flows, relieve inner-city infrastructures and contribute to an improved quality of urban life.”10 Seemingly, the advent of the AV cannot come soon enough for congested and public transit resource-poor cities around the world. The AV is commonly presented as pragmatic and politically benign. This resonates with what the geographers Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge argue is common with the introduction of automated technologies: different groups with vested interests using discourses relating to issues such as safety, security, efficiency, anti-fraud, empowerment, productivity, reliability, flexibility, economic rationality, and competitive advantage, to induce a process of interpellation, wherein the large majority of people willingly and voluntarily subscribe to and desire their logic, trading potential disciplinary effects against benefits.11 In this sense, the narrative of progress offered by AVs is commonsensical, it is a future too good to refuse. Writer Adam Greenfield warns of the dangers of succumbing to the

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promise of automation that is ideologically driven by certain actors with deep investments. Acknowledging that emerging automated technologies have the potential to change how people engage with the world, he insisted that “some sense of what they do is critical to understanding the deal we strike whenever we surrender control of a situation to the judgment of algorithms.”12

Fantastic technology Perhaps it should not be surprising that the promise of the AV has garnered as much attention as it has. The imaginary of cars that drive themselves has been around almost as long as cars have—from Bel Geddes’ concept for automated highways at the 1939 World’s Fair, to the more far-fetched concept of futuristic transportation like in Disney’s “Magic Highway, U.S.A.” Shannon Mattern believes that “the self-driving car has captured the public imagination like few devices since the smartphone,” suspecting that its popularity lies with a general fascination with the vehicle’s “powers of perception, which are largely derived from nineteenth-century technologies that are familiar enough to be relatable.”13 Outlandish fantasies or not, the autonomous vehicle is a future that nearly every major car company is betting on. Most of the major automakers say they expect fully autonomous vehicles to be available 15 years from now, and many are backing that prediction with corresponding capital, from GM’s $1 billion acquisition of a self-driving start-up, Cruise Automation, to Ford’s equally large investment in the AI start-up, Argo. These efforts of the automotive industry dovetail neatly with a new generation of technology companies who believe that technological solutions really are the answer to our urban woes. In the past five years, the self-driving challenge has swept up tech giants such as Google, Uber, Amazon, and Apple. The AVs are seen as the inevitable merging of physical entities with digital software, a type of code/space on wheels and, importantly, an area with potential for huge future growth. Yet, despite the welldocumented drawbacks of private vehicles, many in the technology industry believe that the AV will be the saviour of urban mobility. As described in the report Taming the Autonomous Vehicle: A Primer for Cities, “There is also a sense that the know-how gained in building global networks for electronic commerce and communication can be retooled to re-engineer urban transportation systems from the ground up.”14 Over the past decade, the majority of AV pilots have focussed on highspeed highways. But the AV’s future is in cities, where both the technology industry and traditional automakers see great opportunities and where the biggest market demographics are concentrated. Although complex city environments present unwieldy technical challenges to AV development, there will still be a huge commercial prize for facilitating AV adoption in cities. As the population of cities around the world continues to expand, so too will their automotive markets. Another McKinsey study on changes in the car industry predicts that, as a result, “[c]ity type will replace country or region as the most relevant segmentation dimension that determines mobility behavior and, thus, the speed and scope of the automotive revolution.”15

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This market demand will in turn increase the need for testing in a diversity of actually existing urban contexts. As suggested in Taming the Autonomous Vehicle: A Primer for Cities, perhaps “one likely strategic response from automakers is the creation of vehicle models that are designed for individual cities or city types.”16

Urban transformations Knowing the vested interests in AV adoption in cities, the question of how they might reorder spaces and produce new kinds of epistemologies and urban cultures remains an open one. Will the AV alter the built environment as radically as the manually driven car did over the last century? And, perhaps more fundamentally, considering what we know now about the car’s relationship to the city, do we even want the car to stay? Is the AV an example of an outdated model that should by rights fizzle out but will persist due to the promise of technological progress? Researchers at MIT’s “Senseable City” lab, Carlo Ratti and Matthew Claudel, demonstrate bountiful optimism towards the “imminent generation” of AVs in the city. While having acknowledged that “automobile-centric transportation systems … are insensitive to the subtleties of urban space and, at worst, destroy the fabric of the city,”17 they somewhat contradictorily see the AV as “bringing the death of the car culture but a rebirth of the (new) car.”18 With rose-tinted foresight not dissimilar to the early emancipatory visions of the automobile, they predict that “self-driving vehicles could be programmed according to a variety of different criteria, for example, comfort, fuel efficiency, or shareability. Self-driving could have tremendous impact at the urban scale, where telemetry and big data analytics might optimise vehicular flows throughout the city.”19 For Ratti and Claudel, AVs are key to enabling a new era of shareability, a modality that they believe will in turn optimize systems and eliminate redundancy of space. But, as recently proven with the case of shared car services in the US, the likes of Uber and Lyft are not reducing traffic in cities but instead actively contributing to it. A report by the San Francisco County Transportation Authority concluded that ridehailing services such as Uber and Lyft, that use online-enabled platforms to connect between passengers and local drivers using their personal vehicles, contributed approximately 50 percent of the overall increases in congestion in San Francisco between 2010 and 2016.20 Similarly, a 2017 traffic study of New York City found that ride-hailing services had put an additional 50,000 vehicles on the road over the previous four years, added 36 percent to the total miles travelled by for-hire vehicles, and added to a 15 percent increase in passenger trips.21 As mobility scholar Mimi Sheller notes, even if there were some efficiencies as a result of AVs, they could also unleash “a growing undifferentiated sprawl of quasi-urbanization.”22 Others imagine a world of reconfigured aesthetics and form factors, all bent towards the legibility of machine learning. Considering the sensory shortcomings of AV technology, writer Geoff Manaugh speculates that in an urban world filled with complex architectural forms, reflective surfaces, unpredictable weather and temporary construction sites … cities

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may have to be redesigned, or may simply mutate over time, to accommodate a car’s peculiar way of experiencing the built environment.23 In a similar vein, Florian Cramer suggests that all cars and highways could be redesigned and rebuilt in such a way as to make them failure-proof for computer vision and autopilots … For example, by painting all cars in the same specific colors, and with computer-readable barcode identifiers on all four sides, designing their bodies within tightly predefined shape parameters to eliminate the risk of confusion with other objects … by straightening motorways to make them perfectly linear and moving cities to fit them.24 Maya Indira Ganesh draws the comparsion between this speculation by Cramer and the work of the Danish architecture studio Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG). In a video entitled (Driver)Less is More produced for Audi, BIG visualize this vision with eerie precision. In line with that of Ratti and Claudel, BIG’s driverless city is a vision of shared mobility, “a prim dream of pure order.” The “result is an elastic urban space that can expand and contract to accommodate peak traffic hours or allow a park or plaza to invade the car lanes to fit the demands and desires of its citizens.”25 As Ganesh points out, the only problem being that this city seems devoid of humans. In a somewhat dystopian yet not entirely unrealistic take, Dunne and Raby imagine a fictional world whereby the “Digicar” is the main form of transport. While having many similarities to what we commonly imagine as an AV, in the case of the Digicar, the vehicle has evolved from an object for navigating space and time, to being an interface for navigating tariffs and markets. Every square metre of road surface and every millisecond of access, at any moment, is monetized and optimized. Passengers are required to stand to minimize the vehicle’s footprint, and are happier to communicate virtually with distant friends than fellow commuters. While many contemporary ideas for AVs are presented as social spaces for relaxing commutes, Digicars are closer to economy airlines, offering the most basic, but humane experience. The Digicar is essentially a mobile computer, constantly calculating the best, most economic route. The roads are still owned by the state but companies buy bulk access and offer it to customers, much in the same way that telecom companies manage spectrum.26 Of course, AVs are only possible given huge amounts of collected and processed data, which begs the question as to how these exhaustive amounts of information might in turn have implications for the design and use of the space. Ganesh considers how the resultant mapping data from AVs will drive and shape new forms of ethics and uneven geographies. Quoting comments by Seda Gurses on the racial discrimination in way-finding apps like Waze that “help” stay out of “high crime neighbourhoods,” Ganesh asks “What kind of new places will be created, and discriminations perpetuated, by autonomous driving that identify people and neighbourhoods as criminal or threatening?”27

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Magical thinking In her book, Artificial Unintelligence, Meredith Broussard is more sceptical still about the future of AVs. She believes that there are fundamental limitations when applying computation to aspects of our everyday lives and that includes driving. To illustrate this theory, she takes the case of her own personal experience of participating in the Grand Challenge, the prize competition for AVs, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in the US. Boussard describes how in the 2005 challenge, the task was to create a robot that could navigate 175 miles through the Mojave desert. Quoting Stanford Professor of Computer Science, Sebastian Thrun, also a competition participant, as he described the task in the desert, “it didn’t really matter whether an obstacle was a rock or a bush because either way you’d drive around it.”28 When the competition moved from the desert to an urban setting in 2007, the “challenge” became much more complicated. In this context, the cars had to make “intelligent” decisions in real time by performing sophisticated interactions with other vehicles, negotiating right-of-way, and obeying rules of the road. Highlighting the cognitive jump from completing the task in a friction-free space like the desert to an urban setting, Thrun conceded that “The challenge is to move from just sensing the environment to understanding the environment.”29 The core problem then for AVs, Boussard points out, is that they are without sentience or understanding, and so “replicating the process of human perception and decision-making is both complicated and impossible (with current technology).”30

Three point turn In retrospect, the now historical, observational studies of Alison Smithson and Venturi et al. offer some parallels to the contemporary technological tools used by AVs in order to navigate the environment. Both employ techniques of scanning, sensing, tracking, categorizing, and mapping as they monitor the landscape at high resolution from the perspective of a car, trying to capture a complete awareness of the surrounding environment. Yet the work of Smithson and Venturi et al. offer more than efficiency of data and statistical estimates. They bring a much needed, reflective, embodied, ethnographic, sociological, and political thinking to the complex ways by which the technology of the car has shaped the built environment and human behaviour. This prehistory of sensing the environment from the perspective of the moving car had a completely different set of objectives than that of the contemporary mobile sensing vehicle. Instead of sensing the environment in order to successfully navigate from A to B, as is the case with AVs, Smithson and Venturi el al. sensed the environment to understand how the car has altered the urban fabric. For Venturi et al. the study of the “as found”environment while in motion was important because “it teaches us … to be more understanding and less authoritarian in the plans we make.”31

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If there has been one paradigm that has defined urban development throughout the twentieth century, it has been the car. The resultant culturally and spatially entrenched patterns of automobility are undeniable. Looking forward, the discourse about its future as shaped by automakers and the technology industry is focussed on deterministic solutions with values of logic, predictability, and efficiency as the primary objective functions. But in order to overcome the perceptual risks and interpretive shortcomings posed by both the AV technology itself and the auto and technology industries at large, we need to include a more diverse array of thinking into the process of understanding, imagining, and designing for the complexity, unpredictability, and irregularity of real-world environments. As architecture professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Marshall Brown, reminds us, “a society is cultural, and political, and aesthetic, and about desires—it’s not just how you solve problems.”32 Technical problems aside, the challenges posed by AV development are undoubtedly much more complex than originally anticipated. If we want to move beyond the technocratic ambitions of AVs, future AV policy needs to reflect the potential societal and cultural implications. Just as the car influenced the development of cities so too will AVs create new cradles of power and shape the future of regulation and development. The role of architects and urbanists in this new era of urban change is as important as ever.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9

10

11 12 13 14 15

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Alison Smithson, AS in DS: An Eye on the Road (Baden, Switzerland: Lars Muller Publishers, 1983). Ibid., 1. Ibid., 23. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972). Nigel Bertram, Furniture, Structure, Infrastructure: Making and Using the Urban Environment (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2013). Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). 2012, 5 September. “Look Ma, No Hands!” [news release], www.ieee.org/about/news/2012/5september-2-2012.html (accessed November 1, 2018). Bloomberg Philanthropies, Taming the Autonomous Vehicle: A Primer for Cities. (New York: Bloomberg, 2017). McKinsey & Company, An Integrated Perspective on the Future of Mobility (New York: McKinsey & Company, 2016), http://bit.ly/FutureMob_B (accessed November 1, 2018). David Levinson, The Transportation Futures Project: Planning for Technology Change, Minnesota Department of Transportation, Office of Transportation System Management, research report (January 2016). Christopher Mims, “Driverless Hype Collides With Merciless Reality,” The Wall Street Journal, September 13, 2018, www.wsj.com/articles/driverless-hype-collides-with-merciless-reality-1536831005 (accessed November 1, 2018). Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge, Code/Space: The Software of Everyday Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 106. Adam Greenfield, Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life (London: Verso, 2017), 474. Shannon Mattern, “Mapping’s Intelligent Agents,” Places Journal, September 2017, https://doi.org/ 10.22269/170926 (accessed November 1, 2018). Bloomberg Philanthropies, Taming the Autonomous Vehicle: A Primer for Cities. (New York: Bloomberg, 2017), 50. McKinsey & Company, Automotive Revolution—Perspective Towards 2030, (New York: McKinsey & Company, 2016), 4.

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16 Bloomberg Philanthropies, Taming the Autonomous Vehicle: A Primer for Cities (New York: Bloomberg, 2017). 17 Carlo Ratti and Matthew Claudel, The City of Tomorrow: Sensors, Networks, Hackers, and the Future of Urban Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 99. 18 Ibid., 103. 19 Ibid. 20 UC Davis, Institute of Transportation Studies, Disruptive Transportation: The Adoption, Utilization, and Impacts of Ride-Hailing in the United States, research report—UCD-ITS-RR-17-07, October 2017. 21 Bruce Schaller, “Unsustainable? The Growth of App-Based Ride Services and Traffic, Travel and the Future of New York City,” Schaller Consulting, February 2017, schallerconsult.com/rideservices/ unsustainable.htm (accessed November 1, 2018). 22 Mimi Sheller, Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes (London: Verso, 2018), 268. 23 Geoff Manaugh, “The Dream Life of Driverless Cars,” The New York Times, November 15, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/11/15/magazine/the-dream-life-of-driverless-cars.html?_r=0 (accessed November 1, 2018). 24 Florian Cramer, 2016, Crapularity Hermeneutics, http://cramer.pleintekst.nl/essays/crapularity_herme neutics/#fnref37 (accessed November 1, 2018). 25 Bjarke Ingels Group, (Driver)less is More (Denmark, 2013). 26 Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). 27 Maya Indira Ganesh 2016. “Cities After Cars, Places After Data,” December 1, 2016, https://theso cietypages.org/cyborgology/2016/12/01/cities-after-cars-places-after-data/. 28 Meredith Broussard, Artificial Unintelligence:How Computers Misunderstand the World (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), 124. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 132. 31 Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form, 6. 32 Anna Wiener, “Full Tilt: When 100% of Cars are Autonomous,” The New York Times, November 7, 2017, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/08/magazine/tech-design-autonomous-future-cars-100percent-augmented-reality-policing.html#picturing-the-self-driving-city (accessed November 1, 2018).

References Bertram, Nigel. 2013. Furniture, Structure, Infrastructure: Making and Using the Urban Environment. Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing. Bjarke Ingels Group. 2013. (Driver)less is More. Denmark. Available online: https://vimeo.com/68835782. Bloomberg Philanthropies. 2017. Taming the Autonomous Vehicle: A Primer for Cities. New York: Bloomberg. Cramer, Florian. 2016. Crapularity Hermeneutics. Available online: http://cramer.pleintekst.nl/essays/crapu larity_hermeneutics/#fnref37. Dunne, Anthony and Fiona Raby. 2013. Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Ganesh, Maya Indira. 2016. “Cities After Cars, Places After Data,” December 1. Available online: https:// thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2016/12/01/cities-after-cars-places-after-data. Greenfield, Adam. 2017. Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life. London: Verso. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). 2012, 5 September. “Look Ma, No Hands!” [news release], www.ieee.org/about/news/2012/5september-2-2012.html (accessed November 1, 2018). Kitchin, Rob and Martin Dodge. 2011. Code/Space: The Software of Everyday Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Levinson, David. 2016. “The Transportation Futures Project: Planning for Technology Change,” Minnesota Department of Transportation, Office of Transportation System Management, Research Report (January 2016). Manaugh, Geoff. 2015, November 15. “The Dream Life of Driverless Cars,” The New York Times. Available online: www.nytimes.com/2015/11/15/magazine/the-dream-life-of-driverless-cars.html?_r=0. Mattern, Shannon. 2017, September. “Mapping’s Intelligent Agents,” Places Journal. Accessed 6 November 2018: https://doi.org/10.22269/170926. McKinsey & Company. 2016a. An Integrated Perspective on the Future of Mobility (New York: McKinsey & Company), http://bit.ly/FutureMob_B (accessed November 1, 2018).

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McKinsey & Company. 2016b. Automotive Revolution—Perspective Towards 2030, (New York: McKinsey & Company), 4. Mims, Christopher. 2018, 13 September. “Driverless Hype Collides With Merciless Reality,” The Wall Street Journal. Available online: www.wsj.com/articles/driverless-hype-collides-with-merciless-reality1536831005. Ratti, Carlo and Claudel Matthew. 2016. The City of Tomorrow: Sensors, Networks, Hackers, and the Future of Urban Life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Schaller, Bruce. 2017. “Unsustainable? The Growth of App-Based Ride Services and Traffic, Travel and the Future of New York City,” Schaller Consulting, February 27. Available online: schallerconsult.com/ride services/unsustainable.htm. Sheller, Mimi. 2018. Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes. London: Verso. Smithson, Alison. 1983. AS in DS: An Eye on the Road. Baden, Switzerland: Lars Muller Publishers. UC Davis, Institute of Transportation Studies, Disruptive Transportation: The Adoption, Utilization, and Impacts of Ride-Hailing in the United States, research report—UCD-ITS-RR-17-07, October 2017. Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. 1972. Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wiener, Anna. 2017, 7 November. “Full Tilt: When 100% of Cars are Autonomous,” The New York Times. Available online: www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/08/magazine/tech-design-autonomous-futurecars-100-percent-augmented-reality-policing.html#picturing-the-self-driving-city.

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accountability 5, 176, 180, 188, 191 actors 6, 11–12, 36–8, 79, 98, 104, 129–131, 199, 231, 240–2, 250 advocacy planning 36–7 aesthetics 10, 24, 61, 87, 90, 117, 189, 211, 216, 218, 248, 251 affordable 49, 115, 168–171, 173–4, 189 agency 6, 8–9, 12, 19, 85, 120, 126–7, 136, 198, 202–207, 235, 238–243, 253 Airbnb 79, 168 Alexa 87, 91, 114, 160 algorithm 10, 75, 78, 88, 94, 97, 121, 157, 159, 161, 192, 197–200, 202–3, 206–7, 217, 250 anonymisation 12, 65, 191, 216 apolitical 6–7, 18, 115 Archigram 22, 50–1, 143 Artificial Intelligence (AI) 5, 12, 76, 97, 147, 157, 166, 183, 224, 238, 241–3, 250 autonomous vehicles/self-driving 12, 24, 166, 226, 249–252

control 1, 5–11, 18, 22, 25, 33–4, 45, 47–53, 56, 58, 60–1, 74–5, 78, 85, 88, 90, 97–8, 101–3, 105–6, 109, 113–15, 119–121, 131, 140, 142–4, 148, 158–163, 187–8, 191–2, 199, 228, 234, 250 corporate 19, 22–3, 64, 91, 108, 117, 120–1, 141–5, 167, 173–5, 199 Couroux, Marc 8, 101–6 crowdsourcing 107, 175, 180 customisation 10–11, 91, 94 cyberaffordance 8, 102, 104–6 cybernetics 4, 7, 30, 34–6, 40, 75, 140, 143, 145 cyberspace 60, 76–8

Bettencourt, Luis 30, 37–8 big data 3, 5, 12, 29–30, 37, 39–40, 157, 166–7, 177, 183, 223–5, 227, 231, 234–5, 241–3 blockchain 88, 94, 97, 229

data privacy 17, 23 dataset 12, 35, 37–40, 106–7, 113, 141, 224 decentralisation 11, 35, 72, 94, 98, 106, 108, 199 decision-making 33, 52, 63, 128, 130, 145, 148–9, 237, 253 Deleuze, Gilles 8, 120, 158 democracy/democratic 4, 37, 53, 126–130, 133, 135–6, 145–9, 179 digital environment 223, 225 digital representation 226 digital world 227–8, 230–1 drone 19, 24 dystopia 6, 47, 59, 66, 119, 144, 252

capitalism 7, 56–66, 98, 105–6, 108, 113, 116–17, 119 centralisation 11, 64–5, 78, 119–120, 181–2, 199 civic engagement 178, 200 cloud 20, 40, 69, 78–80, 197 co-creation 130 community-led/community-based 106, 180, 182

ecological capital 10, 165–6 efficiency 1, 4–6, 23, 25, 45, 49, 51, 53, 70, 88, 91, 94, 97–8, 116, 118, 123, 127–128, 135, 141–3, 148, 158, 163, 166–7, 177, 181, 210, 237, 249, 251, 253–4 Ekistics 56, 61–2 environment 4–6, 8, 10–12, 19, 21, 23, 25, 33, 49, 57, 65, 79, 91–2, 97, 104, 114,

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116, 118, 122, 144, 147, 160, 163, 176, 180, 189, 190–1, 197, 199–200, 203, 206, 210–6, 217, 226–7, 231–2, 241, 247–8, 251, 253; see also digital environment environmental noise 187, 190–2 experience 6, 10–11, 19, 36, 43, 61, 68–9, 90–1, 94, 98, 108, 127–9, 146, 149, 186, 202, 204, 207, 210–8, 226–8, 230, 247, 252–3 experimentation 141–2, 148 Feenberg, Andrew 5–6 Fordism/Taylorism 1, 91 Forrester, Jay 35–6, 143; see also Urban Dynamics freedom (individual) 1, 6, 8, 58–9, 60, 65, 88, 94, 127, 213, 215 Fuller, Buckminster 18, 61, 143 gentrification 60, 62, 64, 174, 190 globalisation 20, 22, 56–7, 59, 61, 63–5 Greenfield, Adam 52, 79, 161–2, 173, 249 health 3, 57, 114, 118, 167–9, 173, 175–6, 178, 182, 186, 189–190, 237, 249 Henard, Eugene 24, 118 human agency 12, 126–7, 136, 235, 243 ICT Corporations 6–7, 17, 120; Alphabet, Inc. 23, 37, 79, 121; Amazon 88, 91, 98, 114, 128, 160, 162, 174, 236, 243, 250; Apple 162, 243, 250; Cisco 3, 37, 43, 120, 157, 199; Facebook 88, 94, 236, 243; Google 23, 29, 37, 79, 91, 94, 98, 106–7, 114, 132, 157, 162–3, 202, 226, 236, 243, 250; Hitachi 3; IBM 3, 29, 37, 43–5, 48–9, 76, 140, 199; Microsoft 3, 157; Siemens 3, 19, 79, 120, 140 imaginaries of the future 56, 141–2 immaterial 9, 21, 78–9, 197–8, 202–3, 207 industrial revolution 58, 70, 88 information communication technologies (ICTs) 3, 8, 25, 45–6, 49, 52–3, 126–7, 129, 136 infrastructure 3, 7, 9–10, 17, 20, 25, 37, 43, 45, 47, 49, 50–3, 63, 77–9, 88, 97–8, 105, 108, 121, 127–9, 139–146, 148–9, 166–7, 169, 173–4, 178, 180–2, 200, 211, 217, 249; digital infrastructure 105, 201; social infrastructure 165–6, 174, 176–8; urban infrastructure 33, 116, 140, 191, 215 interface 4, 9–10, 78, 94, 106–7, 159, 199, 201–2, 227, 229, 252 Internet of Things (IoT) 4–5, 57, 61–2, 79, 87, 89, 90, 93–4, 97–8, 131, 140, 157–9, 160–2, 166, 197, 232

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Jacobs, Jane 22, 36–7, 70, 129, 180; The Death and Life of Great American Cities 36, 70 Jameson, Frederic 56, 58 Koolhaas, Rem 3–4, 49, 51, 158–9 Le Corbusier 65, 70, 74 Lefebvre, Henri 9, 113, 117, 126, 127–9, 130, 135, 223, 227, 229; see also Right to the City living lab 130, 141 Marx, Karl 59, 64, 116 materiality 9, 22, 148 Mattern, Shannon 114, 127, 250 methods 22, 26, 30–3, 35–9, 40, 45, 79, 88, 103, 120, 136, 176, 186, 188, 193, 198, 205–6, 224, 236, 243, 248; quantitative methods 30, 33, 36, 40 mobility 12, 20, 90, 97, 107, 115, 211, 213, 217, 225, 235, 249, 250–2, 254 modernity 7, 59, 62, 64, 70 More, Thomas 6–7, 47–53, 56–7; see also Utopia multi-stakeholder 126–7, 129, 130, 136 Negroponte, Nicholas 4, 144 network 2, 5–6, 8–11, 19, 21, 33–7, 39, 50, 56, 59, 61–2, 75, 77–9, 88, 90, 94, 97–8, 105, 115, 120–2, 140–1, 146, 148–9, 158, 166, 171, 175–8, 180, 183, 190, 197, 199, 203, 212, 217–18, 221, 223–5, 235–6, 242, 250 open data 126–8, 130–6, 191 paradigm shift 7, 29, 80, 240 participation 4–5, 8, 47, 53, 57–9, 60, 65, 115–6, 126–9, 130, 135–6, 148–9, 172, 176, 182–3, 229 participatory planning 179–180 policy 12, 17, 24, 38, 52, 120, 128, 130, 132–3, 136, 142, 146, 161, 175, 178, 183, 186, 189, 234, 235, 237, 239, 240–3, 254 privacy 22, 51–2, 90 public space 10, 49, 128, 172–4, 179, 192, 199, 223, 227, 230 quadruple helix 130, 135 resources 21, 45, 57, 60, 63, 106, 118, 128, 135, 141, 158, 166–7, 176, 178, 180, 182–3, 199, 205, 241

Index

Right to the City 9, 126–131, 135–6, 165–6, 183 safety 1, 3–4, 25, 49, 106, 114, 131, 140, 143, 159, 165–6, 179, 210, 214–5, 217, 237, 249 scenario 9, 12, 121–3, 139–140, 142–9, 150, 159, 210, 224–6 Scott Brown, Denise 19, 248 segregation 165, 173–4, 234 sensor networks 140, 190 Sidewalk Labs 22, 24, 37, 115, 120–1, 123, 129 Silicon Valley 60, 62 smart citizens 2, 129, 140–1, 148, 177–8, 193 smart environments 144, 148 Smart Flanders program 9, 132, 135, 137 smart home 157–9, 160–3 Smithson, Alison 247–8, 253 social capital 16–8, 171–6, 178–9, 180–1, 183 social justice 10, 169 social physics 31, 234, 237 social responsibility 167, 180 software 8, 17–18, 22, 68, 79, 103, 106, 119, 120–1, 135, 141, 144, 197–8, 200, 203–6, 226, 250 sound mapping 187–8, 191–2 speculative 51, 90, 101–2, 123, 141–2, 146, 149, 167, 172 standardisation 1, 20, 132, 135, 176–7, 223 statistics 31–2, 176, 224 Stengers, Isabelle 10, 158, 163 Sterling, Bruce 26, 157 sublime 26, 216 subsumption 56–7

Superstudio 56, 63–5, 87–8, 98, 143–4 surveillance 49, 60, 91, 119, 163, 165, 188, 191 sustainability 21–3, 45, 49, 52, 65, 79, 115–6, 127, 136, 139, 140–1, 145, 147–9, 150, 176–7, 182, 199, 243, 249 systems theory 34, 78, 142, 145 tabula rasa 20, 118 technocratic 3, 17–18, 23, 34, 36, 52, 102, 106, 116, 118, 128, 254 Townsend, Anthony 3, 37, 43–6, 51, 127 Uber 79, 119, 250–1 ubiquitous computing 4, 9, 78, 116, 140–1, 144, 198, 232 Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) see drone urban data 29–30, 37 Urban Dynamics 35, 143 urban operating system 18 urban planning 12, 29, 30–1, 33–4, 36, 38, 40, 56, 62, 69, 79–80, 101, 106–7, 109, 167, 176, 235, 239, 240–1, 243 urban transformations 141–2, 146, 149, 150, 251 utopia 1, 5–7, 20, 25, 31, 43–53, 56–66, 113, 139, 141, 144, 228 Utopia 7, 47–8, 50–3, 57–8 Venturi, Robert 19, 248, 253 Weiser, Mark 9, 78 wellbeing 37, 88, 91, 98, 128, 167, 176, 186, 217 West, Geoffrey 30, 38 Wiener, Norbert 35, 75, 143; see also cybernetics

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