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Issue 29 Introduction: Computing the City

2017; Open Humanities Press; Issue: 29 Linguagem: Inglês

10.15307/fcj.29.212.2017

1449-1443

Armin Beverungen, Florian Sprenger, Clemens Apprich, Sarah Barns, Dale Leorke,

Urban Design and Spatial Analysis

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 codes city space and thereby allows for the co-production of its spatiality; more and more space in the city is reliant on code, producing 'code/space' wherein a space simply does not function without software (Kitchin and Dodge, 2011).This themed issue on 'Computing the City', which emerges from a workshop with the same title held at the Centre for Digital Cultures at Leuphana University Lüneburg in 2014, focuses specifically on the development of urban ubiquitous computing, its status as media infrastructure, its complicity with logistics, as well as its contingent histories and virtual futures.The approach to computing the city taken here questions the accustomed self-description of a mediated society as a completely new infrastructure of living and dwelling.This is not yet another themed issue on the 'smart city' -as we will see below; a consideration of computing the city far exceeds the ways in which the smart city as discourse and project seeks to capture our imaginaries of future technological cities.The 'smart city' is promoted as the primary site of the materialisation of ubiquitous computing and the Internet of Things: the integration of computational systems with architectural design is supposed to turn inefficient urban settings into smart cities that manifest as the penultimate value-extraction machines (Goodspeed, 2015).In their essay for this issue that focuses on the smart city projects of Songdo in South Korea and Masdar in Abu Dhabi, Orit Halpern and Gökçe Günel demonstrate how the infrastructural imagination of the smart city is tied to neoliberal capital.Marked by speculation, demo-ing and prototyping, the smart city appears as a prime example of how neoliberal capital proposes to deal with crisis and catastrophe.In this context, human life becomes an experiment for technological futures.Computational 'smartness', and the speculation based on simulation and prediction it affords, are presented as ways of dealing with uncertainty which here is reduced to risk, much like in financial markets dealing in futures.The 'absolute hopefulness' that the smart city exudes is built on the creativity and entrepreneurship it demands of its inhabitants, while the machines of logistics and finance -key complements of smartness in the citykeep extracting value.The smart city needs to make no excuses for its failures: it is always only preliminary, failures are part of its experimental character, yet nonetheless it remains infinitely replicable; a model for the coding of urban space around the globe.Logistics is key here; smart cities are always already logistical cities, not only in the ways in which smart cities like Songdo always require a logistical complement like Incheon (see Halpern and Günel in this issue), but also in the way they rework and extend the model of the 'logistics city' such as Dubai Logistics City (see Cowen, 2014: 163ff.).The connection between ubiquitous computing and logistical cities highlights how smart cities both make possible and are thoroughly conditioned by logistics.Since the invention of the calendar, clock and tower, as explored by John Durham Peters (2013), logistical media not only pervade the city; rather, the infrastructures they make up also connect cities and thereby constitute the logistical and infrastructural networks in and between cities (Rossiter, 2016: 26ff.).In order to understand what Mike Crang and Stephen Graham call the 'embedding of computing into the background environment of cities' (2007: 790), we need to conceptualise technology or media not as single devices at the end of the line, not as the computer or the television, but as infrastructures of mediation.Smart cities are oddly part of these logistical networks in that they are not only deeply permeated by logistical media, but even spread their own logics in a protocological fashion as one smart city serves as blueprint for another, further enabling and reproducing logistical networks through infrastructures.Yet it is only in green site developments, such as Songdo, that the logistical city and its digital foundations are built from scratch.Elsewhere, such projects are confronted with the history, sociality, materiality and mediality of existing cities in all their complexity and ambivalence.Making a city 'smart' requires a lot more than subjecting it to protocol or code and digitising its processes.'Code/spaces are relational, emergent, and peopled', as Kitchin and Dodge argue (2011: 75), so that computing the city is always a complex and contextual endeavour.As Halpern and Günel show, there is much more at play than merely reproducing a model or imposing computation: something that Shannon Mattern (2016) calls the academy-industrygovernment complex makes the city ready for smartness by rebuilding it.In his exploratory ethnographic engagement of smart cities in India, Sandeep Mertia shows how in the absence of an overarching complex for smart cities, the socio-technical imaginaries of the smart city and big data still produce a perceived shift in the epistemic and material basis of urbanism.Mertia traces this shift in five vignettes: the emergence of a 'new' image of the city with the rise of Google Maps alongside GIS; a new practice of frantic data collection that is lacking in experts; a focus on open data bringing forth new civic data scientists; a playful development of apps in the city to deal with all sorts of social problems; and finally, a transformed political analysis focused on programmatic marketing and sentiment analysis, among other things blurring the line between citizen, user, consumer and voter.As a researcher entangled in these configurations, Mertia calls for a 'meta-analytics' of data that enrols ethnographic work in exploring the material and social aspects of data's work in the smart city.Where the smart city expands, is duplicated and traded in a protocological fashion, logistical infrastructure