As argued in the text, “Indicator, benchmarking and dashboad initiatives thus inherently express a normative notion about what should be measured and how it should be measured. The are full of values, judgements and deliberate strategies of occlusion […] They not only present urban systems, but actively help produce them” (p.28) In this scenario, what are the paths to create policies, auditing, or participating in such models of shaping the city?
On Gabrys’s text, if withness is understood as “an articulation of processes of participatinf that involve becoming together, across and extended array of entities, and setting in motion the connections and inheritance that take hold to become something like urban infrastrucure” (p. 263) How does withnessing address the problem of the different forms of agency that comes into the design of technology and into urban planning? Sepecially when as stated by the own text “Our urban future is differently distributed depending upon how close to the machine we are” (p. 264)
Also in Gabrys’s text, how does her proposal of “speculative cities” takes into account the contingency and indeterminacy proposed by Simondon to open new paths of active agency over the city, or to new forms of participation?