on Kitchin, Lauriault and McArdle, “Smart cities and the politics of urban data,” Smart Urbanism: Utopian Vision or False Dawn pp. 16-33
This chapter underlines the urgency to revisit existing smart-city technologies. The most constructive start in this process seems to be the exposure of the data assemblage (pp22) that produces them as opposed to its usual concealment or disregarding (pp30). The process of this revelation would be inevitably political itself – especially if It would not be enough to merely present the dispositif to all stakeholders, but to allow them to understand and actively engage with it too. What would the means of such a process be? How can we keep it from inheriting the same weaknesses that indicator, benchmarking and dashboard initiatives demonstrate?
Being the final visual output of city-sensing, dashboards are responsible for the illusion that a city is a collection of absolute facts to be observed. However, it is the conception of data as a solid, stand-alone series of facts that creates this oversimplified approach to city management in the first place, as it decontextualizes the city from the complex relations that constitute it (pp27). Should the next generation of the smart-city toolbox emphasize on making those relations between facts more apparent to citizens and city managers as a means to prove their contingent nature?
Also, how would a spatial interface with the ability to render these relations tangible look like?
on Gabrys, “Digital Infrastructures of Withness: Constructing a Speculative City,” Program Earth, pp.241-266
Within the digital infrastructures of smart cities, various types of participation arise, some of which produce modalities of withness. As opposed to the usual approach to participatory urbanism that attends to the ways through which individuals and communities are empowered to get involved, withness identifies the human and more-than-human parts that together constitute “a wider infrastructural network of participatory and transindividuating politics and action” (pp243). Is this shift telling of a more post-human approach to urbanism? Would there be enough room for human agency in the cybernetic vision of the city as an “automated urban organism” (pp253)? Also, when Gabrys considers digital infrastructure as Automatism, she refers to Easterling’s quote saying “designing infrastructure is designing action” to suggest that infrastructures and actions coincide and co-emerge (pp257). Are they co-designed as well though? Isn’t the city-as-platform scenario, mostly promoted and implemented by corporations such as Microsoft and IBM, a profoundly top-down one?
Gabrys identifies a paradox in the evolution of abstract technology, where the process of its concretization is apparently one of high indeterminacy (pp254). Is this margin of indeterminacy a fertile ground for all three modalities of withness – measurement, automatism, contingency- or only for the latter?