Virtual Horizons & Futurology for 2021: Žižek on The Great Reset

With much ballyhoo and bellyaching about the absurdly miserable year of 2020, our collective calendars have finally turned to 2021. The year-end was marked by effusive declarations of relief and hope, even though these admissions of optimism were often tinged with cynical self-awareness reflecting the continuing complexities of our current moment (i.e. coronavirus vaccines are officially being rolled out, although infections are currently exploding in the U.S., and a new strain of the virus has been discovered; and it remains likely that Trump will leave office soon, despite ongoing efforts to delegitimize the election outcome, and nevermind what sort of policies we can reasonably accept from a Biden administration). 

In an essay published on New Year’s Eve by Jacobin, Slavoj Žižek considers the prospects of the immediate future in terms of a dichotomy between a socialist reset and a corporate “great reset”:

“When we try to guess how our societies will look after the pandemic will be over, the trap to avoid is futurology — futurology by definition ignores our not-knowing. Futurology is defined as a systematic forecasting of the future from the present trends in society. And therein resides the problem — futurology mostly extrapolates what will come from the present tendencies. However, what futurology doesn’t take into account are historical “miracles,” radical breaks which can only be explained retroactively, once they happen.”

The phrase “great reset” has proliferated through think-pieces and professional publications to describe the ways in which the effects of the pandemic will shape social reality and rearrange policy priorities for the foreseeable future. It is also the title of a proposal by the World Economic Forum for how the global economic recovery should be directed. The proposal thus represents the dissemination of managerialist and technocratic visioning statements on the behalf of an aristocratic elite who assume the mantle for guiding civilization’s progress. Žižek addresses some of the most visible exemplars of this group:

“The human face of this ‘leading with transparency, authenticity, and humanity’ are Gates, Bezos, Zuckenberg, the faces of authoritarian corporate capitalism who all pose as humanitarian heroes, as our new aristocracy celebrated in our media and quoted as wise humanitarians. Gates gives billions to charities, but we should remember how he opposed Elizabeth Warren’s plan for a small rise in taxes. He praised Piketty and once almost proclaimed himself a socialist — true, but in a very specific twisted sense: his wealth comes from privatizing what Marx called our ‘commons,’ our shared social space in which we move and communicate.”

[...]

“We are thus facing a horrible false alternative: a big corporate reset or nationalist populism, which turns out to be the same. “The great reset” is the formula of how to change some things (even many things) so that things will basically remain the same.”

[...]

“So is there a third way, outside the space of the two extremes of restoring the old normality and a Great Reset? Yes, a true great reset. It is no secret what needs to be done — Greta Thunberg made it clear. First, we should finally recognize the pandemic crisis as what it is, part of a global crisis of our entire way of life, from ecology to new social tensions. Second, we should establish social control and regulation over economy. Third, we should rely on science — rely on but not simply accept it as the agency which makes decisions.”

The distinction that Žižek makes between relying on science and delegating agency to techno-scientific forces is a crucial one. This past November I participated in a workshop organized by the Communicative Cities Research Network on the topic of urban communication in the pandemic era. My brief contribution to the proceedings comprised my musings on urban responses to the pandemic in light of prevailing trends in “smart city” policies. The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic initially seemed to reinforce ways of envisioning cities and urban space that characterizes “smart city” urban imaginaries. The propagation of smart city frameworks, particularly those promoted by corporate firms and technology vendors, has been characterized as a “techno-utopian policy mobility” and expression of a “technoscientific urbanism” in which infrastructural packages are sold to beleaguered municipalities as technical “solutions” for intractable urban problems.

One of the problems with these approaches is that by foregrounding technological formulations of urban life, these programs function to depoliticize practices of city planning, obfuscate the social inequalities inherent to urban development, and foreclose opportunities to formulate an emancipatory or oppositional urban politics. The smart city imaginary of transposable technical solutions as promoted by technology vendors has emerged from the conditions of entrepreneurial urbanism and neoliberal policy approaches. The technoscientific tenor that characterizes many smart city discourses is especially amenable to neoliberal applications as it addresses urban problems through a veneer of objectivity, neutrality, and ideological agnosticism. These technocratic approaches attempt to depoliticize what are in actuality politically charged development and governance programs.

The COVID-19 pandemic makes clear the need for science, technology, and engineering to solve urban problems and maintain quality of life. However, it is crucial to be wary of the ways in which a technocratic veneer obscures the ideological underpinnings and inherent value judgments that direct policy programs, as well as the ways in which technocratic imaginaries limit the scope of our potential urban futures.

Žižek concludes his article thusly:

“Futurology deals with what is possible, we need to do what is (from the standpoint of the existing global order) impossible.”

In regards to urban futures and imaginaries, my response to Žižek’s distinction between the possible and impossible draws on a particular notion of virtuality understood not as absent or imaginary but as the potentiality for change, as the as-yet-unrealized. 

The emancipatory potential of virtuality in urban imaginaries is deeply implicated in the Lefebvrian right to the city. Lefebvre's call for a "right to the city" extended beyond access to housing and public space to advocate for spontaneity, sociability, and the utilization of urban environments based on use rather than exchange value. While the formulation of “the right to the city” is effectively an empty signifier, it signals the struggles of urban denizens to exert influence over the shaping of their built environment, to exercise autonomy in their communities, and to realize the use value of public space as a common good in the face of homogenizing capitalist development that aims to render and remake space only on the basis of exchange.

A common rejoinder to urban rhetoric invoking the “right to the city” is to ask for examples of cities or communities that have successfully realized the right. While the phrase has been adopted as a by various activist groups, and has appeared in certain government policies, there are no obvious examples of how the right has been actualized. Yet the virtuality of the right to the city is essential to its continued functioning as a rallying cry of radical urban politics.

The right to the city represents a virtual horizon of urban life and a radical vision for the city to come. Lefebvre’s call has been taken up by urbanists and activists as a rallying cry for expanding urban imaginaries beyond the actual to the possibilities offered by invention and processes of becoming. The right to the city therefore renders the realms of imagination and virtuality as key battlefields for urban struggles. Among the many crises facing cities today - ecological catastrophes, yawning social inequality, infrastructural breakdown, etc. - we might accordingly refer also to a crisis of imagination.

Smoke Signals: Buda’s Wagon and Infrastructure Terrorism in Nashville

“The car bomb, in other words, suddenly became a semi-strategic weapon that under certain circumstances was comparable to air-power in its ability to knock out critical urban nodes and headquarters as well as terrorize populations of entire cities. [...] It is the car bombers’ incessant blasting-away at the moral and physical shell of the city, not the more apocalyptic threats of nuclear or bioterrorism, that is producing the most significant mutations in city form and urban lifestyle.” - Mike Davis, Buda’s Wagon

When the sun dawned over Nashville on Christmas morning the day’s first light illumined dark tufts of smoke above downtown. Like many other Nashvillians my Christmas morning began with local news coverage of a powerful explosion on Second Avenue. Some aspects of the initial details seemed familiar and inherently plausible (an RV transformed into a Vehicle-borne Improvised Explosive Device), while others strained credulity (early rumors of an audio countdown message emanating from the vehicle smacked of Internet hoaxery, though these reports have since been confirmed).

Indeed the early morning attack does seem to have included a warning message that prompted people in the area to evacuate. Remarkably it appears that no one but the perpetrator was killed in the blast. The bombing site in downtown Nashville was in the proverbial shadow of the city’s iconic AT&T skyscraper -- colloquially known as the Batman Building as the tower’s twin antennae somewhat resemble the pointed ears on the caped crusader’s cowl -- yet more significantly the RV was positioned directly in front of an AT&T switching station. This is a building dedicated to housing telecommunications infrastructure; the 15-floor windowless red-brick structure in Nashville bears some superficial resemblance to 33 Thomas Street in Manhattan, the AT&T “Long Lines” building whose 29 stories of windowless brutalist concrete have long sparked observers’ imaginations. 

Considered as an instance of infrastructure terrorism the bombing was quite effective. The explosion didn’t seem to jeopardize the overall structural integrity of the switching station, yet enough damage was done to disrupt critical services. Many areas around the city -- including here in Brentwood -- lost 911 emergency phone services. The Nashville Airport ceased all flight operations due to the telecommunications issues, and the city’s COVID-19 community hotline was also knocked out of commission. Communications were affected throughout the region including in Knoxville, Chattanooga, and Louisville. 

Infrastructure terrorism became a key concern for U.S. authorities following the 9/11 attacks. In 2003 the Department of Homeland Security published a National Strategy for the Physical Protection of Critical Infrastructures and Key Assets. The report details the vulnerabilities inherent to maintaining national and transnational networks supported by critical nodes:

“The facilities, systems, and functions that comprise our critical infrastructures are highly sophisticated and complex. They consist of human capital and physical and cyber systems that work together in processes that are highly interdependent. They each encompass a series of key nodes that are, in turn, essential to the operation of the critical infrastructures in which they function. To complicate matters further, our most critical infrastructures typically interconnect and, therefore, depend on the continued availability and operation of other dynamic systems and functions.” (DHS, 2003, p. 6)

The Nashville bombing thus reveals in spectacular fashion the intrinsic vulnerabilities of infrastructural networks. This vulnerability is not just a threat to urban centers: the use of car bombs to terrorize city populations has a long history, and recent attacks in New York, Toronto, and Nice have demonstrated that a vehicle doesn’t need to be equipped with explosives to cause mass destruction and death. Rather, the apparent target of the Nashville bombing and the subsequent communication disruptions that resulted illustrate the oft-invisible yet overlapping infrastructural entanglements of our networked world. An attack centered on one building in Nashville can produce institutional breakdowns not only throughout the entire city but also in neighboring states. Network resiliency and redundancy was of course the primary goal of ARPANET, the technological foundation for the modern Internet.

The bombing also indicates one of the central paradoxes of our increasingly interconnected technological apparatuses: as the infrastructures of our daily lives become “smarter,” more integrated and networked, they also become more vulnerable to distributed disruption and systemic failure. The implementation of “intelligent” infrastructures in urban environments is often motivated by official imaginaries of omniscient visibility and pervasive control, and accordingly produce attendant anxieties over authoritarian encroachment and the specter of a stifling panoptical security state. Yet the increasing complexity of administrative infrastructures and technologies simultaneously gives rise to greater systemic precarity and emergent opportunities for breakdown.

Mike Davis charts some of the interplay between vehicle-based terrorism and urban governmentality in his book Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (2007/2017). Echoing the DHS quote above, he situates the spread of car bombings in an “open source” era of terrorism marked by “a seamless merger of technologies: the car bomb plus the cell phone plus the Internet together constitute a unique infrastructure for global networked terrorism that obviates any need for transnational command structures or vulnerable hierarchies of decision-making” (p. 11, emphases in original).

Davis also notes that car bombs are “‘loud’ in every sense,” as these explosions are “usually advertisements for a cause, leader, or abstract principle” (p. 9).

“In contrast to other forms of political propaganda, from graffiti on walls to individual assassinations, their occurrence is almost impossible to deny or censor. This certainty of being heard by the world, even in a highly authoritarian or isolated setting, is a major attraction to potential bombers.” (ibid.)

Davis cites Regis Debray’s observation that such attacks are “manifestos written in the blood of others.” Yet the Nashville bombing has thus far failed to yield an explicit political motive or ideological agenda. The Christmas-day confusion was compounded not only by the revelation of the audio warning announcements, but also by the lack of any corresponding media manifesto or claims of responsibility. The volitional vacuum prompted news and social media discourse to project possible motives onto the perpetrator: perhaps the bomber was a right-winger who targeted the AT&T building because of the 5G-Coronavirus conspiracy, or maybe a leftist seeking retribution for the telecomm company’s complicity in domestic spying programs? Personally, I felt the technological elements of both the target and the weapon evoked Unabomber vibes, although the preliminary evacuation notice evinced a greater concern for collateral damage and human life than Kaczynski’s methods.

The impulse to apprehend an underlying motive behind an act of mass violence is understandable, yet ultimately no explanation for terror or mass murder can ever be satisfying or even elucidating. Our current political climate produces knee-jerk responses to inciting events that seek to assign ideological complicity to the “other side,” casting preemptive blame to our imagined opponents (i.e. “this is surely the work of a MAGA anti-masker,” or “this must be a BLM assault on the police” ) such that our own ideological position is affirmed and our cognitive maps cohere. Rituals of scapegoating have long provided essential support for both group and personal identities. Yet no declaration of intent can truly explain wanton destruction, just as no ideological rationalization can justify mass murder.

In recent history the Las Vegas massacre perpetrated by Stephen Paddock epitomizes the unfulfilled search for an explanatory motive. The question of what circumstances led up to Paddock raining bullets on a crowd of concert-goers has fueled futile speculation and conspiracy theory. When police photos of Paddock’s hotel-suite-turned-sniper’s-nest appeared online, viewers seized upon a piece of paper visible on a side table as a critical clue. Surely this was the killer’s suicide note, or personal manifesto, some explanation for the attack! It turned out the paper bore only mathematical equations for calculating trajectory, the killer’s calculus for maximizing mortality.

The lack of a clearly defined motivation can be experienced as a secondary shock to the initial trauma of the attack itself. It seems to deny some semblance of resolution or closure. So far no underlying explanation for the Nashville bombing has been unearthed. It remains an explosive enigma rendered all the more inexplicable by the bomber’s choice to broadcast a warning message prior to detonation. Yet the police have revealed that the vehicle-based speaker system not only conveyed a verbal countdown notice, they also played music:

“Police in the area moments before the blast said the speakers also played the wistful 1963 song ‘Downtown’ by Petula Clark. The lyric, about going to the city to seek refuge from sadness, echoed down Second Avenue just before the blast: ‘The lights are much brighter there.’”

Without reading too much into the song choice as a potential clue, the reported musical selection does seem to suggest that the perpetrator saw some significance to the location of his attack beyond the mere tactical position of the apparent target. The use of the song “Downtown” conveys a striking concession to the particularities of place in comparison to the considerations of extended networks and distributed effects offered earlier. And while the ramifications of terror attacks may resonate across geographic distance and within virtual spaces, every ground zero occupies material as well as mental territory.

Hiroki Azuma's General Will 2.0 and Urban Planning

The Japanese cultural critic Hiroki Azuma has contributed some of the most inventive contemporary propositions for the use of information and communication technologies for democratic practice. In General Will 2.0 (2014), Azuma argues that democratic ideals should be “updated on the basis of the realities of information society” (p. iii). Simply stated, the proliferation of myriad media channels and messages disseminated by networked communication has made modern society too complex to accommodate traditional notions of the public sphere and practices of democratic political participation. Azuma proposes the “creation of a completely new public sphere” (p. x) supported by the use of ubiquitous computing technology. His prescription for a model of governance informed by ubiquitous computing and social media draws on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s notion of “the general will.” The general will refers to the collective will of a people that aims toward common well-being and “creates the standards for good and for the public sphere” (p. 23). This will is distinct from the will of the government or the sum of individual wills, and arises from a community of people joined through a social contract, regardless of whether communication or political deliberation occurs between them. Azuma’s interpretation of Rousseau leads him to the provocative proposition that “politics does not require communication” (p. 34). That is to say, spaces for communication and deliberation are not only unnecessary but are in fact “an impediment to the emergence of the general will” (p.33), as citizens need only be provided with adequate information in order for the general will to emerge. It is here that Azuma locates the potential for data aggregation and information visualization to inform political procedure. 

Azuma introduces the term “democracy 2.0” to describe a model of democratic governance supplemented by data aggregation and information visualization. Such a system, he argues, would provide “a mechanism to visualize what we truly need without the mediation of roundabout systems such as elections, hearings, and public comments” (p. 86). He points to internet-based communication behaviors and social media usage in particular as fertile resources for assessing the collective thoughts and attitudes of a populace. Azuma thus relates the general will to concepts such as “collective intelligence” and the “wisdom of crowds” (p. 12). Under the democracy 2.0 model, the public realm would be shaped by the aggregate of private actions in a way that challenges traditional distinctions between the public and private spheres. Azuma contrasts this notion of democracy 2.0 with Arendt’s and Habermas’ conceptualizations of the private and public realms. Crucially, Arendt and Habermas both stipulated that the public realm is created through speech or communication whereas Azuma is proposing democracy 2.0 as politics without communication. For Azuma, the inherent complexity and fragmentation of contemporary society precludes the realization of an Arendtian or Habermasian ideal public sphere such that modern citizens “are not able to believe in a shared space for discussion” (p. 69). Declaring these formulations of the public sphere as “impossible to establish” (p. 87), Azuma calls for taking “our current social situation and technological conditions” to bring about “something like a public sphere” (p. 87). This approach calls for abandoning both traditional notions of politics as “conscious communication mediated by language” (p. 75) as well as “abstract frameworks that differentiate between private and public” (p. 77). 

In addition to the political philosophy of Rousseau, Azuma’s formulation of “democracy 2.0” is further informed by the Freudian psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious. Social media again functions as a significant touchstone for Azuma, who describes tweets, check-ins, and other social media activities as constituting a vast trove of information enabling “the extraction of patterns of unconscious desires that go beyond the intentions of individuals” (p. 57). Azuma thus defines incidental yet observable online activity as “unconscious communication” and proposes the use of data monitoring in democracy 2.0 for “collecting and systematizing the wills and desires of people without the need for conscious communication” (p. 56). The realization of democracy 2.0 involves not just data aggregation but also data visualization, as Azuma notes “the internet is not only an apparatus for documenting the unconscious but also for actively visualizing it” (p. 95). Revisiting the earlier formulation of the general will as “politics without communication,” Azuma specifies that the “visualization of the unconscious of the masses” (p. 122) should not be understood as a replacement for deliberation but rather as a supplement to deliberation. He proposes that a democracy 2.0 framework should consist of “on the one hand extracting the unconscious of citizens and on the other invigorating conscious communication among citizens” (p. 102). Azuma proposes that the aggregate unconscious communication of the citizenry should shape the contours and define the limits of public policy-making in a fashion that is “neither direct democracy nor indirect democracy but something that might be called unconscious democracy” (p. 143). Such a model reflects the democracy 2.0 ideal that “all deliberation must be exposed to the unconscious of the populace” (p. 144), whereafter the database citizens’ unconscious communication “and harnesses it as a power to restrain deliberation” (p. 153). 

In order to illustrate what such a system would look like in practice Azuma turns to the field of urban planning and design. Azuma’s argument is scaled to the level of the nation state, and he is concerned overall with practices of national citizenship rather than regional or municipal governance. There are, however, significant points of intersection between the theory of democracy 2.0 and urban studies. For instance, Azuma (2014) often employs spatial metaphors in theorizing how to “design an architecture” that would support the democracy 2.0 model (p. 80). His theory also bears correspondences with the urban visualization literature, as he describes the general will 2.0. as “the record of action and desire carved into the information environment” (p. 71). Yet the most substantial connection between urban studies and general will 2.0 is the invocation of Austrian-born urban designer Christopher Alexander. Azuma’s prescription for unconscious communication is not that it be ignored or blindly followed but rather that states should “harness it through visualization via information technology” (p. 136). The unconscious desires of the masses, aggregated and visualized, would then be used to inform public deliberation and policy-making. Azuma cites Alexander’s urban planning work as a prototype for such a model. In the classic planning text A Pattern Language (1977), Alexander and his colleagues outlined an index of urban settlement shapes or “patterns” inspired by the then-emerging fields of network theory and computer science. Alexander’s systems approach to urban design is captured in his well-known aphorism “a city is not a tree” (1965). What Azuma highlights, however, is a method Alexander developed for determining the design of highway routes. 

Alexander and his team identified twenty-six factors that influence planning decisions such as construction costs, economic impact, and environmental issues. The list of factors also included not typically taken into account by highway planners such as air pollution, eye sores, and noise (Lystra, 2016). The planners then examined the site under consideration to determine what the least and most desirable locations were for each influencing factor. They then visualized the distributions of these factors by superimposing shades of color onto a map, with least desirable locations colored lighter and most desirable areas colored darker. Using a combination of photographic and hand drawing techniques they composited multiple overlays to create a final path map. The resulting distribution did not necessarily plot the optimal route, and would not always determine the final planning decisions, but it did provide a method for visualizing a range of options based on aggregated data. Azuma thus cites Alexander’s approach to planning the highway route as “the budding form of an urban design based upon collective intelligence” (p. 152). He also sees in this technique “a method for providing limits to design rather than determining the design” (p. 124). This is a crucial takeaway for Azuma: Alexander’s method is a model for imposing limitations on deliberation via a database. Alexander and his fellow planners did not automatically implement the routes that emerged from the composited path maps, but they rather used the maps to delimit the best areas for potential action. Democracy 2.0 may therefore be seen as “an application of a theory of urban planning” (p. 125) and “a mechanism that restrains the arbitrary wills of planners” (p. 153). As Azuma notes, planners today have access to a wealth of information and communication technologies from which to draw a “map of user desires” (p. 125). The democracy 2.0 framework is thereby applicable to not only national politics but is particularly relevant for e-governance initiatives in smart city programs.

Urban Change and Moving Images in London

I've recently returned from London where I attended a workshop on Urban Change and Moving Images hosted by the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image. It was intellectually gratifying to engage with scholars of film, media, and cities over several days, as well as personally refreshing to indulge my lifelong passion for cinema. In addition to the screening sessions in the BIMI cinema, we also enjoyed multiple sojourns across the city to tour historic cinema sites and contemporary production locations. There was also a "mediated city" walking tour, particularly relevant to my research interests, that highlighted various media and communication infrastructure embedded in the urban environment. I relished the opportunity to discuss film and visual culture with scholars and colleagues, and also to share perspectives on urban change and space/place between London and Pittsburgh. 

One of the Pitt film students presented on skating spaces in Philadelphia and London, so after the workshop the doctoral students made a pilgrimage to the Southbank skateboard mecca. The Southbank skate park is notable for its decades-long history as part of London's urban fabric, as a locus for urban art forms, and also as an example of successful opposition to redevelopment. In 2013 the Long Live Southbank coalition successfully prevented a redesign that would've removed the extant skating space. It's a rare example of anti-redevelopment victory (similar campaigns against the redevelopment of Love plaza in Philly were not successful), and raises significant questions about the various factors affecting such movements in cities around the world. The iconic 5 Pointz mural space in Queens possessed at least as much claim to cultural and historic significance as Southbank, yet these claims were challenged in court and ultimately the space was demolished. 

It was a great trip and a much needed rejuvenating jolt of creative energy as I begin working on my dissertation project in earnest. The only downside is that I've had to reevaluate and overhaul my current research projects in light of the insightful feedback and innovative scholarship offered during the workshop. In addition to critical theories of film and visual culture my major takeaways from the event included ways of historicizing and theorizing media infrastructure in urban space, perspectives on the role of film in mediating experiences of space and place, and new (to me, at least) models of participatory research praxis. It can be tough coming back to Pittsburgh after spending some time in a such a rich and endlessly fascinating city as London, yet trips like these are a reminder of the global flows and phenomenons of development that can be seen manifesting in cities around the world, and a realization of the fecund opportunities for research and exploration waiting to be actualized. And, of course, it's always good to come home.

Songdo U-city: a smart city visit

While in Seoul, South Korea this summer I had the opportunity to visit Songdo City, one of the most comprehensive smart city developments in existence. Located about an hour-long train ride from Seoul, Songdo is located in the Incheon Free Economic Zone (IFEZ) near Incheon Airport. As part of a Korean Free Economic Zone, Songdo is overseen and administered by IFEZ, and this gives Songdo a strange sense that it is not so much a municipality as an international corporate-financial project. Songdo is also a master-planned built-from-scratch development, founded on land that was dredged from the Yellow Sea.

Songdo administrators refer to the development as U-city rather than "smart city," where the U stands for "ubiquitous computing". Networked infrastructure and sensor technology is integrated throughout Songdo city. Our tour group visited the Cisco company offices where we saw demonstrations of this networked monitoring and surveillance. This demonstration included a dramatization of a child being reported missing in the city, and showed how the child's image and name could be displayed on screens throughout Songdo and RFID tracking could be used to pinpoint their location. In daily practice this monitoring appears to mostly concern traffic flow on the city's streets and other infrastructural maintenance.

Having come from the densely packed and winding streets of Seoul I was struck by the scope and scale of the Songdo development. It is a truly monumental space, in multiple senses of the word. The buildings aspire skyward in an ersatz Manhattan verticality that has also characterized new urban structures in places like Dubai and throughout China. Unlike Manhattan, however, the buildings of Songdo are not claustrophobically constrained between the geographical restrictions of the East and Hudson rivers. Rather these skyscrapers are spaced out around stretches of artificially constructed green spaces that explicitly invoke New York with names like "Central Park," and also evoke the monumental distancing of the national mall and similar spaces in Washington D.C.

There is an eerie incongruity between the scope and scale of this development and the comparatively paltry population visible on the ground. It seems as if Songdo was built all at once with the capacity to house hundreds of thousands, and now the buildings are sitting vacant waiting for residents to arrive. We talked with some Cisco employees who live in Songdo and they described some of the impediments to attracting new residents (such as lengthy commuting time between Songdo and Seoul), while also claiming that all available real estate was already filled, and the new construction was barely keeping up with demand. I can only assume that a significant portion of the available housing is owned but not occupied, as a form of investment by international parties for example. The affective result of this situation at street-level is uncanny, as broad avenues and expansive plazas appear to hold a fraction of the capacity they were evidently designed for.

We were also given a look into the "mission control center" of Songdo. This is the nerve center, the base of operations for U-city. As you can see in the photo, the control room is dominated by screens displaying hundreds of real-time scenes transmitted by surveillance cameras. In a continuation of the eerie incongruity between the scale of the environment and the number of occupants, we were surprised that such a complex control center was manned by only two people. Dozens of chairs and computer stations were vacant, and our guide explained that the other engineers of that shift were working "in the field," attending to the city's infrastructure. It was also striking to see so much concern for monitoring traffic flow when most of screens displayed images of empty streets during our visit.

This incongruity, the disparity between the aims of the built environment and how the space is actually used, was a definitive aspect of my perception of Songdo. There are many cases of such disparities throughout the history of urbanization. Many times there has been a disjuncture between the administrative rationality and the "eye" of top-down planning techniques on the one hand, and the quotidian needs and desires of lived experience on the other. The conflict between abstract representations/conceptualizations of space and the vagaries of embodied use of space finds a new expression in "built from scratch" settlements like Songdo and other examples of smart city initiatives around the world. The Cisco employees we met with described each of their company's technologies and services as "solutions" without exception. As our group traversed mostly empty streets and sidewalks, many of the innovations on display in Songdo began to seem like solutions in search of a problem. Shouldn't urban design and policy respond to the needs of citizens rather than impose pre-packaged prescriptive techniques for their own sake? As urban development itself becomes increasingly ubiquitous on the planet, it is worthwhile to interrogate how and why certain developments are considered "smart", and whether such approaches account for the inherently adaptive intelligence required for the navigation of everyday life.

Communication and the City conference: report from Seoul

This past June I was in Seoul, South Korea for the Communication and the City conference. The event was held at Yonsei University and co-sponsored by the Yonsei Communication Research Institute and the Urban Communication Foundation. It was a truly international conference, with participants hailing from around the world. Speakers included academic researchers, architects, urban planners, and Seoul city officials. Over two days presenters spoke about topics including risk factors facing urban populations, the role of storytelling and community media in neighborhood life, and the rise of the Asian megacity. I was particularly interested to learn more about the history of Seoul, and recent developments in its ongoing urbanization. This was my first visit to the South Korean capital, and I was overwhelmed by the scale and complexity of the sprawling metropolis.

The recent history of Seoul's development includes distinct periods of rapid modernization. One of these periods involved the demolition of traditional Korean homesteads and the displacement of residents from entire districts (this happened under the administration of a leader nicknamed "Mayor Bulldozer" by the locals). A second period is characterized by sustainability concerns, and is marked by the 1997 IMF economic crisis. In the wake of the economic crisis' ramifications, Seoul continued to modernize and developed some of the most advanced transportation infrastructure in the world. The drive toward modernization and investment in dedicated "economic zones" has resulted in networked urban districts like Songdo City, sometimes called the first full fledged smart city (or "u-city," with "u" designating ubiquitous computing infrastructure). In future posts I will share my thoughts and photos from my visit to Songdo, and some more thoughts on Seoul.

Columbus wins DOT Smart City Challenge

The Department of Transportation has selected Columbus, Ohio as the winner of the Smart City Challenge. The winning city will receive a $50 million grant to fund the development and implementation of networked and "smart" transportation infrastructure. From the Columbus Dispatch:

Columbus’ application includes several other transportation innovations, including an autonomous vehicle test fleet at Easton Town Center that would pick up passengers at the COTA terminal and deliver them nearer to jobs at the shopping center. 

Columbus also wants to increase electric vehicle access in the city and improve communication between vehicles and infrastructure, which could help reduce crashes. 

A key point in the city’s bid was how the money could be used to improve Columbus’ infant mortality rate. Officials have said that improving transportation options in poor neighborhoods could better connect new and expectant mothers to health care services. 

As a Pittsburgher who has been following the contest for several months, I was very disappointed that Pittsburgh did not win. Not only would it have been a welcome victory for the city and local industry, but it would have been perfect for my dissertation project.

I was genuinely impressed and even moved by Pittsburgh's video component of their proposal, which presented a people-first approach that acknowledged past planning mistakes and continuing concerns about disparities among residents. You can watch the video here.

You can watch the other finalists' videos and read the full proposals at Network World.

A colleague who watched each city's video presentation agreed with me that Columbus' video pitch was the weakest, though he cautioned that the videos are ultimately irrelevant in relation to the process of selecting the winning city.

The DOT has pledged to help the other finalist cities implement their proposed transportation initiatives, and Pittsburgh leaders have also declared their intent to follow through with their Smart PGH plan. 

City space and emotion: Affect as urban infrastructure

For a change of pace this week, I thought I’d write about affect in relation to the urban condition. Specifically I am going to focus on Nigel Thrift’s chapters on spatialities of feeling from his book Non-representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. Thrift begins the first chapter by characterizing cities as “maelstroms of affect,” and asserting the “utter ubiquity of affect as a vital element of cities” (p. 171). Thrift questions why “the affective register” has not formed “a large part of the study of cities,” and states “to read about affect in cities it is necessary to resort to the pages of novels, and the tracklines of poems” (p. 171).

I have to question what Thrift means by “the study of cities,” particularly in relation to the history of urban sociology. There is a lengthy history in this tradition of studying the affective register of cities, from Weber’s anomie and Simmel’s blasé attitude, through the emergence of modern criminology and social scientific studies of urban anxiety and the fear of crime.

There are, of course, prolific approaches available for studying cities. In addition to approaches from fiction and prose, and the aforementioned social scientific methods, there abound philosophical, psychogeographic, and theological engagements with urban life. One approach to the study of cities that has been especially amenable to the affective register is the domain of urban design and planning. Practitioners and commentators from this realm (who often, erroneously and unfortunately, mistake their practice for urbanism entire) have long used affective language to describe and design urban spaces: happy streets, friendly spaces, menacing buildings, etc.

Thrift is not explicitly discussing “smart” urbanization projects, but of course much of the analysis across these two chapters is directly applicable to such initiatives. Shockingly, Ernst Bloch also says much of relevance to smart cities in his 1929 essay “The Anxiety of the Engineer”. Thrift’s summation of Bloch’s “apocalyptic” vision of cities from that essay reads like a ripped-from-the-headlines encapsulation of contemporary urbanization trends: “Transfixed by the idea of a totally safe and calculable environment, the capitalist city is fixed and unbending in the face of unexpected events: ‘it has rooted itself in midair’” (p. 198). It’s a fantastic connection to make, though I despair at my ever-growing reading list.

Lastly, I want to touch upon Thrift’s discussion of the misanthropic city. My first reaction was to respond that cities aren’t misanthropic, people are; but then I recalled my recent trip to Las Vegas. Returning to the affective register of urban design, I must say that Vegas is certainly a misanthropic city. It is a city built for money, not for people. To the extent that it is built for people, it is designed not to affirm or edify humanity’s highest qualities, but is rather constructed to amplify our basest and most animalistic aspects. Compulsion, lechery, and stupefaction are the human attributes “celebrated” in that space. From an urban design perspective, Las Vegas is among the most misanthropic of cities.

Of course, Thrift is not referring to misanthropic urban design (although the invocation of infrastructure is an interesting, and perhaps fecund, reference point for urban affect), but to misanthropic attitudes and behaviors among urban denizens. I do not ascribe to calls for kindness and idealized sense of community in the city, as I find they are often simplistic and embarrassingly maudlin. Indeed, the disconnectedness and universal strangeness that has long been decried as manifestations of the inherent disharmony of urban life, are in fact principal among the reasons that I love life in the metropolis. Nevertheless, I do appreciate that amidst the anxiety and imminent catastrophe of urban life, Thrift finds spaces for kindness and hope.

Fantasy Lands: 5 urban truths I learned at Disneyland

“This book … intends to establish Manhattan as the product of an unformulated theory, Manhattanism, whose program – to exist in a world totally fabricated by man, i.e. to live inside fantasy – was so ambitious that to be realized, it could never be openly stated.”

– Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York

On July 17, 1955, Disneyland opened its gates to the public for the first time. Opening day had its share of mishaps and technical hiccups, as would be expected of such an ambitious undertaking. Ultimately nobody seemed to mind, and the theme park was celebrated as a sensational success. The Disney theme park empire has only grown since then, with the original Anaheim attraction followed by the mammoth Disney World in Orlando, and international parks in Paris, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. Just earlier this week the company released new details about the staggeringly ambitious Shanghai Disneyland resort, expected to open next year.

In 2005, I was in attendance July 17th for the 50th anniversary celebrations at Disneyland. At the time I lived in Southern California, and even held an “annual passport” ticket that entitles the holder to multiple admissions for a year (not valid for admittance on the day of the anniversary, however). My then-girlfriend and I purchased our passes together, and made good use of them; we often boasted that the passports had paid for themselves several times over before they expired. For a while we managed a trip to the park every other Saturday. We spent so much time in Fantasyland we began to feel like citizens of the Magic Kingdom.

Of course, Disneyland doesn’t have citizens; it’s not a real town, there are neither residents nor residences (although Walt did keep an apartment in the Main Street fire station during the park’s construction). In Disneyland, everyone is a tourist (or an on-the-job employee, of course). For most people, a visit to a Disney park is a special occasion, maybe an annual event, perhaps even a once-in-a-lifetime vacation. Our regular visits afforded us the luxury of feeling familiar, being able to skip the overcrowded big attractions to discover something off the beaten path instead. Evincing a disdain for tourists that would rival any New Yorker, we weaved through slow moving crowds of gawkers and In a fake city, we really felt like locals.

Today is the 60th anniversary of Disneyland’s opening, and the occasion has prompted me to reflect on my experiences in Disney’s theme parks in light of my developing thoughts on urbanism. I’ve spent the past year immersed in literature on urban history, planning, and theory. Disneyland occupies a strange position in the world of urbanism. On one hand, the park has been acclaimed by planners and laypeople alike for embodying the principles of good urban design; on the other hand, its been decried for promoting the spread of cheap and generic environments, a corporate commercialized culture creeping beyond the theme park walls into the surrounding society. Looking back at my own experience, I had a surprising realization: Disneyland is where I learned to care about urban space. This will seem a sacrilegious sentiment to some, but as unbelievable as it may seem, it’s true for me. Recalling Baudrillard’s oft-cited claim that Disneyland’s artificiality mirrors the falseness of the surrounding civilization, it was within a simulated city that I came to appreciate the built environment. So inspired by this revelation, and in commemoration the park’s birthday, I have compiled the following list of five urban truths I learned at Disneyland.

1. Carriages, Monorails, and other People Movers: the city and transportation

Transportation is a crucial element of city life, and a huge issue in urbanism. Urban planners are so passionate about transport that there are books, web sites, and podcasts devoted exclusively to the subject. Of course, this is just stating the obvious; consider how contentious the clashes between the entrenched transportation industry and “rideshare” newcomers like Uber and Lyft, or the clamor for bike shares and light rail in your own city. Modes of transport are so integral to the urban experience, that certain cities can be defined by the transportation they are most associated with. Yes, there are elevated trains, double-decker buses, yellow cabs, and cloverleaf freeway interchanges in many cities, but the association is strong enough that each of these transport infrastructures can serve as a synecdoche for an entire city (Chicago, London, New York, and Los Angeles, for those comparing notes).

Transportation is a big deal in Disneyland, too. Walt Disney loved model train sets. So much so, he built a railroad in the backyard of his Los Angeles home. Dubbed the Carolwood Pacific Railroad, it featured a steam-powered locomotive large enough that his children and their friends could ride it around the yard. That’s a big toy train set by any rubric, but Walt dreamed of an even bigger set. The Carolwood Pacific Railroad was a key inspiration for the building of Disneyland; the park is encircled by train tracks, and could be considered the largest model train set ever built. Even if a visitor does not include a ride on the Disneyland Rail Road on their itinerary, the prominence of the train’s place in the park cannot be missed: the Main Street train station is the first building guests see upon entering through the main gates.

The Disneyland Rail Road is just the tip of the transportation iceberg. The original Disneyland parking lot was just outside the main gates; visitors could see Sleeping Beauty castle from their parking spot. Today visitors park in a humongous parking garage and ride a tram to the front gates, since the original parking lot is now the site of the California Adventure park (appropriately, the Golden State-themed amusement park has an entire area dedicated to California’s car culture: Cars Land). Disney World ups the ante even further: from the parking lot, you approach the Magic Kingdom via the Monorail. These specialized methods of arriving at the gates convey the sense that you are transitioning from the mundane world, and prepare you for a special experience. Aside from the Disneyland Rail Road and Monorail, classic attractions included the Autopia go-kart course, the Skyway tram, and the literally-named People Mover. All these options allow visitors to experience Disneyland at different speeds, different scales, and from different perspectives.

How you move through a space will affect your experience of that space, as well as how life develops within it. Street layout, transportation infrastructure, and accessibility obviously impact urban life in many important ways. What I am trying to evoke in this urban truth is something fundamentally experiential, even phenomenological. In several cities in which I’ve lived, I’ve had the experience of walking along a street on which I had previously only driven through. Even if it is a street that I have driven on many times, such as my daily route driving to work, my experience of the street on foot is entirely different than how I experience it through the window of a car moving at 50 mph. You can become aware of something that you had passed by dozens of times without ever noticing; it is a way of rediscovering a place for the first time. Essentially, how you move through the city affects your relationship to it, and opens new possibilities for interacting with your environment.

The profundity of this experiential difference may be a key factor in why visitors find Disneyland so delightful. Many Americans do not live in metropolitan areas with robust public transportation and walkable, pedestrian-friendly streetscapes. For someone like me, who grew up in a decidedly suburban environment characterized by the car-centric layout and lifestyle so common in the United States, a visit to Disneyland can be the first experience of walking for extended periods in an urban area. James Howard Kunstler, an urbanist and harsh Disney critic, writes about this phenomenon in his book The Geography of Nowhere:

Stripped of all its symbolic trappings and show-biz frosting, what Disney World sells is a scrap of public realm free of automobiles – or nearly so, except for a few props. […] As well as being free of cars, of course, Disney World is also free of the bad relationships imposed upon things and people by cars. Since there are so few places of any size with this characteristic in America, the experience is understandably exhilarating.

1. The Windows on Main Street: caring about the built environment

One effect of becoming a “local” at Disneyland was that I started caring about aspects of the park that I had not even noticed before. For example: how many visitors to Tomorrowland do you think give any thought to the color scheme of the area? I had visited many times without giving the issue any thought, but in the lead up to the 50th anniversary events Tomorrowland’s color scheme became a heated topic of discussion. When Disneyland opened, the colors of Tomorrowland reflected a 1950s space age conception of the future: whites, blues, greys. For some these colors were associated with rockets, space vehicles, and the sky itself. Others also associated the color scheme with a 1950s optimism about the future and promise of space travel. In the 1990s, the land was repainted with bronze and copper tones as part of a “future that never was” re-theming of the land. This change likely went unmarked by the majority of visitors, but to an invested few the color change represented an ideological shift from optimism to pessimism toward the space program. Interestingly, the area was repainted with the original color scheme in time for the 50th anniversary.

This degree of awareness and concern for the built environment that urban planners, particularly vocal members of the New Urbanism movement, have been advocating for some time. The fact is, much of the built environment goes unmarked because it is so unremarkable. Blank walls and oppressive structures that repel rather than draw the eye. Caring about your environment and its condition can be a critical element of community engagement, and is often relevant factor in neighborhood change. I believe the key difference is a matter of investment: financial, personal, and otherwise. Unlike in Disneyland, citizens can benefit from being invested in their environment because they actually have a stake in it. Unfortunately, urban dwellers often take this for granted until it is too late and someone else invests in their community and stakes their own claim.

1. Community of tomorrow: the planned city

In addition to his enthusiasm for designing environments and laying out transportation networks, there is evidence that Walt Disney dabbled in formal urban planning. In an article for Micechat.com, Sam Gennawey reports that Disney had one book on urban planning in his office: The Heart of Our Cities by Victor Gruen. Gruen advocated the “garden city” urban form that was very influential in the early 20th century. The urban planners and theorists working during this time had lived through a dramatic rise of industrial urbanism, and adopted a worldview characterized by a stark contrast between the pastoral, natural, and harmonious countryside, and the polluted, toxic, and chaotic city. These conditions contributed to a negative view of city life, and an anti-urban rhetoric that would dominate for much of the 20th century. The garden city movement was intended to right the imbalances of urban development and serve as a blueprint for harmonious cities. According to Gennawey, Gruen cited Disneyland as an example of ideal urban design. Indeed, comparing a map of Disneyland with the garden city layout reveals strong correspondences.

Walt Disney apparently shared some of the negative conceptions of city life that held sway during that time. Walt had grown up in a small town in Missouri, and it is believed that the layout and architecture of Disneyland’s Main Street was strongly based on his hometown. Much of Disneyland’s theming and narrative suggests not only nostalgia for past phases of American society, but also an idealizing of rural and small town life. This nostalgia must have resonated with many Americans in the 1950s, because Disneyland was a huge hit with the public. Disneyland had been built on Anaheim orange groves, a mostly rural area. But once the park opened and crowds began flocking to the site, the area surrounding Disneyland quickly developed with businesses seeking to profit from the crowds. The cheap motels and other questionable enterprises that popped up outside the park dismayed Walt; he felt they marred the family friendly environment he had worked so hard to establish at Disneyland.

Walt grew frustrated with his inability to control the urban development outside of his park, so he looked for a site where he could have control. Walt’s urban flight eventually led him to central Florida, where he clandestinely bought up swaths of land. This project was of course Walt Disney World, where Disney owned enough property they could build multiple theme parks and control the entire surrounding area. Now Walt could control what kinds of lodging and restaurants would be available to his guests outside the park, as well as make sure that even money guests spent out of the park would go to Disney.

The space available in Florida and the newly available level of control led Walt to take his urban planning ambition even further. EPCOT was not intended to be another theme park, but rather a real city. The Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow combined garden city ideals of urban design with a technocratic utopian vision. Walt died before he could see his vision of EPCOT come to fruition; it never did, and the EPCOT Center that exists today is part theme park and, as James Howard Kunstler adeptly puts it, part “half-assed World’s Fair.”

Curiously, the town of Celebration, FL is often cited as EPCOT’s legacy. Celebration is a “master-planned” community developed by the Disney company and connected to the Walt Disney World property. Aside from that, Celebration bears no relation to the utopian city of tomorrow that Walt envisioned. Celebration reminds me of another Florida town: Seaside, another master-planned community, designed by the firm of renowned architect Andres Duany. Seaside is often acclaimed as an exemplar of good design, ostensibly because it follows the tenets and ideals of the New Urbanism movement in urban planning. This may be the case, but I have never understood the praise heaped upon Seaside. In no way does it strike me as a place I would want to live. The town looks clean and well maintained, sure; but it seems fake and lifeless, as well. There is a reason that Seaside successfully stood in for a movie set in The Truman Show.

I am not arguing that urban space needs to be chaotic or decrepit in order to be authentic; indeed, I think this is a common fallacy among urban enthusiasts and city dwellers alike. I am suggesting that attempts at “master-planning” and controlling urban space are inherently flawed, and are not conducive to thriving communities. Now, I recognize that neither Celebration nor Seaside are cities, nor are trying to design urban space. Nor am I criticizing the worth of New Urbanism; reading Duany’s book Suburban Nation was a revelatory experience for me, articulating and elucidating why I had found the built environment so unfulfilling throughout my life, and it is my favorite book on urban planning. Rather, I am citing these two well-known examples of master-planned communities to highlight and criticize the impulse toward total control of development. Planning is not urbanism entire, it is not the only means of understanding the city; focusing solely on planning cannot offer a complete perspective of life in the built environment, just as the city cannot be understood by considering only its architecture.

In regards to the planning impulse in cities: I believe the modern era’s counterpart to the garden city is the smart city. Smart city rhetoric seems to me reminiscent of much anti-urban rhetoric, as well as early social scientific studies of cities from the early 20th century. The idea is that the city is a chaotic, entropic environment that needs to be reigned in and made harmonious. Richard Sennett has written beautifully on the value of the uncontrollable and unpredictable elements of urban life, what he calls “the uses of disorder”. Smart city rhetoric suggests that increased information (through smart sensors tracking data ranging from traffic flow to energy consumption throughout the city) will actualize the efficient, rational, and harmonious city. It is Big Data as solution to the urban problem.

Aside from gentrification, Disneyfication is one of the most decried phenomena by residents of major cities today. Disneyfication refers to the proliferation of corporate and commercialized interests in urban space, often at the expense of local businesses or public interests who cannot afford to compete with such companies. The effect of this development is the spread of cheap and generic buildings and environment with no sense of connection to the unique place in which they are situated. You can walk into any chain drug store in Manhattan and never have to orient yourself to the layout, because it will be uniform across all the stores. Similarly, their storefronts will all have identical facades, leading to generic and generalized streetscape. The stores could exist in any city, there is no signifier connecting it to that specific location. This Disneyfication is a direct result of Disney’s successful theme park designs. It is possible to interpret the Disney narrative and see this as unintended consequences of good intentions: back in Anaheim, Walt was concerned that visitors to his park were being taken advantage of by unscrupulous hawkers and peddlers outside the Disneyland gates. Furthermore, he couldn’t vouch for the safety of enterprises undertaken off his property. Disneyfication could be seen as an outgrowth of this impulse to create “safe” spaces.

In The Conscience of the Eye, Sennett wrote: “A city ought to be a school for learning how to lead a centered life.” It’s a beautiful ideal, and one that cannot come to fruition in a planned and controlled environment.

1. Disneyland Hotel: the city for sale

In his essay “See you in Disneyland,” Michael Sorkin writes about the tourism and hospitality economy that developed around Disney World. Stating that at that time Orlando had more hotel rooms than Chicago or New York, he called Orlando “America’s capital of transience.” Disneyland is not a city; it is a resort, a playground for tourists. Guests pay to stay a while. This notion of city of transience, and city as tourist playground, has come to the forefront of city life today.

As economic practices continue to adapt to the changes of post-industrial capitalism, prominent new forms of labor and services have emerged. One of the most prevalent are the on-demand services sometimes referred to as the “sharing economy”. This emergence is exemplified in the popularity of services like Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb. The advent of car-for-hire services like Uber and Lyft has been tumultuous for taxi industries in major cities. Taxi drivers have protested in cities worldwide. Some cities have banned the taxi alternatives outright. Meanwhile, Airbnb (which essentially functions as a hotel alternative; ostensibly, private homeowners and tenants rent out their homes as accommodation) has received scrutiny in cities suffering housing crises, especially New York and San Francisco. Critics of the service view as essentially turning real cities into Disneylands: displacing residents in favor of a revolving door of transient tourists willing to pay the price of admission.

The issues raised by these services and their functions in urban economies lead to some fundamental questions the role of cities today. What is the city for? Should we view the city as a commodity? Or the city as service? For whom is the city? Who should the city be accountable to, and who should be accountable to the city?

These are questions I am currently considering in depth in my research. My home city of Pittsburgh does not face the housing shortages or Airbnb saturation of larger cities, nor is the taxi lobby here as robust as in Philadelphia, but Uber has established itself in the city. Uber has selected Pittsburgh along with a number of other cities for a hiring surge of new drivers. At the same time, the company has partnered with Carnegie Mellon University to run a research lab in the city to develop robotic, autonomous cars that will eventually obsolesce and replace all the drivers they have hired. One more example of the preeminence of transience in the contemporary city.

This discussion of transience leads us to the fifth and final urban truth:

1. Living in Yesterland: the city and change

Recently the web site Theme Park Tourist published a retrospective on a former Disney World attraction: The ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter. The attraction (I’ll use EAE for short) existed in the Magic Kingdom’s Tomorrowland from 1995 to 2003. I got to experience EAE sometime in the late 90s, and I remember it vividly. First of all, it was a golden era for Disney World’s Tomorrowland: the “New Tomorrowland” period, characterized by theming the area as a functioning futuristic city (complete with re-theming the People Mover as the Tomorrowland Transit Authority) and featuring such attractions as The Timekeeper, the revamped Astro Orbiter, and of course, EAE.

I was elementary school-aged, visiting the park with my family. We found ourselves in New Tomorrowland toward the end of a long Disney World day. My dad took me with him to ride EAE while Mom and my sisters went to do something more their speed. As detailed in the Theme Park Tourist series, EAE was particularly intense for a Disney attraction. In an effort to prevent unwary parents from taking tots on the terrifying attraction and leaving traumatized, Disney plastered with queue area with warning signs. I must’ve read every one of those warning signs as the ride line snaked through the holding pen. “Warning: The ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter my be too frightening for small children.” “Portions of this attraction take place in a confined space and total darkness.” “Warning: this attraction features flashing lights and pyrotechnics.”

The warning notices were effective: I was terrified the entire time we were in line. I remained terrified during both of the pre-shows. I was terrified entering the main show room: a theater in the round, with three concentric rings of seats facing the center of the room. And when, after taking a seat, a Disney crewmember lowered restraints onto my shoulders and locking me in, I was petrified. But then the attraction proper got underway, and something wonderful happened.

The show was not nearly as unrelentingly vicious as I’d been imagining. Instead, it was a delightful combination of tongue-in-cheek humor, cutting edge special effects, and pop sci-fi storytelling. As the auditorium filled with screams (some genuine, some forced, some piped in through hidden speakers), I started laughing, and I continued laughing for the duration. The fears I had projected onto the unknown proved unfounded; the drama of a howling space beast breaking free of its cage and rampaging around the room devouring unwitting humans was nothing but good, clean fun. When it was over, I walked out grinning, and wanting to immediately get back in line for another go.

That experience of an amusement park attraction nearly twenty years ago has remained a potent and positive memory. As far as Disney vacation memories go, it’s easily one of my best; a fond recollection of being thoroughly impressed by a real E-ticket ride. It’s also a dear memory of time spent with my father. Sure, sharing a theme park ride may not register as much of an experience for the zealously cynical and jaded, but for me there was something unquestionably profound in that experience: while in line I was afraid and wanted to leave, but dad knowingly did not indulge my overblown anxiety (rest assured, I was old enough to handle to EAE). Having gone through the experience, I found that the ultimate cause of my anxiety had been my own imagination, and came out the better for it knowing it had been worth it. Joy was the reward for having faced my fear. This is a terribly important life lesson, irregardless of the medium through which it is communicated. The fact that a theme park is an artificial environment doesn’t preclude the possibility for real, meaningful experience to occur there.

The ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter was closed in 2003 and overhauled into an attraction called Stitch’s Great Escape. In the new version, the berserk alien beast is replaced by a cute cartoon character who gets loose in the theater and farts in the audience’s faces. In fact, most of New Tomorrowland is gone. I have many other examples from various Disneyland attractions that have either been removed or altered. The disappearance of the Carousel of Progress; the addition of a Johnny Depp animatronic to Pirates of the Caribbean; the replacement of Star Tours with an entirely new version. Each of these irked me in some way. Perhaps you have your own examples. Changes like these can be affecting because they alter the landscape of our memories. If you return to those places, you can’t help but remember what used to be there, or how it was before. Such changes are not always experienced negatively, but they are noticed.

Returning to the question of city life, I am reminded of something Colson Whitehead wrote in The Colossus of New York:

No matter how long you have been here, you are a New Yorker the first time you say, That used to be Munsey’s, or That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge. That before the internet café plugged itself in, you got your shoes resoled in the mom-and-pop operation that used to be there. You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.

Obviously, the maxim about “the only thing that is constant” does not apply only to cities, or to Disneyland. It is a universal precept, but one that can be difficult to accept, especially when it affects our pasts and personal histories. The city is change. Cities are not static, but constantly changing; that dynamism is integral to their vitality.

Urban Comm roundup: Smart cities, hostile architecture, and placemaking

Smart Cities

• Writing for Forbes, Rich Karlgaard reports on the smart-city champions, i.e. the countries and companies poised to benefit from the smart city boom:

I see three categories of winners. The first will be suppliers of digital technology, from high-speed telecom, cloud services and digital security to apps, for example, like Uber’s and Airbnb’s that use physical resources with greater efficiency. But these can get you only so far.

The second category will be traditional industry reborn. The trick will be to find breakthroughs in materials, construction and transportation–updates to the blood-and-sweat stuff that built the great cities of the 20th century. Will the winners be known names, such as GE, Mitsubishi, Tata and Samsung, or new players?

A third category will be the smart cities themselves. Leaders will likely create services that can be used to teach other cities, so their expertise will have value beyond the benefits enjoyed inside the cities. Smart cities will enjoy premium brands in a tough global economy, and they will attract talent. A great example is Singapore.

• Focusing on India's smart cities initiative, Arindham Guha outlines "three broad categories of investments in infrastructure and technology, all of which are required for delivering 'smart' urban services":

The first category is what we can call basic infrastructure—water or sewerage pipelines would fall under this group. Unlike developed countries, most Indian cities have significant shortages in this area.

[...]

[The] second category of technology investments in a typical smart city, which we can broadly call network level infrastructure. These are essentially a set of devices or sensors installed at specific points in the city-wide network which are used to monitor parameters related to service delivery.

[...]

Integrating information and communication technology (ICT) solutions constitute the third and final component of the smart city technology architecture. These solutions can be of two types. One set of ICT solutions usually help the city administration manage their internal functions like finance and accounting, human resources etc. The other set of ICT solutions are usually used to analyse data collected through network level sensors to generate potential decision options for the city administration to provide seamless and efficient urban services.

• CNBC contributor Nyshka Chandran asks, "Are India's smart cities too ambitious?":

"Smart city" remains loosely-defined in India and around the world, but many say the adoption of technology is a crucial element. Ambitious initiatives to build "smarter" cities include the use of data and digital infrastructure to manage energy and water usage to the creation of intelligent transport networks, according to a Brookings report earlier this year.

However, India will likely focus on fixing the lack of basic amenities and infrastructure such as housing, water supply, sanitation, and electricity in existing urban regions.

• Darren Pauli at the Register warns "your city's not smart if it's vulnerable":

"Real world hacker" Cesar Cerrudo has blasted vendors, saying they're stopping security researchers from testing smart city systems, and as a result they're being sold with dangerous unchecked vulnerabilities.

The warning will be detailed at RSA San Francisco this week, and comes a year after the IOActive chief technology officer found some 200,000 vulnerable traffic control sensors active in cities like Washington DC, London, and Melbourne.

Vendors don't want their kit tested, Cerrudo said, although there are now 25 major cities across the world taking the lead in deployment, such as New York, Berlin, and Sydney.

• AlterNet's Allegra Kirkland considers the "troubling social and political consequences" posed by smart cities:

Smart cities are loosely defined as urban centers that rely on digital technology to enhance efficiency and reduce resource consumption. This happens by means of ubiquitous wireless broadband, citywide networks of computerized sensors that measure human activities (from traffic to electricity use), and mass data collection that analyzes these patters. Many American cities, including New York, Boston and Chicago, already make use of smart technologies. But far more radical advances are happening overseas. Masda in Abu Dhabi, and Songdo, in South Korea, will be the first fully functioning smart cities, in which everything from security to electricity to parking is monitored by sensors and controlled by a central city "brain".

The surveillance implications of these sorts of mass data-generating civic projects are unnerving, to say the least. Urban designer and author Adam Greenfield wrote on his blog Speedbird that this centralized governing model "disturbingly consonant with the exercise of authoritarianism." To further complicate matters, the vast majority of smart-city technology is designed by IT-systems giants like IBM and Siemens. In places like Songdo, which was the brainchild of Cisco Systems, corporate entities become responsible for designing and maintaining the basic functions of urban life.

Hostile Architecture

• In an article for the Guardian, Alex Andreou considers the broader implications of anti-homeless spikes and other forms of defensive architecture in urban spaces:

From ubiquitous protrusions on window ledges to bus-shelter seats that pivot forward, from water sprinklers and loud muzak to hard tubular rests, from metal park benches with solid dividers to forests of pointed cement bollards under bridges, urban spaces are aggressively rejecting soft, human bodies.

We see these measures all the time within our urban environments, whether in London or Tokyo, but we fail to process their true intent. I hardly noticed them before I became homeless in 2009. An economic crisis, a death in the family, a sudden breakup and an even more sudden breakdown were all it took to go from a six-figure income to sleeping rough in the space of a year. It was only then that I started scanning my surroundings with the distinct purpose of finding shelter and the city’s barbed cruelty became clear.

[...]

Defensive architecture acts as the airplane curtain that separates economy from business and business from first class, protecting those further forward from the envious eyes of those behind. It keeps poverty unseen and sanitises our shopping centres, concealing any guilt for over-consuming. It speaks volumes about our collective attitude to poverty in general and homelessness in particular. It is the aggregated, concrete, spiked expression of a lack of generosity of spirit.

Ironically, it doesn’t even achieve its basic goal of making us feel safer. There is no way of locking others out that doesn’t also lock us in. The narrower the arrow-slit, the larger outside dangers appear. Making our urban environment hostile breeds hardness and isolation. It makes life a little uglier for all of us.

• Hannah Butler at Non Profit Quarterly reacted to Andreou's article with additional thoughts on "the fierce hostility of the urban landscape":

Creating urban spaces that reject human interactions affect us all. Not only do they prevent the homeless taking refuge; neither can the young mother find shelter from the rain or the elderly man a space to rest. It creates a physical manifestation of a hostility that we could all stand to be without, rather than encourage. These problems are not limited to New York City or to London, but are in fact a stubborn part of the architecture of modern city life, whether indented or accidental. However, they aren’t intractable.

• In a post on Medium, Justin Schumacher writes about the balance between security and liberty in relation to architecture:

Early on, the British did much as we have done since 9/11, installing barriers and bollards anywhere they might save some lives. But as the years passed, their approach became much more nuanced as they realized that over-securitizing public spaces drives away the public, which increases crime. This appears to happen in part because security features lead people to believe that crime is commonplace and increasing even if it is rare and decreasing, and in part because simply seeing security features causes anxiety and discomfort.

Placemaking & Tactical Urbanism

• Referring to it as a "rhetorical gimmick," James Russell says "enough of bogus 'placemaking'":

Unfortunately, Placemaking, as promulgated by its chief advocate, the nonprofit Projects for Public Spaces, is largely bogus, even though PPS rather presumptuously claims it “has the potential to be one of the most transformative ideas of this century.” After you hack through thickets of slogans and vagaries, Placemaking seems to comprise a community-driven process for designing public spaces (streets, sidewalks, plazas, squares, campuses, parks, and so on) that are mixed use, host a variety of activities for diverse audiences, and are well-connected to the larger city or town. All this has been mom & pop, apple-pie stuff in urban planning circles for decades, derived from the valuable 1960s work of the urbanist and author Jane Jacobs and the urban planner William H. “Holly” Whyte. The same ideas energized the 1990s New Urbanism that gave us Neo-historical neighborhoods, a few of them actually good.

Sadly, Placemaking could only gain currency because our building and development processes create so little that is inviting and memorable. America’s default is to assemble standardized real-estate products along roads engineered for auto throughput, and call it a day. Placelessness is so ubiquitous and such second nature that it is actually hard to think about what it takes to make a building or streetscape that’s appealing, that feels as if it belongs.

[...]

What are the lessons here? Making great places is a more organic and less mechanical process than PPS makes it out to be. Yes, the public must be involved, and yes some places should be active social mixing bowls. But some places—especially extraordinary natural features—should be left alone. In others, we should recognize that what is unique is sometimes strange (like Gasworks’ rusting ruins). Recall that the rail line that hosts the High Line Park escaped demolition only because two intrepid people cared.

• Annah MacKenzie of the Project for Public Spaces recently reiterated the organization's stance on space vs place:

Let’s start with Public Space. Outlining the role and value of public space has long been a subject of academic, political, and professional debate. At the most basic level public space can be defined as publicly owned land that, in theory, is open and accessible to all members of a given community—regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, age, or socio-economic level.

[...]

Places, on the other hand, are environments in which people have invested meaning over time. A place has its own history—a unique cultural and social identity that is defined by the way it is used and the people who use it. It is not necessarily through public space, then, but through the creation of places that the physical, social, environmental, and economic health of urban and rural communities can be nurtured.

• Writing at The City Fix, Alex Rogala describes how "tactical urbanism is shaping cities for people, by people":

As many people increasingly rely on data-driven apps and platforms like Google Maps to navigate their cities, some skeptics have worried that our streets are losing their traditional element of chance, surprise, and mystery. Kopfkino (roughly, “head theater” in German) is a project to revitalize those aspects of the urban experience. Using a shopping cart as their base, a group of friends in Istanbul built a portable projector that casts users’ faces onto building facades when they peer into a laptop camera. Kopfkino invites the curious passerby to pause from his or her regular routine and discover a new experience in a familiar place.

DIY projects in public spaces like Kopfkino are popping up all over Turkey. However, unlike some other examples of tactical urbanism, Kopfkino likely wasn’t intended to be replicable or scalable. The point, however, is to challenge what it means to encounter other people in public space, and to revisit the idea that every city offers an individual and unique experience.

• Tactical urbanism is the subject of a current MoMA exhibition entitled Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities. In an essay posted at the MoMA website, Neil Brenner asks, "is 'tactical urbanism' an alternative to neoliberal urbanism?":

Especially in light of the stridently anti-planning rhetoric that pervades many tactical urban interventions and their tendency to privilege informal, incremental, and ad hoc mobilizations over larger-scale, longer-term, publicly financed reform programs, it seems reasonable to ask in what ways they do, in actuality, engender any serious friction against the neoliberal order, much less subvert it. In some cases, tactical urbanisms appear more likely to bolster neoliberal urbanisms by temporarily alleviating (or perhaps merely displacing) some of their disruptive social and spatial effects, but without interrupting the basic rule-regimes associated with market-oriented, growth-first urban development, and without challenging the foundational mistrust of governmental institutions that underpins the neoliberal project. The relation between tactical and neoliberal forms of urbanism is thus considerably more complex, contentious, and confusing than is generally acknowledged in the contributions to the debate on Uneven Growth. As illustrated in the list below, it cannot be simply assumed that because of their operational logics or normative-political orientations, tactical interventions will, in fact, counteract neoliberal urbanism. No less than five specific types of relation between these projects can be readily imagined, only two of which (1 and 5 in the list) might involve a challenge to market-fundamentalist urban policy. There are at least three highly plausible scenarios in which tactical urbanism will have either negligible or actively beneficial impacts upon a neoliberalized urban rule-regime.

Smart Cities: India's initiative; technologized transport; democratic dilemmas and dystopian dangers

• Smart cities continue to be a hot topic for urban designers and commentators, even as the very definition of the term is debated. Kieron Monks at CNN recently addressed this in an article on the next generation of smart cities:

The urban planning equivalent of a Rorschach test, a "Smart City" can be taken to mean almost anything.

But by the most popular criteria; sustainable energy and development, open data and government, and integrated information, communications and technology (ICT) serving wide areas of a city, these ultra-modern hubs are on the rise.

• One site for this next generation of smart cities is India, where the Prime Minister has advanced a vision of building "100 smart cities":

Secretary of India's Urban Development ministry, Shankar Aggarwal interacted with the people and officials involved with the ambitious project.

Aggarwal said a smart city may have diverse significance for different groups belonging to various fields.

"The definition of smart city differs from person to person. One can say that smart design is smart city or smartly deployment of a city can be considered as smart city. If utilities are put forward in a smarter way can be defined as a smart city. Assimilation of all the things makes a smart city. If there is growth of economic activates, improvement of quality of life, that is a smart city," he said.

• Urban designer Alykhan Mohamed has written about the process of introducing "smart city" technology and infrastructure to ancient cities and holy sites, and the inherent challenges posed by the country's stark inequality:

Smart cities have the potential to transform India's cities, but unless the people who design them are sensitive to the reality that half a billion Indians are not even on the current grid, and almost a quarter of the country is illiterate, real change will not happen. Unless the engineering is combined with ingenuity to address fundamental political, social and economic weaknesses, smart cities will inevitably become another high profile megaproject; a false promise that does not realize its potential and becomes a burden, much like an empty Olympic stadium after games that promised much needed infrastructure and sustainable economic development.

• Writing for Forbes India, economic journalist K. Yatish Rajawat urges urban designers to "focus on liveable cities, not smart ones":

The current model of city planning is based on an outdated Le Corbusier concept that the city needs to be flat. Indian planners still believe that Chandigarh is the best city as it was planned by Corbusier, but it is not a smart city because you need a car to live in such a city. And dependence on a car means depending upon fast-depleting fossil fuels; it means commute as a part of daily life.

While small initiatives like Raahgiri are catching people’s attention as they reclaim the streets from cars for a few hours every week, what if it was part of a city’s design? That the streets belonged to people, and not to cars? A fundamental shift in even the way permissions are given for development and integration of public transportation has to be part of city planning. Then only can a city be livable; it has to be embedded in its planning and not in its sensors.

• A letter to Indian business daily Business Standard suggested that smart city design should also address drainage and agricultural concerns:

Another suggestion would be to make the city self-sufficient in terms of agricultural produce, so that in times of crisis it is capable of taking care of the basic requirements of the residents of the city. Of course, it seems to much to ask for in the current scenario but with advanced technological know-how it's not impossible.

• In the Straits Times, editor Han Fook Kwang recently argued that many urban issues in need of being "smarter" have nothing to do with technology:

But just as having a smartphone doesn't make you a smart person, a digitally smart city isn't necessarily one that's doing all the right things by its citizens and making their lives more pleasant.

In fact, a smart city with all the computers at its disposal can be doing many dumb things, and doing them even more quickly.

A really smart city (as opposed to being just digitally smart), on the other hand, knows what the right things to do are, with or without technology.

• Adam Greenfield at The Guardian writes that the "smartest cities rely on citizen cunning and unglamorous technology":

The true enablers of participation turn out to be nothing more exciting than cheap commodity devices, reliable access to sufficiently high- bandwidth connectivity, and generic cloud services. These implications should be carefully mulled over by developers, those responsible for crafting municipal and national policy, and funding bodies in the philanthropic sector.

In both these cases, ordinary people used technologies of connection to help them steer their own affairs, not merely managing complex domains to a minimal threshold of competence, but outperforming the official bodies formally entrusted with their stewardship. This presents us with the intriguing prospect that more of the circumstances of everyday urban life might be managed this way, on a participatory basis, by autonomous neighbourhood groups networked with one another in something amounting to a city-wide federation.

• In a recent article for the New York Times, Diane Cardwell reported on Copenhagen's new network of street-embedded LED lights:

The system, still in its early stages, has put Copenhagen on the leading edge of a global race to use public outdoor lighting as the backbone of a vast sensory network capable of coordinating a raft of functions and services: whether easing traffic congestion, better predicting where to salt before a snowstorm or, to the alarm of privacy advocates, picking up on suspicious behavior on a busy street corner.

Cities worldwide are expected to replace 50 million aging fixtures with LEDs over the next three years, with roughly half of those in Europe. Some are mainly interested in switching from outmoded technologies to one that uses less energy and can last for decades. But many others want to take full advantage of the LED’s electronics, which are more conducive to wireless communication than other types of lighting.

• Gordon Feller at The City Fix has also written on smart urban transportation systems:

Many cities are also using smart technology to integrate services between different areas of government. For example, Barcelona has undertaken an ambitious multi-year program, Smart City Barcelona, in order to efficiently ensure that city services reach all citizens. The city’s long-term plan involves government, residents, and the business community in developing and shaping the city’s technological initiatives. One of these unique solutions will be called CityOS (operating system), for which the city is currently seeking a developer. City officials envision this OS as an open platform that unites the various smart technology projects operating across the city. In particular, the OS is expected to improve the daily commuting experience as well as reduce the operating costs of transport systems.

• Finally, Steven Poole in The Guardian considers the dystopian dangers posed by such smart city initiatives, and whether "they will destroy democracy":

One only has to look at the hi-tech nerve centre that IBM built for Rio de Janeiro to see this Nineteen Eighty-Four-style vision already alarmingly realised. It is festooned with screens like a Nasa Mission Control for the city. As Townsend writes: “What began as a tool to predict rain and manage flood response morphed into a high-precision control panel for the entire city.” He quotes Rio’s mayor, Eduardo Paes, as boasting: “The operations centre allows us to have people looking into every corner of the city, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”

What’s more, if an entire city has an “operating system”, what happens when it goes wrong? The one thing that is certain about software is that it crashes. The smart city, according to Hollis, is really just a “perpetual beta city”. We can be sure that accidents will happen – driverless cars will crash; bugs will take down whole transport subsystems or the electricity grid; drones could hit passenger aircraft. How smart will the architects of the smart city look then?

[...]

One sceptical observer of many presentations at the Future Cities Summit, Jonathan Rez of the University of New South Wales, suggests that “a smarter way” to build cities “might be for architects and urban planners to have psychologists and ethnographers on the team.” That would certainly be one way to acquire a better understanding of what technologists call the “end user” – in this case, the citizen. After all, as one of the tribunes asks the crowd in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus: “What is the city but the people?”