Panel #4: Smartness in and beyond the City
A collection of artwork and presentations
Wal*Smartification: Documenting the Superimposition of Dockless Shared Electric Scooters on Fayetteville, Arkansas / Devin Shepherd and Juliette Walker, University of Arkansas
Arkansas is a place whose recent past and imminent future are determined by major corporations; nowhere is this more true than in Northwest Arkansas, home to what are colloquially known as the Big Three: Tyson Foods, J.B. Hunt, and Walmart Inc. Given even this broadly painted backdrop, it will perhaps be unsurprising that the way the Arkansas electric scooter law, Act 1015, is written, means that municipalities may reasonably regulate e-scooter companies, but they are not permitted to ban them. What I am proposing, alongside artist and collaborator Juliette Walker, is to contribute to this conference a risograph-printed publication that will critically examine—through photographs, a coordinated map, and at least one essay—the phenomenon of foisting e-scooters upon the city of Fayetteville, Arkansas. Part of the critical text will connect the undemocratic appearance of smart scooters in this locality to a larger trend of corporations abusing asymmetrical information access and capitalized power to domineer localities across the nation in a way that was famously pioneered by a logistically savvy household name from this very region. The visual discrepancies between scooters and the preexisting logic of the built environment will also illustrate the lack of planning and care behind the hastily deployed electric scooters. In general, I am hoping to provide a semiotic analysis alongside a phenomenological one, in booklet form, figuring the space of a small city as a palimpsest whose latest layer is, as is traditional, what seems to be the smart repurposing of an ostensibly disused space. Printing this publication with a risograph printer means that this publication with all of its information, in both the form of text and image, can be reproduced quickly and at a large scale. Therefore, these publications, like the “smart” e-scooters, can be dispersed with ease.
Bios: Devin Shepherd is a graduate student in the Department of English at the University of Arkansas. Juliette Walker is a graduate student in the MFA visual arts program at the University of Arkansas.
Thinking like a City / Carola Moujan, UMR 7324 CITERES, Center for Research on Ecology and Forestry Applications (CREAF)
Cities are shaped by the interplay of forces grappling with a multiplicity of human choices. Biological, social, mental, technical relationships and processes which make the identity of places. Thinking about the augmented city through the prism of sustainable development requires taking these relationships as a starting point - an approach hardly compatible with the technocentric ideal of Smart Cities. Reducing inhabitants to mere activators of a closed system, the performance utopia conveyed by this model has proved excessively reductive regarding the complexity and messiness of real cities: indeed, “a city is not a computer” (Mattern, 2017). Yet, to respond to the major challenges contemporary cities face today, criticism is not enough. The question thus becomes whether there might be alternative paths to enhanced, more-than-urban, metabolic digital augmentation of cities that support entangled processes of co-evolution, sharing and mutual help between living entities, both organic and human-made. Models of intelligence that, departing from computing and dualistic thinking, drive inspiration from the way forest think (Kohn, 2014). Reflecting on three research-creation projects associating art and design, digital technologies, sentient bodies and urban environments, this presentation will draft possible ways, for urban design, to accompany the transition from Smart Cities to Forest Cities. It will be a question of understanding the role forms may play in the genesis of augmented urban environments, looking at the myriad of relationships that give them birth, and which they, in return, help to structure.
Bio: Carola Moujan is an artist, designer and researcher based in Paris (France). Her practice spans across interaction design, digital art, installation, artist’s editions, urban design, scenography and cartography. Her research through design work explores the entanglement of interactive processes connecting spaces, temporalities, sensitive bodies, affects, materials, and digital code in more than human contexts.
Reboot the Land, Smartify Everything: Cleared Land as Smart Technology Infrastructure in South Korea and Vietnam / Hyo Jung Kim
Minimizing interference in 5G signals is one of the core technical bases to build “smart” environments based on immersive computing. Because existing structures can interrupt 5G communications, building the environment from scratch could be an ideal option for "smart" environments, where everything can be attached to sensors to be managed and optimized based on 5G technologies. While redesigning existing cities into such “smart” environments might not be an easy task in the Global North, in South Korea and Vietnam, physical redesign of the environment has been an ordinary practice. In my presentation, I will discuss the materiality of cleared land in constructing information technology infrastructures for 5G-powered “smart” environments. Smart cities in South Korea and Vietnam are built from scratch, realizing the “test-bed urbanism.” (Halpern et al.) In line with the South Korean government’s aspirations to export replicable “smart” environments, technologies developed and tested in well-controlled, cleared environments are exported to countries that have similar environmental setups. Focusing on Sejong, South Korea, and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, my presentation offers a critical examination of the environmental cost of immersive computing, and the power dynamics in importing and exporting "smart" environments. I will discuss techniques of clearing land (bombing, demolition, eviction) used in the physical redesign of multiple sites, in South Korea and Vietnam from the 1950s onwards, to get rid of material and symbolic barriers that get in the way of technical innovations and the "smartification of everything."
Bio: Hyo Jung Kim is a doctoral student at the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. In her study, Hyo Jung thinks about how the worlds and the relationships they hold can be reappropriated. With that interest, Hyo Jung is currently working on her dissertation project investigating the sociotechnical formation of human-made and natural environments in urban Vietnam, focusing on the contemporary histories of telecommunication technologies with an emphasis on Vietnam-South Korea relations.
Tracing “Smart” Urbanism / Ali Fard, University of Virginia School of Architecture
“Smart” technologies claim to provide not only the tools of technological development but the very environments of human habitation. Smart homes, smart neighbourhoods, smart cities, smart farms, and smart regions present a seemingly seamless scalability to these technologically mediated environments. The body, now instrumented through an assortment of wearable technology, has become an active participant in the scales of smart urbanism. But what may be obfuscated by the high visibility and hype associated with these technologies is the extensive infrastructural palimpsest of “the cloud” that forms the operational basis of these initiatives. Much of recent developments in smart urbanism are dependent on spaces and material geographies that exist outside of cities, and which form the core of the cloud. Geographies that remain hidden as a function of the convenience and power dynamics coded into the user side of smart technologies. This project presents the hidden form of the cloud as a constitutive but latent aspect of smart urbanism. The spatial projects of the cloud encompass planetary-scale geographies and operations: from sensors to data centers and from smart watches to the informal Cobalt mines of Sub-Saharan Africa. This is a planetary landscape dominated by cables, data centers, extraction sites, manufacturing plants, and distribution centers; as well as the smart cities and technology campuses where the extended geography of the cloud is concentrated and connected to its user-citizens. This project traces the spatial imprints of data and examines the sociotechnical structures and ideologies that support and continually maintain the smartification of everything.
Bio: Ali Fard is a designer, researcher, and educator, currently an assistant professor at the University of Virginia School of Architecture. Ali’s teaching and research explore the uneven material and spatial geographies of technology and infrastructure.