Test-Bed Urbanism

Halpern, Orit; LeCavalier, Jesse; Calvillo, Nerea; Pietsch, Wolfgang

doi:10.1215/08992363-2020602

Cited by 176 publications

(80 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…A contemporary example of the creation of continuous feedback loops is the futuristic smart city development of Songdo in South Korea (Lindsay, 2010;Halpern et al, 2013;Kshetri et al, 2014;Carvalho, 2015). Songdo was initiated by the national government as a new development in the early 2000s as a 600-hectare international business district located 65 kilometres southwest of Seoul.…”

Section: Developing Learning Loopsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Innovating Climate Governance

Turnheim¹,

Kivimaa

Berkhout

2018

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Over the last decade, a multitude of urban climate change experiments have emerged to go beyond traditional role of the state in environmental governance. These activities provide a real world evidence base for how a low-carbon world could be realised and they have the potential to fundamentally change the way that cities are conceived, built, and managed. Most urban climate change experiments are designed to be geographically and temporally bounded to accelerate innovation activities and realise actual changes on the ground. But what if urban experiments did not scale up? What if, instead of informing existing modes of urban governance, they became the dominant approach to governing cities? What would a 'city of permanent experiments' look like and how would it function? This chapter speculates on the implications of experimentation as the new mode of governance for twenty-first century cities. Here, experiments are not interpreted as one-off trials to provide evidence and justification for new low-carbon policies, regulations, and service provision; instead, they are emerging as a new mode of governance in themselves. This emerging form of urban governance is characterised by uncertainty, recursive learning processes, and spatial fragmentation with multiple unknown implications on the politics of cities in the future.

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Section: Developing Learning Loopsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Innovating Climate Governance

Turnheim¹,

Kivimaa

Berkhout

2018

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“…While the imaginaries of the future are steeped in threats, what is surprising is that these disasters are presumed to never arrive. When Halpern interviewed engineers at Cisco and government officials from IFEZ, in July 2012 and September 2013, repeatedly the language of Songdo as an 'experiment', a 'test' -in short, a demo -continually reasserted itself (Halpern, LeCavalier and Calvillo, 2013). In fact, few places on 7 earth share so close an intimacy and so great a love for the demoing ethos and techno-fetishisation of MIT as South Korea; particularly as related to ubiquitous computing projects.…”

Section: Inhabiting the Futurementioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is a platform for testing these parametrically designed and generated cities; and it is part of a global demo ethos that brings us endless versions, updates, and trials -comprised of constant feedback loops between market research, personalisation, and product development. Songdo might fail, but this is only a temporary problem, that will encourage the next version, a better smart city in Rio or New York or Shenzhen, another prototype (Halpern, LeCavalier and Calvillo, 2013). Just as car accidents are regularly reperformed on auto-manufacturer test-beds, so in the case of these massive infrastructures any failure can be contained and managed.…”

Section: Inhabiting the Futurementioning

confidence: 99%

FCJ-215 Demoing unto Death: Smart Cities, Environment, and Preemptive Hope

Halpern¹,

Günel²

2017

FCJ

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Today, growing concerns with climate change, energy scarcity, security, and economic collapse have turned the focus of urban planners, investors, and governments towards infrastructure as a site of value production and potential salvation from a world consistently defined by catastrophes and crisis. This paper will interrogate the different forms of futurity and life that are currently emerging from this complex contemporary relationship between technology and design by engaging with two contemporary case studies of greenfield: 'smart' and 'green' developments in South Korea and Masdar in Abu Dhabi. In doing so, the paper will ask how these contemporary practices in ubiquitous computing and green technology are shaping large scale infrastructures and our imaginaries of the future of urban life.

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“…A canonical case is New Songdo in South Korea, which serves as a global testbed (Halpern, et al, 2013) and urban laboratory (Gieryn, 2006) for implementing largescale smart systems in the wild. At a cost of approximately US$40 billion, Songdo's corporate and government backers hope to make it the world's first fully smart city.…”

Section: What Is a Smart City?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The spectrum of control: A social theory of the smart city

Sadowski¹,

Pasquale²

2015

156

101

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There is a certain allure to the idea that cities allow a person to both feel at home and like a stranger in the same place. That one can know the streets and shops, avenues and alleys, while also going days without being recognized. But as elites fill cities with “smart” technologies — turning them into platforms for the “Internet of Things” (IoT): sensors and computation embedded within physical objects that then connect, communicate, and/or transmit information with or between each other through the Internet — there is little escape from a seamless web of surveillance and power. This paper will outline a social theory of the “smart city” by developing our Deleuzian concept of the “spectrum of control.” We present two illustrative examples: biometric surveillance as a form of monitoring, and automated policing as a particularly brutal and exacting form of manipulation. We conclude by offering normative guidelines for governance of the pervasive surveillance and control mechanisms that constitute an emerging critical infrastructure of the “smart city.”

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Test-Bed Urbanism

Cited by 176 publications

References 21 publications

Innovating Climate Governance

Innovating Climate Governance

FCJ-215 Demoing unto Death: Smart Cities, Environment, and Preemptive Hope

The spectrum of control: A social theory of the smart city

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