Exploring Networked Urban Mobilities by Malene Freudendal-Pedersen Sven Kesselring

Author:Malene Freudendal-Pedersen,Sven Kesselring
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Discussion: Agile, Articulated, and Constructively Agonistic?

Networks of trust and technologies of articulation are made in engagement with the affordances of new technologies, new partners, new publics, and the complexities of risk. They are ambiguous: simultaneously sites of new forms of community and humanity, and new forms of risk and conflict. In our synthesis, the characterization of the checklist as a technology that articulates the organization, the work, and the emergent communities of risk is important. An example may serve to highlight how the development of new techniques for articulation is, at least in part, driven by difficulties of understanding today’s complex mobilities of information and the resulting informational topographies and, simultaneously, a constructive, innovative response to these difficulties. During the search for suspects in the days after the 2015 Paris attacks, Brussels’ police imposed a lockdown of the city, engendering lively social media coverage of the events. Then “authorities asked residents not to tweet the whereabouts of raids fearing the suspects would likely monitor police movements,” and citizens responded by tweeting cats instead (Vale 2015).

Trivializing and sarcastic perhaps, but attuned to the need for more sensitive situation awareness, citizens learned how their communications can affect and support, as well as challenge and shift, risk governance in practice. More generally, the practices we have discussed in this chapter constitute a particular form of networked urbanism, characterized by interconnected infrastructures, netcentric organizations, and self-organized mobile publics. There are still many more dimensions than we have been able to discuss, such as the ‘data deluge’ generated as Public Protection and Disaster Relief organizations appropriate this networked urbanism, new modes of exclusion and surveillance (Graham and Marvin 2001) as well as new forms of collective intelligence and action (Büscher et al. 2014; Lévy 1997). Still our analysis provides insights into the need for and the type of work necessary to forge new partnerships and publics. There is a need to understand communities of risk not as static communities of those affected by risks, located physically and permanently in a specific place and in need of protecting, but as socio-technical, dynamic, fleeting, distributed, and mobile collectives that coalesce around risks, that interpret and contest them. The quality of new partnerships does not depend on resolving conflicts of interests and difficulties in defining and communicating about risk. Instead, they require support for communities of risk to form dynamically to express and explore the diversity of interests and interpretations, to practice agonist pluralism, connecting those who produce and assess risks with those who live with and coproduce them, finding ways of leveraging technologies of humility to frame risks, vulnerabilities, and capacities in ways that seek fairness and justice, and to critically consider the distribution of risk. Developing common information spaces, networks of trust, and technologies of articulation can support such practices and the mutual learning needed.

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