SIMON MARVIN<\/p>\n
Urban Institute, University of Sheffield and
\nSchool of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney<\/p>\n
Unpacking urban AI’s genealogy, dynamics, and implications will be a programmatic responsibility for urban studies.\u00a0 This will take time, and the need for cautious, rigorous analysis will help avoid the trap of too quickly embracing utopian imaginaries or dystopian visions of AI\u2019s benefits and dangers. However, we must also carefully scrutinise other \u2018post-smart\u2019 technological trajectories that are less visible yet actively operationalising selected milieus, humans, and more-than-human urban life.\u00a0\u00a0 This talk offers a critical reflection on the current state of the urban technological landscape and its potential future development.\u00a0 Specifically, I look through the lens of the Australian context, which is becoming hotter and more prone to extreme heat, bushfires, droughts, and floods, where existing and new technologies are being repurposed and assembled to enable humans to \u2018live with\u2019 climate change.\u00a0 These responses are of broader relevance and emblematic of systemic shifts in constructing new urban operational capacities that pose stimulating challenges to urban studies.\u00a0 The talk explores three themes: i) Climate crisis has brought into focus our relationships with each other, with non-human life, with materials and the atmosphere, and all increasingly mediated through technology, as we need to find new ways of living with<\/em> climate change.\u00a0 ii) A bricolage of responses is emerging as existing technologies are being reworked, tested, and applied to create novel operational capacities to manage many aspects of urban life.\u00a0 The talk focuses on five extensions in urban \u2018techno-social\u2019 capacities in which AI is frequently entangled: a). the secure reproduction of more-than-human life in artificial ecosystems, b) the technical governance of the elemental and atmospheric milieu, c). the remaking of mundane urban surfaces as infrastructures, d) new rounds of investment in drones, kinetic machines, and robotically enabled automation, and e) the neurotechnically enabled integration of urban humans within technological systems.\u00a0 iii) The paper reflects on the critical challenges of this extended technisation of urban life, the challenges of meaningfully keeping \u2018humans in the loop\u2019 and what this means for future research on AI in urban studies.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Unpacking urban AI’s genealogy, dynamics, and implications will be a programmatic responsibility for urban studies.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":130,"featured_media":10310,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","tags":[],"mec_category":[971],"class_list":["post-10307","mec-events","type-mec-events","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","mec_category-annual-john-urry-lecture"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/cemore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/mec-events\/10307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/cemore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/mec-events"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/cemore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/mec-events"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/cemore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/130"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/cemore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10307"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/cemore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/cemore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/cemore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10307"},{"taxonomy":"mec_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/cemore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/mec_category?post=10307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}