Ubiquitous Computing, Complexity and Culture by

Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781317704560
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2015-12-21T16:00:00+00:00

The individual parts stand in a causal relation to one another and are hierarchically ordered by the whole of which they are part. Society is regarded as an organism that is made available for the human mind through strategies of homogenization and abstraction, but also an irreducibility which follows its emergent properties. This is the centralized and controlled perspective of the planner, and this inclination to attempt to get an overview is an approach, which we also know as a response to the encounter with the modern metropolis of the nineteenth century and the notorious sensory overload this encounter may provoke.3 According to Paul Cilliers, this is a mathematical and computational view which can also be associated with more contemporary theories such as cybernetics and chaos theory, which both aim to get an overview by looking up, that is, zooming out and abstracting until a whole can be identified (Cilliers 1998). In a discourse based on romantic complexity, there is a presumed fixed set of natural laws by which entities can be known and the patterns of a system can be modelled and predicted as emergent structures (Hillier 2007, 44–45).

If we now return to the question of complexity, technology, and the contemporary city with which we began, the rhetoric of the smart city purports to seek to reduce complexity— thus placing it in dialogue with age-old conceptualizations of urban planning (Van Wezemael 2009). This sense of complexity as a negative fact of the unordered city stands in contrast to notions of the city as a complex system but at the same time a smooth machine, one that is efficient and well organized through the insertion of particular forms of technologies. So what we are dealing with is in fact not a reduction of complexity (understood in its simplistic form as tending towards disorder), but a replacement of an argument around complexity as disorder with a different kind of understanding of complexity (which we here call Romantic). It is one that is based on the idea of the city as an infrastructural system that can be controlled and thus reshaped for the better, and it fantasizes the city as a closed container of which we can get an overview in the panoptic sense. It thus regards the city as an emergent, complex (implicitly global) whole that can and should be managed.

Identifying the smart city discourse as purporting a romantic notion of complexity points to a particular way of thinking about cities (as chaotic and disjointed) and a perception of technology as a tool that can be used to make cities and the world better and more whole. However, as already argued, the embedding of ubiquitous computing technologies in the urban lifeworld does not as such result in a well-ordered and systematized urbanity that can be viewed from above. Rather than following this line of interpretation, we may focus on the fact that the integration of these technologies into everyday life generates new forms of experiences. This means that we need to consider how we may describe and understand the city in the face of these technological changes.

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