Alan-Miguel Valdez

Focused on urban experiments such as electric vehicle deployments and the development of requisite urban technologies and infrastructures, this contribution argues that such developments become sites where place‐based, relationally constructed futures can take shape. We outline a curatorial approach founded in relational geography to inform the construction and navigation of such futures. Drawing parallels with nineteenth‐century curatorial approaches centred on exhibits as instruments of power and seduction, a critical perspective on contemporary technology demonstrators foregrounds how urban experiments promote specific futures and implicitly pare down alternatives. A curatorial lens is applied to urban experiments to reveal the tensions and topologies of power as technology developers, communities and local authorities add new elements to urban constellations and in doing so (re)negotiate the meanings and futures associated with urban technologies such as low‐carbon vehicles.

Social media influence materialises in the physical world by shaping our urban environment and changing the modality we experience. This under-explored outcome still lacks the conceptual tools to build a discourse around it. We present a case study that showcases how urban planning and development are influenced by social media and a first framework addressing the interrelation between social media, urban design, and the experience of the urban environment. This short contribution provides concepts for critically analysing the physical implications of social media-based ubiquitous hypertext systems.

In this paper, we extend current debates around urban Artificial Intelligence (hereafter “urban AI”) by outlining new modes of framing or conceptualizing urban AI, understanding its trajectory, and...

In this chapter, the rapid response of a fleet of ‘Starship’ delivery robots during the COVID-19 pandemic becomes an entry point for investigating cybernetic, or rather cybernetic and organic (or cyborg) (re)configurations developing around urban robotics. The notion of the cyborg city is used to investigate urban spaces where humans and machines interface with each other, undergoing processes of joint learning and distributed cognition as machines learn to be in the city and cities learn to live with intelligent machines. Ultimately, we investigate cyborg cities in terms of the (re)configurations that take place as robots and humans become enmeshed in rapidly changing configurations. The case suggests that the presence of autonomous robots and their integration into the urban fabric has the potential to make cities more resourceful and better able to respond to shocks, as prefigured by early proponents of cyborg urbanism. However, it also suggests the presence of AI-driven robots is not by itself sufficient to produce such (re)configurations. Here, renewed intensities of human–robot interactions resulted from joint responses to a sudden shock. The resulting human and non-human configurations persisted after the crisis, potentially revealing new ways of living with AI in the city.

In this paper, a curatorial perspective is developed to draw attention to the notion that smart cities are assembled within a field of relations and thus inevitably connected to constellations of actors, histories, materialities and ideas. In this way, a curatorial perspective informed by diverse disciplines such as art history, critical theory and institutional critique, can be used to reveal the struggles through which fragmented, entangled and shifting constellations of technologies, places and policy ideas are purposely cultivated to prefigure new ways of living in smart cities. Drawing on an in-depth longitudinal case study of Milton Keynes (MK), an English new town founded in 1967, this paper examines how concepts of a smart city were used to draw together, catalyze and possibly (re)configure pre-existing policies, narratives and materialities, i.e. to curate smart city developments. Urban curation, understood as the selection, organization and care for a constellation of elements and their relation to place, is revealed to be profoundly political. Actors with local remits curate urban constellations to render them receptive to smart city agendas while pursuing their contextually defined goals and often resisting those imposed from elsewhere.

Urban experiments have been initiated in several locations to purposively initiate and shape transitions to more sustainable urban socio-technical systems, e.g. for energy, water, mobility. Although knowledges produced within such learning spaces are often presented as logical, technical and rational (Vanolo, 2013; Kitchin, 2014), the actors and mechanisms that shape decisions are far from obvious, involving cultures, power relations and multiple logics that are profoundly political (Machin, 2013). This research presents a case study founded in a phronetic perspective (Flyvbjerg, 2001; Avelino and Grin, 2017), unpacking the epistemological politics of an urban experiment taking place within a ‘smart city’ programme. A ‘smart transport’ application for mobile phones, ‘MotionMap’, was developed to transform the mobility system of Milton Keynes, an expanding city located 80 km to the north of London, UK. The case study recognises power relations and reveals how various actors engaged in the development of this application have further rendered the MK mobility socio-technical system an object of urban governance.

This paper explores citizen concerns emerging in the design stage of MotionMap, a smart transport initiative developed in the context of a £16 million smart city programme. A city-wide sensing system integrated with other databases will provide real-time information about vehicular and pedestrian movement. The experience of a series of smart transport workshops in Milton Keynes suggests that citizens feel that they bear the cost of smart cities through potentially intrusive surveillance producing sacrifices in convenience and privacy, while the gains are captured by industrial and governmental actors. This distrust of surveillance through urban sensing systems is not inflexible. Such systems can gain legitimacy through a participatory approach where users legitimize the sensing system by taking an active role in providing transport data, as opposed to having it ‘harvested’ from them through passive or opportunistic mechanisms. Participatory approaches are challenging because users will engage only if the system can provide compelling benefits. A key contribution of this research comes from identifying that the benefits important to citizens are not necessarily measured in economic terms nor in terms of increased efficiency.