Digital oases in the analog desert. Sensing the first materializations of a smart city in Seestadt / Sebastian Bornschlegl

In the north-east of Vienna, a city-within-a-city has been built on the area of a former airfield over the past decade. An artificial lake lends this flagship project of urban development its name: Seestadt. It is advertised as an urban laboratory and smart city development region. Here, the dream of a seamlessly connected, smart urban infrastructure was cast into fresh layers of concrete, wires and silicon. In my visual vignette, I explore Seestadt as a digital oasis at the very fringes of the urban analog desert. Beyond lies only the vastness of rural space. Building on critical work on the smart city discourse and its material impact on urbanity across the globe, I study two smart city applications belonging to the mobility sector: the test operation of two autonomous shuttle buses and a station-based bike rental service. As these case studies show, the smart city grid of Seestadt does not form a uniform fabric that covers all of its territory, but is separated into multiple oases. Bordering practices thus take place on two levels: between analog and smart urbanity, and in between specialized smart oases. I based the visual vignette on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the quarter. Through my own senses, and with the help of digital sensors, I tried to sense the sensing networks of Seestadt. Found footage on the quarter blends with my own photographs. Visually, the vignette is self-referential: It employs the panoptic gaze of city planning and smart city applications to study these very phenomena.

Bio: Sebastian Bornschlegl completed the Science–Technology–Society Master Program at the Department of Science and Technology Studies at the University of Vienna. His thesis on the re-assembly of mobility for automated public transport takes place in Seestadt, just like the artwork he will present at the symposium. Previously, he studied Theater, Film and Media Studies as well as Comparative Literature Studies.