Interactive Sessions
Interactive Session #1 Thursday, March 10, 12:30 - 1:30 pm
Locked out of the neoliberal Smart City: a-systemic technologies in crisis? A WebVR (Mozilla Hubs) installation and hands-on workshop / Eleanor Dare, Cambridge University
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.
Bio: Dr Eleanor Dare teaches on MA Arts, Creativities and Education, MA Transforming Practice and BA Education, at Cambridge University, Faculty of Education, as well as continuing to develop stories and critical practices, predominantly within game engines. Eleanor was formerly Reader in Digital Media and Head of Programme for MA Digital Direction, at the Royal College of Art. Eleanor has been a PI and CO-I on a number of projects involving immersive storytelling and emerging technologies and is currently a Co-Investigator for the RCA/British Council Crafting Futures project as well as an organizing member of the Arts Creativities Research Group at Cambridge.
Interactive Session #2 Thursday, March 10, 12:30 - 1:30 pm
Legend of Smartopia / Abhishek Viswanathan, Bonnie Fan
Whose needs are (un)met when planning cities? This is the central question we try to investigate with our role-playing game – Legend of Smartopia. Players assume various roles in the city – bus driver, non-profit president, university chancellor, tech-worker, fast-food worker, etc. and use their varying degrees of power to advance agendas according to prevalent modes of urban planning. Impossible choices abound in our acceleration towards a vision of modernity that concentrates power in the already powerful, while surveilling and surpassing the rest of us. Based on real-world struggles in Pittsburgh and elsewhere, this game will look at the mechanisms through which a smart agenda papers over inconvenient facts and reinforces existing forms of oppression.
Bios: Abhishek is an immigrant, organizer, and phd student with decolonial desires currently designing projects to address issues of environmental injustice and poor air quality in the Pittsburgh region. He is interested in exploring the gap between the abundance of dire environmental data, and the civic action that is necessary to remedy it. Bonnie Fan is a monkey and community organizer dancing in the halls of Carnegie Mellon University. They channel institutional complicity into centering radical and grassroots movement work against techno-solutionism, settlement, and carcerality. They organize with Pittsburghers for Public Transit, Coalition Against Predictive Policing Pittsburgh, and the coveillance collective.
Interactive Session #3 Friday, March 11, 12:30 - 1:30 pm
Mapping the Citational Architecture of the Smart City: An Interactive Workshop / Junnan Mu, Harvard University; Nicolas Zehner, University of Edinburgh; Cassandre Rey-Thibault, Université Paris-Est; Nicole Bassoff, Harvard University
"Smartification" often appears as a floating signifier, tagging projects with a kind of virtue that transcends a singular ideal type. Yet the English-language term "smart city" travels and seemingly holds together across contexts through practices of linkage, reference, and networking that connect different uses of the term to one another. We propose that a partial answer to the question, ‘What keeps the notion of the "smart city" alive?’ is contained in its textual inscriptions. Inspired by studies of metapragmatics in sociocultural linguistics (Silverstein, 1993; Silverstein and Urban, 1996), we want to explore the citational architecture of “smart city” as an infrastructure allowing the circulation and sustaining the liveness of the term in its articulation with concrete projects globally. In particular we are interested in the textual inscription of “smart city” in strategic plans and academic, consulting and corporate reports that ground the conceptualization of the “smart city” empirically. Recognizing that mapping this web of citations internationally could enhance our collective study of the "smart city" signifier, we propose an interactive, virtual workshop to crowd-source the creation of a preliminary citational map of smart cities and smart city institutions internationally. Organizers will present a preliminary starting map to participants based on the organizers' own work on different smart cities around the world (including US, UK, Kenya, and France). The map would help to visualize the "linking" of different smart city projects together based on a review of different mentions and references in plans and reports. Participants are asked to prepare by collecting similar instances of citation in documents related to smart cities they study. During the workshop participants will share these inputs and work together using the tool Miro to explore linkages and patterns. The workshop is an opportunity to explore the value of such citational mapping exercises and would help to grow connections between "smart city" researchers, revealing ways of drawing “smart cities” together that help cut through the seeming empty ubiquity of the term.
Bios: Junnan Mu is a Ph.D. student in African and African American Studies with a primary field in Anthropology. Her research centers on urbanism and digital technology in Africa. She is also interested in exploring the experiential and sensorial aspects of city-making through a combination of audio and video language. Junnan Mu is a Ph.D. student in African and African American Studies with a primary field in Anthropology. Her research centers on urbanism and digital technology in Africa. She is also interested in exploring the experiential and sensorial aspects of city-making through a combination of audio and video language. Nicolas Zehner is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Edinburgh and a visiting research fellow in the Science, Technology & Society Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. In his research he aims to shed light on the practice of city-making by examining how urban planning agents construct and diffuse specific urban-regional sociotechnical imaginaries. In particular, his dissertation focuses on the role of scientific expertise in the drive for ‘smart urbanism’. Cassandre Rey-Thibault is a PhD candidate at the Université Paris Est, Paris, and a visiting fellow in the Science, Technology & Society Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is interested in the local practices to face urban risk and crisis. She points out the highly fragmentation of expertise, actors and devices to face both, with an analysis that lies at the intersection between geography of risk and crisis and the sociology of administration and organization. Nicole Bassoff is a PhD Candidate in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, in the Science and Technology Policy track. She is a co-founder and co-organizer of the Graduate Research in STS (GRiSTS) Conference and holds an MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine from the University of Cambridge. Broadly she is interested in the shifting social compact between city and citizen in the digital age.