I’m delighted to moderate a special session during the upcoming AMS conference Re-Inventing the City.

The session (Thursday, Feb.17 at 15:00, online) will bring together artists, designers and researchers to consider how the public can be meaningfully brought into urban transition initiatives. The point of departure for the session is that efforts to transform urban systems often neglect to include the public, resulting in urban futures (and technologies) that are envisioned and created in a top-down matter by industry and government.

The conference’s call for papers (especially the theme “co-designing the system”) is evidence of this, mentioning “Science, industry partners and policymakers” but not the public (neither as organizations, nor as communities or individuals). The session will gather multiple perspectives on the roles the public can and should play in envisioning and promoting urban futures, with an emphasis on creative, imaginative or speculative approaches for urban co-creation. Such approaches serve to promote equitable public inclusion in urban development processes, while aiming to “stretch” the public’s imagination of how the city may take shape in the future.

I’ll be joined by Kars Alfrink, designer and PhD candidate at TU Delft, Cristina Ampatzidou, researcher at RMIT Europe and CreaTures project, Michiel de Lange, Assistant Professor, Culture and Media Studies at Utrecht University, and Julien Thomas, interdisciplinary artist and social designer.

As part of Alternative Imaginaries for the Smart City‘s expansion to Amsterdam, I was interviewed for the Responsible Sensing Lab‘s website. The lab, a collaboration between the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS) and the City of Amsterdam’s Chief Technology Office (CTO), “explores how to integrate social values in the design of sensing systems in public space”.

This is how I described the motivation for the project:

The idea behind the project is that so much smart city technologies are designed and then deployed in a top-down manner. So it’s either industry or governments that have either a particular technical interest or a particular managerial interest; and they develop technology that ends up in the neighbourhoods and affects people’s lives.

We are trying to see if we reverse that order, if we work from the bottom-up, that would result in different types of sensing technologies and different types of metrics (what we decide to measure). So on the one hand our desire with this project is to engage the public in questions around what is measured and how.

The interview also features Bob Pannebakker who did the ethnographic research in the neighbourhood (Waterlandpleinbuurt in North Amsterdam). It can be read here.

Biennale. Such a sexy word. I always wanted to be part of one and so I was delighted when the opportunity to organize and speak in a symposium on urban imaginaries during the Media Architecture Biennale (MAB 2020) came my way – even if the event was postponed by more than half a year and ended up taking place online.

The City Otherwise: Urban Imaginaries in Art and Design, featured four amazing speakers: Cristina Ampatzidou, Ollie Palmer, Tara Karpinski, and Maarten Hajer. We offered different perspectives on the question of how artists and designers engage with urban imaginaries as a means to democratize urban futures. This is how I introduced the panel on the biennale’s website:

Urban scholars have increasingly turned to urban imaginaries as a concept with which to interrogate the complex relations between the city’s materiality and the experiences of its inhabitants. The urban theorist Edward Soja describes urban imaginaries as “the mental or cognitive mappings of urban reality and the interpretative grids through which we think about, experience, evaluate, and decide to act in the places, spaces, and communities in which we live”. Urban imaginaries not only capture the way city dwellers make sense of their environment, but they provide a valuable means to consider urban entanglements. As Christoph Lindner and Miriam Meissner explain in their introduction to the Routledge Companion to Urban Imaginaries (2019), urban imaginaries “meaningfully interlink the different structures and signs, minds and bodies, facts and subjectivities, actualities and virtualities, economies and ecologies of urban social space”. In this sense, considering urban imaginaries allows researchers to start unpacking the richness of the urban lifeworld.

Urban imaginaries, “our situated and city-centric consciousness”, to cite Soja again, draw from multiple sources, including the cultural circulation of urban images, the everyday practices of city dwellers, and the technologies that mediate them. While the growth of cities has always coincided with the introduction of new technologies into the urban fabric, this process seems to have reached new heights with the rise of the smart city. Networked sensors and the algorithms they feed figure largely in the way cities are imagined and managed, revealing the smart city as an urban imaginary per excellence – a container for innovation and a platform for envisioning urban futures. This, however, raises important questions about who gets to imagine the smart city, and how a plurality of urban forms and configurations may break through the homogeneity of smart city technologies and policies. The role of artists and designers seems especially pertinent here.

Taking at its point of departure the assumption that urban imaginaries and, by extension, the public imagination are central to urban politics, the symposium will explore the relations between urban imaginaries and urban futures. Drawing from art and design projects, research and activism, symposium speakers will engage with such issues as the value of urban imaginaries as sites of collective creativity; the functioning of urban imaginaries as boundary objects that bring into dialogue the social sciences, arts and humanities; the usefulness of urban imaginaries as a means to interrogate and problematize the drive to quantify everyday urban life; and the value of urban imaginaries as windows into the political role of art and design.

Future proofing appears as an idea whose time has come, but in this short polemical article [pdf] I argue that it may also be seen as a modernist fantasy of control. The article appears in Volume #59, in an issue dedicated to the upcoming Media Architecture Biennale (‘Futures Implied’).

In Feb. 2019 I helped organize a wonderful workshop at the Lorentz Center in Leiden University. The workshop was a first of its kind attempt to grapple with the relations between counterfactuals and futures thinking, and was attended by an amazing cast of interdisciplinary scholars from history to engineering, economics to design.

Since the workshop, Elina Eriksson, Daniel Pagrman and I have been thinking about how to consolidate everything we’ve learned, and now our efforts have been published in Futures (and is open access). Here’s the abstract:

While the past is present in all futuring activities it tends to remain implicit and has not received adequate attention by futures scholars and practitioners. In response, this conceptual paper offers a novel framework with which the past can be brought into futures studies in a structured and comprehensive way. We begin by providing a brief account of how the past already figures in futures studies as part of efforts to understand the lingering effects of the past on the future; as part of a drive for ontological pluralization; and as a way to augment more mainstream futuring exercises. We then introduce two past-facing approaches to futuring, recasting and pastcasting, and illustrate their symmetry with the more familiar future-facing approaches, forecasting and backcasting. The symmetry, we argue, is based on shared aims and a shared style of inquiry. We then compare the different approaches and illustrate the landscape of futuring as an interplay of two dimensions: the focus of the activity on outcomes or pathways, and the stakes involved in it.