Panel #5: Modelling Smartness
A collection of artwork and presentations
Panel image artwork by Bornschlegl
Traverse / Mark Igloliorte, Concordia University
A continuation of these early paintings can be seen in Traverse through a collection of new works made for the exhibition. Collectively entitled Rendering (2019), Igloliorte has produced a series of three paintings that bring together a number of elements he has explored in different formats in the past. Combining topographical viewpoints made from a collection of digitally altered satellite imagery with Inuktitut phrases, he explores the slippages that occur for those, like himself, that have a strong sense of belonging to the land of their ancestors, but do not always have access to their knowledge and customs. Simple two-word arrangements reflect Igloliorte’s own burgeoning journey of learning Inuktitut. Phrases he is familiar with and hears when visiting home, Kasilik SekKuk (Hurt Knee), kavisilik Uvinik (Salmon Skin) and Pulâttik Angiggak (Visiting Home) fill the unknown spaces in each of the landscapes, making bold statements of connection. Igloliorte says; “These words gesture to various relationships with the land, such as hurting my knees while out on hunt or an analogy for how land ownership was written out of our land claims agreement...”
Bio: Mark Igloliorte (Inuk, Nunatsiavut) is an artist, essayist and educator. As a scholar and artist, his work investigates relating to indigenous futures through a grounding in the embodied practices and language.
Digital oases in the analog desert. Sensing the first materializations of a smart city in Seestadt / Sebastian Bornschlegl, University of Vienna
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.
Liar Liar Grants on Fire - Institutional Complicity in Expanding the Smart Surveillance State / Abhishek Viswanathan, Bonnie Fan
In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania - `smartness' has had unique currency when it comes to urban planning decisions. With roots in the historic concept of the `creative city', since the 1950s Pittsburgh's power brokers have made urban planning decisions based on attracting members of the `creative class' (predominantly white male scientists) who can procure lucrative defense and research grants from the state, over serving the needs of its under-resourced, working-class and non-white residents. As state and defense priorities have morphed into rolling out smart/surveillance technologies, so have the priorities of the city's grant machinery. A powerful nexus of foundations, university boards of directors & trustees, corporations, and local politicians have been steadily advancing an agenda of tech gentrification and surveillance capitalism. Several recent examples highlight how urban planning decisions are made - the mayor and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) signing an MoU about Pittsburgh being an `urban laboratory', autonomous delivery robots acquiring pedestrian rights, and the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police working with CMU researchers to carry out `Predictive Policing' using crime data. In a paper presentation, we propose to highlight the important, disguised role played by universities in advancing the smart/surveillance agenda. Universities are majorly responsible for theorizing smartness as a progressive force, with an evangelical belief in the power of data to `solve' societal issues. This paper will explore some ways that universities impact the cities they reside within, not only as forces of `progress', `smartness', and `success', but also as forces of gentrification, racism, and neoliberalism.
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.
The smartification of water and energy – the rise of smart cities / Lauren Touchant, University of Ottawa
As climate change becomes reality for many Canadian cities, municipalities are facing two major challenges: water issues, and energy efficiency of buildings and public transportation. Municipalities control about 80 % of water infrastructure, and 60% of the overall infrastructure in Canada, they are responsible for providing drinking water, and planning and land use under the Provincial’s planning acts. Even if they are creatures of the provinces, municipalities play a significant role in addressing climate and water-related issues. In the past few years, expressions such as smart cities, smart energy communities, and smart water have emerged across the country, translating into tangible municipal programs and policies, supported by municipal networks, for instance, the 2020 City of Ottawa’s Smart Water Strategy. What does being a smart city mean? How are they encouraged by networks and the private sector to embrace smart technologies? From the use of artificial intelligence to growing investments in blue-green infrastructures, municipalities are embracing technologies and natural infrastructure. They partner with the private sector to develop these new smart initiatives. They embrace the smartification of everything, including nature, municipalities are engaged in a policy learning process within municipal networks, (i.e. QUEST Canada, SIWI, and the FCM), that support the shift toward smartification. This paper will explore why and how municipalities are embracing the idea of smart city using specific case studies (ex. City of Ottawa). It will also show that they have three primary co-benefits in mind: lowering operating costs, enhancing public and utility services, and quality of life.
Bio: Lauren Touchant is a PhD in Public Administration Graduate from the School of Political Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Ottawa. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Centre for Environmental Law and Global Sustainability and the Centre on Governance, and the recipient of the Alex Trebek Scholarship.
Smart city near and far: site visit in the making of smart city in Kenya / Junnan Mu, Harvard University
Like many other developmental projects in Kenya smart city development was often criticized as a “failed promise.” Yet despite a growing sense of disillusionment, the aspiration for a smart city never falls off. In this article, I explored the significance of a set of practices - “site visit”- in restoring and upgrading the aspiration of smart city development in Kenya. Once a strategy for developers to attract potential investors, site visit gradually performs to resolve doubts of relevant stakeholders in the wake of growing critiques. By rendering the not-yet realized smart city physically near, site visit contributes to producing intersubjective spatiotemporal horizons which are constitutive to the rhythm of smart city development and the sociotechnical imaginary of the smart city in Kenya. Through this discussion, I suggest that the making of the smart city in Africa should not be simply taken as a technological or spatial fix on the part of capitalist regimes of different scale, speed, and intensity, but as the assemblage of intersubjective values produced in condensed spacetime as practiced on the ground.
Bio: Junnan 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.
Coded jaywalkers and the performativity of smart traffic lights/ Pouya Sepehr, University of Vienna
William Mitchell (1996) was arguably the first person to imagine a smart city as a complex place where citizen choices will evermore be liberated by information-sharing. In his vision, the city can continually be changed and enriched in meanings, just as does the flow of information. However, instead, the smart technologies are used to describe, analyze, produce knowledge of everyday life, and predict certain patterns of behaviour. Hence, they manipulate, discipline, and control life by reshaping how people and objects interact in time and space (Gabrys, 2016). In this paper, I follow the mundane ways in which smartness matters in everyday life and the meanings they create through the work we delegate to smart objects to resolve everyday issues. In doing so, I investigate the smartification of pedestrian traffic lights in Vienna. This technology recognises pedestrians’ intention to cross a street and automatically manages waiting time for them, therefore preventing jaywalking, and providing better flows of urban traffic. Through a multi-sited ethnography, my analysis starts with focusing on justifications for developing such a technology. Then I study the computational programming and the design process which led to exclusion of the visually impaired citizens. Finally, I visit five sites where the smart traffic lights are implemented as testbeds. Drawing on Lefebvre and Miyazaki, I conduct what I call AlgoRhythmic Analysis to analyse how the temporality of the city based on different mobilities is understood and reshaped by smart infrastructures. In the end, I invite the audience to walk with me in an imaginative crosswalk, where I propose seeing and visibility as the basis of smart design.
Bio: Pouya is a PhD candidate, a lecturer, and a researcher at the department of Science and Technology Studies, University of Vienna. In his research he focuses on the politics of urban knowledge, urban imaginaries, and urban transformation to smart cities.