Article

The city, that shambolic mutant

Thursday 28 July 2011 Tags: architecture, urbanism, technology, town

ARTOF POPOF - artofpopof.com

“Be Radical,” that is the title given to “Lift France 2011,” a series of lectures devoted to the social implications of new technologies (July 6-8 in Marseilles). The need for a change in outlook, imagination and strategy with regards to the city is clear but the approaches are more progressive...than radical.

Cities and utopias have been indissociable, from Plato’s “Callipolis” (The Republic) to the grand urban utopias of the 19th Century. But the imaginary city stands out more than any other “utopianized” object because of the violence of its contrasts: between naïve fantasies and paranoid dystopias.   This tension can be observed particularly in projections involving new technology. It is difficult to find a representation of the city that doesn’t sink into either excessive darkness (cf. the cyberpunk tendencies), or into dangerous beatitudes (cf. the “smart city,” which we'll return to shortly). Yet such overly pronounced imaginings push urban thought into an impasse. Philosopher Cynthia Fleuryi thus denounced the “double bind” of a prophetic projection that is either self-fulfilling of the disaster, or either naively utopian and thus a euphemism for actual tragedies.” (1)

How does one resolve this situation? “By building an imagination and combat strategies,” replied the philosopher. Or to be more specific, in the case of the city, by REbuilding imagination in order to support the city’s absorption of technology.

Saskia Sassen

Frédéric Mazzella

Taming the digital city for want of mastering it

The first change brought up by these experts has to do with the way the city itself is considered. More than a fixed object and therefore predictable, economist Saskia Sassen, a specialist in “global cities,” insisted on the mutability of cities with the help of a synthetic metaphor: "Cities in themselves contain multiple futures. Therefore the futures we prepare for never really happen. In a sense, we are constantly building these futures. To summarize, the city is in constant mutation, the city is a mutant."

An idea that makes perfect sense when you put it alongside the one put forth by Adam Greenfield, interface designer specializing in ambient technology. He draws his inspiration here from the systemic theory: "There are two categories of challenge facing the city: On the one hand, the "problems," and the problems are wonderful because they have readymade solutions. And on the other hand there are the “messes” [original version], which, by definition, do not have predefined solutions. Instead, the “messes” have contradictory imperatives for which it is necessary to find an optimal compromise. You cannot break down the challenges of the city into isolated problems. You cannot, therefore, solve the problems of the city, but you can find ways to address these “messes.” Thus the city must be considered a “mess,” not a problem [original version: “city is a mess, city is not a problem].”

This change of perspective implies abandoning logic in which new technologies are seen as ready-made solutions that are by necessity the means for salvation.  “It is impossible to use technology to solve “the problem of the city.” Yet that is precisely the opposite hypothesis that dominates today’s urban prospective via the notion of the “smart city,” fully optimized by all-technology. There is talk of "techno-fix", literally "repair through technology."

Because of this faith in technology, the smart city forgets de facto the "messy" reality of the city and thus, ultimately, the presence of humans. According to Frederic Mazzella, founder of the French leader in car pooling: “And yet the city will have to go back to humans, and the machines will have to learn how to be forgotten.” To consider the city a “mutant mess-up” thus entails not entering into this dehumanizing logic but instead finding compromises that are closer to the city's people. That, AMONG OTHERS, is the role of digital technology, whose “only” function will be to “collect information on the different aspects of the “messes” faced by the city and thus to make better suggestions on the best way to address them,” concluded Adam Greenfield. Saskia Sassen added to this by stressing that by urbanizing technologies, the latter respond to the city thanks to retroactive loops [see here as well] that enable us not to solve problems but to improve on them little by little” [see here and here].   

Such a change of outlook regarding the very definition of the city helps to eliminate the first half of the “double bind” mentioned earlier [the one about the “naively utopian projection”]. It is however more complicated to get out of the second bind [the one about the “prophetic projection that is self-fulfilling of the disaster”], which makes the city of technology the place for all sorts of paranoia and thus blocks any attempt to peacefully build the digital city. For these experts, it appears necessary to change the perspective on imagination itself.

Robin Chase

Alain Renk

To be done with spectacular imaginings

For Jean-Louis Fréchin, digital designer, we have to get out of the readily sensationalistic aspect of urban fantasies:  “Fantasies about the city of tomorrow are already here. The digital city such as I see it does not come from spectacular imaginings, from fiction or from storytelling. On the contrary, it depends on fairly pragmatic issues, simple and political.  

The same goes for city planner-architect Alain Renk, who‘s counting on a change of paradigm at a daily level.  “The livable city of tomorrow, if it exists, will self-develop based on the model for a completely different geometry: a fractal geometry, a geometry of life, where the cracks will be inhabited and will widen until they take over the standardizations programmed by classic urban development. Take the example of the Japanese city. There you find very small places of nature with a small temple, a small chair... Reduced gardens, certainly, but offering a rapport with nature at least as “powerful” as what the larger parks would offer. In the fractal vision, forms and usages multiply in a mirror effect on different scales. For example, that little park there, in front of us, could develop into a sort of campus, but a campus on a scale of three people.” "The fractal approach", he added, would consist, for example, in simultaneously developing what one expects from a campus, but in places with all sorts of different scales, in order to create a “fractal campus,” adapted to the acceleration of the contemporary world. An ultra-efficient, for being multiple, campus, without a fixed form, spread out throughout the city, easy to appropriate and reconfigure permanently. Now let’s imagine a metropolis of 20 million people, woven on a large scale according to this geometry that is dormant today but that the digital city can make possible.”

To make the concepts accessible to the general public, the experts were not stingy with their metaphors. Here, Alain Renk made the most of the fantasy of the campus, greatly ingrained in the collective unconscious, to support his thesis. Along the same lines, Robin Chase, founder of several car-sharing networks, called on the image of the picnic. She had introduced her idea during her presentation [available soon on the Liftconference site], insisting in particular on the diversity characteristic of picnics (some will show up with a few simple chips while others will plan a much more organized meal), which, in her mind, is a symbol for the plurality of needs and the response of a city's people on a common platform (the lawn / the city). “The city, she explained, will be a platform for new forms of consumption: not only the purchase of products and services made on a large scale the way it exists today, but also at the same time the relocation of agricultural products and food grown in urban mini-gardens... This unfolds in many ways and each person will choose the combination that fits his budget, just like at a picnic.”

In another vein, but still following the logic of the "unspectacular", Jean-Louis Fréchin used the famous parisian fontaine Wallace"Wallace fountain" to demonstrate what would be a down-to-earth imagining of the city of tomorrow. [see here as well: the author of this text was on the show].

“What I imagine is very simple, he began, what made the Hausmann city were statues, public benches and drinking water. What is the Wallace Fountain today? It’s something we carry in our pocket, not devoted to me but to the collective being, to the manner in which I interact with others and with the city. The most human metaphor we could find was the wallet we all have in our pocket. Very ordinary, very everyday.”

Adam Greenfield

Jean-Louis Fréchin

What are the fundamentals for a more human digital city?

Not everyone, however, is necessarily keen on metaphors. This is the iconoclastic point of view of Adam Greenfield. “I am less and less interested in metaphors. Certainly they have a tremendous capacity for stimulating the imagination and mobilizing feelings. But by using them, you run the risk of misleading people as to their meaning. I find that to be dangerously distracting. Take a basic metaphor such as the “smart city:” even I can’t say what it means exactly!”

“Expressions such as “an operating system for the city” or “city as platform” or “city as software,”’ continued Adam Greenfield, “only really speak to a certain percentage of the public. It means practically nothing to all the others, and it takes on multiple meanings depending on the person.” He concluded with what could be a campaign slogan for the “combat strategies” we are looking for here:   “But I am no longer interested in waiving my arms to make grand statements and pretty promises. It’s time to roll up our sleeves and makes these promises come true. And if it doesn’t address the problems of ordinary city people, well then it doesn’t interest me.”

In the same way, Jean-Louis Fréchin insisted on the values it is necessary to attach to these futuristic projections, be they imaginary and metaphorical or not. The digital city, in that sense, is an opportunity to reinsert fundamentals into the urban environment: “The issue is to integrate into the digital some of the well known, the ancient, meaning notions of public space, shared space... All those values that made the European city, and that contain a double paradox: to find one’s bearings (the rational city), and to lose oneself (the historic city). The digital city must also allow that.”

The same tune from Frédéric Mazzell, who insists on values like community, solidarity, sharing, from which machines must not isolate us –automobiles in particular. As Alain Renk stressed, it’s mostly about avoiding reproducing the errors of the automobile. The latter will have been the symbol of a city “badly” imagined during the industrial age. “The automobile brought about a disturbing event that was considered only from a technical angle, and which guided the mutation of the city according to its own interest, without a pause, since the negative externalities were not taken into account. We already have some good ideas about externalities driven by digital technology and security logic...” And it’s precisely this focus on technology as salvation that it seems necessary to avoid today when addressing the digital city. While it’s not about being paranoid, we must not forget about the biases inherent in every form of progress.

Along the lines of “Be Radical” which served as “combat strategy” at the Lift conference, the experts stressed that change is not necessarily where we think it is. Thus the self-proclaimed "breakthrough innovation" does not necessarily lie in flashy fantasies, which lead to deadlock, but, to a much greater extent, in a focal change: each in his own way calls for a close-up on the urban dweller and his everyday life, more than for a long shot of the city of the future. Such a paradigm shift is not to be taken lightly: “It’s enough work for a lifetime!”, as Adam Greenfield slyly reminded.

Philippe Gargov

(1) with Cynthia Fleury, Nouvelles CLÉS n°69 / Février-mars 2011

Documents and links

Dipping back in...

Conférence Opening conference with the tmp/lab - survival kit 20 October 2011	Article Teach me to breathe, uh huh 11 March 2011
Article Berlin told by the writer Wladimir Kaminer 30 March 2011	Article Three pens in Paris 5 May 2011