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Make City Berlin 2015 interview
This coming June, I've been invited to offer a keynote that will function as a hinge between two complementary events of Berlin's Make City Festival 2015: a workshop called "Science Fictions: Smartology as a New Urban Utopia" on Friday the 19th, followed by a public symposium called "Beware of Smart People! Re-defining the Smart City Paradigm towards Inclusive Urbanism" that takes place on Friday and Saturday the 20th both.
As part of the run-up to the events, the organizers asked me to answer a few questions for a newspaper they're putting together for free distribution at the Festival. I've reproduced this interview below, and hope, as ever, that you enjoy it.
Why is the "Smart City" relevant to a broader public?
It's only relevant because at the moment this is the predominant conception of the way in which networked information technology ought to be deployed in cities to aid in their management and governance, and it encodes within it a pathetically circumscribed vision of urban citizenship. As far as classic conceptions of the smart city are concerned, your sole job as a citydweller is to generate data which can be captured, analyzed and acted upon by administrators — those are the limits of participation.
Another way of putting it: If the municipality you live in buys and deploys this technology, your life will be affected by it, whether you particularly care about this thing we call the "smart city" or not. Your choices will be conditioned, your scope of action curtailed, and your ability to shape the circumstances of your own life constrained, in ways that might not appear immediately obvious, for the ultimate advantage of others. You do not have a voice other than in the aggregate. And while this is a rather bleak prospect, it's easily enough avoidable if enough people come to understand what's at stake in the deployment of these technologies, and refuse to let it unfold unchallenged.
How can a focus on people as urban knowledge producers help to redefine the technology and market oriented concept of the Smart City?
That's a pretty abstract and, to my way of thinking, overly intellectualized way of framing what it is we do as residents of an urban place and as participants in a community. Do we "produce knowledge"? Yes, of course we do: at all times, all of us, both individually and collectively. We produce knowledge about place, most of which is and only ever can be tacit, and it's important to understand that this is what ordinary people are in fact doing as they pursue the course of their everyday lives. It's not, or not exclusively, the regime of experts and specialists.
But is that the best — the most satisfying or resonant — way to construct what it is we do as city people? I would argue that it isn't. I would, in fact, argue that in a sense it dovetails all too well with the command-and-control model implicit in the smart city rhetoric, because if we're all "urban knowledge producers," the implication is that some sufficiently subtle array of technical systems will be able to capture that knowledge, derive actionable inferences from it and make it available to be acted upon remotely.
So I prefer to focus on participation. I prefer to understand everyone in the city as an actor, an active and vital contributor — someone who is capable of mobilizing knowledge and bringing it to bear on the matters of concern they themselves perceive.
How can smart people become active participants in new urban governance models based on knowledge sharing and coproduction?
Understand that I'm not at all interested in "smart," in smart anything. What I am interested in is creating circumstances in which ordinary citydwellers are able to acquire an refined understanding of all the circumstances that shape their participation in civic life, whether those circumstances are technical, political, economic or psychological.
We should, in particular resist the notion that every last citizen needs to acquire a high degree of specifically technical competence — the inane calls for everyone to learn to code, and so on. Not everyone has the cognitive propensity, not everyone has the ability, and quite simply not everyone wants to. But this is not the same thing as groups of neighborhood scale acquiring a greater collective sophistication as to how informational-technical systems work and what it is that they do. It's crucial that we demystify these things, but it's neither necessary or possible for everyone to acquire the habits of mind of a software engineer.
What we need, therefore, is for those who do have the propensity, the capability and the insight into the workings of technical systems to share that insight, in terms ordinary people can relate to. For many, it will mean developing a theory of mind that will guide them in understanding what it is that people don't understand, and what metaphors are best suited to helping explain these systems and their functions without condescension or oversimplification.
Everybody who possesses comfort and competence with information-technical systems needs to realize that from now on, part of their job is to function as a translator. And this will be frustrating. There are literally different cognitive styles involved, different intelligences, and bridging between the divergent models of the world people hold, however unconsciously or inarticulately, is by no means a straightforward or a simple thing. But it's not optional, not if we believe in the right of ordinary citydwellers to understand the systems that condition their everyday choices.
How do smart people redistribute urban resources and reconfigure urban spaces?
This is not, of course, a technical question. I personally believe we need to ensure that the information-technical systems which increasingly govern the distribution of (material-energetic, spatial, financial or attentional) resources in the city work in as self-explanatory a way as can possibly be achieved, and that the valuations bound up in them remain available for inspection and renegotiation at all times. But this ambition ultimately relies on how we choose to organize ourselves in a polity, what values we hold and enact in our collective decisions. We cannot achieve any such thing if we do not first believe we have the right and the affirmative obligation to do so, and in fact that the exercise of all our other rights will ultimately come to depend on our doing so.
Zeroville-on-Khambhat, or: The clean slate's cost
A response to a piece Ayona Datta wrote for the forthcoming Dialogues in Human Geography, which I am pleased to present to you on the occasion of the Urban Age Delhi conference on Governing Urban Futures.
«Dites donc, c'est pas Alphaville qui faut appeler votre patelin, c'est Zéroville!»
– Eddie Constantine as private eye Lemmy Caution, in J.-L. Godard's Alphaville (1965)
In her paper examining the Indian "smart city" development of Dholera, Ayona Datta furnishes us with a very welcome case study in just how elite actors mobilize the language and appearance of technological contemporaneity to achieve ends of displacement. Her analysis is straightforward and capably presented, and the most useful thing I can do in the space allotted to me for commentary is cosign, and hopefully amplify, certain of her conclusions.
Datta, as I understand her, has two fundamental aims here. The first is simply to establish that in the claims made on its behalf, in its disconnection from the history of the land, in its mendacity about its actual purpose, and in every other relevant register, the development site of Dholera is utterly exemplary of the smart city paradigm so many of us have inveighed against over the past half-decade or so. The second — to me, a more interesting and more enduringly valuable ambition — is to demonstrate that this existing line of critique is insufficient to understand the particular kind of work Dholera does in Indian politics.
What any such understanding would require is a kind of multipronged forensic analysis, and that is precisely what Datta provides. In the case of Dholera, an account of the actual site, its physical characteristics and existing demography are no less crucial to the development of insight than the provisions of the enabling legislation facilitating the new city and the highly interested language swirling around it. And without wanting to be overly actor-networky about things, this attention to detail — to the ways in which specific institutions, events, personalities, laws, and phrases mesh with one another to produce a state of affairs — is the most welcome aspect of the article at hand.
So what is Dholera?
We learn that it is a 903 km^2 development site in the Indian state of Gujarat, masterplanned by the UK engineering firm Halcrow, with some ten percent of its budget provided by the Indian national government and Japanese enterprises (specifically Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Toshiba, JGC and TEPCO), and the balance by unspecified but presumably domestic "private sector" entities.
We learn that — just like the canonical smart cities that came before it, among which the South Korean New Songdo and Abu Dhabi's Masdar City remain the most widely known — Dholera is promised to be a place where embedded information-technological services and systems mediate every aspect of everyday urban life. Everything from personal mobility to access control and the functioning of the supply and removal chain is to be handled by IT vendors, "optimized" in the name of maximum efficiency. (That this model of urbanity bears no resemblance whatsoever to the way in which any Indian city current or historical functions doesn't matter; indeed, as we'll see, it's an important part of the value proposition.)
And, like the canonical smart cities as well, we learn that Dholera is represented to the world by its backers as having been magicked into being from nothing, on what planners are pleased to call a "greenfield site." But of course the terrain upon which this tomorrowland is to be built wasn't precisely a bare Cartesian plane beforehand: parcels of land had to be acquired to make the project a reality, and the people living and working on those parcels dealt with somehow.
The particular history of this process of acquisition and displacement (and the local resistance to it) deserves sustained attention. In Datta's telling, this smart city with Indian characteristics turns out to be a place where the impoverished people who currently occupy the site — subsistence farmers and fishers, mostly, with soil rendered barren by previous government misadventures in macroengineering, and a literacy rate that stands twenty full points lower than India's average of 77% — have been convicted by more powerful forces of failing to fully capitalize on the value latent in their land, and sentenced to expulsion.
Here we see how a global body of rhetoric, promulgated primarily by all-but-placeless multinational enterprises, converges with powerful regional and class interests, squeezing the nation-state (and the better part of its citizenry) to a thin paste between them.
As Dholera functions within Gujarat, so does "investor-friendly" Gujarat function within India. Depicted by its own business-development initiative as "Vibrant Gujarat," the state is home to both India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and the philosophy of governance he pursued as the state's Chief Minister between 2001 and 2012, a policy stance that has been described as "native-born neoliberalism." For over a decade, the state has consciously positioned itself as a testbed for techniques and practices that are seen as efficacious in overwriting external perceptions of India as teeming, mired in grinding, endemic poverty, and riven by communal strife with an image more consonant with its ambitions and hopes. These techniques and practices amount to a "Gujarati model," intended to realize "maximum governance with minimum government," and a nation desperate to cut the fetters imposed by its legendary bureacratariat might well regard that model as a turnkey solution for its own economic problems. This was the broadly implicit — and at times, entirely explicit — message of the 2014 Modi campaign, and indeed the Gujarati model has become national policy since his election to the Prime Ministership.
In a pungent and fascinating passage, Datta traces the development of this discourse to Modi's Asian peregrinations. Denied entry to the US, UK and EU for his role in fanning Gujarat's vicious communal pogroms of 2002, Modi took to visiting China and Japan instead — and there, Datta argues, he encountered both a "Shanghai model" of top-down citymaking, readymade for transplantation into Gujarati soil, and a set of institutional partners prepared to foot the bill. The bitter irony is that identification with the program of crash urbanization that resulted is what lubricated Modi's ongoing and evidently successful pivot from redhanded champion of the Hindu far right to polished global statesman — all of which suggests that well-intentioned British and American moves to marginalize the firebrand of 2002 may have resulted in the mother of all unintended consequences.
For reasons of investor confidence, if no other, it was important that whatever happened in Gujarat was seen to transpire under the rule of law. Ensuring the formal legitimation of whatever measures it deemed necessary in the development of Dholera, the State of Gujarat granted itself new powers of eminent domain, leaving the victims of dispossession quite literally no ground to stand on.
Here Datta embarks upon the sort of detailed explication that helps us understand how a single piece of legislation (specifically, Gujarat's 2009 Special Investment Region Act) allowed the state to do an end run around provisions dating to 1894 that guaranteed small holders both due process and fair recompense for land forcibly acquired. Under SIR's terms, the state simply had to designate land as "needed for public purpose," while nothing compelled them to compensate those with existing tenure; and of course parcels assembled in this way could then be transferred to whatever "parastatal" or entirely private development partners the state found congenial.
But after all the farmers and fishermen have been chased from the land, the digital infrastructure laid down, and the golf club opened for business, what of day-to-day life in this environment? Here is where more of the detail that Datta lavishes on other aspects of her tale would be welcome; specifically, I would have appreciated a closer look at the social and spatial logic of this ostensibly smart place on Earth. But then Dholera, like Masdar and Songdo before it, may as yet (and forever will?) be too unrealized to permit this sort of interrogation. What we do know is that Dholera's promise/premise of furnishing citizens with information allowing them to "manage their lives better" dovetails perfectly with the neoliberal fetish for the individualization of responsibility, and parallel deemphasis of collective or solidaristic action of any sort.
This, however, is only to scratch the surface of the questions we could ask of this project. If one were of a particularly sincere cast of mind, and thought that honest answers might actually be forthcoming, one might want to inquire as to why all of the following were so heedlessly conflated in Dholera's conception:
— the perceived necessity of developing entirely new urbanized sites as a response to India's social and economic transformation;
— the desirability of doing so using putatively "advanced," i.e. imported, methodologies, practices and paradigms;
— the degree to which such models do or can speak to the needs and desires of the populations they are ostensibly intended to benefit;
— the suitability of informationtechnical systems and services as means to any ends articulated by these populations; and
— the identity of the institutions, organizations or actors best placed to achieve the conception and deployment of such systems.
But it may well be pointless to ask such things of Dholera's promoters, or to subject their rhetoric to any particularly fine level of analysis. Like "eco," "green," and "sustainable," it appears that "smart" is simply the latest in a series of terms used to wreathe development projects with a superficial gloss of contemporaneity. Indeed, despite the claims of advocates that it could only operate at peak efficiency when designed and purpose-
built from the ground up to accommodate information technology, Dholera wasn't identified (by its developers, or anyone else) as a "smart city" until 2012, some three years after the project's inception. This record suggests that, like any other sufficiently interested party, the actors responsible for developing Dholera are comfortable latching onto just about any old justificatory apparatus if it serves their shortterm needs — helping the project pass through the decision gate of an endorsement, authorizing vote or allocation of investment — and discard it without compunction once it has outlived its utility.
When someone lays out the evidence as clearly as Datta does here, one conclusion is unavoidable: the point was never, really, to engineer an all-seeing technological utopia. It was to dispossess the near-voiceless of their land and turn it to the ends of optimal revenue generation. At times, various actors involved in facilitating Dholera's transformation from salinated flatland to smart city have been surprisingly forthright about their values and motivations. Datta quotes Amitabh Kant, CEO of a state-sponsored enterprise invested in the project, as mentioning that "the key challenge" to transforming India "will be to monetize land values." Meanwhile, the Indian Intelligence Bureau justifies the surveillance it maintains on the lowercaste activists resisting the seizure of their land on the grounds of their involvement in "anti-
development activities." The degree of cooptation of the apparatus of state on view here is truly impressive; not even in the US or the UK are the logics of accumulation by dispossession generally quite that close to the surface.
But why this particular confluence of ideas, why India, why now? We are often told, in the West, that India's cities are now home to a growing middle class — crores of people liberated from the village and its strictures, flush with capital pumped into the economy by globalization's outsourced engineering and back-office operations, and beginning to flex their consumerist muscles. Given the very real benisons of all this material comfort and choice, it may well be that those on the receiving end of it are not overly inclined to question where it all comes from.
One result of this is that perhaps nowhere else in the world has reified "IT" to the extent that India has. That I can tell, anyway, the acronym is universally understood at all levels of Indian society — and nearly as universally, is understood to be desirable for its connotations of efficiency, effortlessness, logic, cleanroom sterility and sheer modernity. It is a thing and a force both, something one applies to a circumstance to make it better. And to be a software engineer in this new economy is a noble thing, for in the end what else does so much of the new prosperity consist of but software?
In such a charged environment, the unremarkable trappings of postindustrial knowledge production acquire a curious valence in and of themselves. One can get some sense of what this looks like from Dholera's promotional materials, which are dense with bombast and puffery of a distinctly Indian flavor: the state government's act of having "appointed a consultant to develop the master plan of the project" and the involvement of "a global IT powerhouse" (transparently Cisco) are in themselves proffered — and perhaps even accepted by the intended audience — as guarantors of excellence.
I have no interest in judging an entire people's aspirations, but the darker and more troubling aspects of all this are obvious. Among other things, the uncritical embrace of practices, arrangements and ways of doing things that originate in the developed world, and must therefore be "modern," allows propositions that wouldn't otherwise stand up to the slightest challenge to pass by without comment. Perhaps this explains why the State of Gujarat's due diligence doesn't seem to have extended to wondering why the masterplanner they entrusted with the development of a megacity destined to be twice the size of Mumbai — the UK-based engineering practice Halcrow — had no other successful urban planning engagements to its name, nor why its business fundamentals were evidently so weak that it had to be bailed out (and was eventually fully acquired) by the American concern C2HM HILL. Even mild skepticism regarding such matters would be powerfully salutary, particularly at a moment when the Modi government plans to plant one hundred such cities on the land.
This is why I'm glad to see Datta throw a little shade at relative optimists like Ashis Nandy, quoted here to the effect that whatever our reservations now, all will be well in the fullness of time, as India's propensity to "corrupt" the bestlaid plans renders the alien imposition of the smart city "impure…but ultimately less malevolent." This is charming, and undoubtedly contains an element of truth, but as Datta implies, it verges on irresponsible naivete given the power of certain imperial discourses to transform subjectivity.
And in the end, subjectivity — the realm of sentiment, hope, fear, pride and desire — is far more central to the whys and wherefores of Dholera than might appear to be the case. For a state that has solid historical justification for wanting to believe in the possibility of a new beginning, the notion of rebuilding from a truly clean slate must be all but irresistible. There are many, no doubt, for whom this insistence that the ghosts of 2002 be plowed under constitutes a virtue — indeed, a primary aspect of Dholera's appeal. For millions of young Indians just now coming into their maturity, it's easy to imagine how tempting it must be to treat historical events that happened in childhood as bygones that should remain bygones, and considerations of communal, religious or caste identity as baggage from the past that has no place in an India founded on gleaming clean-room technology. They may well be willing and more than willing to overlook the fiction of its origin myth, if Dholera's promise of a new and glorious dawn can only be extended to Gujarat, to Narendra Modi, to India itself.
What remains clear is that others will pay the price for that wiping of the slate. Where master-planned High Modernist environments like Brasilia and Chandigarh at least paid lip service to the notion that issues of social justice could be addressed via the technics of the built environment, Dholera doesn't even rise to that low standard. From the evidence at hand here, it seems certain that this smart city is destined to do little but inscribe further injustice and sorrow on the land. And for demonstrating just what the rhetoric of the smart city accomplishes on this particular terrain, at this particular moment in history, we have Ayona Datta to thank.
Route Master: A Biography of the London Map
I'm beyond honored to have had this piece — a love letter to London and its maps — commissioned for the launch issue of the revived Journal of the London Society. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it. For the record, the impeccable choice of title was theirs.
I very much doubt that there is a city on the face of this Earth better mapped, over a longer period of time — nor more potently associated with the image of the map, as cultural and practical artifact — than London.
I'm sure some of the reason behind this stems from the need to assert administrative control, assess taxation and clarify property rights across a bewildering profusion of boroughs, wards, parishes, liberties, districts and councils. Part of it, certainly, arises from the way in which successive mobility technologies have allowed the city to colonize the land — sprawling its way across terrains and conditions, levering itself ever outward via rail lines and motorways, until the area within the ambit of the M25 subsumed a not-inconsiderable chunk of the British landmass.
But a great deal of this history is driven by history itself. Over the two thousand years of its documented existence, the physical fabric of London has blithely folded everything from animal trails and Roman roads to the Abercrombie Plan and the Westway into its network of connections. As a result, this is, at its core at least, a topologically ornery city. It is a place threaded with byways that admit to no obvious exit, that continue past a nodal point only under some other name (and therefore bear multiple designations within the space of a few dozen meters), that deposit the pedestrian somewhere, anywhere else than wherever reason and intuition suggest they might. Saffron Hill, Newman Passage, Johnson's Court, the increasingly (and, it must be said, distressingly) salubrious alleys of Soho — you can walk these thoroughfares half a hundred times, and still not quite remember how they link up with the rest of the city. Or even, necessarily, how to find them again the next day.
At the same time, of course, London is a city of roundabouts, flyovers and gyratories, of circuses and viaducts and junctions — a city that was already thoroughly reticulated by bus routes and Tube lines before anyone now living was born. With each new layer, its complexity increases in a way that is not additive, but multiplicative. But if all of this is undeniably the case, it's also true that you can wake up one morning to discover that the tramways have been pulled up, that Charing Cross Road no longer quite connects with Tottenham Court Road, that someone's proposing to turn Elephant & Castle roundabout into a peninsula. The confoundments threaten to spiral out of control. So whether they avail themselves of one via the enameled surface of a Legible London plinth, an app on their phone, or for that matter the Knowledge so splendidly immanent in the comparably complex network of neurons in a cabbie's head, the would-be reckoner with London needs nothing so much as a chart, a guide. A map.
So equipped, one can finally negotiate the city with relative ease. But navigation is by no means the only thing we use maps for. It's long been understood that cartographic tools can help us better comprehend some state of the world, and even allow us to make effective interventions.
As it happens, this kind of spatial analysis was born right here in London. When John Snow tallied deaths in the 1854 Soho cholera outbreak on a map, he made manifest a pattern that had previously eluded even the most conscientious ledger-based tabulation: that peak mortality clearly centered on the Broad Street water pump. Armed with this evidence, Snow famously petitioned the parish Board of Guardians to remove the pump handle, which they did the next day, stopping the epidemic in its tracks. It was a landmark moment for both epidemiology and geographic information systems — and it would not be the last time in the history of London that a map proposed an intervention.
Though a great deal more impressionistic than Snow's fastidious chart, Charles Booth's poverty maps of late-Victorian London are almost as granular, delineating among seven increments of socioeconomic status as they varied block to block, and occasionally house to house. Though Life and Labour of the People in London, the magnum opus in which they appeared, must be given the lion's share of the credit — and this is to say nothing of Booth's apparently indefatigable organizing — it's generally acknowledged that the maps themselves were critical for catalyzing the sense that something had to be done to redress abject want in the city, perhaps by conveying its true extent in the backstreets and rookeries only rarely penetrated by the respectable classes. (The blithe ignorance these classes nurtured for their own city was truly impressive. In 1855, the London Diocesan Building Society had described the East End to its subscribers as being "as unexplored as Timbuctoo," which must have come as some surprise to the hundreds of thousands of Cockneys living there.)
In their way, Booth's maps were as effective as Snow's in driving change in the world. The response, when it came, may not have been quite as elegant or as precisely targeted as the removal of a single pump handle, but its impact was undeniably felt at a larger scale. When Parliament authorized the first Old Age Pension in 1908, Booth's work was widely regarded as having been instrumental to the effort aimed at securing its passage.
Here we get some sense of the power of a geographic data visualization. By judiciously folding complex urban dynamics back against the ground plane, maps like these help us comprehend circumstances that may well be transpiring beneath or beyond the threshold of unaided human perception, in space or time or both. They are, quite literally, consciousness-altering.
In all the long history of mapping the great metropolis, though, it's arguable that no single map did more to change the ordinary Londoner's perception of urban space than Harry Beck's original Underground diagram of 1933. In reckoning with the burgeoning complexities of a then relatively new addition to the city's network of networks, Beck's map emphasized the experiential truth of urban space over the geographically literal. As anyone who's ever hoofed it between Angel Station and Old Street can tell you, the overland distance between any two contiguous stations bears only the slightest resemblance to the proximity implied by the Beck schematic and its many descendants.
The distortions pull in both directions. With only the Tube map to rely on, someone unfamiliar with the topography of central London might well conclude that it's entirely reasonable to take the Tube from Bank to Liverpool Street, or from Borough to London Bridge, when the former is at worst a nine- and the latter a ten-minute walk. (And don't get me started about vertical distances. At Angel Station, the system's deepest, it can take the rider a good five minutes just to get from turnstile to platform.)
But these gross displacements, however grievously they might afflict the small but vocal contingent of people who care passionately about such things, are entirely beside the point. For all its compressions, expansions and improbably crisp 45-degree angles, the map is impeccably accurate in reflecting the way Tube riders actually perceive the space of the city, as it unspools a few dozen meters above their heads. Rely on it often enough for long enough, and you too may find — to paraphrase Edward Tufte — that the map organizes your London.
For someone more than casually fond of both London and maps, it's inordinately pleasing that these landmarks in cartographic history are all also part of the story of this particular place on Earth. You can go and visit the very places that John Snow and Charles Booth mapped any day of the week, using the system that Harry Beck described with his map.
We are, however, safe in considering all of this history mere preamble, however glorious it may be. I believe that at this moment in time, we are collectively experiencing the most significant single evolution in mapping since someone first scratched plans on papyrus — for one relatively recent and very simple development, made possible by the lamination together of three or four different kinds of technology, has completely changed what a map is, what it means, and what we can do with it.
It's this: that for the very first time in human history, our maps tell us where we are on them.
Nothing in all my prior experience of maps prepared me for the frisson I experienced the first time I held an iPhone in my hand, launched Google Maps, pressed a single button…and was located, told where I was to within a very few meters. When you realize that, already, some 30% of the adults on the planet own a device that can do this, that this audience already greatly outnumbers all the people who ever consulted an A-Z, a Thomas Guide or a friendly green Michelin volume put together, you begin to understand just how dramatically the popular conception of cartography is evolving. Those who come after us will have a hard time imagining that there was ever such a thing as a map that couldn't do that.
The fact that such depictions can now also render layers of dynamic, real-time situational information — traffic, weather, crime and so on — seems almost incidental compared to this. The fact of locability, in itself, is the real epistemic break. It subtly but decisively removes the locative artifacts we use from the order of abstraction. By finding ourselves situated on the plane of a given map, we're being presented with the implication that this document is less a diagram and more a direct representation of reality — and, what's more, one with a certain degree of fidelity, one that can be verified empirically by the simple act of walking around.
I'd argue that this begins to color our experience of all maps, even those that remain purely imaginary. We begin to look for the pulsing crosshairs or the shiny, cartoonish pushpin that says YOU ARE HERE. The ability to locate oneself becomes bound up with the meaning of any representation of space whatsoever.
And it has profound pragmatic consequences, as well. It means that our maps can do real work for us. Typical of this is the online service Citymapper. Fed real-time information by TfL via a series of conduits called "application programming interfaces," or APIs, Citymapper constitutes nothing less than a set of keys to the city, accessible to anyone with a smartphone and a data plan. It effortlessly tames what is otherwise the rather daunting perplexity of the street network, divining a nearly-optimal path through all those closes and courts and alleys, or suggesting just what combination of buses and trains you'd need to cobble together to get from, say, Stoke Newington Common to Camberwell Green.
Again, here London is different from other places. Though Citymapper offers versions for New York and Berlin, Paris and Barcelona, the utility of each is hampered by the limitations placed on it by those cities' respective transit authorities. In my experience, no metropolitan transit agency in the world provides APIs as robust and thorough as those offered by TfL, and as a direct result Citymapper and its competitors are more useful here than they are just about anywhere else.
Happily, buses and Tube trains aren't the only ways of getting around that are enhanced by the new interactive cartography. The networked maps so many of us now rely upon transform the practice of walking, too. The way in which access to real-time locative information enhances one's sense of security in exploring the city is beautifully expressed by the London-based technologist Phil Gyford: "I can quickly see that my destination might be only 25 minutes' walk away, and I know I'll be going the quickest route, and GPS will ensure I won't get lost halfway there. Somehow walking now seems more viable and less uncertain." What this opens up, even for the longtime resident, is the prospect of exploring a city they never knew, though it may have been separated from them more by habit and uncertainty than any physical distance. Gyford now feels free to wander "the overlooked parts of London…the neglected seas between the Tube-station islands"; somewhere, the worthies of the London Diocesan Building Society breathe a sigh of satisfaction before returning to their deep slumber in the earth.
That we are becoming — that some of us have already become — so intimately and thoroughly reliant on our maps to guide us safely through the urban thicket makes it more important than ever that we regard them critically. Though we know intellectually that the map is famously not the territory, the emotional truth of this can be harder to internalize; we've all seen news stories about truck drivers following their satnav directions straight into a lake, or a wall. We need to get in the habit of asking pointed questions about who makes the maps, who chooses the information that is rendered upon them, and where that information comes from in the first place.
We might also attend to the deeper truths about the city we live in that are brought to light by this class of representations. Consider the dynamic visualizations of the Milan-based transportation-planning practice Systematica. In their time-series map of London, peristaltic pulses of expansion and contraction wash across the familiar terrain, revealing what we've always known to be the case: that at no hour of the day is the actual city coextensive with its formal, administrative boundaries. Though the human presence must still be inferred from these abstract surges of color, the message is unmissable: for all the grandeur of its physical fabric, the deep London is nothing more or less than the people who move through it, animate it and endow it with meaning.
This, in the end, is not such a bad lesson to derive from contemplating the play of pixels on a screen. If, as the disgraced geographer Denis Wood puts it, all "maps are embedded in a history they help construct," this is true of maps of this city more so than most. And if we know that London, this gorgeous hypersurface, is forever absconding from the knowable, and can never be entirely reduced to a set of lines and points and paths, this doesn't necessarily imply that there is no point in making the attempt. Perhaps, as with those of John Snow, Charles Booth and Harry Beck, the maps of Citymapper, Systematica and their descendants may yet help bring a safer, wiser, more just and merciful city into being.
Beacons, marketing and the neoliberal logic of space, or: The Engelbart overshoot
If you've been reading this blog for any particular length of time, or have tripped across my writing on the Urbanscale site or elsewhere, you've probably noticed that I generally insist on discussing the ostensible benefits of urban technology at an unusually granular level. (In fact, I did this just yesterday, in my responses to questions put to me by Korea's architectural magazine SPACE.) I'll want to talk about specific locales, devices, instances and deployments, that is, rather than immediately hopping on board with the wide-eyed enthusiasm for generic technical "innovation" in cities that seems near-universal at our moment in history.
My point in doing so is that we can't really fairly assess a value proposition, or understand the precise nature of the trade-offs bound up in a given deployment of technology, until we see what people make of it in the wild, in a specific locale. The canonical example of the perils that attend the overly generic consideration of a technology is bus rapid transit, or BRT, which works very, very well indeed on sociophysical terrain that strongly resembles its original home of Curitiba, and much less so in low-density environments like Johannesburg, or in places where, for whatever reason, access to the right-of-way can't be controlled, notably Delhi and New York City. BRT was sold to these latter municipalities as a panacea for problems of urban mobility, without reference to all of the spatial, social, regulatory, pricing-model and service-design elements that had to be brought into balance before anything like success could be declared, and it shows. (Boy howdy, does it show. Have you ridden the New York City MTA's half-assed instantiation of BRT lately?)
And if anything, information technology is even more sensitively dependent on factors like these. The choice of one touchscreen technology (form factor, operating system, service provider, register of language…) over another very often turns out to determine the success or failure of a given proposition.
But despite all this, sometimes it is possible for the careful observer to suss out the likely future contours of a technology's adoption, based on a more general appreciation of its nature. And that's why I want to take a little time today to discuss with you my thinking around the emergent class of low-power, low-range transmitters known as "beacons."
Classically, of course, a "beacon" was a visually prominent effect of some sort, designed to notify or warn those encountering it of some otherwise indistinct condition or feature in the landscape. And perhaps as originally envisioned, this class of transmitters genuinely was supposed to be what it said on the tin: a simple way for relatively low-powered devices to find and lock onto one another, amid the fog and unpredictable dynamism of the everyday.
This is not a particularly new idea; as long ago as 2005, I'd proposed on my old v-2 site that networked objects would need some lightweight, low-cost way of radiating information about their presence and capabilities to other things (and by extension, people) in the near neighborhood — the foundation of what, at that time, I thought of as a "universal service-discovery layer" draped over the world. And of course I was nowhere near the first to have proposed something along these lines; I myself had been inspired to think more deeply about things talking to each other from a sideways reading of a throw-away bit of cleverness in Bruce Sterling's 1998 novel Distraction, and it's fair to say that the idea of things automatically broadcasting their identity to other things had been in the air for quite a few years before that.
But in evolving commercial parlance, beacons are nothing of the sort, really. A contemporary beacon (like these ugly and rather hostile-looking blebs, sold by Estimote) is primarily designed to capture information, not to convey it — and such information as it does convey outward is disproportionately intended to benefit the sender over the recipient. So my first objection to beacon technology is that this very framing is in itself mendacious, dishonest and misleading. (You know you're in trouble when the very name of something is a lie.)
As things stand now, beacons are intended for one purpose, and one purpose alone: to capture and monetize your behavior. As with the so-called Internet of Things more broadly, there simply aren't any particularly convincing or compelling use cases for the technology that aren't about driving needless consumption; almost without exception, those that are even partially robust have to do with closing a commercial transaction. Both the language of beacon technology and the framework of assumptions it grows out of are airlessly, claustrophobically hegemonic, and this thinking is all over their sites: vendors urge you to deploy these "media-rich banner ads for the physical world" in "any physical place, such as your retail store," to "drive engagement," "cross-sell and up-sell" and eventually "convert" passersby to purchasers. Even beacon advocates have a hard time coming up with any more than half-hearted art projects by way of uses for the technology that are not founded in the desire to relieve some passing mark of the contents of their wallet, reliably, predictably and on an ongoing basis.
And even those scenarios of use which appear at first blush to be founded in blamelessly humanitarian ends, when subjected to trial by ordeal ultimately turn out to embrace the shabbiest neoliberal reasoning. Cheaper to spackle a subway station with networked microlocation transponders, goes the thinking, than to actually hire and train the (unpredictable, and damnably needy) human beings that might help riders navigate the corridors and interchange nodes. Even if the devices don't actually turn out to work all that reliably in the fullness of time, or impose a starkly higher TCO than initially estimated, there will be a concrete deployment that someone can point to as an accomplishment, a ticked-off achievement and a justification for renewed budgetary allocation or re-election.
Finally, I find it noteworthy that the beacon cost-benefit proposition can only subsist when it is accomplished stealthily, and when it is presented to citizens forthrightly and transparently, it is just as forthrightly rejected. Perhaps it's a temporary blip of post-Snowden reticence, but my sense is that most of us have become chary of bundling too many performative dimensions of our identity onto our converged devices at once, and not at all without reason. (Ultimately, I diagnose similar reasons underneath the failure to date of digital wallets and similar device-based payment solutions to gain any market traction whatsoever, though there are other questions at play there as well.)
Beyond and back
The interest in beacons strikes me as being symptomatic of something deeper and more troubling in the culture of technology, something I think of as "the Engelbart overshoot."
There was a powerful dream that sustained (and not incidentally, justified) half a century's inquiry into the possibilities of information technology, from Vannevar Bush to Doug Engelbart straight through to Mark Weiser. This was the dream of augmenting the individual human being with instantaneous access to all knowledge, from wherever in the world he or she happened to be standing at any given moment. As toweringly, preposterously ambitious as that goal seems when stated so baldly, it's hard to conclude anything but that we actually did achieve that dream some time ago, at least as a robust technical proof of concept.
We achieved that dream, and immediately set about betraying it. We betrayed it by shrouding the knowledge it was founded on in bullshit IP law, and by insisting that every interaction with it be pushed through some set of mostly invidious business logic. We betrayed it by building our otherwise astoundingly liberatory propositions around walled gardens and proprietary standards, by putting the prerogatives of rent-seeking ahead of any move to fertilize and renew the commons, and by tolerating the infestation of our informational ecology with vile, value-destroying parasites. These days technical innovators seem more likely to be lauded for devising new ways to harness and exploit people's life energy for private gain than for the inverse.
In fact, you and I now draw breath in a post-utopian world — a world where the tide of technical idealism has long receded from its high-water mark, where it's a matter of course to suggest that we must attach (someone's) networked sensors to our bodies in order to know them, and where, rather astonishingly, it is possible for an intelligent person to argue that spamming the globe with such devices is somehow a precondition of "reclaim[ing our] environment as a place of sociability and creativity." And this is the world in which beacons and the cause of advocacy for them arise.
There's very little meaningful for this technology to do — no specifiable aim or goal that genuinely seems to require its deployment, which could not be achieved as or more readily in some other way. As presently constituted, anyway, it doesn't serve the great dream of aiding us in our lifelong effort to make sense of the endlessly confounding and occasionally dangerous world. It furthers only the puniest and most shaming of ambitions. To the talented, technically capable folks working so hard to build out the beacon world, I ask: Is this really what you want to spend any part of your only life on Earth working to develop? To those advocating this turn, I ask: Can't you think of any way of relating to people more interesting and productive than trying to sell them something they neither want nor need, and most likely cannot genuinely afford?
It doesn't take too concerted an intellectual effort to understand what's really going on with beacons — as a matter of fact, as we've seen, most people evidently seem to understand the situation perfectly well already. But I don't hold out too much hope of getting any of the truly convinced to see the light on this question; we all know how very difficult it can be to get people to understand something when their salary (mortgage payments/kids' private-school tuition/equity stake/deal flow) depends on them not understanding it. If you ask me, though, we were meant for better things than this.
What I'm working on lately: Practices of the minimum viable utopia (long)
Hey there! It's been awhile since I've shouted at ya properly, and I'm going to be MIA for just a little longer yet (having stupidly locked myself into back-to-back-to-back-to-back trips to Dublin, Manchester, Aarhus & NYC, and finding myself rather burnt to the ground as a result). In the meantime, I thought I'd give you a brief idea of what I've been thinking about lately, and what kinds of questions I'll be taking up over the next few months.
I'll warn you from the outset that everything that follows is both speculative, in that it reflects hints, notions and potential trajectories more than fully coherent and robustly worked-out arguments, and overdense, in that it alludes to more lines of thought than I can properly treat at any length you'd tolerate in a blog post. Bear with me anyway and hopefully we'll get somewhere interesting together.
This year's model
More than a few of you have asked just what it is that I'm up to here at LSE. My research project is fairly open, but I think it's fair to describe it as a consideration of the perennial urbanist themes of land use, mobility and governance, as they fold back against an environment and population whose capacities and affordances are increasingly conditioned by the presence of networked computational systems.
Roughly, I'm asking: given the presence of these systems, how might we use them to (a) help allocate common spatial resources in such a way as to ensure the most socially productive use of the available space; (b) underwrite the greatest ability of all to participate personally and physically in all the circuits of exchange that constitute the city; and (c) assist communities in making wiser, more responsive and more widely agreed-upon decisions regarding these and other matters before them? And how do we do all of these things in a way that respects, supports and makes the most use of our existing competences for the city — that skillful negotiation of the world and its prospects that big-city folks have been known for since time out of mind?
Big questions, obviously, and what's (I hope) equally obvious is that I make no pretense whatsoever of essaying neutral answers to them. With regard to the first of these topics, for example, it ought to be evident that my notions of "most productive use" bear very little resemblance to the argument from revenue-generation potential that furnishes most contemporary redevelopment schemes with their primary justificatory apparatus, and which as of this writing appears to have hollowed out any hope that the so-called "sharing economy" might give rise to radically different ways of working and living together.
As I'll explain in greater detail below, it's what happened to the early promise of a networked sharing economy that haunts me as I prepare to propose new configurations for convivial systems. For all the utopian hope that may have attended their arrival, I think by now it's clear that all too many existing coworking and "maker" spaces orbit venture-financed technology startup culture too closely, badly underfulfilling their potential and reproducing conditions I have no interest in perpetuating. That I can see, they have broadly failed as alternative spaces in which we could shelter from the invidious operations of consumer-phase capital, rediscover some sense of ourselves as skilled and competent agents and reclaim responsibility for the furniture of our world. Meanwhile, other potentially transformative models, like those on which Zipcar and AirBnB are founded, seem to have been placidly, even hungrily absorbed into the extant framework of neoliberal assumption.
Signs, pointers and portents
Readers of "Against the smart city" (in Kindle or POD pamphlet editions) know that I don't place any particularly great faith in existing institutions' capacity (or willingness) to address these circumstances. I go into a fair amount of detail, in fact, to spell out just why I think the "smart city" is such a disastrously misguided conception of the role of networked information technology in our urban places and our lives. At the same time, though, I do think it's incumbent upon anyone levying such a critique to articulate at least some affirmative vision of what they would like to see happen in the world.
So what do I believe more satisfying, more fructifying alternatives might look and feel like? And what do I think are some ways of using networked technologies capable of encouraging conceptions of the relation between self and society that are a little less atomic — that are, in other words, less Californian-ideological and more oriented toward commonwealth?
In the following months, I'll be sketching out at least the basic contours of a vision of urban living and working that responds to these questions. In particular, I'm interested in elaborating the outlines of a post-growth, near-steady-state industrial permaculture in city centers, autonomously and locally managed, undergirded by networked systems of deliberation, resource stewardship, mobility and exchange. This is a vision of localism in which flows of matter and energy circulate in a carefully-maintained dynamic equilibrium; communities produce most of the things (and skills, and affects) they need to survive in an unstable world; and sensitive onshoring brings compact, clean sites of precision manufacture and production back into the urban fold, undoing the supply chains of continental and oceanic scale and the ludicrous energetic, environmental and human costs they entail. We learn, once again, to work in atoms as well as bits; we do so together; and in doing so, we focus on the creation of real prosperity in the absence of economic growth.
For a variety of reasons, it's important to me that I ground everything I'll be proposing in empirical observations of events and situations that have some track record of functioning successfully. As it happens, some hints of what aspects of this vision might look like in practice do crop up in three very different existing projects/processes I'm aware of: Madrid's Campo de Cebada; the Godsbanen/Institut for (x) complex, in Aarhus, Denmark; and finally a commercial enterprise called Unto This Last right here in London. Each of these sites has something to teach us, and in some ways I think of each of them as a dress rehearsal for a best-case future.
Campo de Cebada: Community control
At el Campo de Cebada, a fenced-off 60,000 sq ft lot in the heart of Madrid — formerly the site of a market, seemingly doomed to persistent vacancy by the economic crisis of 2008 — was reclaimed and transformed into a community resource by the neighborhood's residents themselves.
After securing physical access, but before anything was built on the lot, a core group of local activists (including members of the Zuloark architectural collective) convened a series of weekly open assemblies, organized on bedrock principles of transparency, openness and participation. Residents and other interested parties were asked to propose, weigh and decide upon the programs, structures and activities the site should support. And so what had been more or less an abandoned site came under autonomous community control, using horizontal, leaderless processes very similar to those that proved so successful in the Occupy movement (including Occupy Sandy, as I describe here). It was under this informal and only retroactively sanctioned process of management that the space finally began to generate meaningful value for its users and neighbors. (At this point it may be worth noting that Spain has a robust history of anarchist practice, though it would also be something of an sublime understatement to point out that Madrid was not historically the heart of this activity.)
Both public assemblies and other, more casual activities on the site notably rely upon rapidly reconfigurable/demountable pallet-based furniture designed by Zuloark, similar to that Raumlabor Berlin has deployed in their pop-up public spaces in the past. (Such furniture also suggests a slow percolation of open-source hardware design and construction schemas like OpenStructures, a central theme of year-before-last's tremendous Adhocracy show.) But it would be a mistake to identify the lesson of el Campo de Cebada with its physical tokens. Like the community gardens of New York's Lower East Side, or more recently 596 Acres, what its success suggests is that ordinary, nonspecialist people are more than capable of taking on responsibility for maintenance, deconfliction and the other less glamorous aspects of administering and operating any such site, in the very core of a world city of the long-developed North — and to do so not in response to an environmental shock like Katrina or Sandy, but as a (dare I say "entrepreneurial") way of grasping the emergent opportunities that lay curled up fractally inside the slower processes of economic calamity.
What the people behind el Campo de Cebada have forged together is, in essence, an Occupation that is affirmative rather than merely critical, productive and forward-looking as well as polemical. What their experience teaches us is that we can reimagine and reconfigure the sacrifice zones left behind by the reigning calculus of land valuation, grasping and making maximum use of them as a collective resource, in a maximally inclusive way.
Godsbanen/Institut for (x): Gradient of engagement
In Aarhus, my host Martin Brynskov took me for a walk around the publicly-funded Godsbanen production space/event venue, and the curious Institut for (x) that partially overlaps it. These institutions occupy a scatter of buildings lying at the end of a decommissioned rail spur that thrusts up into the heart of town, and the hour we spent walking over, around and through them began to suggest a particularly potent hybridization: autonomous self-management in the style of el Campo de Cebada, fused to the provision of standing community workshops and production facilities.
To my eye, anyway, Godsbanen consists of four distinct structures or conditions: the former railyard administration building, now the offices of various public, private and non-profit groups; a long main hall that was formerly the intermodal freight-transfer center, and now shelters the printshop, photo studio, metalshop and so on; a new infill structure (complete with vertiginously climbable roof) by 3XN, that comprises the event venue and canteen, and sinters the other buildings together; and a tumble of trailers, ad-hoc shacks, shade structures and lean-tos that apparently constitute the Institut for (x).
What was wonderful about Godsbanen was seeing men and women both — of all ages, very few of whom were obviously hipsterized — using the available wood-, metal-, clay- and textile-working facilities to make things for their own daily use. It's this deployment of emergent digital craft techniques to produce things primarily with an eye to their use value rather than their exchange value à la present-day Etsy that so excited me.
But there are other ways in which Godsbanen one-ups the usual makerspace proposition. For example, the site sports a legible gradient of formality and structure, accessible at any point and traversable in either direction; you can literally see the stiff Scandinavian rectitude of the administration building decomposing into particles as you walk further down the rails, with everything that implies for uses and users. Martin pointed out that the complex supports two entirely distinct woodworking shops, one at either end of the gradient: the first (low-cost, but still pay-for-use) furnished with state-of-the-art equipment and on-site assistance, and the other, further down the yard, free but provided with somewhat older equipment and not much in the way of help/oversight. A project could germinate with two or three friends tinkering in the anarchic fringes, and move up the grade as they began to need more budget, order and privacy, or, alternately, a formal enterprise used to the comforts and constraints of the main building might hive off an experimental or exploratory activity requiring the freedom of the fringes. Either way, individual or collective undertakings are able to mature and develop inside a common framework, and avail themselves of more or less structure as needed. This is something that many self-styled incubators attempt, and very few seem to get right.
The further away one walks from the main building, the greater the sense of permission granted by the apparently random distribution of objects around the central space, by the texture of these objects and their orientation. This is of course not at all random: everything you see has been selected with an eye toward a precisely calibrated aesthetic that at times comes perilously close to favela chic, but that does send a very powerful message about the appropriability of the environment, the kinds of things people can do here and the kinds of people who can do them. (Note that this is the same message ostensibly conveyed, but actually undermined, by the "wacky," infantilized furniture of dot-com and tech-startup offices.)
This aspect of legibility, or performativity, strikes me as being nontrivially important to the success of the Godsbanen project. What fifty or more years of spectacular consumerism have left us with is the need to be seen to be doing what we do, as a performance of self, identity and affiliation. What participation in a place like Institut for (x) gives its user-constituents is a way to achieve that end without it necessarily being commodified. Citizens are making a very deliberate statement by participating here, and being seen to participate: a statement of value that remains outside the register of consumer capitalism, without necessarily being overtly, consciously or uncomplicatedly in opposition to it.
My sense is that Aarhus has figured out something sensitively dependent on a whole lot of boundary conditions — something that municipalities around the planet are falling all over themselves trying to reinvent, and generally missing by a country mile. Their success has something to do, certainly, with the fact that Denmark can find funds in the public purse to support this kind of activity, and just as certainly with the fact that a coherent fabric of trust yet persists in Danish culture of the everyday.
But it owes even more to some very canny spatial and social thinking. What the Aarhus experiment teaches us, among quite a few other things, are how to organize space so its legibility serves its users rather than the prerogatives of territorial control, and that many of the material things we need in life we can learn to make for ourselves.
Unto This Last: Local production, training and employment
Which brings us to Unto This Last, a commercial furniture manufacturer that has been operating in London's Brick Lane for the past thirteen years. Their product line — a reasonably wide selection of chairs, tables, beds, bookshelves and storage units — displays a total coherence from conception all the way through design, fabrication method and setting to delivery. Each piece has been carefully designed so that it can be assembled from flat pieces cut from sheets of sustainably-grown birch plywood, by a CNC cutter right in the back of the shop. (Swing by at the right time, and you can see it in action, cutting components of the piece that you yourself will take home and weave into your life.) The shop's ethos of "less mass, more data" rather takes the logistics-friendly Ikea flatpack concept to a new level.
There are, inevitably, issues. While I personally rather like it, it's clear that the stripped-down aesthetic (ably conveyed by the store's iconic sign) isn't for everyone. And ideally trees yielding wood suitable to this kind of application could be grown within the local bioregion, rather than being shipped from the (state-owned and -managed) forests of Latvia.
Nevertheless, alongside other, slightly differing initiatives, like the wonderfully-named Assemble & Join, what Unto This Last teaches us is how to wrest the greatest practical, economic and (as we'll see) social value from the minimum investment in matter and energy.
Come together
In the fusion of each of these three archetypal processes, el Campo de Cebada, Godsbanen and Unto This Last, we can see the outlines of something truly radical and terribly exciting beginning to resolve. What can be made out, gleaming in the darkness, is a — partial, incomplete, necessarily insufficient, but hugely important — way of responding to the disappearance of meaningful jobs from our cities, as well as all the baleful second-order effects that attend that disappearance.
When apologists for the technology industry trumpet the decontextualized factoid that each "tech" job ostensibly creates five new service positions as a secondary effect, what they neglect to mention is that the lion's share of those jobs will as a matter of course prove to be the kind of insecure, short-term, benefits-lacking, at-or-close-to-minimum-wage positions that typify the contemporary service sector. This sort of employment can't come anywhere close to the (typically unionized) industrial-sector jobs of the twentieth century in their capacity to bind a community together, either in the income and benefits they produce by way of compensation, in the conception of self and competence they generate in those who hold them, or in the sense of solidarity with others similarly situated that they generally evoke.
At the same time, though, like many others, I too believe it would be foolish to artifically inflate employment by propping up declining smokestack industries with public-sector subsidies. Why, for example, continue to maintain Detroit's automobile manufacturers on taxpayer-funded life support, when their approach to the world is so deeply retrograde, their product so very corrosive environmentally and socially, their behavior so irresponsible and their management so blitheringly, hamfistedly incompetent? That which is falling should also be pushed, surely. But that can't ethically be done until something of comparable scale has been found to replace industrial manufacturing jobs as the generator of local economic vitality and the nexus of local community.
So where might meaningful, valued, value-generating employment be found — "employment" in the deepest sense of that word? I have two ways of answering that question:
– In the immediate term, I believe in the material and economic significance of digital fabrication technologies largely using free and open-source plans, deployed in small, clean, city-center workshops, under democratic community control. While these will never remotely be of a scale to replace all the vanished industrial jobs of the past, they offer us at least one favorable prospect those industrial jobs never could: the direct production of items immediately useful and valuable in one's own life. Should such workshops be organized in such a way as to offer skills training (perhaps for laid-off service-sector workers, elders or at-risk youth), they present a genuinely potent economic and social proposition.
There are provisos. The Surly Urbanist correctly suggests that any positions created in such an endeavor need to be good jobs, i.e. not simply minimum-wage dronework, and my friend Rena Tom also notes that the skills training involved should be something more comprehensive than a simple set of instructions on how to run a CNC milling machine — that any such course of instruction would be most enduringly valuable if it amounted to an apprenticeship first in the manual and only later the numeric working of materials. I also want to be very clear that, per the kind of inclusive decision-making processes used at el Campo de Cebada, such a workshop would have to be something a community itself collectively thinks is worth experimenting with and investing in, not something inflicted upon it by guileless technoutopians from afar.
– In the fullness of time, I believe that the use of relatively high-technology techniques to accomplish not merely the local, autonomous production of everyday objects, furnitures and infrastructures, but their refit and repair, will come to be an economically salient activity in the global North. In this I see a congelation of several existing tendencies, logics or dynamics: the ideologically-driven retreat of the State from responsibility for stewardship of the everyday environment; the accelerating attrition and degradation of the West's dated and undermaintained infrastructures, and their concomitant need for upgrade or replacement; increasing belief in the desirability of densifying urban infill; the rising awareness in the developed world of jugaad, gambiarra and other cultures of repair, reuse and improvisation; the emergence of fabricator-enabled adaptive upcycling; the circulation of a massive stock of recyclable componentry (in the form of obsolescent structures as well as landfill-bound but effectively nondegradable consumer items), coupled to the emergence of a favorable economics of materials recovery; broader experience with and understanding of networked, horizontal and leaderless organizational structures; the creation of a robust informational commons, including repositories of freely-downloadable specifications; and finally the clear capability of online platforms to facilitate development and sharing of the necessary knowledge, maintain some degree of standardization (or at least harmonization) of practice, suggest sites where citizen repair might constitute a useful intervention, and support processes of democratic decision-making.
On forgetting to slay the dragon
Especially when they're of industrial grade, the 3D printers, laser cutters, CNC milling machines and other devices involved in digital precision manufacture are highly visible and — if you've ever seen one in operation, you know it's true — coldly glamorous, possessed of the same eerie machinic grace and certainty that makes the flight of quadcopter drones such an uncanny thing to witness. Nor are fabricated things themselves without a certain evocative power. In a dynamic we should all be familiar with by now, and deeply suspicious of, the discrete printed object is often taken as not merely a sign standing for a complex underlying process, but accepted as a unremarkable replacement and stand-in for it. Thus we see an efflorescence of on-demand mall and High Street "fab labs" apparently dedicated to churning out novelty items of puissant symbolism, but little actual utility: personalized busts, complex gear trains that will never be connected to any other mechanism, and similar dead ends and blind alleys.
I certainly do not mean to fetishize the new production. What I do mean to suggest is that we've barely taken the measure of these networked, decentralized, distributed technologies of material production as economic and social enablers. The same techniques that generated kipple of the sort I describe above have clearly already transcended the hobbyist stage, having recently been used to rapidly produce and assemble objects of architectural scale and intent. (If anything, this impressive performance was underhyped; as Fred Scharmen points out, the designers/fabricators responsible for the Shanghai development "don't have press agents, they didn't make a rendering, they didn't even post any photos or concepts until after they did it.")
But neither are the technologies themselves really the point here. In everything I suggest above, the act of production is — comparatively, and for all its many rigors — the trivially easy bit. The challenge isn't, at all, to propose the deployment of new fabrication technologies, but to deploy them in modes, configurations and assemblages that might effectively resist capture by existing logics of accumulation and exploitation, and bind them into processes generative of lasting and signficant shared value. This is the infinitely harder project of weaving all of these technologies into not merely "sustainable" but actually sustained practices and communities of practice.
My mistake in the past — and, in retrospect, it's an astonishingly naïve and determinist one — was to think that emergent networked forms of shared resource utilization might in themselves give rise to any particularly liberatory politics of everyday life. Experience has taught me that such notionally transformative frameworks as do arise very readily get appropriated by existing ways of valuing, doing and being; whatever "emancipatory potential" may reside in them swiftly falls before path dependency and the weight of habit, and the gesture as a whole comes to nought.
This is what appears, for the time being anyway, to have fatally undermined the more interesting prospects for conceiving of space as a shared network resource, the cluster of practices I think of as treating "space as a service." Consider what's become of my original argument that the companionable coexistence of AirBnB and Couchsurfing.org implied enough space for a (non-corporate but robustly) commercial business model and a fiercely noncommercial service model to subsist side-by-side, even as they brokered access to the same resource: fast-forward three years, and AirBnB looks more and more like a formal branch of the hospitality industry with each passing day, while Couchsurfing has — fumblingly, and much to the chagrin of its original animating community — reinvented itself as a for-profit competitor.
The dynamic here puts me in mind of a thought expressed succinctly by David Harvey in his new, and excellent, book Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism:
The long history of attempts to create some such alternative (by way of worker cooperatives, autogestion, worker control and more latterly solidarity economies) suggests that this strategy can meet with only limited success…If the aim of these non-capitalistic forms of labor organization is still the production of exchange values, for example, and if the capacity for private persons to appropriate the social power of money remains unchecked, then the associated workers, the solidarity economies and the centrally planned production regimes ultimately either fail or become complicit in their own self-exploitation.
Also sobering is how very often over the past few years "disruptive innovation" in services has been attended by the worst sort of triumphalist douchery on the part of the already-privileged beneficiaries of the ostensible disruption. I think of the tellingly-named Uber, explicitly positioned as an outright celebration of the "self-made" Randian superman's differential ability to route around urban infrastructural, bureaucratic and regulatory failure, in a world where his social and economic lessers are reduced to relying on defunded, dysfunctional, all-but-dystopian public transit. Uber's self-serving rhetoric casts any regulation of their service as unwonted friction imposed by meddlesome rent-seekers, when that fabric of regulation was for the most part woven into place for good and sufficient reason.
As if these disappointments weren't enough to chasten me from making assertions about propensities and likelihoods, not too long ago Anil Bawa-Cavia (rightly, I think) poked back at something I'd said regarding the "latent and unrealized emancipatory potential" of certain technologies:
I don't see any reason to believe that any technology has a pre-inscribed 'potential' that remains latent within it. I agree with Harman's interpretation of Latour on this point, extreme as it may be. Either entities have active affinities and relations or they don't. I see no convincing reason to believe they possess an essence in which potential may reside. So can networked technology be emancipatory? I'd like to believe so, but only acting in relation with other actors in a co-ordinated manner…I don't [therefore] think it's constructive to simply assert that this potential is latent, as it amounts to an ideological projection or political posturing. The task, then, would be to go ahead and activate these technologies by bringing them in relation to other actants in ways which might be regarded as emancipatory.
Here the terms of what might at first blush appear to be an abstruse debate in the metaphysics of the flat ontology turn out to have important implications for the ways in which we see, describe and act in the world. Though for myself I tend to believe that all things have recourse to a broader performative repertoire than that set of relations currently enacted, I take Anil's (and Harman's, and more distantly Latour's) point: we have to actually do the work of forging some linkage between things before we can know whether that particular linkage was in fact possible. And that work is an investment, is never accomplished without some cost.
So for all of these reasons, I've become wary of using that word "potential" to express my hope for the trajectories that appear to me to be latent in some emergent technosocial circumstance, but have yet to be actualized. But history nevertheless suggests that there is a marked degree of affinity between practices of material production in distributed, networked workshops, on the one hand, and polities choosing to organize themselves as a federation of autonomous local collectives managed by popular assembly on the other. If the latter seems in any wise to be a productive way of addressing some of the more vexatious challenges that afflict us, then maybe it might not be such a bad idea to experiment with the former. (Murray Bookchin gives some consideration to the organic politics of the materially self-reliant, in contexts that include medieval northern Italy and post-Colonial New England, in The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship, which I recommend without reservation.)
Given the direct and ancillary benefits that seem likely to cascade off of locating material production capabilities of this sort in the community, it might not be such a bad idea to experiment with them in any event, regardless of your politics. My aim, in all cases, is to see if the binding power of the network can't be used to perform a kind of urban kintsugi: Expose the seams and sutures between things, articulate those seams in such a way as to improve the whole, leave the newly-rejoined fabric stronger than it had been before. What lies ahead is the costful task of attempting to verify whether this can in fact be accomplished — whether the value I suppose to subsist in this particular imagined alignment of technologies, spatial arrangements and organizational structures can actually be realized, by helping to produce real-world circumstances and situations that demonstrate it. And while there are certainly enough daunting aspects to this endeavor, and more than enough, I've rarely in my adult life been more optimistic than I find myself at this moment. It is clear to me that what we now have at hand, and ready to hand, are practices of the minimum viable utopia.
An event on urban data: Beyond the fetish object, toward the social object
UPDATE: Event confirmed for 14th March, 2014. See the final post.
For the past half-decade or so, in a phenomenon most everyone reading this site is no doubt already intimately acquainted with, data-derived artifacts (dynamic visualizations, digital maps, interactive representations of place-specific information, even static "infographics") have taken increasing prominence in the visual imaginary of mass culture.
We see such images all the time now: broadly speaking, the visual rhetoric associated with them is the animating stuff of everything from car commercials to the weather forecast. The same rhetoric breathes life into election and sports coverage on television, the title sequences of movies, viral Facebook posts and the interactive features on newspaper sites.
Sometimes — in fact, often — these images are deployed as abstract tokens, empty fetishes of futurity, tech-ness, data-ness, evidence-basedness…ultimately, au-courantness. Just as often, and very problematically, they're used to "prove" things.
But we've also begun to see the first inklings of ways in which such artifacts can be used more interestingly, to open up rather than shut down collective discussion around issues of great popular import — to ask its users to consider how and why the state of affairs represented by a given visualization got to be that way, whether that state of affairs is at all OK with them, and what if anything ought to be done to redress it. And this is whether the topic at hand happens to be land use, urban renewal and gentrification, informal housing, the differential consequences of public and privatized mass transit or expenditures in the criminal justice system.
Very few methods of advocacy can convey the consequences of our collective decisions as viscerally as a soundly-designed visualization. (Similarly, if there's a better way of helping people imagine the spatial implications of alternative policy directions, strategies, investments and allocations, I haven't stumbled onto it yet, although that certainly blurs the distinction between representing that which does exist and simulating that which does not.) What would happen if such visualizations were consciously and explicitly used as the ground text and point of departure for a moderated deliberative process? Could democracy be done this way? Could this be done at regular intervals? And how might doing so lead to better outcomes (or simply more buy-in) than existing procedures?
There's plenty of rough precedent for such a notion, albeit scattered across a few different registers of activity:
– A few savvy journalists are starting to use data-based visualizations and maps as the starting point for their more traditional investigative efforts, and the narratives built on them. Visualizations, in this mode, essentially allow unexpected correlations and fact patterns to rise to the surface of awareness, and suggest what questions it might therefore be fruitful for a reporter to ask.
– SeeClickFix, of course, already allows citizens to levy demands on local government bodies, though it doesn't provide for the organization of autonomous response to the conditions it documents, and it forthrightly positions the objects it represents as problems rather than matters of concern. More proactive and affirmative in its framing is Change By Us, which does emphasize voluntarism, though still with a sense of supplication to (elected or appointed) representatives in government. (The site answers the question "Who's listening?" by promising that a "network of city leaders is ready to hear your ideas and provide guidance for your projects.") In any event, both SeeClickFix and Change By Us focus on highly granular, literally pothole- or at most community-garden-scale issues.
– Storefront Democracy, a student project of Kristin Gräfe and (ex-Urbanscaler) Jeff Kirsch, reimagined the front window of a city councillor's district office as a site where community sentiment on various questions, expressed as votes, could be visualized. Voting is not quite the same thing as democracy, much less deliberation, but the project began to explore ways in which situated representations might be used to catalyze conversations about matters facing the community.
– There are even full-blown technological platforms that promise to enable robust networked democracy, though for all the technology involved this one at least seems to blow right by the potential of visualized states of affairs to serve as focal points for managed dissensus.
Draw out all of those threads, and what do you wind up with? I'm not at all sure, but the question is certainly provocative enough that I want to explore its implications in further depth and detail. Again, I'm interested in digital cartography and interactive representations of data used as the starting point, rather than the product and culmination, of a decision process. My intention is to disturb these things as settled facts, disinter them from the loam of zeitgeisty but near-meaningless infoporn that furnishes more than one glossy coffee-table book, and activate them instead as situated social objects. I think by now it's clear that data-driven projects like Digital Matatus can furnish people with practical tools to manage the way things are in the city. But can they usefully catalyze conversation about the way things could (or should) be? And can we somehow bundle information about provenance into every representation of data, allowing users to ask how it was gathered, by whom, using what means and for what notional purpose, so they can arrive at their own determinations of its reliability and relevance? All of that remains to be seen.
If you find yourself nodding at any of this — or, indeed, you think it's all deeply misguided, but nevertheless worth contesting in person — consider this a heads-up that I'll be convening a one-day seminar on this and related topics at LSE in mid-March, and am looking for qualified speakers beyond my personal orbit and existing friendship circles. If you're interested in either attending or speaking, please do email me at your earliest convenience at my first initial dot my last name at lse.ac.uk. Limited travel support is available – I have an event budget that allows me to fly in two to three speakers and put you up in Central London for a night, so if you or someone you know is inclined to present I definitely encourage you to get in touch. And let's see if together we can't figure out if there's a thing here or not.
"Against the smart city" bibliography
Now that we're finally slouching toward Amazon to be born — i.e. I'm confident that the Kindle edition, at least, will ship within the next ten days — I'm happy to be able to share this final bibliography for "Against the smart city." I hope, as ever, you find it useful.
Alcatel-Lucent Corporation. "Getting Smart About Smart Cities: Understanding the Market Opportunity in the Cities of Tomorrow," February 2012.
→ foryoutou.se/marketopportunity
Alexander, Steve. "IBM wants Minneapolis to become a 'smarter city,'" Minneapolis Star Tribune, 6 June 2011.
→ foryoutou.se/smartmpls
Allease, Eve. "Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates: Future Green City Now," Urban Times, 22 May 2011.
→ foryoutou.se/masdargreen
Allianz Open Knowledge Initiative. "Masdar City: a desert utopia," 30 March 2009.
→ foryoutou.se/masdarutopia
Alusi, Annissa, Robert G. Eccles, Amy C. Edmondson and Tiona Zuzul. "Sustainable Cities: Oxymoron or the Shape of the Future?," Harvard Business School Working Paper 11-062, 20 March 2011.
→ foryoutou.se/unsustain
Amnesty International. "Amnesty International Report 2008: Americas Regional Update. Selected events covering the period from January to April 2008," 28 May 2008.
→ foryoutou.se/amnestyamericas
— "'We have come to take your souls': the caveirão and policing in Rio de Janeiro," 13 March 2006.
→ foryoutou.se/amnestybope
Android Open Source Project. "Licenses."
→ foryoutou.se/androidlicenses
Beer, Stafford. Platform for Change: A Message from Stafford Beer. Wiley, New York, 1975.
Bell, Genevieve and Paul Dourish. "Yesterday's Tomorrows: Notes on Ubiquitous Computing's Dominant Vision," Personal and Ubiquitous Computing Volume 11 Issue 2, January 2007.
→ foryoutou.se/belldourish
Bettencourt, Luís M.A., et al. "Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 104 Number 17, 24 April 2007.
→ foryoutou.se/superlinear
Biddle, Sam. "Racial Profiling: Newest Trend in Silicon Valley?," Valleywag, 7 August 2013.
→ foryoutou.se/athertonprofiling
Black, Edwin. IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation, Random House, New York, 2001.
Boudreau, John. "Cisco helps build prototype for instant cities," San Jose Mercury News, 01 June 2010.
→ foryoutou.se/mercurycisco
Brand, Stewart. How Buildings Learn, Viking Press, New York, 1994.
Brewster, Kent. "Profiling Atherton," July 2013.
→ foryoutou.se/athertonnailed
Buro Happold. "Projects: PlanIT Valley."
→ foryoutou.se/planitmasterplan
Carlisle, Tamsin. "Masdar City clips another $2.5bn from price tag," The National, 1 December 2010.
→ foryoutou.se/masdarscrubsprt
Chalmers, Matthew and Ian MacColl. "Seamful and Seamless Design in Ubiquitous Computing," Technical Report Equator-03-005, 2004.
→ foryoutou.se/seamfuldesign
Chen, David W. "Survey Raises Questions on Data-Driven Policy," The New York Times, 8 February 2010.
→ foryoutou.se/jukingthenypd
Chomsky, Noam. "The Case Against B.F. Skinner," New York Review of Books, 30 December 1971.
→ foryoutou.se/chomskycontraskinner
Cisco Systems. "Cisco and Lake Nona Unite to Create First U.S. Iconic Smart+Connected Community in Orlando, Florida," 24 October 2012.
→ foryoutou.se/ciscofla
— "Cisco Contributes to Open Source."
→ foryoutou.se/opencisco
— "Cities of the Future: Songdo, South Korea," 2012.
→ foryoutou.se/ciscosongdo
— "Cities of the Future: Songdo, South Korea – Living," 2012.
→ foryoutou.se/songdoliving
— "Cities of the Future: Songdo, South Korea – Roadmap for a New Community," 2012.
→ foryoutou.se/songdoroadmap
— "Smart City Framework: A Systematic Process for Enabling Smart+Connected Communities," September 2012.
→ foryoutou.se/ciscoframework
— "Smart+Connected Communities."
→ foryoutou.se/ciscosmart
City Mayors Foundation. "Largest cities in the world ranked by population density," 2007.
→ foryoutou.se/densestcities
City Protocol Society. "City Protocol."
→ foryoutou.se/cityprotocol
Cohen, Boyd. "Singapore Is On Its Way To Becoming An Iconic Smart City," Fast Company co.Exist, 14 May 2012.
→ foryoutou.se/siniconic
Le Corbusier. The Athens Charter, Grossman Publishers, New York, 1973.
→ foryoutou.se/athenscharter
— La Ville Radieuse. Editions Vincent, Freal & Co., Paris, 1935.
Cotton, Brian ("Ph.D."!) for Frost & Sullivan. "Intelligent Urban Transportation: Predicting, Managing, and Integrating Traffic Operations in Smarter Cities.
→ foryoutou.se/smarttransport
CSIR-Central Road Research Institute. "Evaluating Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) Corridor Performance from Amebedkar Nagar to Mool Chand Intersection," 13 February 2013.
→ foryoutou.se/delhibrtfailure
Davis, Mike and Daniel Bertrand Monk. Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism, The New Press, New York, 2008.
De la Peña, Benjamin. "Embracing the Autocatalytic City," The Atlantic Cities, 11 March 2013.
→ foryoutou.se/benjieautocat
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, Athlone Press, London, 1986.
Dourish, Paul. Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction, The MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2004.
The Economist. "Masdar plan," Technology Quarterly, 4 December 2008.
→ foryoutou.se/masdarplan
Economist Intelligence Unit for Siemens AG. "Managing the city as a 'living organism,'" Asian Green City Index, 2011.
→ foryoutou.se/asiagreenindex
Emirates Center for Human Rights. "Migrant workers in the United Arab Emirates," July 2012.
→ foryoutou.se/uaemigrantworkers
English, Bella. "He'll Build This City," Boston Globe, 13 December 2004.
→ foryoutou.se/hynestale
Executive Affairs Authority, Emirate of Abu Dhabi. "Law No. 22: Establishment of Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company and Masdar Institute of Science and Technology," 2007.
→ foryoutou.se/masdarlaw
EXP, Research Centre for Experimental Practice at the University of Westminster. "Archigram Archival Project."
→ foryoutou.se/archigram
Feuer, Alan. "Occupy Sandy: A Movement Moves to Relief," The New York Times, 9 November 2012.
→ foryoutou.se/occupytimes
Flood, Joe. The Fires: How a Computer Formula Burned Down New York City — And Determined the Future of American Cities. Riverhead Books, New York, 2010.
Forrester, Jay. Urban Dynamics, The MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1969.
Frayssinet, Fabiana. "Forced Eviction from Rio's Slums Echoes Dark Past," Tierramerica, 10 May 2010.
→ foryoutou.se/favelaevict
Galbraith, Jay R. "Matrix organization designs: How to combine functional and project forms," Business Horizons Volume 14 Issue 1, 1971.
→ foryoutou.se/matrixorg
Gartner, Inc. "Is 'Smart Cities' The Next Big Market?," 2010.
→ foryoutou.se/gartnermarket
Gehl, Jan. Life Between Buildings: Using Public Space, trans. Jo Koch, Van Nostrand Reinhold, New York, 1987.
Gibson, William. Neuromancer, Ace Books, New York, 1984.
Green, Jeremy for OVUM. "Digital Urban Renewal," April 2011.
→ foryoutou.se/ciscorenewal
Greenfield, Adam. "Preliminary Notes to a Diagram of Occupy Sandy," Speedbird, 21 November 2012.
→ foryoutou.se/sandynotes
— Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing, New Riders, Berkeley, 2006.
Gunther, Marc. "A Photo Tour of Masdar City," Greenbiz.com, 21 January 2011.
→ foryoutou.se/masdarpics
Hatch, David. "Singapore Strives to Become 'The Smartest City,'" Governing, February 2013.
→ foryoutou.se/sinsmartest
Hedlund, Jan for Microsoft Corporation. "Smart City 2020: Technology and Society in the Modern City," March 2011.
→ foryoutou.se/mssmartcity
Hitachi, Ltd. "Coordination of Urban and Service Infrastructures for Smart Cities," 2012.
→ foryoutou.se/hitachifees
— "Telecommunication Systems for Realizing a Smart City," 2012.
→ foryoutou.se/hitachicomms
Howard, Ebenezer. Garden Cities of To-morrow, Faber and Faber, London, 1902.
→ foryoutou.se/gardencities
Human Rights Watch. "World Report 2012: United Arab Emirates," January 2012.
→ foryoutou.se/humanrightsintheuae
IBM Corporation. "City Government and IBM Close Partnership to Make Rio de Janeiro a Smarter City," 27 December 2010.
→ foryoutou.se/ibmrio
— "IBM Intelligent Operations Center for Smarter Cities."
→ foryoutou.se/ibminteractive
— "Intelligent Operations Center," 6 March 2012.
→ foryoutou.se/iocdevworks
— Advertisement: "Mayors Of The World, May We Kindly Have 540 Words With You?"
→ foryoutou.se/ibmwsjad
— "The Smarter City: Traffic."
→ foryoutou.se/ibmmodel
— "Smarter Cities: Infrastructure. Operations. People."
→ foryoutou.se/ibmoverview
— "Smarter Public Safety: Smarter Cities solutions for law enforcement."
→ foryoutou.se/smartercops
— "Traffic Prediction Tool."
→ foryoutou.se/ibmtraffic
— "Welcome to the Smarter City."
→ foryoutou.se/ibmwelcome
Incheon Free Economic Zone Authority. "Business Outline: Development Plan."
→ foryoutou.se/ifezdevplan
— "Incheon Free Economic Zone: One-Stop Service."
→ foryoutou.se/ifezonestop
— "Investment Incentive, Incheon Free Economic Zone."
→ foryoutou.se/ifezincentive
International Data Corporation. "Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Networks Tracker: Top Five Worldwide Layer 2/3 Ethernet Switch Vendors," 23 August 2012.
→ foryoutou.se/ciscoshare
International Telecommunication Union. "Living In a World of 7 Billion People: Digital Cities for a Better Future," ITU News, August 2011.
→ foryoutou.se/itudigitalcities
— "The World in 2013: ICT Facts and Figures," February 2013.
→ foryoutou.se/itustats
Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Random House, New York, 1961.
Kim, Bongsu. "Subway CCTV was used to watch citizens' bare skin sneakily," Asian Business Daily, 16 July 2013. (In Korean.)
→ foryoutou.se/seoulcctv
Kitchin, Rob and Martin Dodge. Code/Space, The MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2011.
Koetsier, John. "Cisco helps build first U.S. 'Smart+Connected' city of the future in Lake Nona, Florida," VentureBeat, 23 October 2012.
→ foryoutou.se/smartflorida
Kolesar, Peter. "Model for Predicting Average Fire Company Travel Times," RAND Institute report R-1624-NYC, June 1975.
→ foryoutou.se/randfiretimes
Koolhaas, Rem. "The Generic City" in S, M, L, XL, The Monacelli Press, New York, 1994.
Lee, Junho and Jeehyun Oh. "New Songdo City and the Value of Flexibility: A Case Study of Implementation and Analysis of a Mega-Scale Project," MS thesis Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2008.
→ foryoutou.se/songdocase
LG Electronics. "LG HomNet: Total Solution."
→ foryoutou.se/lghomnet
Lindsay, Greg. "Building a Smarter Favela: IBM Signs Up Rio," Fast Company, 27 December 2010.
→ foryoutou.se/smartfavela
Living PlanIT. Video: "Building efficient urban-scale environments."
→ foryoutou.se/lewisvideo
— "Cities in the Cloud: A Living PlanIT Introduction to Future City Technologies," July 2011.
→ foryoutou.se/planitcisco2
— "Design Wins."
→ foryoutou.se/designwins
— "Living PlanIT at Cisco C-Scape," July 2011.
→ foryoutou.se/planitcisco1
– "Living PlanIT's CEO Steve Lewis selected by the World Economic Forum as a Technology Pioneer 2012."
→ foryoutou.se/lewisaward
– "Living PlanIT Urban Operating System: Introduction to the Living PlanIT UOS Architecture, Open Standards and Protocols."
→ foryoutou.se/uosintro
— "Planit [sic] Valley, a true innovation in urban development."
→ foryoutou.se/iplanits
— "Urban Operating System: Overview."
→ foryoutou.se/uosoverview
— "What is Living PlanIT?"
→ foryoutou.se/whatislivingplanit
— "Why Become a Living PlanIT Partner Company?"
→ foryoutou.se/whypartner
— Image.
→ foryoutou.se/planitpic1
— Image.
→ foryoutou.se/planitpic2
— Image.
→ foryoutou.se/eiffelplease
— Images.
→ foryoutou.se/planitpictures
Masdar (Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company). "Benefits of Setting Up in a Free Zone."
→ foryoutou.se/masdarbenefits
Masdar City. "Frequently Asked Questions," 2011.
→ foryoutou.se/masdarfaq
— "Masdar City: The Global Center of Future Energy," 2011.
→ foryoutou.se/welcometomasdarcity
McCullough, Malcolm. Digital Ground: Architecture, Pervasive Computing, and Environmental Knowing, The MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2004.
Medina, Eden. "Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation: Socialist Cybernetics in Allende's Chile," Journal of Latin American Studies Volume 38 Issue 3, 2006.
→ foryoutou.se/allendecomp
Mehta, Suketu. "In the Violent Favelas of Brazil," New York Review of Books, 11 July 2013.
→ foryoutou.se/intheviolentfavelas
Microsoft Corporation. "Microsoft and Living PlanIT Partner to Deliver Smart City Technology Via the Cloud," 22 March 2011.
→ foryoutou.se/msplanit
— "The Smart City: Using IT to Make Cities More Livable," December 2011.
→ foryoutou.se/smartlivable
Migurski, Michal. "Visualizing Urban Data," in Beautiful Data: The Stories Behind Elegant Data Solutions, Toby Segaran and Jeff Hammerbacher, eds., O'Reilly Media, Sebastopol CA, 2012, pp. 167-182.
— "Oakland Crime Maps X," tecznotes, 3 March 2008.
→ foryoutou.se/oaklandcrime
Mitleton-Kelly, Eve. "Ten Principles of Complexity & Enabling Infrastructures," Complex systems and evolutionary perspectives on organisations: the application of complexity theory to organisations, Elsevier Science Ltd, Oxford, 2003.
Mlot, Stephanie. "Microsoft CityNext Aims To Build 'Smart Cities'," PC Magazine, 11 July 2013.
→ foryoutou.se/mscitynext
Montavon, Marylène, Koen Steemers, Vicky Cheng and Raphaël Compagnon. "'La Ville Radieuse' by Le Corbusier once again a case study," The 23rd Conference on Passive and Low Energy Architecture, 6 September 2006.
→ foryoutou.se/corbdebunked
Mostashari, Ali, Friedrich Arnold, Mo Mansouri and Matthias Finger. "Cognitive cities and intelligent urban governance," Network Industries Quarterly Volume 13 Number 3, 2011.
→ foryoutou.se/cogcities
Mumford, Eric. The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928-1960, The MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2002.
Mumford, Lewis. The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects, Harcourt, Brace and World, New York, 1961.
Newman, Oscar. Creating Defensible Space, US Department of Housing and Urban Development Office of Policy Development and Research, Washington DC, 1996.
→ foryoutou.se/defensiblespace
OFFICE: Jason Schulte Design, Inc. "IBM: Designing a Smarter Planet."
→ foryoutou.se/ibmsmartcityads
Patten, Bob. "Standard operating procedures in Intelligent Operations Center Version 1.5," IBM developerWorks, 10 May 2013.
→ foryoutou.se/iocsop
Paul-Ebhohimhen, Virginia A. and Alison Avenell. "Systematic review of the use of financial incentives in treatments for obesity and overweight," Obesity Reviews Volume 9 Issue 4, July 2008.
→ foryoutou.se/incentivesmeta
Perrow, Charles. Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies, Basic Books, New York, 1984.
Poole, Erika Shehan, Christopher A. Le Dantec, James R. Eagan and W. Keith Edwards. "Reflecting on the invisible: understanding end-user perceptions of ubiquitous computing," Proceedings of Ubicomp '08, Volume 344, ACM, New York, 2008.
→ foryoutou.se/invisicomp
Quigley, John M. "Urban diversity and economic growth," Journal of Economic Perspectives Volume 12 Number 2, 1998.
→ foryoutou.se/urbandiversity
Reporters Without Borders. "Authorities crack down on social networks and activist bloggers," 30 March 2012.
→ foryoutou.se/emiraticlampdown
Rider, Kenneth L. "A Parametric Model for the Allocation of Fire Companies," RAND Institute report R-1615-NYC/HUD, April 1975.
→ foryoutou.se/randfirecos
Riis, Jacob. How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1890.
Ross, Andrew. "Human Rights, Academic Freedom, and Offshore Academics," Academe, January 2011.
→ foryoutou.se/abudhabirights
Roudman, Sam. "Bank of America's Toxic Tower," The New Republic, 28 July 2013.
→ foryoutou.se/leedracket
Rudofsky, Bernard. Streets for People, Doubleday, New York, 1969.
Sadler, Simon. Archigram: Architecture without Architecture, The MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2005.
Sen, Amartya Kumar. "The impossibility of a Paretian liberal," Journal of Political Economy Volume 78 Number 1, January 1970.
→ foryoutou.se/nopareto
Schmidt, Harald, Kristin Voigt and Daniel Wikler. "Carrots, sticks, and health care reform: problems with wellness incentives," New England Journal of Medicine, 4 January 2010.
→ foryoutou.se/nejmincentives
Schneider, Friedrich, Andreas Buehn and Claudio E. Montenegro. "Shadow Economies All over the World," World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 5356, July 2010.
→ foryoutou.se/worldbankinformal
Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1999.
Segel, Arthur I. "New Songdo City," Harvard Business School case study 9-206-019, 15 June 2006.
→ foryoutou.se/songdocasestudy
Siemens Corporation. "Collective Intelligence: City Cockpit, Real-Time Government," 2011.
→ foryoutou.se/citycockpit
— "Smart City in detail: Intelligent communication solutions for smart cities."
→ foryoutou.se/smartercomms
— "Sustainable Buildings — Networked Technologies: Smart Homes and Cities," 2008.
→ foryoutou.se/siemenstotal
— "What is the Siemens City of the Future?," 2012.
→ foryoutou.se/siemensfuturecity
Simon, David, Kia Corthron, Ed Burns and Chris Collins. The Wire, Season 4, Episode 9: "Know Your Place," first aired 12 November 2006.
Smith, P.D. City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age, Bloomsbury Publishing USA, New York, 2012.
Songdo IBD. "The City: Master Plan."
→ foryoutou.se/songdomasterplan
Sönmez, Sevil, Yorghos Apostopoulos, Diane Tran and Shantyana Rentrope. "Human rights and health disparities for migrant workers in the UAE," Health and Human Rights Volume 13 Number 2, 2011.
→ foryoutou.se/uaemigrantrights
Spufford, Francis. Red Plenty, Faber and Faber, London, 2011.
→ foryoutou.se/spuffordredplenty
Stallman, Richard. "Why 'Open Source' misses the point of Free Software," Communications of the ACM, Volume 52 Issue 6, June 2009.
→ foryoutou.se/rmsvsopen
Sussman, Joseph M. "Collected views on complexity in systems," MIT Engineering Systems Division Working Paper Series, 30 April 2002.
→ foryoutou.se/complexsystems
Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1977.
→ foryoutou.se/tuanspaceandplace
Ubisoft. Watch Dogs.
→ foryoutou.se/watchdogsgamesite
Vidal, John. "Masdar City – a glimpse of the future in the desert," The Guardian, 26 April 2011.
→ foryoutou.se/guardianmasdar
Wakefield, Jane. "Building cities of the future now," BBC News, 21 February 2013.
→ foryoutou.se/bbcsmartcities
Webb, Flemmich. "Sustainable cities: Innovative urban planning in Singapore," The Guardian, 11 October 2012.
→ foryoutou.se/guardiansin
Weiser, Mark. "Creating the invisible interface." ACM Conference on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST94), 1994.
The White House, Office of the Press Secretary. "President Clinton: Improving the Civilian Global Positioning System (GPS)," 1 May 2000.
→ foryoutou.se/cleangps
Whyte, William H. The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, Project for Public Spaces, New York, 1980.
Wilken, Rowan. "Calculated Uncertainty: Computers, Chance Encounters, and 'Community' in the Work of Cedric Price," Transformations Issue 14, March 2007.
→ foryoutou.se/cedricprice
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→ foryoutou.se/planitblueprint
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→ foryoutou.se/songdoforbes