Panel #2: Inequity in/of smartness
A collection of artwork and presentations
Panel image artwork by Macktoom and Fatima
Contesting smartness in an unequal city / Soha Macktoom, Karachi Urban Lab, NED University, Nazeer Hussain University; Aqdas Fatima, Karachi Urban Lab
Who is smart in an unequal city? Discourses on rural/urban dynamics often homogenize “city” experiences, glossing over uneven terrains of liveability, particularly in developing cities of the Global South. Contesting this discourse is pertinent as cities get hotter under impacts of climate change, with variegated ecologies contributing to differentiated lived experience, especially as city aesthetics are driven by ideas of the “World Class City”. In the post-colonial context of Karachi –the largest metropolis in Pakistan– urban experiences of smartification are highly variegated both spatially and temporally. With an unofficial population of 25 million, and 62% of its residents living in informal settlements, the city hosts a diverse range of thermal experiences, as well as “smart” and “unsmart” technologies used to manage them. We combine visual analysis techniques with ethnographic data and use Karachi as a lens to explore and complicate the discourse of smart urban cities in the Global South. By forming a visual landscape using material layering techniques, we examine vernacular cooling practices, materialialities, and technologies, particularly as they interplay with spatial and socio-political inequalities. In our sketch, we portray the unequal city not only through aesthetics of the built environment, but also in the ways in which globally informed ideas of smartification interfere with culturally grounded practices. In doing so, we not only present multiscalar perspectives on “smartness” when it comes to cooling, but also tackle their compounding impacts with factors such as density, structural vulnerabilities, and ongoing colonial legacies.
Bios: Soha Macktoom is an Architect, with a Master's degree in Urban and Regional Planning from NED University of Engineering and Technology, Karachi, Pakistan. She is currently working at Karachi Urban Lab, IBA, as a senior research associate and teaches in the capacity of a visiting faculty at NED University and Nazeer Hussain University. Aqdas Fatima is an anthropologist with a Bachelor’s degree in Social and Biological Anthropology from the University of Kent, United Kingdom. She is currently working at Karachi Urban Lab, IBA, as research associate.
Hybrid Justice: Urban AI for Equitable and Sustainable Semi-Smart Cities / Mennatullah Hendawy, Ain Shams University, TU Berlin, UMass Amherst; Stephanie Sherman, University of Arts London; Katrien Pype, KU Leuven; Farah el Beheiry, Impact Circles; Raneem Alaa Abdulghany, Ain Shams University; Samah ElKhateeb, Ain Shams University
Technology companies in collaboration with governments are developing and integrating computational technologies into urban landscapes worldover. With the advent of Covid-19, the “smart city” movement has accelerated, introducing digital services, infrastructural transformations, and urban planning innovations that integrate AI into the hardware and software of urban coordination and decision making. The paper proposes that Urban AI can and should be a tool that facilitates environmental and social justice, and that technology transitions offer a special opening for designing just and sustainable cities. We argue that while we must recognize technological critiques and precautions, the work of academics, social change agents, and technologists should be to conceptualize and leverage AI as a tool for the redistribution of resources, and that visioning it and planning for it in this way is a critical step to making this outcome possible. Through the lens of hybrid justice, we propose a non-binary process of technological and social change, one that is mutually contingent, draws upon a balance between top-down and bottom-up perspectives, and deployes Urban AI not only as an instrument but as a logic for the planning and implementation of spatial justice. We argue that through this process, the integration of Urban AI reframes intelligence, planning, and spatial relationships, shifting the ways we understand justice in the city itself.
Bios: Mennatullah is a postdoc research associate at the HCI-VIZ Lab, CICS, UMass Amherst. She is an interdisciplinary urban planner working on the intersection of cities and technology towards justice-driven interactions. She received her Ph.D. in Planning Building Environment from TU Berlin in Germany, and a MSc. of Integrated Urbanism and Sustainable Design with a focus on urban policies from Stuttgart University. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Architectural Engineering from Ain Shams University in Cairo, Department of Urban planning and design. Mennatullah was a research associate at the Chair of Urban Design, TU Berlin where she is currently co-leading two research groups: Connecting Urbanity (Funded by Berlin University Alliance) and Towards Equitable Planning Curricula (Funded by TU Berlin).
Disposable: Infrastructures of Exclusion in Dharamshala’s Smart City / Hannah Carlan, Rollins College
In 2015, the current Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, launched the “Smart Cities Mission”: an urban development project aiming to bring sustainable technology and infrastructure to 100 cities across India. One such city that was selected under the program is Dharamshala, a small, semi-urban town located in the foothills of the western Himalayas. Drawing on fieldwork in Dharamshala from 2017-2019, this paper explores how “smart” infrastructures worked to constitute new boundaries of the city through the erasure and eviction of specific people, lands, and animals. Focusing on the narratives of bureaucrats, politicians, and women living at the peripheries of the Smart City, I analyze how different actors articulated the meanings and goals of making the city “smart,” which I argue relied on the selective constitution of both living and non-living entities as disposable. Whereas bureaucrats and politicians envisioned the Smart City Mission as making the city more “livable,” doing so required implementing infrastructure projects that made surrounding rural environments and political institutions unstable and unlivable. I show how these designations of disposability were challenged by nearby residents, who organized to contest the expansion of the Smart City and its imposition on their land, water, and political institutions, thereby articulating alternative understandings of “smartness” and “livability.” In bringing supposedly “smart” infrastructure technologies, I show how the project generated new modes of exclusion, pollution, and inequality for citizens deemed disposable by the state.
Bio: Dr. Hannah Carlan is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Rollins College in Florida, US. Her research examines the role of language in development practice and state bureaucracies in Himachal Pradesh, India. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, International Journal of the Sociology of Language, and Anthropology News, among other venues.
Fantasies of Smart “Self-Sufficiency” and the Production of Inequality Through Enclosure in China / Aaron Su, Princeton University
What are the concrete political consequences of ubiquitous computing, as its regulatory logics – premised on theories of cybernetics and ecology – acquire particular meanings within the local contexts of their implementation? This paper ethnographically examines plans to construct a carbon-neutral, “pandemic-proof” neighbourhood called Self-Sufficient City in Xiong’an, China, a new administrative zone near Beijing where many government agencies are expected to relocate in the coming years. Through the deployment of smart agriculture initiatives (such as hydroponic greenhouses and smart-soil remediation technologies) as well as rooftop solar panels, the smart management of rainwater, and 3-D printing services to sustain a circular bioeconomy, the neighbourhood represents the fantasy of a self-regulating, protected ecological enclosure as the ideal technical fix for concerns pertaining to public health and the environment. Through ethnographic fieldwork with the architects in charge of the plan, I criticize the logic of self-sufficient enclosure sustained by smart urbanism and its cybernetic practices. I further reveal how the abstract logics of enclosure sustained by cybernetics and ecology can reverberate in geopolitical dramas as well as reinforce the reproduction of class and ethnic inequalities in China.
Bio: Aaron Su is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University. He researches how pandemic preparedness and public health practices interact with issues of class, race, ethnicity, and indigeneity in Taiwan and China.
FloodSmart: “Equity in Action” or Equity Inaction? / Martin Abbott, Cornell University
The digital node of FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program is FloodSmart.gov, a website established to “tell the story of flood risk.” According to FEMA, flooding causes more damage than any other natural hazard in the USA. To sell the benefits of insurance, the virtue of property protection and recovery are emphasized. Equally important is the story not told. In the USA and especially New Orleans, low-income groups and communities of colour live in high flood risk areas and are disproportionately affected by flooding. FEMA’s story also fails to mention how urban flooding caused by heavy rainfall over the built environment remains difficult to model digitally due to a dynamic array of intersecting social, technological, and environmental relationships. Instead, FEMA highlights a new and transformational smart flood technology, “Risk Rating 2.0—Equity in Action,” which they claim represents a seismic shift in how risk and the price of insurance are determined. However, the algorithm behind Risk 2.0’s new methodology considers economic fairness only. Environmental equity and racial justice considerations are not included in the algorithm. In this paper, I draw on ethnographic and interview data to show how FEMA’s Risk 2.0 perpetuates environmental inequity and racial injustice in New Orleans. I argue how stories of smart flood technologies are told is a matter of care for how we re-think ways of knowing urban landscapes in order to build more resilient coastal futures for everyone as climate change takes effect.
Bio: Martin Abbott is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. His research is concerned with the scientific and social nature of urban flooding, risk, and map-making. This research is focused on New Orleans and how the Federal Emergency Management Agency has refined the city’s Flood Insurance Rate Map. These maps form the backbone of FEMA's trillion-dollar National Flood Insurance Program and rank among governments’ most powerful tools to not only minimize the impact of flooding, but to also adapt cities to climate change.