 Good evening everybody. I'd like to welcome you on behalf of the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung in the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet Society to our first lecture after a lengthy summer break. For those of you who are here for the first time, the lecture series Making Sense of the Digital Society is co-organized by two organizations, the Federal Agency of Civic Education and the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet Society. The purpose of this lecture series is to make sense of the digital transformation in a broader sense. We invite thinkers, sort of prominent academics to shed light for us on the issues they find central when it comes to the transformation of the society to give us explanations but also to talk about the sort of theoretical background of what we are seeing. What is important to us is that we try to cultivate a European perspective on the digital transformation. Today we are very pleased to have Steven Graham with us whose work focuses on the transformation of cities. Tobi Müller will introduce Steven to you. Thank you very much. Thank you, Shona Tovman, for this introduction. Thank you the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society and the Federal Agency for Civic Education for having me once again as moderator of this series. I think my colleagues did not choose this place for nothing here at Holtzmarkt. It's a very beautiful place. It's the first time I'm here right in here. I know a little bit of the area around here. It was a highly contested area in Berlin City planning. A lot of questions of urbanism have been discussed around this Holtzmarkt. Some of you remember the term Mediaspray maybe 10 or 15 years ago and apparently you can see that this is not really what investors architecture looks like all over the world. There you know the cooperative models that are being tried out here and so forth. Questions of who is the city going to sell to and so forth. So that's why we're here tonight. A little bit on the format of this evening for those of you who are here for the first time. There's going to be of course the talk of our dear guests tonight. Then we're going to have a conversation. Just the two of us for maybe about 20 minutes and then it's your turn. There's microphones here and there's also a Twitter wall. Hashtag digital society where you can ask questions. The Twitter wall will not be up here so it's not to distract our conversations but at one time during the discussions I'm going to ask a colleague of mine who sums up some of the questions you are able to ask on Twitter. Also the people who are watching the live stream of this discussion tonight and all of this is going to be broadcasted on the respective websites of the partners of this evening. Our guest today has contributed to European urban studies for well over two decades you could say but I wonder if it is safe to say that cities are back with the vengeance at least retro futuristic outlook on cities. I remember in the mid 70s when I was a kindergarten kid I was visiting my dad. He was a teacher but in Switzerland it was possible for him to have a sabbatical in Vienna and I was really excited to actually for the first time in my life to see a city coming from Switzerland that doesn't really have cities so to speak of in a global perspective and I was very disappointed because there were no skyscrapers at all it was just the old city to me and I think this dream this childlike dream of a vertical city so to speak of a very tech driven city is at the heart of Stephen's talk tonight. Later then I did some studies in Detroit and that wasn't really my dream of a skyscraper and tech driven cities either so I'm very excited about what Stephen has to say. I don't think Stephen will reject all those childlike dreams of a vertical and tech driven cities he's just focusing more on the downsides of it of the interests that are at play in a city like that at the hidden agendas at the unveiled or veiled infrastructures he's going to talk about that cities have. Stephen is from the northeast of England he studied geography first in later city planning there's a lot of Berlin experts here tonight I am told in the audience so this would be interesting in the talk with the audience later on. He worked for the city of Sheffield for a couple of years and stayed true to the north so to speak further studies led him to Manchester while continuing working for the School of Architecture Planning and Landscape in Newcastle where he's actually from he was visiting prof at MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology I'm sure you all know then he taught at Durham University as professor of human geography in 2010 he returned to Newcastle then as professor of cities and society. In 2001 I read today on Wikipedia actually I have to admit he attended a military conference by mistake so to speak and that this really did alter I think his work how the military complex affects urban infrastructure I'm sure we're going to hear about that outlook on cities as well later on. Cities under siege is a book called from 2010 at Verso is one of the many testimonies to that outlook much of what we are about to hear tonight goes back to the anthology disrupted cities when infrastructure fails which he edited his latest monography deals with the again childlike when it's in its core probably modern notion of the city I hinted at earlier it's called vertical cities the city from satellite to bunkers. I'm sure we will hear about this shifting perspective too from sprawl to consolidation so to speak from the author himself now please a very warm welcome to Steven Graham Graham I'm sorry. Thank you very much Toby thanks very much to to Jeanette and to Christian and to everybody involved in the Humboldt Institute tonight it's a real honor and a real pleasure to say a few words and to introduce a few lines of thought about this question of infrastructure it's a word that gets used widely in in all of the European languages it's the word that gets used incredibly widely in in the in the sense of everyday speech but it's a word that's rarely defined it's a word that is often absent in terms of clinical definition do we have the slides oh I need to just hang on a minute infrastructure right which which button digital infrastructure is even more confusing than analog infrastructure there we go thank you okay we got there in the end so the title of what I have to say is the politics of digital infrastructure in cities okay and I want to I want to get you to think through what we mean by infrastructure both in an urban context a city of four or five million people like Berlin but in a society where the digital is pervading everything where the digital is mediating every micro aspect of every dimension of our lives and this is a transformation that has come on in a profoundly rapid and unpredictable and sometimes bewildering way so let's kick off with the obvious point that cities are and cities always have been the sort of key hubs of infrastructural society we're going right back to the origins of cities they are always the hubs that concentrate infrastructure that become possible through infrastructure and in the latest transformations of digitized infrastructure and digital infrastructure we're just seeing the let the the latest manifestation of a very old process and in a way infrastructures historically in terms of modern cities industrial cities have been a way of making what geographers called nature into culture they bring all of the resources all of the water energy and food and communications into cities from all of the distant hinterlands that serve cities often that's very contested and so on and they they move all of the things out of cities that we want to leave we want to remove through the wastes and outputs of the city there's can be in gas form through pollution they can be in water form they can be in produced form all of the products and services so digital media are interfacing with big questions about who we are as people our very bodies are caught in these webs of infrastructure and these are webs of infrastructure that are often invisible without the infrastructure we simply can't live that's the bottom line if you imagine Berlin without the vast array of food infrastructures logistics infrastructures energy water waste as well as digital media which allows all the rest to function these days we would be in a state of massive crisis you try living without electricity for a week and you start to realize that the always on switched on infrastructural city is always always linked to those flows okay that raises a few questions that I'm going to concentrate on firstly I want us to ask the question what infrastructure actually is and as I said before there's a startling lack of really good social science literature which really tries to define this this word we use so readily secondly I want us to look at the question of digitization and how does the digitization not only of the city but of all the other infrastructures of the city raised questions about equality and social exclusion and thirdly I want to look at the question of the smart city this is a language and a paradigm that's really powerful in terms of thinking through how digital technology can be harnessed to a city's future very contested and I want to look into some of those ideas and perhaps to criticize them and finally I want to explore some of the work that Toby was discussing which is to look a little bit of how in how we understand more about infrastructures when they're taken away somehow you learn a lot more about a power grid or an internet system if it's actually removed from you there's a paradox there that's always very interesting I think okay so I have to turn to look at the slides so I'm gonna try and angle the microphone here in terms of defining infrastructure I think the best the best academic source is a wonderful anthropologist called Susan Lee star who sadly no longer with us but she wrote this really powerful work where she really went into the fine grain of the things we name as infrastructure the things we actually encompass within that term and there are a lot of technical questions here she talks about them offering spatial and temporal reach so connecting other times and places to where you are now she talks about the fact that you have to learn how to use infrastructure or to be turning a tap on as a child learning how to use toilets cars electricity plugs and so on and obviously the vast and complex world of learning how to use digital media which seems to be reinvented every five minutes for a 53 year old man like me anyway right it's linked to conventions of practice so there are all sorts of cultures and norms about how we use these vast arrays of technologies it embodies standards think about the different plugs you have to carry around the world because of the inherited technologies of different national power systems it's built in sunk into sunk what they call sunk capital sorry this sounds like a dry economics lecture it will make sense later on so it's sunk into the world around us to allow us to move all sorts of things around it's fixed in what she calls modular increments so continually added to you don't build an entire global power system all at once you don't build an entire global airport system all at once and it's complicated as people in Berlin know with the Schoenfeld story it's embedded so infrastructure gets sunk into all the other aspects of life and that word is interesting because as I say it's often forgotten about once it's there it's often forgotten about until it doesn't work and finally it's transparent which means that when you send when you start a car you don't need to think about all of the different things that are going on to allow you to drive the car because when you get on a train it's not it's not a long complex process you're just getting on the train and going there is a ninth feature which I will return to but this definition of infrastructure I think helps us to be quite precise about what digital digitization does to infrastructure because it builds on the history of how electricity of how communication systems like telegraph and telephone systems how water systems metro subway uban of how all of the other grids that built modern cities like Berlin came to be in place they came to be in place and once all those systems were built we tended to do what sociologists call black box the technology what that means is you just treat it as something to use you don't go into all of the details inside each system each time you use it so what when infrastructures work best they're noticed least of all that's the quote from a colleague David Perry this is an image of when infrastructures were not working well this is an image from Manhattan in 1884 when they were just starting to string telephone lines around the city each one of those lines is a telephone line it was chaos this before the telephones became black boxed once the blizzards brought all of these things down they were put underground and then you could just pick up the phone and it would be connected and that was the end of the story electricity was very much at the center of these transformations and this city was the electrical metropolis par excellence in the 1920s especially in the Weimar period there was a huge excitement that Berlin's massive growth into the equine the industrial superpower quite late in the day compared to Britain and France was fueled by a huge advanced electrical infrastructure that was very much the focus of of conversation who now thinks of electricity as the cutting edge of infrastructure but in 1930s it very much was so what about digitalization okay what about how it coming into the scene changes places changes people and changes cities well there was a long tradition particularly in North America of seeing it in a very sort of I think quite a naive way the assumption particularly between the 1960s and the 1980s as you see with some of these quotes I'm not sure if they're legible to everybody was that because you could move more and more information over faster and faster communications grids culminating in optic fibers and global satellite networks and so on cities would somehow cease to exist okay we would somehow all be able to do anything anywhere and I find this particularly fascinating because I was hearing about the location of the Humboldt Institute Institute today and how it being close to the parliament buildings and to the center of billion was absolutely pivotal to its success historically a lot of people at Marshall McLuhan thought the city was anachronistic was old-fashioned it was going to be literally disinvented as people could do all of their communication remotely from wherever they wanted to live so if you look at some of these quotes Martin poorly an architect says in urban terms once time has become instantaneous you can send anything anywhere anytime at light speed space becomes unnecessary it's almost a sense that we're going to inhabit cyberspace and cyberspace was very much seen as a separate world in the 80s and the 90s Marshall McLuhan says the city is a form of major dimensions and this is 1964 must inevitably dissolve like the fading shot in a movie so why is that not come to pass we are now living in the most urbanized age in the history of our world and it's the most digitized age in the history of our world my argument is that's not a surprise my argument is that digital media digital technologies facilitate urbanization and relate really closely and subtly to the fact that we're all here today if media was so fantastic why would you all come here to see a face-to-face exposition of an argument you know place still matters and arguably matters as much as ever despite the incredible growth of digital technologies sorry there's a bit of text in this one but I think it's worth reading the response to people who saw cyberspace as a separate world that we would somehow start inhabiting in a sort of VR sense was most powerfully expressed by two media theorists in the United States jade david balter and richard grues and they said rather than substitute for the city or the body or the book or the street or the newspaper or the building all of these technologies were actually what they called remediating those things so let me just go through this quote and you might get a sense what they mean by that it's really quite subtle so they say cyberspace is very much part of our contemporary world it is made through these re mediations so as a digital network it remediates electric communications so telephone telegraph and so on it remediates painting film and television so none of those have gone away they've had to be digitized and are now organized and consumed and produced through digital media which has profound implications as social spaces it what it webs into physical place and physical contact in all sorts of complex ways so these new media this is going back to 1990s this this was deemed to be quite a revelation given this weight of debate from North America that somehow cities were going out of fashion what the argument is that far from going out of fashion these digital media reanimate and reorganized places in ways that are so so important and so hard to understand because they're so political and yet so hidden and I'll say a bit more about that in a minute so let's just take some examples just think I would say of this humble device in your pocket think how the smartphone has remediated the camera the video camera the map cartography computer databases the telephone rather obviously global navigation systems and so on and so forth global retail and shopping and logistics systems because that phone is a portal into an unknowably complex set of infrastructures that straddle the world every time you use the GPS on that system you are connecting to 24 geo stationary satellites owned by the US Air Force that are the same things used to drop bombs on targets in Afghanistan okay behind this front end is this vast backstage the backstage of global information infrastructure think of the book everyone was saying the book is dead you know the book is doomed we're going to have kinders and e-readers and so on but it's not the case you know books are now organized and consumed in all sorts of different ways but the physical artifact has almost an extra pull yes bookstores are dying but there's as many books printed as ever think about the body think about how digital bodies are being reorganized and interfaced with all sorts of technologies through sort of cyborg type transformations think of easy yet and how the front end of the cheap airline system with you doing all the work rather than a travel agent has completely transformed global global airline flows we don't sit all at home in our little VR caves doing virtual tourism we're traveling more and more around the world between cities which has huge impacts for big tourist cities like like Berlin because of the Airbnb boom which is another platform which reorganizes urban space and so on think about streets think about global spaces think about the globe and so on and so forth so I would argue that you know the best way of us thinking about these subtle transformations in the relationship between digital media and place and bodies and cities is this concept of remediation how the old is remediated into all sorts of new dynamics which has really profound implications because of the ease of connecting through some platforms I'll give you one example the Guardian traditionally the left leaning newspaper in the UK only read by physically printing the actual paper transporting it across the UK a very UK centered audience that physical logistics now it's the biggest left leaning newspaper in North America okay it's hardly printed at all and that print run is threatened some newspapers are not doing it at all but it doesn't go out of business it reorganizes itself as a platform for digital content that's globally accessible but let's not forget that internet infrastructure is physical too too much of that 80s and 90s stuff was suggesting that somehow the virtual the cyber was just going to arrive as if by magic everywhere and anytime this is profoundly geographical it exists in some places and not in others and cities generally have a huge advantage because of the way they concentrate the best digital communications infrastructure I have two teenage sons 18 and 19 they go into a cold sweat if they don't have broadband digital media access saturating their lives and they basically don't get that in rural England and they genuinely have psychological disturbances okay but it's not just about the actual cables and satellites of the global internet system and it's associated financial media and so on systems there's a huge array of other infrastructures that sustain that think of the electricity system that drives internet you know it consumes vast amounts of energy think of does anyone know what this is this is the internet by the way well it's part of the internet this thing we call the internet any suggestions this is a cooling complex as one of the hundreds of Google server farms that are being located all around the world near cheap energy some they're increasingly moving to higher latitudes global warming is forcing them to go further and further north so at some stage there's going to be vast amounts of server farms cooled by these enormous cooling systems because of the heat they generate moving higher and higher in the like global latitudes it's a fascinating and poorly discovered process when you ever think of this when people talk about the internet this is the backstage but it's profoundly important materially and environmentally so that's the question of what infrastructure is okay I want to move now on to the question of smart cities it's a word that's everywhere just as digital cities were or virtual communities were 20 years ago or cyberspace perhaps 25 30 years ago or wired cities in the 1960s there's a very long history to the idea of political and governance communities real estate organizations place marketing organizations trying to sell their cities by making them look high-tech remember Berlin with its electricity infrastructures in the 1920s and 30s the last 30 or 40 years it's been profoundly about who's more digital and more futuristic as we were hearing with Toby and the smart city rhetoric is powerful at the moment it's coming out of the corporate IT corporations it's coming out of the cities themselves and the real estate organizations and so on and it builds on a whole set of debates that surround pervasive and ubiquitous computing and the way it's permeated everyday life in terms of bodies buildings cities spaces and infrastructures on the back of the internet of things ubiquitous computing social media the massive growth of Google Earth and based cartography and navigation systems and it's very much a sort of cybernetic idea that this time despite all of the failures with previous information systems in cities we will have perfect information we will have perfect optimization we will be able to control all of the complex systems that connect cities in terms of nature ecology infrastructure services government and so on there's a great quote from IBM this is the the image that often dominates smart cities debates the well-known and incredibly well photographed control room in Rio that was put together on the back of the huge investment in the Olympic and World Cup programs IBM one amongst many big IT corporations trying to get into what they call the urban operating system world trying to colonize all of the sort of backstage of cities in terms of their data their software their operating systems IBM described the problem as thus today cities are based on separate domains right with no real ability to be managed as an entire entity so two fractured too disparate too confusing city managers have no single place to get the real-time status they want the updates to the minute cybernetic style or historical reports daily operations generate vast amounts of data for many different sources but cities lack the ability to extract meaningful information it's sort of the fog of war the chaos of situated life in a big urban administration not surprisingly the likes of IBM say they have the solution solution is the smart cities their smart city it's not Cisco's or or Hitachi's or whoever else and it's this sort of thing which is a very old idea if anyone's been interested but done any research on the history of cybernetics that was a very urban idea post 1940s a lot of the lot of urban management urban governance techniques in the states were bringing in military notions about cybernetic control of highway planning and housing planning and welfare systems and so on and this is an example of say the mundane world of traffic regulations how you can bring all of those different databases together make them talk to each other have this clarity have this perfect knowledge that's often being discussed what's very important I think given what Toby was saying about this urge to be futuristic this urge to sell your city as a high tech hub as a center of digital innovation and so on is it's about symbolic power the symbolic power of the digital but also the symbolic power of new physical landscapes and the history of all of these projects is very much to sell the future William Gibson famously said that the future is already here it's just unevenly distributed right now a lot of city agencies and developers are trying to say we are here we are the future Dubai is fantastic at this Dubai is actually employed futuristic sci-fi script editors and thinkers to say how can we look like the future the guy that designed the Burj Khalifa the tallest tower in in Dubai is actually employed by the biggest skyscraper architects in the world SOM in Chicago and he said he wanted it to look like the emerald city in the wizard of Oz so the really interesting debate here about how so much of these future cities are being sold and made and rendered through very bad CGI very often to look like a sort of 1950s vision of the future so we're looking at retrofuturism now to create cities in the future very interesting so we've had classic examples like Songdo in South Korea many of these never get built but they become icons of the imagination even without their material emergence we're getting the big architects a stark attacks of this world like foster coming in to do ecological cities in in the Gulf for very lucrative fees I'm sure these are being sold as green as has been sustainable as in ways that reduce resource use and do a lot more recycling and so on this is Mazdar city in Abu Dhabi what's very often lacking is a social component what's very often lacking up people which I think is the really interesting question about smart cities where you ever see a human being on these images or on these diagrams they are often highly elitist and highly technocratic perhaps the most troubling example I can find at the moment is an island which is literally being built out of the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Lagos in Nigeria the bigger city in Nigeria which is effectively a sort of elite apartheid bubble for real estate interests to colonize away from the chaotic and flood-prone landscapes of the lagoons of Lagos this is called eco Atlantic have a look at it on Google Earth it's pretty pretty startling what's also been sold on new ways of life new ways of life and this is a very dated version of new ways of life but very often these are about new interfaces there are sort of Google Glass type notion of the future which is about augmented reality a new digitized interfaces between you your body your senses and the wider city so this is a sort of augmented reality notion very sort of very sci-fi again drawing on a myriad of dystopian sci-fi films probably most notably Minority Report with the whole idea of the city sensing your location feeding you data through a whole load of sort database systems that are connecting your historic preferences to your location and then you become a marketing opportunity a lot of the smart city rhetoric is actually about how do you harvest data how do you commercialize data from the massive amount that we're generating all the day all the time through our digital presence and our digital activities this is a perhaps a satirical take on where this might go if we have complete collapse of privacy we have complete collapse of data regulation people talking satirically about post-privacy advertising and the ways in which this could completely challenge all sorts of notions of anonymity and I think this raises all sorts of questions about the history of cities in the modern industrial period because for many subcultural groups many people fleeing the conservatism of village life the city was vastly seductive because of its anonymity okay that was a big part of the pull the sense of being absorbed into the mass that was also why the city was such a threat such a constant threat to political elites in terms of revolution and interaction so what happens to those traditions of urbanism urban political mobilization in a world which is increasingly tracked monitored and sensed into in a profoundly intense way which challenges all sorts of questions of anonymity and privacy sorry but there is a more upsetting and worrying aspect of this and I know that some of the debates in this these lectures the series have talked about this and that's when you organize cities as vast arrays of software the agency increasingly is the software there's no way human agency can monitor and organize all of the actions all of the activities all of the infrastructural flows in cities and once the agency is the software itself the politics of the city increasingly is defined by who writes that software how does the software differentiate between people in the city this is what I call the concept of software sorted city and it's going on all the time it's going on in ways that are often profoundly invisible I'll give you one example this is a very early example which still still includes a human in the interface we're not talking about complete artificial intelligence in this example if you ring a lot of the call centers UK but also elsewhere in the world your phone number is automatically sensed by the call center management system and you are actually queued differently depending on your previous behavior as a customer okay so for example a very well-off good consumer will be answered straight away you will be bypassing the queue someone who's a long-term poor payer poor debtor poor consumer will be will be hanging on so so much of this politics of what's going on in these smart cities the worry is will be orchestrated in ways that are really hard to get at in terms of mobilization activism and regulation this is getting more powerful because of the shift towards smart video technologies there are video surveillance systems all over the world now the numbers are staggering particularly in parts of the UK actually again that shifting to automation and what's called video analytics so rather than having the board person eating the sandwich half asleep trying to monitor the technology increasingly the video is computerized digitized and the software is making decisions about what is a threat and what needs to be protected again totally political this is one example which are worried which worries a lot of people and I'm sure there are many others this is an example of a video system that was tried out in Boston about seven or eight years ago where basically the software detected a man getting out of a car and a cyclist the man getting out of excuse me the man getting out of the car was deemed to be under threat the cyclist was deemed to be the threat so again it's a profound sense of somehow the programming of the software shapes the right to the city but of course this gets even weirder and even scarier when you start to see entirely automated urban infrastructures the example which is getting a lot of attention at the moment is the big push by the likes of Uber for entirely driverless vehicles entirely driverless cars trucks buses and eventually aircraft that will be the great what they call disruptor challenging mass transit systems conventional human-based auto systems there's a big big push there again inspired by historical ideas of the future how many sci-fi films have you seen without automated vehicles or flying cars right but here this is what we what the Guardian is calling Franken algorithms because already people are being hit by these vehicles a woman was killed in March 2018 as a cyclist on the side of the highway when uber was doing one of its autonomous vehicle tests the suggestion is that the various sensors in the car linked to the computerized control systems of the car use LiDAR and radar and all sorts of different sensors detected the woman but deemed it to be a non a non human so down at that micro scale we're seeing a radical intensification of the politics of the smart city and as I hinted at before there's another sort of subtext to this because so much of the new infrastructures coming into cities are ostensibly about making you bike around cities night in a cool way or having really useful search engines or what have you or driving in autonomous vehicles but the bottom line is that the profit very often from these infrastructures is about harvesting data it's about selling data within very complex marketplaces and of course we're seeing the likes of of Apple and Google and so on become the platform for such huge sways of the world's economy that it again masses enormously how those platforms develop how they prioritize different sources of information different services different locations within within the city things that are very often poorly understood deemed to be a proprietary very badly regulated in terms of nation-states and data protection well agencies we're seeing hints of this with the exposures of the Cambridge Analytica crisis and scandal we're seeing hints of this with some of the exposures about Facebook and some of the others we see hints of all of this stuff with various cracks in the edifice but it's very hard to get a sustained understanding of the politics and social effects of how all that data is harvested sold and then and then passed on you see the in you see the implications with the scary way in which ads follow you around of course the scary way in which your consumer behavior on one system will migrate strangely around the various other systems that you that you use and perhaps a final aspect of this is the efforts as I said by a whole load of different companies to try and build new ways of moving new ways of moving goods new ways of moving people already the Amazon equivalent in Israel Israel where did that come from Iceland that doesn't look like Israel to me is is offering home delivery through the drone it seems to be the sort of killer idea for so much of the smart city debate it's a bit like the smart fridge was for the smart home debate about 20 years ago as long as the fridge can order milk we will have digital utopia right now it's as long as the burger can be brought to you through the air we will have digital tech digital Nirvana and this is Dara Kauraswari's argument he's the chief of one of the big uber pushes into the aerial challenge he says a key to solving urban mobility is to fly burgers you know some strange stuff flies around these debates but again massive amounts of R&D all of our colleagues in aeronautical departments in universities in it departments in universities all feverishly at work on so much of these these events I think there are 35 sky taxi projects been being launched these are not for flying burgers these are for flying people they're very much a response to the congestion of cities because everybody's congesting into big cities they're getting very very hard to move around well why not go into the vertical dimension and exploit new motor technology new battery technology and all of the smart city technologies around navigation and make them autonomous I think there may be a consumer resistance to strapping yourself in autonomous vehicles putting your credit card through a slot and just saying okay here we go but it's all about faith and trust who knows maybe this will take off but it's a very contested issue that's very much embraced being embraced by those cities whose elites are trying to be the future so not surprisingly a lot of these are having their trials in you guessed it Dubai this is one example Airbus is very active in this world they've actually bought one of the apps in Sao Paulo which is one of the only cities with a big helicopter infrastructure for very very rich people very very small numbers of very very rich people there is now a sort of uber-style app for helicopters in Sao Paulo it's now being bought by Airbus which is interesting they're seeing it as a sort of transition to this sort of futuristic sky taxi system which they really want to have flying around London by 2023 they're talking about they're already doing urban scenarios for how this might actually work where are they going to take people to where are they going to drop people off and so on NASA and so many others are saying how can city air spaces accommodate all these drones what are the sort of legal challenges safety challenges anti-terrorism challenges of having agricultural drones drones near airports sky taxi drones hobbyist drones security and surveillance drones and so on and architects are getting on the scene with a whole load of different futuristic notions for sky ports or verty ports or the sorts of infrastructures that will be stations in the sky again how many sci-fi films have you seen that don't have flying cars and stations in the sky or cars that can just land on any street directly from anywhere it's long been the dream of architects and sci-fi filmmakers but I think perhaps the biggest concern goes back to the question of anonymity because once you build biometric systems into smart cities you you effectively have a totalitarian regimes fantasy as far as I can see you effectively abolish the notion of anonymity completely and this is not some bad remake of a George Orwell or a minority report this stuff is moving so so quickly with deep learning systems and the contemporary face recognition systems that are embedded in our phones these days our cameras and so on the Chinese regime which is profoundly authoritarian as we've seen with the clampdown on artists and social movements and journalists recently has pushed the biggest face recognition system in history onto the streets of Chinese cities and they are very much on to a complete tracking system for the population they are now able to name and shame jaywalkers remotely this is not known to any of the the people who are caught doing this this activity but they can do that sort of covert tracking through deep learning face recognition was always deemed to be a problem because people age weather changes people wear hats and so on because this is now a deep learning system it is always continually learning each time it tracks a face so it's continually adapting in a profoundly concerning way and what concerns me is that this seems to overlap quite a lot with notions of security systems coming out of the US military in the US government this is the city's under siege where the Toby talked about how am I doing for time what do you reckon okay that's fine the smart city idea of continually sensing everything and analyzing and pre-empting and predicting overlaps completely it seems to me with that sort of military idea of how you can secure cities in the post 9-11 world the American Homeland Security Department build these systems into particular cities in America one was called the Oakland Domain Awareness Center which basically has a lot of the ingredients that we're talking about it would have video analytics it would have cameras sensors and so on loads of loads of different types of sensors for perimeter detection and so on and it was all about sensing the city and anticipating threat through that dream of real-time information it was actually not back for a huge protest by local social movements and had to change dramatically the way it was it was enforced and that shows the importance of those social movements in politicizing what's often presented as a technical and rational development there you go the debate was do you want to live in a surveillance police state extra evidence of the depth of the data capture from the security agencies is obviously coming out massively through the various leaks from Snowden from the the Pentagon papers from all of the the different whistleblower events and so on and the big one was to see the depth of the NSA the National Security Agency's capture of data around the world they have an amazing system for capturing and thieving and sensing data using algorithms of course the volumes here are way beyond anything this was a revelation of their Cryptological Platform sick they call it SIGINT which stands for Signals Intelligence a couple of these big platforms are in north of England where I live so we're very aware of this what's powerful is that the big IT companies willingly give all of their data to the NSA you can see here likes a Microsoft Yahoo Facebook these are actually military powerpoint slides that were exposed as part of that revelation it's called the prism system and it's being used to supply data to vast fusion complexes this stuff gets enough to get it's really paranoid actually but this is the biggest of the lot it's a huge fusion complex for bringing all of that that harvested data together and trying to understand interconnections with a view to industrial espionage but also security this is in in Western US but it's also very domestic you can also see through the work of Trevor Paglin who's a very interesting geographer who works on exposing the geographies and the urbanisms of what he calls the dark state in America the black projects the secret security agencies everything from area 51 to CIA rendition Trevor's on the case and he's even found some evidence that some of the optic fiber grids in Germany are being systematically connected to NSA listening systems I think all of these issues to do with the digitized end of anonymity in cities overlap with some of the complex discussions about the political situation we're facing at the moment in ways that really challenge our traditions in Europe of open liberal cosmopolitan cities I think there's a sense that profound changes are underway in the media landscape obviously the post-truth politics in in the US led by by Trump has a huge bearing here but I think the final point I want to say about the smart city idea is that it's a social it's a non-social view of the future it's an entire technological technocratic view of the future city which I think gets the entire logic wrong what we need a social visions of the future of cities which start with all of the pressing social political concerns environmental concerns then if digital media are part of the solution that's fine but they're trying to squeeze every aspect into this more data more data Adam Greenfield has done some really interesting critical work on smart cities puts it this way he says that smart this is a quote smart cities tend to be discussed casually as if it was self-evident all one needed to do with to finally solve the city remember the IBM quote earlier on is to weave sensors into the urban fabric by the million to all the relevant social networks for geo-tagged utterances and apply just the right analytical algorithms to the ever-mounting tally of tetrabites captured this way a lot of the smart city labs seem to be full of very very bright people trying to do stuff just because the data is there in other words which I think is a getting it entirely wrong there are some much more interesting and challenging grassroots social hacktivist platforms as a long history of those I haven't got the expertise to go in which start with the social they start with human lives in place and then build from there this is just one example which is the work of Christian old in East London who's actually started to tag people as they move around East London to see how stressed they are encountering the pollution and the danger of the various vehicles and highways around East London with a way of mobilizing for environmental and social justice my final point is to look at infrastructure from the the perspective of failure and disruption if you remember Susan lay star the start of this talk had these quite technical definitions of what makes infrastructure there were eight of them I won't go over them again but the ninth one I think is very important the ninth one is that infrastructure quote tends to become visible on breakdown because we have this tendency to put all of the systems that keep our lives going in cities into these black boxes to not see them even if they're right in front of us when those systems go all of a sudden those infrastructures become visible it's paradoxical very paradoxical and that means that they become more political because it's hard to make infrastructure political so much of the debate about infrastructure seems to be technical engineering until a lot of people boring okay just give you an example of what happens if you take electricity away from a society that depends on it totally you have all sorts of effects that move around places that move between places that move between different infrastructures in ways that we just can't predict until we have the crisis so you'll have no gas you'll have no oil you'll have no road transportation you won't be able to get money at your ATM and so on and so forth just taking electricity away electricity is very important because you can't really store it and yet everything depends on it we are all hostages to plugging in those bloody smartphones every day or every two day if you've got a new model what these events also expose is what we what geographies of infrastructure called topological space the way infrastructures especially digital ones connect here and now with very far away places it don't seem to be connected at all and I give you an example I won't read this I hope you can see this but effectively in 2001 in July there was a fire in a railway tunnel in Baltimore underneath the downtown okay very prosaic little urban event all of a sudden many countries in Africa don't have email access okay and you think what earth is going on here well what's going on is that the internet is remember a physical thing and it connects some places and not others and the fibers that connect Africa very few of them actually often do via big connections with North America where the internet was invented so emails between two countries in in Africa will be going to perhaps to Washington and then Baltimore back to the country so a small fire in a tunnel will expose these really complex and hidden and very political geographies another example even more powerful in 2008 a fishing boat off the coast of Alexandria in the Mediterranean caught more than fish and managed to sever one of the key optic fiber lines of the global internet system all of a sudden 75 million people in the Middle East and in India don't have internet access again why well you have to look at infrastructure the geography of the fibers the optic fibers that make the internet work predominantly it's very localized and a lot Alexandria is pivotal but these failures and these these collapses means that when you have a completely digitized society completely digitized surveillance system activists have a lot to go out to because the evidence is always coming out because that is recorded as well so whether it be WikiLeaks the Panama Papers Snowden wonderful websites like Krypton are continually undertaking what's called Sue surveillance surveillance from the French means from on high Sue surveillance is from below where you are challenging those in power because the digital technologies have a very powerful means of capturing what's going on through elite power and I'll finish with one example that's really powerful in the Arab Spring we all saw how social media was being used to sustain challenges to regimes from Egypt from Tunisia and so on sometimes with revolutions and so on in Bahrain there was another attempted revolution that was prompted by a Google Earth image why a Google Earth image well the majority I always forget whether it's she a mode Muslim or Sunni Muslim excuse me if I'm offending anybody the vast majority of the population living in quite squalid cities could see how the elite who own all of the real estate were privatizing and extending the beaches of Bahrain they could see all of these new beaches being manufactured for real estate hotels and condos and so on at the same time as distancing them from their own fishing grounds their own coastlines so a new means of visibility albeit using a sort of highly corporate surveillance system allows all sorts of new means of challenging those in power and that was the basis for the mobilization so I hope this hasn't been a too grim and too but paranoid sense of the the network and the digitization of urban space what I hope I've given you a flavor of is the subtlety of how everyday encounters between people in places the things that keep and always will keep cities going is now so completely mediated in in all sorts of ways by a new set of infrastructures so thanks very much for for coming thanks a lot for this very insightful journey for your talk Stephen thanks a lot also for the simultaneous translators for translating this into German I'm always amazed how you do that job I could never imagine doing that in that kind of pace so thank you very much that we have that tonight there's many topics you touched tonight Stephen I'd like to just touch a few in a little bit more detail we do maybe 15 minutes before we open up this discussion for you and there's still the hashtag actually active hashtag a digital society where you can ask questions on Twitter so let's start right away maybe with the city of Berlin trying to connect the city of Berlin to some of the things you talked about Steve you know we have massive housing crisis you could call it there's a shortage of housing there are skyrocketing rents not only in Berlin it has become actually a subject for the federal government as well of course I know there are cities that are a lot worse off in Europe like London or Paris but still relatively speaking this is a major problem of the cities and of this city Berlin and I wonder if it has anything to do with what you talked about when you at the beginning of your talk when you talked about all those you know digitally fueled narratives of the end of importance of time and space you said digitization facilitates urbanization place matters as much as ever and I wonder if this actually has led to this how you want to say it to this late reaction of many cities that this problem will occur eventually I mean couldn't it have been foreseen like decades ago and this narrative this ideology of the cyberspace that sort of abolishes the need for space does it lead to this in some way their connection that's a really great question I mean I think we have to go back to the days of the 60s and 70s particularly in say the US and perhaps other parts of Europe to see that cities were really in trouble you know New York went bankrupt in the mid 1970s there was a profound sense of anyone who could in could leave cities and this is often highly racialized in the US was leaving cities the suburbs were where it's at the technological suburbs the edge cities were where it's at so the the cyberspace thing was coming very much out of that culture which was not really European culture in Europe it was the old industrial cities that were really in trouble the renaissance of cities is fueled by all sorts of things and it was not foreseen in many in many debates as far as I can see it's been fueled by certainly an economic motor many sectors that are driving the new technological economy thrive on urbanization they thrive on highly dense co-location they need cities because that's where the infrastructure is because that's where the skills are because that's where the cool people are and all of that has driven this gentrification process in certain cities which are hubs for the new digital economy not every city is by any means but in parts of certainly the high tech cities like San Francisco London gentrification is partly fueled by that but I think it was missed and it was really missed you know unpredictable and perhaps unexpected dynamics have emerged you know who'd have thought that a couple of platforms like an easy jet website and an Airbnb website could have huge gentrification impacts in European cities why because easy jet is now so much cheaper than the old nationalized aircraft airlines it's cheaper because it's got a new business model which is remediated remember that word because you are doing all the work at the front end and everything is stripped down to allow it to be so cheap because it's so cheap people are using it in the way they used buses 40 years ago how does that impact on cities well they're going to cool cities like Berlin Amsterdam and Barcelona in numbers that no one could have expected why is that an impact on housing will an Airbnb gets in which is another platform which is massively transforming how housing markets work in cities and unless you're careful all of those central communities will just be pushed away because how can any renter in a city compete with an easy jet influx going paying premium money in an Airbnb platform you know so well Berlin actually did react to that to Airbnb and made it a lot harder to rent out your apartment or to put it up on Airbnb unless you actually live in it for yourself you can rent out like a room or two but you cannot rent out the whole apartment unless you get some kind of permit which is hard to get as I am told in some house I mean I think there is a there is a possibility for the city actually react to that I mean I think this is a new territory for urban planners and for urban managers and so on how do you deal with being too successful being too popular you know I mean this is bizarre because the last 40 years anyone in urban is an urban planning has been desperate to market themselves to be a center to be a to be a hub and now we're having to think of how do we turn people away how do we discourage this sort of stuff it's a new paradigm which is fascinating you talked a little bit about you know grass roots let initiatives to counter all that kind of corporate data harvesting to counter all those gentrification processes that are linked to what you have talked about can you give us an example or two of what those grass roots let initiatives or cooperatives could look like yeah I mean do look like the environmental justice movement is in the States is very powerful at trying to understand how the algorithms of insurance companies are used to disadvantage certain cities so they've trying to sort of reverse engineer how what's called red lining happens because so many of the biases and prejudices and exclusions in cities are now done through postcodes through geographically reference data if you're in the wrong neighborhood you're gonna struggle to get a mortgage you're gonna struggle to get financial services and you are redlined it happens in more subtle ways in Europe but some of these activists communities are actually you know getting real experts on on the algorithms to say actually this is illegal or this is you know trying to expose the agency of the algorithm in a way that makes it much less of a technical thing because the challenge is always to politicize the technical the technical is always political there is some kind of philosophical maybe cultural notion in your talk when you spoke about infrastructure as being veiled and unveiled that the disruption and you know non-functioning of the infrastructure makes it visible and only that and you talked about electrification as well in Berlin or in New York now nowadays in many US cities I know or Japanese cities actual electrification is still highly visible the cables are overground which they are not anywhere I know in Europe off at least you think that actually changed people's relation to infrastructure of the city is there a cultural difference you could describe with that between say the US Japan and Europe it's complex history there is a whole discipline of urban history and they're starting to get really into the sort of differences and you know I'm using these really general narratives and there's clearly very distinct differences I think there's a general similarity for example with water water systems when they were first built were incredibly visible because you know cities had dealt with the terrible health consequences of bad water for centuries so you go to some of the Alec the water pumping stations around Europe built in the 19th century they are like cathedrals you know they what they are made to be visible water pumping stations now are the most anonymous concrete and steel things that no one ever thinks about no one looks so those are being veiled certain infrastructures are now being celebrated you know like telecom towers Alexanderplatz of course I was from a different country yeah but in terms yeah of course that they were symbolic of national arrival and national modernity and and all of those sorts of things but I think you know we're all seeing those moments when these things are unveiled I'll give you a brilliant example when the when the the flights across the Atlantic were stopped because of the volcano that nobody could pronounce a thousand consonants all having a fight was was my best basically all of a sudden newspapers that normally don't deal with technology they had cross sections of aero engines all over the world for about two days and we were learning all about aero engines and so on the same happened with Fukushima for two days the whole world had cross sections of nuclear reactors and then once the crisis goes they are veiled back again into the into the background so you know it's there are generalizations but are also very different specificities because you have different national infrastructural cultures the French tradition is particular because it was so central to the way the Republic was built after the revolution it was about modernity it was about the metric system it was about lexical centralized on Paris infrastructures were there about creating the nation of France as a modern rational technical space in disrupted cities the book you edited I think in 2010 you write extensively about you know the interruption of infrastructure becoming useless junk you write there you write about blackouts and gridlocks and so forth in in cities now okay that's eight years ago we've seen a lot of growth since 2010 digitally speaking at least and in terms of the smart city you talked about there's a lot of growth there's a lot of acceleration you could say no maybe a little not to Paul Virilio who died last week you quoted in a different context here I know but this has definitely you know become a phenomenon on a much different scale than 2010 what would you say now 2018 to what you wrote about in 2010 what's the what's the agency there is it just to handle this growth differently or is actually degrowth one of the concepts as I was saying earlier I think this is a really interesting question because you know there's been a long debate about the ecological impacts of cities and how we need to change the economy so that it's not devastate in the earth biosphere and creating this anthropocynic crisis and so on but now yes cities are almost struggling with being too popular there are moments in London which are genuinely terrifying because of the crowdedness we shouldn't forget that our debates in these conversations is very geared towards global north cities where infrastructures still despite the crisis and collapses are pretty reliable and pretty decent we need to stress that for the billion of the world's urbanites who live in self-made settlements shanty towns sometimes pejoratively labeled slums the whole idea of taking infrastructure for granted is a complete dream you know huge amount of everyday life in those communities is about how do you improvise infrastructure how do you steal power how do you get water to stop your children getting cholera so we need to be careful in our north centric discussions that we don't talk about the bigger crisis arguably which is to do with global urbanization in mega cities in the global south which are horrendously poorly served in terms of infrastructures particularly water and power and that's what brings fascinating challenges because Mumbai is trying to be the next Shanghai that's the elite right the elite model they're obsessed with being the next Shanghai but how do they do that if their stock exchange doesn't even have 24 hour electricity right in a 24 hour global economy that's a little bit of a problem so again there's a lot of highly politicized efforts to build infrastructural rights into urban rights in in many global south cities so I would say that's where the real challenges are we have huge challenges in the north too but we need to be mindful of that we have talked quite a bit in this series actually about algorithms from different perspectives and you show this beautiful IBM slide from 2012 from the control room in Rio and the Chonero the quote goes just to refresh that maybe quickly cities lack the ability to extract meaningful information out of the date of the of the data they collect IBM set in 2012 now this is typical internet centrism we've encountered that almost on a daily basis on the daily basis there's this book by Yevgeny Modosov that says to save everything click here that pretty much sums up that kind of thinking the question remains the same though what is the alternative to better algorithms that actually solve some of those problems they were invented for in the beginning because these debates are often so technical and so deep politicized I think they often camouflage the social problems that they are ostensibly designed to help you know getting more data about the social and environmental crisis of Rio doesn't necessarily help solve those problems you might have more data about those problems in a in a in a better managed platform but ultimately the the rampant injustices and crises going on in and around the favelas of Rio carry on okay so I think this is really important point that the politics of cities remain the politics of cities however the data is harvested sensed and represented and you need broader social challenges founded in social and political conversations to challenge and transform this that's always been the case and that always will be the case well some of those discussions are somehow arriving in northern cities as well maybe I can tap into some kind of current fears or subjects that are you know getting a lot of media coverage in Germany and there is an outburst or people think there is an outburst of right-wing extremists patrolling certain cities certain people of certain color of certain descent do not feel comfortable anymore there's houndings there's hunts and there's this kind of you know discussion about what is a hunt what is the hounding on highest political levels so in a time like this it's very hard to argue actually against surveillance and all of a sudden there's this there's this shift with this public insecurity that is definitely taking place in changing political discourse now I don't want to I don't want to imply that surveillance is is inherently bad you know try raising children without intense surveillance your children will be dead in an hour mm-hmm it's it's a fundamental part of every social relationship to have surveillance it's a question of the politics of surveillance there are many many great opportunities for sue surveillance the un the um counter surveillance yeah counter surveillance think of the rodney king episode think of the many events the many protests against globalization think of many of the protests against political summits where the the exposure of police violence through global media global digital networks and so on has a massive impact in terms of changing the mood changing the levels of sympathy think of the bioania example i talked about before there are many human rights organizations across the world that are using google earth really really intensively to challenge authoritarian regimes there are many scholars like isle weissman who are using new sensing technologies incredibly powerfully to address war crimes committed by particularly israel and western countries so by no means suggesting that surveillance is a bad thing it's a question of how do we prevent the really worrying possibilities of a sort of chinese style permanent tracking society and how do we mobilize the technologies to do that another example would be you wrote about i think in vertical cities the greek government looking for tax evaders and checking google maps for swimming pools around athens and what they did then is cover up their swimming pools with tarpaulins yeah that's one of the examples you cited i thought that was pretty funny but i think now is the time to open this discussion to you there's one or two microphones i'm not quite sure uh for the audience it's right there and a little bit later on we're asking for the twitter wall but there's somebody in the back i cannot see that clearly but yeah it's not on hi thank you for the talk my question also goes to this big and messy field of alternatives and i wonder what's your take on attempts to appropriate the smart city when you think about infrastructures also there's been some debate of owning infrastructure barcelona is celebrated as an example where they tried to combine smart city with participatory democracy in order to create a different narrative around it some of this also spilled over to Berlin and i just wonder what's your take on this idea is it like if a city builds their own platform is it a possibility is it a way to make a difference or generally yeah um yeah i think it's a really great question i would say it's an area of great possibility absolutely because you know the history of infrastructure is one of municipal municipal authorities taking control so much of what was done creatively in terms of the history of transportation systems and highway systems and water and things all the things that are now the basis for urban life started with those sorts of municipal efforts to socialize and create public infrastructure in cities as as resources for citizens so i don't see why that tradition can't bounce back despite the fact it's very unfashionable in a world of privatization and neoliberalization i think there's a long history of in even in digital media of cities trying to build platforms for their own for their own use which create their own spaces that are less prone to the sort of corporate um excesses of the of the big it companies the history of virtual communities the history of virtual cities the history of community it networks goes right back to the the 70s and 80s actually and you can even look earlier on with cable tv in the in the 1960s so i think it's a very exciting development the gentleman in the first role who would like to make a comment or ask a question thank you very much for a great talk um i have a question that might might sound stupid actually but i'm not sure so um you were talking about infrastructure a lot and you also were so kind to explain us what you understand as infrastructure you were also talking about platforms a lot but you weren't really defining what um a platform means to you or maybe i didn't hear it so i was wondering how like the the concept infrastructure relates to platform in in your opinion i'm not by any means an expert on platforms but i think what's what's so powerful about the contemporary dynamics is that huge swathes of infrastructure in terms of the traditional idea of the world you know like a global airline system or a global um electricity system or or global transportation systems can now very much be organized through a sort of screen interface which is the platform um and that allows the remediation dynamics to change everything think of uber as a classic example you know a whole rather than a whole traditional network of taxis which are hailed by perhaps telephone or the traditional way you now have the platform as the interface between the infrastructure which is now highly privatized often highly um individualized you know it's used by the company to take away social protections from drivers and so on um but it provides a radically new way of organizing managing and running what was the taxi system and that's no surprise that the traditional taxi organizations are up in arms at fighting that from a point of view of social conditions but also from the phone view that they could potentially go literally go because they can't compete on price so i think the relationship between uber and the taxi system is a classic example of how platform politics interfaces with infrastructural politics yeah that makes sense uh thank you for your talk my name is matthew stinder i'm a berlin based tech ethicist um i'm just gonna step here for a second i was wondering if uh you could talk about the how our two things match up um you use the word black black boxes as in kind of the covering a casing an external casing for the way in which that infrastructure is concealed um i wonder if you also use the phrase black boxes as a synonym for uh proprietary algorithms and if you see any connection between kind of a black box algorithm versus black box infrastructure but also talking about like kind of the next billion people in the global south or however we define it i was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the interplay between agency and identity and the way in which that as public private partnerships are a new vector of technological infrastructure the way that perhaps that the city the municipality is losing its capacity to infer and confer identity on its inhabitants not just citizens but inhabitants and how you see that going forward um and where you see the role of individuals let's say let's take sub-saharan africa in which that may have limited uh institutional capacity in the municipalities but also see kind of the cisco's and the ibm's or the facebook's as an easy r&d remedy to kind of leapfrog current uh municipal woes let's say thank you um wow there's a lot lot in there i think um on the black black boxing point clearly it's a concept that applies to all sorts of technological worlds and it's certainly appropriate to the highly problematic efforts by the big it companies to be deeply proprietary and you know it's it's a way of reducing scrutiny to the algorithmic powers that we're all talking about in just making the catch all phrase that this is a proprietary corporate system and is is not um able to be unblackboxed uh it reaffirms that that sense of of power and control and a removal from democratic or social scrutiny in terms of the the wider sort of dynamics of identity infrastructure and power yes i think many many city agencies feel powerless because they they often don't have any technological expertise to take on the big technological behemoths and they can be very you know these smart city visions can be superficially very seductive you know they can really really think we're going to be um going to the future much more quickly we're going to have the experts on hand we're going to look glossy and futuristic like eco-atlantic uh we're going to be up there with the big boys and it is normally always boys of course um so there's a real a real huge amount of work necessary from you know ethicists like yourself to try and get away from this sort of seductive mythology and to try and look much more closely at how questions of cultural and social identity interface with with media in all sorts of forms define ways of perhaps um upscaling uh infrastructural possibilities in much more sensitive ways i think the history of the appropriate technology movement is really interesting here um to find ways of socially shaping technologies and we should remember there's a huge amount of flexibility in how these things are actually run in ways that are appropriate to to each place but rather than just imposing the cookie cutter behemoth of the IBM urban operating system willy nearly around the world okay let me ask real quick if there's anything up on twitter that uh you would like to share with us yes there are a few questions um so i like to read the first of them how do we prevent the permanent tracking city like in china wow um that's it's a really good question i mean clearly the chinese case is quite an extreme one because you still have a deeply authoritarian one party system which has enormous amounts of control on um the likes of uh internet access and so on so it's despite being the most urbanized the biggest urban population in the world there is the possibility there of that hyper central control i think that is a sort of scary big brother world but in most cities we have hundreds of little brothers perhaps is the best way of describing it and i think the despite the fact these silos are becoming more interconnected there's a lot of mess there's a lot of chaos and there's still a lot of massive uncertainty in how these things work often they don't work often they don't connect i'm not being being complacent what we seriously need are much more robust data protection and um data regulations in in contemporary western societies at the moment those organizations exist but they're often toothless they're often badly resourced and they're often way behind the curve in terms of what's going on in the sort of corporate and smart city developments so the second question is related to this will we be able to influence such developments in advance or are we bound to repair things after they go wrong do you see changes for policymakers to set up guiding frameworks for the digital society i think again there are many many challenges because um again the sort of ways in which smart city ideas are being sold is very seductive it taps into these deeply held notions about being modern being futuristic being switched on many of our public policy communities are struggling to have the level of expertise again necessary to really intervene to really understand how these things can be regulated in highly globalized highly uncertain ways when a small number of trillion dollar behemoths have so much power and i think it's it's a big challenge i'm not sure if it's doable but it certainly needs needs to happen is there maybe one more question on twitter before we switch back to the live audience or yeah there's there's one more it's about infrastructure so the person's asking i am skeptical of the notion that digital infrastructures should always aspire to what a notion of perfect optimization inefficiencies exist in any system and externalities are not always priced i would counter with the question for whom is networked infrastructure optimized i couldn't agree more um this is a myth of optimization as anyone knows who's used it systems in practice over a sustained amount of time there's a huge amount of failure a huge amount of glitches a huge amount of stuff going wrong it is always suboptimal these are dreams of control that are part of the sales pitch anyone who's ever worked on any of these systems in practice whether in public administration or in in private sector economies they know that these these things are more or less work some of the time and sometimes people aren't even sure why they work you know there are so many layers of software going on in different systems that they more or less work some of the time so yeah i think we need to remember this is this seductive ideology of perfect optimization that is a big part of the sales pitch thank you a question directly connected to one of the questions beforehand that the repair mode do we only have the repair mode because after the not foreseeable developments into the future the political political arena for instance is only reacting to the developments they didn't foresee do you consider it feasible that any already in the political arena existing concept on the EU level on national level on city level on whatever we call it level of regions and so on is there maybe today already one ministry or any other body having the kind of an overall concept being in connection with you and anything like that with the scientific arena maybe as well like a little bit to be able to foresee what is going to be in the future that we are not only in the repair mode um no they're not in my experience i think i think you know the fact is the future is profoundly unpredictable and always has been and always will be and the dynamics of uncertainty now are on such a huge scale whether it be to do precisely because of these tightly interconnected digital infrastructures that are globalized that connect the financial and technological architectures of our world so tightly a tiny small problem can as we saw with the financial crush in 2012 um was it 2012 earlier than that 2007 sorry can can cascade out into huge and unpredictable crises so by definition it's profoundly unpredictable um and that's why it's enormously challenging the world is full of and littered with technological failures you know the the underground of cities is full of technological failures the detritus of previous attempts to be the future and i think that's we have to look at this as a cultural phenomenon you know we are all in cities which are messy amalgams of previous futures which is the joy of the city and there's so much stuff in the city that we can learn from i think one thing we need to do is to learn from history um and to learn from the detritus of previous futures um which are often ironically ruined around us you know there's an amazing example actually that human beings have mined so much copper that apparently this this sounds like why is that relevant well it's relevant because we're now having to mine our own cities for the metals that we've used in previous futures um because that's where the copper is so let's look at this in a sort of deep archaeological sense media archaeology is the end thing and and let's try and take a bigger grandeur rather than a modernist sense of being able to foresee the future if I could see could foresee the future i'd be a very rich man because i'd be a bet i would be betting all of my salary well let's get back to the present for closing this discussion here it's already 845 i was told to close at 45 forgive my swiss compulsion of punctuality i just can't help it maybe it's just one last questions we usually uh do at the very end is uh again we've touched this a little bit so far actually european outlook on things because we've talked a lot about us policy about us cities we talked about the gulf we talked about china uh and face recognition and so forth uh let's talk about europe a little bit you know being sandwiched in between those digital superpowers uh because this is what those years is about i mean there are things there are ways of countering that i mean the u is trying to you know tax multi national corporations a little bit more properly in berlin there's this initiative that one of the um bike sharing companies is actually getting state money it's one of those companies that does a little less aggressive data harvesting than the two chinese companies that are into business as well in berlin that probably are going to make the race but we don't know i mean there are certain things you can do but what else can we do is there actually a genuinely european uh um forms of agency or an outlook on those topics you've touched i think as europeans we are really bad asserting our strengths and our differences to the to the asian traditions or the north american traditions the uk has been far too swayed towards the us in the last 30 40 years and i think that's part of the deep prehistory of this brexit nightmare that we're all having to inhabit at the moment which is very very very um sort of relevant to the conversation in terms of geopolitics europe faces big challenges as you say demographically it's it's not being able to grow and that raises all sorts of questions around cosmopolitanism around migration you know german the german birth rate traditionally is really low so in terms of our futures perhaps we need to put aside the digital and just think through what are our societies going to be in terms of demography in terms of populations in terms of a balanced age profile for our society as we age and age and age and so on because one thing for sure we're really old compared to east asia and north america and that and that is really vital economically in terms of culture in terms of the ability to organize cities the ability to provide services and infrastructure cities um and this is where we have these huge contradictions with the shift to the right the shift to the right is all about protection and ethno nationalism and putting walls and barriers up for europe to have a really strong position in the future i think we have to embrace a radical cosmopolitan future based on mixed up messy cities which completely challenge all of the right wing traditions which which are hating those places so i think this is profoundly to do with identity politics and the role of big messy cities fueled by global migration because those are the ways of surviving and prospering for europe as far as i can see which is completely against the rhetoric of brexit the rhetoric of the far right across europe of course it's funny you're ending on a sort of carbon or human or analog note uh this whole evening you also talked about books and we actually have a present i have to look for it where is it christian behind what it's hidden there and you sort of ask for it it is a book and now you'll find out soon what it is about thanks a lot steve grab for making the journey from new castles to brilliant thanks a lot for this very inspiring talk this is the analog thanks very much for coming thanks for holding out could i also ask that we thank toby for doing such a great job