Locked out of the neoliberal Smart City: a-systemic technologies in crisis? / Eleanor Dare

A WebVR (Mozilla Hubs) installation and hands-on workshop

An online virtual space will be co-created, enabling a nonlinear, critical examination of how smart city rhetoric fails marginalized communities in the UK and beyond. The accusation that smart cities are simplistic and idealized, is one of Greenfield’s (2013) main criticisms, developers of smart cities, Greenfield states, ‘think of the urban environment primarily as an abstract terrain for business operations’; In this work, sonic, visual and embodied forms of smartness will counter such reductionism, surfacing relationships between the over determination and militarism of Virtual Reality (VR) (Rose, 2018, Suchman, 2016) and neoliberal Smart City rhetoric. The proposed virtual space and workshop (which will take place within a virtual environment) will investigate alternative constructions of smartness and smart subjectivities/spatialities.

Participants will be invited to change the installation and contribute their own smartness, investigating ways of working together and framing intelligences beyond the extractivist logic of surveillance and the Internet of Things. The installation and workshop will ask what we mean by smartness, in what way does neoliberal smartness contradict itself, does it create cities which neglect communities and environments? Can alternative smart systems effectively challenge social and environmental inequalities, and what role does design play in these processes? What kinds of design prevents social equality? (Ansari, 2016, Irani, 2018). Who is left out of these constructs and why? The space has potential to unfold across urban, oceanic, agricultural and other settings, to be underpinned by an openness to new understandings of intelligence and alternative logic(s) for digital and non-digital systems.