The Smartness Mandate: Notes toward a Critique

Halpern, Orit; Mitchell, Robert Cameron; Geoghegan, Bernard Dionysius

doi:10.1162/grey_a_00221

Cited by 72 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…These critiques are as relevant today as at the time, and the contradictions are most palpable in the field of urbanism. The case of Etarea offers an unexpected prehistory to the post-Cold War era of control societies and smart cities (Deleuze 1992;Halpern, Mitchell and Geoghegan 2017). Čelechovský's design for variegated living environments that nurtured self-realization was ultimately inseparable from his belief in the ' quantification', ' algorithmization' and 'stabilization' of cities-systems -a paradox of revolutionary yet homeostatic urbanism (1967a: A6/3).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automation or Meaning? Socialism, Humanism and Cybernetics in Etarea

Krivý

2019

Architectural Histories

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Designed in 1967 for a site near Prague, Czechoslovakia, and exhibited that year at the Montreal Expo, Etarea was to be a city of 135,000 inhabitants, where the conveniences of automated infrastructure would satisfy future socialist generations. Conceived by the architect Gorazd Čelechovský as the ideal communist city, the case offers compelling insight into the influence of Marxist humanism and systems theory on postwar and specifically post-Stalinist state socialist architectural culture. Informed by these intellectual currents, as the article details, Etarea placed the question of meaning at centre stage. Meaning in architecture was considered in terms of both cybernetic communication and existential phenomenology, and its function was no less than to advance the communist transition. Etarea was informed by Civilization at the Crossroads (1966), an influential policy treatise that emphasized the significance of the intelligentsia and the so-called 'scientific and technological revolution' to future communism. The article explores the function of the 'living environment' as a conceptual banner and link between the publication and the project. While Civilization argued that urbanization must be decoupled from industrialization, Etarea was to be a model 'post-industrial' environment. Three aspects to Etarea are analysed in detail: the territorial question of the city-country divide, the balance between automation and sociopsychological meaning and tensions between political emancipation and cybernetic control. Civilization at the Crossroads The Constitution of 1960 declared the socialist development of Czechoslovakia complete. 'We gather forces for the communist transition', the document proclaimed, in conformity with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's belief that communism was on the horizon (NACSR 1960). The teaching of 'scientific communism' was inherent to that transition, inaugurated under Party chairman, president and Khrushchev disciple Antonín Novotný (Sommer 2016). 3 Coming to grips with the Stalinist legacy of Klement Gottwald, under whose leadership the Communist Party seized power in 1948, and who died in 1953 only a week after Stalin, the scientification of communism was consid

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automation or Meaning? Socialism, Humanism and Cybernetics in Etarea

Krivý

2019

Architectural Histories

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“…Think about your Wi-Fi-connected smart phone, houses, and, of course, streets. Yet, as Halpern et al (2017) explain, the appeal of smartness lies not only in its infrastructural capacity via computing but also in ‘an orienting telos about what smartness is and does’ (p. 108). Recognizing a decisive break from the Cold War notions of centralized control, the authors suggest smartness offers ‘neither reason nor rationality’ (Halpern et al, 2017: 110), as it elevates resilience and optimization above all else.…”

Section: Temporalities Of Smartness: Between Crisis and Utopiamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Yet, as Halpern et al (2017) explain, the appeal of smartness lies not only in its infrastructural capacity via computing but also in ‘an orienting telos about what smartness is and does’ (p. 108). Recognizing a decisive break from the Cold War notions of centralized control, the authors suggest smartness offers ‘neither reason nor rationality’ (Halpern et al, 2017: 110), as it elevates resilience and optimization above all else. By constantly experimenting with data models and real-time information, smartness envisions sustainability as the outcome of the continual testing and tweaking of data analysis in city spaces.…”

Section: Temporalities Of Smartness: Between Crisis and Utopiamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Over the past decade, the smart city has emerged as a space in which anticipations and calculations about societal futures are constructed in the present (Albino et al, 2015; Cocchia and Dameri, 2016; Halpern et al, 2017). The growing scholarship in this area has demonstrated that smartness , as a particular urban vision, emboldens the kind of technological idealism that promotes efficiency and innovation across urban spaces (Hollands, 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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What smartness does in the smart city: From visions to policy

Baykurt

Raetzsch

2020

Convergence

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This article examines what smartness does on the ground by examining how its anticipatory media visions have been interpreted and acted on in policy decisions and local implementations since the early 2000s. Using a comparative-historical analysis that draws on fieldwork in aspiring smart cities in the United States and Europe, we argue that the visions of smartness are neither singular nor fixed across time and space. Instead, the role of smartness in diffusing new technologies is recruited and reshaped in the present to lend legitimacy to future public and private interventions. We first demonstrate that the narrative of crisis, often associated with smartness, shifted from a pre-2008 emphasis on sustainability and climate change to a post-financial crisis engagement with entrepreneurship and platformization. We then discuss how the development of smart city initiatives has followed divergent paths in the United States and Europe, with big tech companies dominating in the former and the ‘living lab’ model prevailing in the latter. Our analysis highlights the importance of investigating the complex relationships between anticipatory media visions of smartness and their varying, down-to-earth implementations in the built environment rather than solely focusing on the discursive appeal of techno-idealism. It also explains the enduring appeal of smartness as an urban vision, despite its various shortcomings, by revealing its adaptability to the changing social and political–economic shifts.

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“…It presents a novel vision of a human being whose mind is trained to “bounce back” from the effects of future catastrophic violence. Capable of living in a world in which emergencies have become routine, as it were, this human being has to be resigned to life in a permanent catastrophe-management mode, without a horizon of hope or an expectation of change or progress (Halpern, Mitchell, & Geoghean, 2017, p. 121; see also Aranda, Zeeman, Scholes, & Morales, 2012).…”

Section: The Contours Of the Resilient Subjectmentioning

confidence: 99%

From the therapeutic to the post-therapeutic: The resilient subject, its social imaginary, and its practices in the shadow of 9/11

Brunner

Amrami

2019

Theory & Psychology

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In the aftermath of 9/11, the concept of psychological resilience, which refers to the ability to “bounce back” after adversity, became prominent across the American mental health community. Resilience thinking made its way quickly into the U.S. military, where it sparked the most expensive psychological intervention program in history. This article interweaves four strands of explanation—political, scientific, technological, and cultural—to account for the success of resilience thinking in the U.S. military and beyond. It shows that theories and practices of psychological resilience are not as novel as their proponents make them out to be. However, it also details how the ideal of a post-therapeutic, resilient subject became the cornerstone of a new, post-9/11 social imaginary. This article concludes that the contemporary ascendancy of psychological resilience indicates that rather than allying itself with the therapeutic as it had done previously, post-9/11 neoliberalism has moved toward the post-therapeutic.

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The Smartness Mandate: Notes toward a Critique

Cited by 72 publications

References 7 publications

Automation or Meaning? Socialism, Humanism and Cybernetics in Etarea

Automation or Meaning? Socialism, Humanism and Cybernetics in Etarea

What smartness does in the smart city: From visions to policy

From the therapeutic to the post-therapeutic: The resilient subject, its social imaginary, and its practices in the shadow of 9/11

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