(Bitte bis zum Schluss durchlesen)
Technoscience and the City
October 15, 2024 – February 11, 2025
Tuesday, 2-4 pm, FH 314
Description
This course explores how Science and Technology Studies (STS) theories, concepts, and methods have been brought to bear on the city as a complex and dynamic object of study, and as an important site of socio-technical, cultural, and political life. A key assumption guiding our collective exploration pertains to the co-productionist relationship between technoscience and the city: technoscience shapes the city but the city also shapes technoscience. Keeping this mutually constitutive relationship in mind, students will be exposed to a range of empirical phenomena: the “smart city”, Google Maps as a spatial infrastructure, the built environment, climate change, urban innovation. By the end of the course, students should have gained an enhanced understanding of the intricate interdependencies of science, technology and the city. The seminar will be held in English and consists of 16 sessions covering a period of 18 weeks: one introductory session, 13 text-based sessions, one guest lecture as well as one excursion to Futurium.
Assessment
3 credits (LP)
1. Discussion lead (50%)
· Approximately once during the semester
· Leading discussion involves summarising the (mandatory) readings, preparing written notes and questions for class use and, depending on class size, may be done in collaboration with others responsible for a given session.
2. Protocol of a seminar session (50%)
· Prepare a structured summary (600 words) of the discussion of one seminar session other than the one where you act as discussion lead, to be presented at the beginning of the next session
· The summary should focus on the following points: Which questions or issues were discussed? What arguments were exchanged? What were the results of the discussion (and where was the discussion left open)? The purpose of the protocol is to document the progress of the seminar discussion and to record the knowledge and arguments that will still be worth reading six months or three years from now.
6 credits (LP)
1. Discussion lead (30%)
· Approximately twice during the semester
· Leading discussion involves summarising the (mandatory) readings, preparing written notes and questions for class use and, depending on class size, may be done in collaboration with others responsible for a given session.
2. Short essay (70%)
· Complete a final written exercise (1,500 words) in a form to be negotiated with the instructor. All such writing is expected to be the student’s own individual work and not done in collaboration.
Key literature
· Felt et al. (2017) “The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies”, MIT Press
· Jasanoff (2004) “States of Knowledge: The Co-production of Science and Social Order”. New York: Routledge
· Latour and Hermant (1998) “Paris: Ville Invisible”. Paris: La Découverte.
· Easterling (2014) “Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space”, London, New York: Verso
· Graham and Marvin (2001) “Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities, and the Urban Condition”. London: Routledge
· Zukin (2020) “The Innovation Complex: Cities, Tech and the New Economy”, Oxford University Press
· Amin and Thrift (2002) “Cities. Reimagining the Urban”. Cambridge, Oxford: Polity
· Farias and Bender (2010) “Urban assemblages: How actor-network theory changes urban studies”. Routledge
· Gieryn (2018) “Truth-spots. How Place make People Believe”, University of Chicago Press.
· Lindner and Meissner (2019) “The Routledge companion to urban imaginaries”, Routledge.
· Evans, Karvonen and Raven (2017) “The experimental city”, Routledge.
· Lachmund (2013) “Greening Berlin. The Co-Production of Science, Politics, and Urban Nature”, MIT Press
Readings
There is no single textbook for this course; instead, you will be exposed to a variety of literature at the intersection of STS and urban studies, produced by a diverse group of social scientists. Each week below is divided into “Mandatory Reading”, which you are expected to come to class having completed, and “Suggested Reading”. The Suggested Reading can provide clarification of key concepts, further examples, or simply showcase interesting research. It will become especially useful to you as you embark on your individual projects. In addition to that, there are media publications.
Technology policy
Turn off your cell phone and store it during class. There will be short breaks during each seminar where you will have the opportunity to check your devices. Otherwise, please refrain from using them.
Similarly, please strongly consider storing your laptop during class. Research shows that for many students using a laptop during class impedes both your learning and the learning of students around you (see, e.g., Sana et al. 2013, and Dynarski 2017). You will learn better and retain more information if you actively engage with the course. If you do use your laptop, you may use it only for note-taking and consulting electronic copies of the course readings.
Schedule
Session
Date
Topic
1
15 October
Course introduction
2
22 October
STS and the City
3
29 October
Urban infrastructures and Politics
4
5 November
The Built Environment
5
12 November
Scientific Management and Cybernetics
6
19 November
The Smart City
7
26 November
Locative Media
8
3 December
Google Maps as Spatial Infrastructure
9
10 December
The City in the Anthropocene
10
17 December
Guest lecture
-
24 December
Public holiday – no session
11
7 January
The City as Innovation Complex
12
14 January
No class – Excursion to Futurium
13
21 January
AI Urbanism
14
28 January
Right to the (Smart) City
15
4 February
Contested Futures
16
11 February
Essay writing workshop (concluding session)
Syllabus
October 15: Course introduction and overview
· Basic introduction “STS and the City”
· In-class self-introductions, expectations, outcomes
· Distributing discussion leadership
I. Setting the scence: science, technology and the city
October 22: STS and the city
Mandatory readings:
· Farías, I & Blok, A (2017) “STS in the city” in: U Felt, R Fouché, CA Miller & L Smith-Doerr (eds), The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies. 4 edn, MIT Press, pp. 555-581.
· Dierig et al. (2003) “Introduction: Toward an Urban History of Science” (pp. 1-19) in: Dierig et al. (2003) “Science and the City”, Osiris, Second Series, Volume 18.
Suggested readings:
· Amin and Thrift (2002) “The Legibility of the Everyday City” (Ch. 1, pp. 7-30) in “Cities. Reimagining the Urban”. Cambridge, Oxford: Polity
· Latour and Hermant (1998) “First Sequence” (pp. 1-31) in “Paris: Ville Invisible”. Paris: La Découverte.
· Jasanoff, S. (2004) “The idiom of co-production” (Ch. 1, pp. 1-12) in: “States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and Social Order”, London: Routledge.
October 29: Urban infrastructures and politics
Mandatory readings:
- Brian Larkin (2013) “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure," The Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 42, pp. 327-343.
- Antoine Picon (2018) “Urban Infrastructure, Imagination and Politics”, in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 42, n°2, pp. 263-275.
Suggested readings:
- Easterling, K. (2014) “Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space” Chapter 6, "Extrastatecraft", London, New York: Verso.
- Tom Hughes, "The Evolution of Large Technological Systems," in Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, Trevor Pinch (eds) The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1987), pp. 51-82.
- Amin, A. (2014) “Lively Infrastructure”. Theory, Culture and Society 31 (7-8):137-161.
- Kitchin, R. and Dodge, M. (2011) “Introducing code/space” (Ch. 1, pp. 3-22) in: “Code/Space. Software and Everyday Life”. MIT Press
November 5: The built environment
Mandatory readings:
· Gieryn, Thomas F. (2002) “What Buildings Do.” Theory and Society 31(1): 35-74.
· Winner, L. (1980) “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”, Daedalus, vol. 109, n°1, pp. 121-136.
Suggested readings:
- Latour, B. and Yaneva, A. (2008) “‘Give Me a Gun and I Will Make All Buildings Move’: An ANT’s View of Architecture.” In Explorations in Architecture: Teaching, Design, Research, edited by Reto Geiser. Basel: Birkhäuser. 80-89.
- Edensor, T. (2012) “Vital Urban Materiality and its Multiple Absences: the Building Stone of Central Manchester”, Cultural Geographies published online. http://cgj.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/06/15/1474474012438823
- Gieryn (2018) “Oracular Tourism” (Ch. 1, pp. 1-19) in “Truth-spots. How Place make People Believe”, University of Chicago Press.
November 12: Scientific management and cybernetics
Mandatory readings:
· Mary McLeod (1983) “Architecture or Revolution: Taylorism, Technocracy, and Social Change”, Art Journal, vol. 43, n°2, 1983, pp. 132-147.
· Jennifer S. Light (2003) From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America (Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), Chapter 3, “Cybernetics and Urban Renewal”, pp. 55-91.
· Media:
o “A Physicist Solves the City”, New York Times (2010) https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/magazine/19Urban_West-t.html
o Evgeny Morozov (2023) “The Santiago Boys”: https://the-santiago-boys.com
Suggested readings:
· Medina, E. (2011) “Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile” Ch. 1 (“Cybernetics and Socialism”), pp. 15-41, Cambridge: MIT Press.
· De Monchaux, N. (2011) "Cities and Cybernetics," New Geographies, n°4, 2011, pp. 17-25.
· Mitchell, T. (2002) “The Character of Calculability” (pp. 80–119), in “Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity”, Berkeley: University of California Press.
II. Interrogating intersections: contemporary developments
November 19: The Smart City
Mandatory readings:
Suggested readings:
- Sadowski and Bendor (2018), “Selling Smartness: Corporate Narratives and the Smart City as a Sociotechnical Imaginary”, Science, Technology, & Human Values, Vol. 44, Issue 3, pp. 540-563.
- Green, Ben (2019) “The Smart Enough City. Putting Technology into its Place to reclaim our Urban Future”, Cambridge: MIT Press
- Robert G. Hollands (2008) “Will the real smart city please stand up?”, City, 12:3, 303-320.
- Morozov and Bria (2018) “Rethinking the Smart City. Democratizing Urban Technology”, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung
November 26: Locative Media
Mandatory readings:
· De Souza e Silva (2006) “From Cyber to Hybrid. Mobile Technologies as Interfaces of Hybrid Spaces”, Space and Culture vol. 9 no. 3, august 2006 261-278
· Miles, S. (2021) “Let’s (not) Go Outside: Grindr, Hybrid Space, and Digital Queer Neighborhoods”, in: Bitterman and Hess (eds.) “The Life and Afterlife of Gay Neighborhoods. Renaissance and Resurgence”, Springer.
· Media:
o Gill (2024) “There’s a gay bar in my pocket!”: How 15 years of Grindr has affected gay communities and dating culture”, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/25/theres-a-gay-bar-in-my-pocket-how-15-years-of-grindr-has-affected-gay-communities-and-dating-culture
Suggested readings:
· Collins and Drinkwater (2016) “Fifty shades of gay: Social and technological change, urban deconcentration and niche enterprise”, Urban Studies, pp. 1–21.
· Crawford, A. (2008) “Taking Social Software to the Streets: Mobile Cocooning and the (An)erotic City.” Journal of Urban Technology 15 (3): 79–97.
· Turkle, Sherry. 1995. “Identity in the age of the internet” (Ch. 1), in “Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet”. New York: Simon & Schuster.
· Frith, J. (2015) “Smartphones as Locative Media”, Chapter 1: “From Atoms to Bits and Back Again” (pp. 1-11), Cambridge: Polity Press.
December 3: Google Maps as spatial infrastructure
Mandatory readings:
· Plantin, J-C. (2018) “Google Maps as Cartographic Infrastructure: From Participatory Mapmaking to Database Maintenance”, International Journal of Communication (12), pp. 489-506.
· Luque-Ayala, A. and Neves Maia, F. (2019) “Digital territories: Google maps as a political technique in the re-making of urban informality”, EPD: Society and Space, Vol. 37(3), pp. 449-467
· Media: Weckert, Simon. “Google Maps Hacks, Performance & Installation, 2020,” February 2020, http://simonweckert.com/googlemapshacks.html
Suggested readings:
· McQuire, S. (2019) “One map to rule them all? Google Maps as digital technical object”, Communication and the Public, Vol. 4(2), pp. 150-165
· Ahlert, M. (2022) “Hacking Google Maps”, in: Quadflieg et al. (2022) (Dis)Obedience in Digital Societies. Perspectives on the Power of Algorithms and Data, Transcript Verlag.
· Picon, A. and Ratti, C. (2019) “Mapping the Future of Cities: Cartography, Urban Experience, and Subjectivity”, MIT Senseable City Lab: https://senseable.mit.edu/papers/pdf/20190601_PiconRatti_Mapping_NewGeographies.pdf
December 10: The City in the Anthropocene
Mandatory readings:
· Lachmund, J. (2013) Greening Berlin: “The Co-Production of Science, Politics, and Urban Nature”, “Introduction” (pp. 1-19), MIT Press
· Gabrys, J. (2016) “Citizen Sensing in the Smart and Sustainable City: From Environments to Environmentality” in: Gabrys, J. (2016) Program Earth - Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet, University of Minnesota Press.
· Media:
o Belogolovsky (2020), “Acros Fukuoka Prefectural International Hall by Emilio Ambasz turns 25”, Stir World, https://www.stirworld.com/think-columns-acros-fukuoka-prefectural-international-hall-by-emilio-ambasz-turns-25
o Natura Urbana. Die Brachen of Berlin. https://www.naturaurbana.org/
Suggested readings:
· Farías, I. (2014) “Misrecognizing tsunamis: ontological politics and cosmopolitical challenges in early warning systems”, Sociological Review, 62:S1, pp. 61–87
· Swilling, M., Hajer, M., Baynes, T., Bergesen, J., Labbé, F., Kaviti Musango, J., Ramaswami, A., Robinson, B., Salat, S., & Suh, S. (2018). The weight of cities – Resource requirements of future urbanisation. Paris: UN Environment/International Resource Panel (IRP).
· Viitanen, J., and Kingston, R. (2014). Smart cities and green growth: Outsourcing democratic and environmental resilience to the global technology sector. Environment and Planning A, 46, 803–819.
· Gabrys, J. (2014) “Programming Environments: Environmentality and Citizen Sensing in the Smart City.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32 (1): 30–48.
December 17: Guest Lecture
January 7: The City as Innovation Complex
Mandatory readings:
· Zukin, S. (2020) “Imagining Innovation” (pp. 1-26 ) in: “The Innovation Complex: Cities, Tech, and the New Economy”, Oxford University Press.
· Etzkowitz, H. (2003) “Innovation in Innovation: The Triple Helix of University-Industry-Government Relations”, Social Science Information, Vol. 42, Issue 3.
Suggested readings:
· Pfotenhauer et al. (2022) “The politics of scaling“, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 52(1) 3 –34
· Evans, Karvonen and Raven (2017) “The experimental city: new modes and prospects of urban transformation” (Ch.1) in “The experimental city”, Routledge.
- Latour, B. (1996) “Prologue: Who Killed Aramis?” and “An Exciting Innovation” (Ch. 1) in“Aramis or the Love of Technology”, Harvard University Press.
· Pfotenhauer and Jasanoff (2017) “Panacea or diagnosis? Imaginaries of innovation and the ‘MIT model’ in three political cultures”, Social Studies of Science 2017, Vol. 47(6) 783 –810
January 14: Excursion to Futurium Berlin
January 21: AI Urbanism
Mandatory readings:
· Cugurullo et al. (2024) “Artificial Intelligence and the City. Urbanistic Perspectives on AI” , “Introduction” (pp. 1-20), Routledge
· Eubanks, V. (2017) “The Allegheny Algorithm” (Chapter 4) in: Eubanks, V. (2017) “Automating inequality: how high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor”, St. Martin's Press
· Media
o O’Kane (2023) “Rio de Janeiro: A test for the intelligence of smart cities” https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-rio-de-janeiro-a-test-for-the-intelligence-of-smart-cities/
o Felton (2015) “Welcome to MCity, Michigan’s ghost town of driverless cars”, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/26/mcity-michigan-driverless-cars-ghost-town
Suggested readings:
· Kitchin R. (2016) “The ethics of smart cities and urban science”, Phil.Trans.R. Soc. A 374: 20160115.
· Stilgoe (2018) “Machine learning, social learning and the governance of self-driving cars”, Social Studies of Science, Vol. 48, Issue 1.
· Fernandez-Monge et al. (2023) “Reclaiming data for improved city governance: Barcelona’s New Data Deal”, Urban Studies 1–17.
January 28: Right to the (Smart) City
Mandatory readings:
· Shaw, J. and Graham, M. (2017) “An Informational Right to the City? Code, Content, Control, and the Urbanization of Information”, Antipode Vol. 49 No. 4, pp. 907-927
· Kitchin et al. (2019) “Citizenship, Justice, and the Right to the Smart City”, in: Cardullo et al. (2019) “The Right to the Smart City”, Emerald Publishing Limited.
· Media: Harvey, D. (2008) “The Right to the City” https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii53/articles/david-harvey-the-right-to-the-city
Suggested readings:
· Jacobs, J. (1961) ‘The Death and Life Cities of Great American Cities’. New York: Vintage Books.
· Lefebvre, H. (1996) Writings on Cities. Blackwell Publishers.
· Harvey, D. (2019) “Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution”, Verso.
February 4: Contested Futures
Mandatory readings:
· S. Jasanoff (2015) “Future Imperfect: Science, Technology, and the Imaginations of Modernity,” in Jasanoff and S-H Kim, eds., Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), pp. 1-33.
· Hajer and Versteeg (2019) “Imagining the post-fossil city: why is it so difficult to think of new possible worlds?”, Territory, Politics, Governance, 7:2, 122-134
· Media:
o Moreno, C. (2021) “The 15-minute City” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQ2f4sJVXAI
Suggested readings:
· Pozoukidou, G. and Angelidou, M. (2022) “Urban Planning in the 15-Minute City: Revisited under Sustainable and Smart City Developments until 2030”. Smart Cities, 5, 1356–1375.
· Lindner and Meissner (2019) “The Routledge companion to urban imaginaries”, “Introduction. Urban imaginaries in theory and practice” (pp. 1-22) Routledge.
· B. Latour (2004) “Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences Into Democracy” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), Ch. 2 (“How to Bring the Collective Together”).
· E. C. Ellis (2018) “Science Alone Won’t Save the Earth. People Have to Do That,” New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/11/opinion/sunday/science-people-environment-earth.html.
February 11: Essay writing session (concluding session]
· Summary of class – discussion and outlook
· Essay writing workshop
