City
Issue 29 : FCJ-212 Computing The City
issue doi:10.15307/fcj.29 introduction doi:10.15307/fcj.29.212.2017 Introduction by Armin Beverungen of Leuphana University Lüneburg and Florian Sprenger of Goethe University Frankfurt. Ubiquitous computing and the Internet of Things are often referred to as prime examples not only of new modes of computing, but of a new paradigm of mediation itself. If Lewis Mumford could already ascribe key characteristics of media – such as storage and transmission – to the city, so the city could in itself be understood as a medium (see Kittler, 1996), then nonetheless something changes considerably once ‘the city itself is turning into a constellation of computers’, as Michael Batty noted around twenty years ago (1997: 155). Today the city is indeed awash with distributed and networked computation, and many forms of knowledge and practice not only in architecture and urban planning are turning the city into a subject of computational practices while equipping it with computational capacities. Software…
FCJ-216 ‘Know Your Place’: headmap manifesto and the Vision of Locative Media
Dale Leorke Melbourne School of Design, The University of Melbourne [Abstract] What is the point of all the extraordinary technical inventions the world now has at its disposal if the conditions are lacking to derive any benefit from them, if they contribute nothing to leisure, if imagination is absent? Constant Nieuwenhuys, ‘Another City for Another Life’ (2006/1960: 71) Introduction When the headmap manifesto first appeared in 1999, Google was barely a year old, the U.S. government had not yet removed the GPS signal degradation that prevented its widespread commercial use, and Apple’s iPhone was still almost a decade away. Predominantly written by computer engineer Ben Russell, headmap (always spelt in lower case, although I capitalise it here when beginning a sentence) envisioned a world not entirely unlike the one we inhabit today, in which location-aware devices have radically transformed everyday life. It foreshadows recent developments from the emergence of location-based…
FCJ-217 Socio-Technical Imaginaries of a Data-Driven City: Ethnographic Vignettes from Delhi
Sandeep MertiaThe Sarai Programme, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi [Abstract] Several decades from now cities will have countless autonomous, intelligently functioning IT systems that will have perfect knowledge of users’ habits and energy consumption, and provide optimum service … The goal of such a city is to optimally regulate and control resources by means of autonomous IT systems. (Siemens Corporation cited in Greenfield, 2013: 12) Do you, as a city, objectify the most sophisticated knowledge in a physical landscape of extraordinary complexity, power and splendour at the same time as you bring together social forces capable of the most amazing socio-technical and political innovation? (Matthew Fuller, 2012) ‘Smarter Solutions for a Better Tomorrow’ was the tagline for the 1st Smart City India Expo organised in Delhi, 20-22 May 2015. Ravish Kumar, a veteran Hindi journalist, covered the expo in his popular television news show. During a ‘City…
FCJ-221 Collecting Elements of a Minor Future: Commoning in Alphabet City
Soenke Zehle xm:lab – Experimental Media Lab, Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Saar, Germany [Abstract] Much more than an exercise in urban development, the smart city is the harbinger of a providential processuality, announcing yet another machine age of algorithmic architectures. Marked by the missionary rhetoric and sense of manifest destiny immanent in the infrastructural informatisation of vast cartographies of communication, it is the cloud-based ‘city upon a hill’ of an imperial imagination, coupling the terraforming of the topographies of life and labor with visions of technological transcendence. In this Alphabet City, there is a multitude of folds to map, but no strategic hill to scale – and only non-places to plant the flags of a new regime. The didactic fictions that organise the semiotics and socialities of ‘smart citizenship’ are epic in scope, confronting us with the open worlds of a distribution beyond reaggregation. As ambient media changes and challenges…
FCJ-219 The Sensed Smog: Smart Ubiquitous Cities and the Sensorial Body
Jussi Parikka Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, United Kingdom Air pollution and waste management are two interconnected environmental concerns that demand our attention in the modern era. While the focus on air pollution often revolves around quantifying and governing the quality of air in smart cities, it is essential to recognize the broader implications of atmospheric conditions. Air pollution, caused by various particles and pollutants, presents political dilemmas of inclusion and exclusion, highlighting the urgency of addressing this issue. Just like air pollution, waste management is equally important, as improper waste disposal can contribute to air pollution and its harmful effects. For effective waste management solutions and dumpster rentals, you can visit https://grissmandumpsters.com/neenah-dumpster-rentals/. By addressing both air pollution and waste management, we can work towards creating a cleaner and healthier environment for the present and future generations. [Abstract] Air Conditions There is not much that could not be…
FCJ-220 Imperial Infrastructures and Asia beyond Asia: Data Centres, State Formation and the Territoriality of Logistical Media
Ned Rossiter Institute for Culture and Society / School of Humanities and Communication Arts, Western Sydney University [Abstract] How do the technical operations and infrastructural properties of data centres produce new territorial configurations that depart from and challenge the territorial borders of the nation-state? And what is distinct about such formations within the Asian region? These are the core questions that guide my thinking on digital infrastructures as a novel instantiation of imperial power. This is a power not beholden to the logic of the sovereign state, though it may take on attributes of the state such as the authority to decide and the power to govern economy and space, society and culture. It is a power that may also overlap with policy making and the ideological contours of the state. [1] And while such power may manifest chiefly in metropolitan, urban settings, its computational dimensions lend it an elasticity…
FCJ-218 Train Ticket Sharing: Alternative Forms of Computing in the City
Paula BialskiLeuphana University, Lüneburg [Abstract] Introduction In the city of Grodno, Belarus, which is populated by around 300,000 inhabitants, the main form of transportation is the bus. This transit system is run by a public company called Grodno Bus Park. In 2008, the bus company cancelled their reduced-price tickets for students and seniors, and all passengers were expected to pay the same price for a ticket. While each ticket cost only 0.15 Euro (1700 Belarusian rubbles), this was enough for somebody on a 200 Euro monthly salary to get agitated. In order to challenge the change in ticket price, public bus system commuters started ticket sharing. A bus passenger would leave the bus at their destination and hand their used ticket to a boarding passenger, free of charge. As Grodno Bus Park tickets had to only be ‘punched’ by the ticket machine located inside the bus in order to be…
FCJ-214 Visions of Urban Informatics: From Proximate Futures to Data-Driven Urbanism
Sarah BarnsInstitute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University [Abstract] Introduction Urban informatics, the nascent field that took as its subject the urban contexts of increasingly connected, smartphone-enabled citizens, is ten years old. Armed with tools of digital experimentation, data science, and design, equipped to decipher and decode complex urban environments, the field is increasingly positioned as a vital contributor to the contemporary urban sciences. The proliferation of distributed computing throughout our cities presents seemingly unlimited opportunities to explore and interrogate the workings of the city using novel methods of information retrieval, analysis and visualisation. Reflecting this opportunity, investment in urban informatics research capability is growing. In 2012, three significant research institutes focused on establishing city-focused data sciences capabilities were created in New York alone, [1] joining existing groups such as Queensland University of Technology’s Urban Informatics Research Lab and the MIT SENSEable City Lab in promoting the applications of…
FCJ-213 Babylonian Dreams: From Info-Cities to Smart Cities to Experimental Collectivism
Clemens Apprich Leuphana University, Lüneburg. [Abstract] Welcome to post-liberal Los Angeles, where the defense of luxury lifestyles is translated into proliferation of new repressions in space and movement, undergirded by the ubiquitous “armed response”. This obsession with physical security systems, and, collaterally, with the architectural policing of social boundaries, has become a zeitgeist of urban restructuring, a master narrative in the emerging built environment of the 1990s. […] Images of carceral inner cities (Escape from New York, Running Man), high-tech police death squads (Blade Runner), sentient buildings (Die Hard), urban bantustans (They live!), Vietnam-like street wars (Colors), and so on, only extrapolate from actually existing trends. (Davis, 1990: 223) In his bestselling book City of Quartz, Mike Davis, urban sociologist and rigorous chronicler of his Southern California home, described the imminent end of the ‘California Dream’ in the early 1990s (cf. Davis, 1990). By ‘excavating the future in Los Angeles’…
FCJ-215 Demoing unto Death: Smart Cities, Environment, and Preemptive Hope
Orit HalpernDepartment of Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University Gökçe GünelSchool of Middle Eastern and North African Studies, University of Arizona [Abstract] Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living.(Nicholas Negroponte, 1995: 6) Today, growing concerns with climate change, energy scarcity, security, and economic collapse have turned the focus of urban planners, investors, and governments towards infrastructure as a site of value production and potential salvation from a world consistently defined by catastrophes and crisis. From discussions about ‘disaster capitalism’ to the embrace of a world after humans, the idea that some environmental, economic, or security catastrophe has arrived, or will arrive, is almost unquestioned. In response, there has emerged a new paradigm of high technology infrastructure development obsessed with ‘smart’, ‘ubiquitous’, or ‘resilient’ infrastructures. Such smartness and resilience must be understood as quite specific as it directly refers to computationally and digitally-managed systems – from electrical grids…
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