 I think we're going to get started. If you're still kind of waiting to get food, just do it quietly, I guess. And also, there are plenty of seats up in the front. Anyways, so for those of you who don't know me, my name is Wanfei. I'm a PhD student in the Urban Planning Department here and also organizing our planning lecture series for the year. And I guess part of my not-so-hidden agenda for this year is to kind of demonstrate that in planning, we're really lucky to be such an interdisciplinary field. And I think the urban context is embodied in a plurality of domain knowledge, but also in different ways of seeing, knowing, and representing. And I think Professor Shannon Mattern is the model interdisciplinary scholar. She is a professor of anthropology at the New School for Social Research, a new disciplinary home, as I understand it. Her writing and teaching focuses on archives, libraries, and other media spaces, media infrastructures, spatial epistemologies, a mediated sensation and exhibition. She's the author of several books, the new downtown library designing with communities, deep mapping the media city, and Code and Clay, Dita and Dirt, all published by the University of Minnesota Press. She contributes a regular long form column about urban data and mediated infrastructures to places, a journal focusing on architecture, urbanism, and landscape. And she collaborates on public design and interactive projects and exhibitions. You can find her work at wordsinspace.net, but really all over the internet and physical spaces, it seems. So with that, let's please warmly welcome Shannon Mattern. So thank you for having me. If any of you are on Twitter, I know I follow some of you, might follow me, you probably realize that I finished this at four this morning. It's been a really busy beginning of semester, so this research started a bit later than I would have wanted. And also, I just kind of explained the context for this project. I was asked to speak in this series and then also I'll be giving the same talk at Brown next week at our conference on radical cartography. So I wanted to try to find a topic that brings together issues of pertinent to urban planning and to cartography. And at the same time, there is a lot of interest in civic design and service design at Parsons and the New School, some of which really perplexes me. So I kind of wanted to understand that a bit as well. So I tried to find a project that would mash together those three things. So this is where this product of my delirious early morning mind comes together. And I hope I will welcome your feedback. As I said, this is the first time that's kind of been erred or been born into the world. So, for the last decade or so, I've taught a variety of classes on mapping inspired by the radical cartography of folks like Bill Rankin, Lizzie Local, Laura Kirkin, and Marco Ferrari, by the participatory processes of Bill Bungie, Dennis Woods, Kate McLean, and Maypoh Kwan. And by the critical data visualizations and map art of Catherine Dignasio, Georgia Loopy, Josh Begley, Johnny Urykisys, Tiffany Chung, Bushla Khalili, Nina Kachadorian, and Jared Thorpe. I work with a couple hundred students to translate their research projects and idiosyncratic obsessions into interactive maps and hybrid format atlases. I documented and expanded upon some of this work in my small book, Deap Mapping the Media City, and a variety of articles and book chapters on the websites I've created for each class. The one on the left is the funk to have been taught that one for five years. This one I just retired last year because I had to move to a new discipline. So those courses and related writings have led to my invitation to collaborate on some critical cartography projects and mapping exhibitions. And while I'm still a steadfast believer in the critical potential, sorry, and while I'm still a steadfast believer in the creative and critical potential of mapping as a method and of the radical political power of participatory mapping, I've also developed a few reservations. First, I've observed that digital participatory and particularly open source maps present great challenges with regard to preservation, maintenance, and labor. Content moderation, bug fixing, and general upkeep where people out. In a few cases, as with the full open staff humanistic mapping platform I developed with colleagues to over the course of about five years in the early aughts, we simply gave up, to be honest. Second, my collaborators and I have noted as have many critics of participatory GIS projects among indigenous and marginalized communities that standard digital mapping platforms, which do tend to address all of those earlier concerns, they make the preservation and maintenance not so much your problem, but they have their own concerns. They impose methodological and epistemological limitations, forcing users, particularly folks in the global south, indigenous populations to transform complex spatial phenomena into machine readable points, lines, and areas and to adopt a spatial ontology defined by Euro-American geopolitics, settler colonialism, and a teleology of territorial control and property ownership. In other words, not everybody thinks about earth or land in terms of property and kind of political boundaries, for instance, but most of our digital platforms require them to think in that way. So these concerns were made particularly acute when I was recently asked to respond to an edited collection documenting various crowdsourced activist mapping projects largely rooted in the global south. As I wrote in my afterward for the book, which should be our next year and promises to be great, the rise of digital mapping tools from consumer GPS to Google Maps to OpenStreetMap has famously opened up cartography to a wider public. For that expanding cartographic community, maps have become an everyday presence, customized and pocket sized. And more importantly, the wider public now has the capacity to make their own maps, chronicle their own spatial experiences and model their own worlds. Those marginalized populations who had historically only been cartographic subjects, native populations of colonized territories, recipients of aid from global development organizations and red-lined communities and other inhabitants of the margins, they now wield the digital sextant, sextant, excuse me, sextant, the hard word to say, for me at least. Women, people of color, the impecunious and victims of both historical and contemporary injustices can plot their individual and collective lived experiences and validate their own ways of knowing, data that are often of little value to commercial cartographic interests. And through this auto cartography, the editors note, these populations can potentially hold governments accountable, fill gaps when infrastructure and municipal services are fragmented, call attention to a variety of issues that impact everyday lives, such as sexual or political violence, environmental injustice or corruption, and make visible social and political processes and events that might otherwise be hidden or overlooked. There's much to celebrate in these developments, yet we're at a point now in the history of participatory GIS and crowdsource mapping, when we can reflect critically on such projects, the ambiguity or ambition of their initial goals, the constraints of available tools, the limitations of their reach and impact. Stephen Brattle and Matthew Anderson in a recent article in Progress and Human Geography acknowledged that while participatory GIS has succeeded in advocating for the incorporation of more marginalized groups into planning and governmental decision-making, such projects have historically dealt poorly with conflict, offered little opposition to entrenched power brokers, and created minimal disruption for neoliberal agendas. We should question, they propose, the degree to which people's participation actually shapes outcomes beyond having their input coded on the map. Critical reflection on participatory mapping's capabilities and limitations, particularly regarding its use with indigenous populations, indicates that we need to anticipate both the map's desirable and intended consequences and its undesirable and unintended consequences and to develop clear protocols before we start plotting points. I'd add another new contextual concern. In an age when mapping and spatial practices like design and planning can be automated or rendered generative by responding to data harvested from the immediate environment and its inhabitants, perhaps even without their explicit consent, what does it mean to participate? What happens when a map becomes merely an intermediary between automated data extraction and algorithmic urban engineering? Amidst all the promises of data-driven urbanism in smart cities and responsive architectures, we should be aware of how state and corporate entities are deploying participation, both as a means to substantively inform and offer critical resistance to their proposed plans, and as a public performance, wherein the aesthetics of collaborative mapping and civic design serve to signal democratic processes, so they kind of co-op the look and feel of civic design to kind of pay lip service to democratic process. For decades, as federal agencies and municipal governments have sought to encourage public participation in urban planning, they've turned to maps, models, games and other playful, designerly means of soliciting and validating public spatial knowledge, and ostensible using that insight to inform design and planning processes. But as cities increasingly turn to private technology contractors to manager of an infrastructure and development projects, their proprietary platforms and processes are often obscured. Can civic design tools like participatory maps and community engagement apps meaningfully inform these often obfuscatory processes? Or are these methods susceptible to co-optation, to map washing, by design savvy tech developers who've mastered techniques of discursive engineering through their virtual platforms? Can participatory planning methods stand up to algorithmic planning? To address some of these questions, we'll begin with a case study that exemplifies the mixed modalities and materialities of participatory mapping and planning. It's one you're probably well familiar with. So several months ago on an afternoon featuring both spits of snow and auspicious bursts of early spring sun, I walked with a group of fellow infrastructure aficionados into a former fish processing plant near Toronto's portlands. The build, have any of you been here before? Have any of you been to 307? Okay, wow, I'm surprised. Anyway, so I'll tell you what it is. So the building at 307 East Lakeshore Boulevard East, now painted a vibrant cerulean blue, is SideBlock Labs Experimental Workspace, where the company, Alphabet's Urban Innovation Unit, tests out and solicits ideas for the smart neighborhood it hopes to build in nearby Keyside. The project, a partnership with Waterfront Toronto, a multi-scalar government organizations that incorporates the city, the province, and the nation, has faced significant resistance, as you probably know. Critics have challenged the terms of the public-private partnership, the opacity of the development process, and the lack of clarity over data governance. Given the obfuscatory nature of SideBlock's closed-door deals and proprietary technologies, it might be surprising that they've adopted relatively transparent, intelligible, accessible tools of civic engagement, or maybe there are tools of self-defense, so it could be both or either. Paper and ink and models and maps. The 8,000 square foot double height, primary white open space, featured in the assortment of unassuming analog media, post-its, index cards, and rough models, amidst scaffoldings of unfinished plywood, chipboard, and cork. Its aesthetic was resolutely lo-fi and DIY. As Vanessa Quirk noted on the SideBlock Labs' medium channel, when the space opened, the concrete floors have been ground down but not perfectly polished. The columns, once covered up with drywall, have been stripped to reveal their graffiti-lined skeletons. The rough space, architect Luc Bouillon of Lebel and Luc Bouillon explained, looks like something that you would be testing a lot of stuff in, which kind of harkens to Stuart Brand's idea of how buildings learn, buildings learn as you probably know. So humble, saw-horse tables hosted an array of annotated cards, each offering feedback or questions from fellow 307 co-designers. A nearby stack of blank cards and a pile of markers called upon us to add our own voices. A question I have about facial recognition is, was a prompt on one of the cards. How will, one person wrote, how will sensors and cameras be used with regard to safety and security and data collection? Nearby, as you can see on the right, an efficient unit prototype, a sample apartment made of cardboard, invited visitors to annotate its features with colored posters. One person wrote, corridor too narrow for wheelchairs. Another wrote, I like looking at something while I cook. So paper signage was affixed to walls, tacked to bulletin boards, were hung from movable metal dividers. These layered sheets of white and pastel, which resembled an interface designed in accordance with Google's signature stacked card material design system, mixed simple stencil and sans-serif type bases to tell us about everything from the project concept, job creation and Ontario's timber industry, to sidewalks proposals for data use, environmental sustainability, accessibility and social infrastructures. Trained sidewalk liaisons, one of which whom you can see on the right, roamed the room, engaging in casually scripted conversations with their guests. At other times, the space hosted scheduled workshops and forums, where a chorus of voices registered their interests in and concerns about the waterfront development and the city's future. Embedded among the paper text and illustrations was the occasional screen, where we could explore maps, videos and sidewalk bespoke design tools. One such tool, which earned its own full two-sided kiosk, was Common Space, an application developed in collaboration with advocacy organization Park People, and the now-defined Gell Institute, to facilitate public life studies, that is the observation of how people use public space. Inspired by urbanist Jan Gell's own empirical methods, the tool would allow researchers to bypass, this is what they consider to be a problem that has to be solved, we can bypass the traditional clipboards and clickers, and instead, input data directly into an app that's calibrated in accordance with the Gell Institute's public life data protocol, an open data standard. As sidewalks Jacqueline Liu and Matt Breuer explain, those standards make it possible to perform valuable comparisons between different public spaces, and to export that data into visualizations and analysis tools, thus allowing both experts and community members to see patterns and make evidence-based human-centered changes. Ananta Pandey reports that the Common Space team experimented with more high-tech models of data collection, including cameras and computer vision, but opted for human, in-person approaches, because, quote, they lead to stronger studies. When community members participate, they not only add important local context, but subsequently tend to become more active participants in the planning process, end quote. Public life studies, Blue and Breuer claim, are an example of how small data collected intentionally by people and for a specific purpose can help make cities better. Sidewalk made its open-source code available on GitHub in March 2019 in order to seek feedback and encourage third-party development, but there's been no online activity since April, and the Common Space website is gone with the way-back machine telling me that nothing has been tracked or recorded since April of this past spring. Yet, small data are harvested in 307's Common Space, too. Exhibition designers daily to the jour say they've created a set of colorful, rolling, modular, stackable, playful, interactive tools that turn 307 into a place for input, plus discussion, plus experimentation, plus new ideas, plus action. The workspace is itself an inhabitable model, a platform for sidewalk team members to observe behavior, conduct informal interviews and focus groups, pilot test new urban futures or features that is, collect data and iterate inside the building's walls and eventually implement in the dock lands outside. 307's humble material objects, concrete and chipboard, post-its and foam blocks are rhetorical tools suggesting that here, cities are workshopped. Urban futures and data plans are co-created from a mix of open platforms and public knowledge. 307, we might say, is a participatory map itself that is writ large. The aesthetic and ethos of the workspace is a far cry from that of sidewalk labs, original headquarters in New York's Hudson Yards development, and this is my class with everybody's face grayed out on the left-hand side here. So their original headquarters in Hudson Yards where the team provided a digital master planning support for developers related in Oxford properties. As Matt Shaw explained in the Architects newspaper, because the development is on state-owned land, there was no oversight from community boards. The parcel became part of a larger economic development strategy that usurps local regulation, leading the citizens of New York City more or less out of the conversation. So a night and day comparison between sidewalk or between Toronto and New York. That meant minimal design review and public process, which even if it happened, wouldn't have swayed related anyway. Former housing commissioner Raphael Castero told Crane's New York back in 2012 that related's lack of fear of public process, bureaucracy, and unions is what allows them to be the powerful player they are. In other words, they don't really care about public process. Have it all you want. It's not going to change their minds really. Sidewalk, whoops, I just closed my document. Sidewalk, now in the developer seat in Toronto, has taken a very different tack. And they sought to cultivate a public persona very much unlike related's. Among those differences is the fervor of Sidewalk's public process and documentation. Media scholar Molly Souder acknowledges that Sidewalk Toronto has amassed an immense archive on its website, which echoes the material design aesthetics in both 307 and throughout the whole Google empire. She writes, in addition to the 200 odd page vision document released when the deal was originally announced in October, 2017, there are videos, press releases, blog posts, white papers, artistic and architectural renderings, photos from public events and reports stacked of Sidewalk's technological innovations and public engagement exercises. The Sidewalk Toronto websites contains an overwhelming cascade of documentation. As designer and urban scholar Kevin Rogan notes, Sidewalk's first wave of spatial images, part of their 2017 response to the request for proposals, are rendered in sketch up, but meant to look like their illustrations. Kevin, I should note, is one of my former thesis advisies. He wrote this piece in the Atlantic. So their hand-drawn quality alludes to the hypothetical humans behind the design and the purported humanism of the design, while also implying that the renderings are works in progress, mere imaginings subject to public input. They're diagrammatic and didactic, reminiscent of the complex cutaways in children's books, like David McCully's The Way Things Work, Souder explains. Sidewalk's four volume master innovation and development plan, published in June of this summer, features a virtual encyclopedia of graphic styles. Elementary Richard Scarry-like drawings that you might have remarked called from your children's books growing up, photorealistic renderings, dramatic human portraiture, abstracted maps, data visualizations, and those flat illustrations so common to big tech world interfaces, which Rachel Holly argues, serve to deploy cheerful minimalism, minimalism in order to mask the insidiousness of multinational tech corporations. Each mode of visualization makes a different epistemological claim. This is speculative, well, this is how it's really gonna be. This is fanciful, well, that is rational. The contents of those graphics are themselves highly varied. They convey facts and figures and flows and feelings. Design critic Alexandra Lange responded to the newly released architectural renderings and she proclaimed on Twitter, there is too much 21st century urbanism in these sidewalk Toronto renderings. Kites, kayaks, leftover industrial equipment, painted cutting colors, permeable pavements, fill in the blank, it's there. The too muchness of it all, the kites and kiosks, the cards and colors, the workshops, the maps, the open source code and the exhaustive archive, adds up to a form of what Bianca Wiley, who's a very vocal critic of the sidewalk Toronto project calls Engagement Theater. So 307 follows in the tradition of the EU's urban living labs, sites where since the early 1990s, municipalities have developed, tried out and innovated urban solutions in a real life context. As Georgia Nesty explains, such labs allow urban governments and increasingly in this age of smart cities, they're kind of tech contractors to pilot test projects and products on a fast timeline with minimal bureaucracy and with minimized consequences for failure, which is framed here, failure that is, as just an ordinary externality of innovation, it's inevitability. Such smart city engagement arenas, which would also include things like hackathons and data boot camps, fit with the European Commission's neoliberal vision for urban development, Rob Kitchen argues, as well as with the entrepreneurial municipalities ideas about citizens needing to be seen participating in their cities. And the smart city in particular. The city of Boston is engaging in a similar experiment. Their Beta Blocks project consists of three exploration zones, pilot tests of urban technology like digital sidewalk displays and camera-based sensors in three neighborhoods, also a roving inflatable exhibition featuring such technology in discussion about its effective and equitable implementation, as well as various community engagement groups. Project designers are super normal called Beta Blocks, a part which is a partnership with the local government, Emerson College's engagement lab, tech companies and city residents. They call it both a block-level technology experimentation zone and a civic learning and experimentation process. So it's about technology and experimenting with civics itself. Strategic designers and urban innovators, and I put urban innovators as what they call themselves, Indy Johar, Jane Engel and Jonathan La Palme propose that such labs might even be a place to engage in regulatory experimentation. They could pave the way to whole new governance models that realign the pace of technology and regulation and enable both to embrace and learn from real-time feedback. Also, I think they're proposing just like speed-up regulation so it actually fits the pace of technology too. Do we want that? I don't know. They're kind of proposing this. So this is precisely what Sidewalk Labs was hoping for at 307 and in the Keyside neighborhood for which it served as a training ground to build new tech-friendly public-private modes of smart urban governance, that kind of fit its own agendas. 307's visitors inhabit and co-create, this is how I always put co-create in scarecourts again, and I want to keep doing that, co-create an urban model. They generate a qualitative data set that will then eventually be mapped onto the landscape outside. That real-world terrain will meanwhile conjure up its own map. In the June 2019 Master Innovation and Development Plan, Sidewalk describes their plan to create a high-resolution, 3D comprehensive digital map made of the public realm, which would serve as a single repository for information about public spaces and related infrastructure, creating a shared foundation for ongoing operations and proactive maintenance. That was a long quote from them. The map, updated continuously via data collected by sensors, by open space managers and users, would include all public spaces from parks to public libraries, amenities and physical infrastructures from benches to playground equipment, utility systems, such as stormwater pipes and power grids, as well as shared participatory infrastructure, like electrical outlets, public speakers, water fountains, projection mapping technology, which they regard as an integral, essential kind of public service, Wi-Fi and picnic tables. All of these would be linked up to the internet of things, essentially. And that mapping system would in turn scale out as an urban prototype for implementation in cities around the world. This map would rely largely on the passive participation of objects and people reduced to monitoring and reporting on those objects' condition. Some elements of 307 hinted at such limitations of human agency. We weren't allowed to play with the digital electricity demo or visit the offices upstairs. Other features simply announced their presence and expected us to deal with it. Perched high in a corner was a pair of gadgets, a white cylinder in a gray box, which as a stencil and sans-sir of sign on a stand informed us was a numina sensor, which some of you saw Leah Meisterland here. There are people from numina who are going to be at her conference here about digital cities on October 11th. So this thing I'm about to tell you about is they will be featured at her October 11th event. Anyway, the sign says hello. A low resolution image of you may be taken in this area. This image is immediately de-identified and is only used to calibrate and validate pedestrian and vehicle movement operating in the area. No opt-in or out, no solicitation of your opinion or request for comment, numina simply is, as is and it may have already taken your photo and mapped your location before you even knew of its existence. As urban tech consultant Nabil Ahmed reported in July, sidewalk initially promised openness releasing a public engagement plan in February of 2018, touting collaboration and co-creation to imagine this new neighborhood together. Despite an impressive array of activities that included public roundtables, design jams, neighborhood meetings and a physical showcase, mean 307, they pushed forward their own agenda. Instead of addressing data governance, which was one of the big public concerns, it talked about parks and public spaces. When it did share proposals, it preferred to present already fleshed out ideas with little room for debate, leaving conversations with residents to be largely a performative exercise. That's despite the fact that, you know, we have these watercolor drawings which are supposed to rhetorically canote openness to revision. And Bianca Wiley told me, when sidewalks share the maps, they sometimes use them to, she says, deceive. The scope of sidewalks plan was always well larger than the Keyside neighborhood and as many have pointed out, this fact was on the request for proposals and the parties to the deal knew this. But if sidewalk would have started to show maps of the entire portlands from day one, the larger region rather than just the tiny zone where everybody thought they were focusing on and that they tied their intents and influences that scope more broadly, Bianca says, some people would have had a very different reaction. While the kiosks and public forums focused on tall timber construction and modular pavers and all the maps and plans typically trained people's visions on a delimited territory, the team behind the scenes was hatching bigger plans and creating new technologies to automate collaboration and participation. So it's not just good enough to get people in a room together, you have to have an app for that. So CoLab created and collaboration with an organization called Digital Public Square was meant to foster more inclusive, collaborative community decisions. The prototype invites users to propose events in public spaces and review the trade-offs associated with each proposal. If you have your birthday party here, we can't have our, I don't know, like our digital divide meeting. So whatever the trade-offs might be. I think I have to go back and smack, lost my tape's place in the slides. So there's no shortage of similar digital participatory platforms and e-government tools. You have things like commonplace, co-urbanize, decidem, neighborland, transform city, all kinds of interesting port-men-toes type names that allow for information sharing, interaction, and co-production. Sidewalks co-ord, meanwhile, all these great kind of shortened versions of names, allows for city agencies, public drivers, mobility and logistics companies, and engineering firms to share data about curb real estate, from signs to curb cuts to curb paint, to improve compliance and informed policy and planning. And its replica, which is probably the one you are most likely to have heard about, it's gotten the most press, which spun out of Sidewalk Labs just last week as its own company, you might have heard, uses de-identified mobile data, procured through mobile app publishers, data aggregators, and telecom companies, to create models of how people move in cities, what their commutes are like, how ride-sharing impacts traffic, and how many cyclists use bike lanes, for instance. The tool maps these movement models onto a synthetic population generated through census demographic data, producing a simulated city on the move. Replica is working with Kansas City, Portland, Chicago, and Sacramento, and other partners are lining up, despite many big questions about the data's origins and privacy. These projects involve participatory mapping and collaboration too, but that participation is mediated, filtered, aggregated, and in some cases automated and unwitting. Gratuitously technologized too, some critics say. Waterfront Toronto's Digital Strategy Advisory Panel released its preliminary commentary and questions on sidewalk labs draft master long title, on September 10th, just a couple days ago. The authors agreed that many of the issues sidewalks planning tools promise to address, like traffic management and citizen participation, are real concerns, things we want to improve. Yet they wondered whether a technical improvement innovation was really required. Some proposed solutions, they said, that felt like tech for tech's sake, applying a complex technological solution to a situation that mostly doesn't need it. One member said, I don't really understand the drive to move these things out of regular public governance if the desire is to work on behalf of public good. So why not keep the work within the government if it's actually going to be affecting the whole civic enterprise anyway? Another, referencing sidewalks Toronto's multi-layered master plan said, I would prefer to see these digital tools and services brought together more formally as a civic technology layer that is owned and executed by citizens and to enable stakeholders to have direct impact on their design. This too is engagement theater. It's mapping a smokescreen, civic tech is diversion. Sidewalk Labs has marshaled the aesthetics of participation to frame performative ethics as political action. As geographer and smart city scholar Rob Kitchen argues, citizen-centric design or co-design has in many cases acted as an empty signifier, designed to silence the detractors, detractors that is, or to bring them into the fold while now altering the technocratic workings, profit-driven orientation or ethos of stewardship and civic paternalism of most smart city schemes. Kitchen in his article refers to Barcelona, Detroit, Seattle and Amsterdam as well as to various kind of university-based AI ethics like lots of universities who put in the AI ethics kind of enterprises now. This is not to say that these city's efforts are disingenuous or ineffectual, rather that the way in which ethics is operationalized and performed through citizen-centered processes merits scrutiny. Bertrand Baker, Assistant Professor of Urban Futures which is a great title at University of Massachusetts Amthurst conducted several years of ethnographic research in Kansas City which was one of the original Google Fiber Cities which Google Fiber then later pulled out of as you might know. She went there and stayed there for three or four years to better understand the process by which smartness is envisioned, negotiated and materialized in an already existing city. So whereas Toronto had the kind of tabula rasa key side to work with or at least they like to pretend that nothing was there, Kansas City is trying to incorporate smartness into a city that's already there with all of its many problems as all cities have. So, so full disclosure, I also worked on in Bershu's dissertation committee. She graduated from here in the spring. So these are all kind of local examples of people who've done great scholarship. So Bershu attended, so at the many code for KC and digital divide meetings and smart city public events that Bershu attended. Maps, she says, and how we should rethink the city type questions about maps always appeared at some point. I think because the city's historic racial divide is so visually obvious, if you look at like a redlining map of Kansas City, it is stark. So because it's so visually obvious, she says it immediately communicated why any intervention would be justified. Maps were also an efficient way to make the attendees feel like they did something collectively because even though maps were really rarely central to the outcomes of those meetings, they offered a moment to talk over a concrete object and do something about it together, even if that something is just making a map together. It usually didn't take more than an hour to do the mapping exercise, but that one hour is often the only time we talked to each other, she said. Maybe the maps offered a platform on which different epistemic communities could work together without reproducing hierarchical power structures, which designers Eduardo Stazowski and Benjamin Winter regard as critical for analyzing what they regard as social innovation. Yet Baker had found that map making sometimes seemed to be an end in itself. She was confused by the constant reaffirmation of well-known problems via new maps. She recalled a digital divide meeting in which a city official showed years old data, data with which the team was already well familiar, it was the very reason they were actually meeting as a digital divide committee, but in a new dashboard designed by an analytics company. Berkard said she kind of sheepishly asked what we should take away from this map since we already knew everything was telling us, and she was taking the task for that, that was not what they wanted to hear. Most a lot of the folks said the dashboard constituted a new visual tool with which they could discuss the phenomenon with their constituents and funders. So even though it didn't contain new information, she said, and there were many existing maps using the same data, this particular map looked smarter and therefore more useful. Continual cartographic upgrades seemed to get in the way of using the map as a step toward taking meaningful actions, she said. I'm puzzled by how the technical capabilities of a dashboard map could so mundanely get in the way of politics or public action. End quote. Even in the not so smart parts of the city where analog maps address analog problems, we observed similar political processes. Fernando Contelli de Castro, an urban planner and architect who wrote his graduate thesis on grassroots community movements fighting displacement, found that the participatory frameworks implemented in New York City's Department of City Planning to address community's concerns about rezoning often ultimately served to justify the city's plan. Full disclosure, Fernando was also a former TA in my maps class. So, framed as opportunity for employment these workshops, opportunities for empowerment that is, these workshops instead function, he said, more like marketing campaigns. They reduce community engagement to simple exercises designed to educate communities about zoning through technocratic lenses. Presentations typically adhered to rigid schedule and scripted dialogue. There is no spatial casual conversation he recounted. And that directed conversation as in Kansas City often revolved around a concrete visual which set the agenda and tone for conversation. Proposed plans were often shared via hand-drawn street-scape perspectives, idyllic images of an unpredictable future. A future that, while visually appealing, could actually mean the very attendees' displacement from their homes. Maps, too, were present in every community meeting where participants commonly organized into working groups of five to 10 participants and were then guided by a facilitator. Contelli de Castro and his roles as both designer and city planner and as a scholar of those processes often created the maps himself in his work for the city's Department of Planning. They appeared in slide decks and they were plotted in large sizes and placed in the middle of groups tables, as you can probably see in these previous slides. In general, he said, the maps are pretty busy graphically and highlight the open spaces, public amenities, roads, and other urban nodes. They're drafted with the intention to inform about urban amenities, about buildings, different ownership types, et cetera, and to entertain by allowing neighbors to attach stickers and notes to create their own indecipherable collective palimpsests, he said. When later on, back in the office, we try to interpret what the neighbors are communicating to us through their stickers and post-its, we find isolated ideas and anecdotes but hardly something that influences the project. Ultimately, instead of collectivizing the decision process, Contelli de Castro argues, these participatory practices instead serve to corroborate the expert's proposals. Kylian Riano, Associate Director of the Cleveland Urban Design Collective for a former designer in New York City's Department of Design and Construction and founder of a group called Design Agency, a politically engaged studio has had similar experiences. His collaborative work with various government agencies convinced him that community engagement is often performed so those organizations can say they had a conversation, even if that conversation was never meant to inform the design. Riano found that the agencies themselves often required participatory intervention. He recounted an occasion on which Design Agency stepped out of the purview of their contracted work and actually created a participatory training manual for a major government partner, a federal government partner, because they just weren't doing that as part of their process. So while Contelli de Castro made clear that the maps they used in public workshops weren't intended to manipulate or coerce, they did function, like sidewalk maps, labs in Toronto, as marketing tools and rhetorical documents. As he explained to me, the maps focused participants' attention on a delimited territory by highlighting the project boundary, typically what you see here via a red dash line. In other words, don't look at what happens outside of here that's not of concern to you. Whatever we do inside the red dotted line will have no effect on the, anywhere beyond this kind of artificial boundary. So really kind of shaping the rhetorical dimensions of the conversation also. These attractive, exhaustive, didactic tools also serve to educate a community on school and planning to help them reimagine the unavoidable future of growth or change. Yet Contelli de Castro also saw the potential for bilateral education. These participatory maps could and should, he said, be used to educate the planners themselves, to show those spatial patterns that are lived realities for community residents, but invisible to planners and politicians, to service what isn't represented in official data. One urban phenomenon that isn't represented in the official data, or at least in data that are commonly accessible to the general public, and which is the concern, which is the common unintended consequence for things like rezoning, redevelopment, and smartification is eviction. When I asked all of the aforementioned researchers and designers if they could identify a mapping project that has the potential to pose serious resistance to neoliberal urbanism and algorithmic planning, several folks mentioned eviction maps. As anti-eviction mapping project founder, Aaron McElroy told me, and as we've seen through a lot of the examples we've just gone through, community mapping really is just a tool that can help produce any of an array of futures, depending upon who designs and uses it. It can be used to embolden techno-capitalism, as is the case with sidewalk labs, or to produce anti-capitalist futures. It really depends on who the community is composed of, users and developers alike. There are also, McElroy acknowledges, plenty of community groups that are using maps to fight for social justice of various genres and who have been impactful. The anti-eviction project she notes has produced maps and other resources on serial evictors. This is a long quote from her. By connecting eviction data, property ownership data, and business data, and by creating public-facing online maps, we've been able to identify large corporate landlord entities who often hide behind a web of shell companies, which affords them anonymity. We've made this data available to the public to put pressure on evictors and stop particular evictions. In this way, our mapping feeds on the ground tenant organizing and helps build connections and probe. McElroy thus acknowledges that the politics of community mapping also depends upon its modalities and materialities. The anti-eviction project describes itself as much more than a map. It's a data visualization, data analysis, digital storytelling collective documented dispossession and resistance upon gentrifying landscapes. That's their self-definition. So that collective composed of housing justice activists, researchers, technologists, artists, filmmakers, oral historians, and cartographers across the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles and New York, has produced over 100 digital interactive maps, roughly the same number of oral histories and videos, and an array of articles and reports and zines, interactive murals and events. The anti-eviction mapping project began in 2013 with traditional maps, then expanded to incorporate the oral histories and narratives because, quote, eviction markers and chloroplasts on Cartesian maps as useful and actionable as they may be, tended to reduce complex light stories and neighborhood histories to dots on a map. These other formats then also enabled them to expand beyond maps of loss to incorporate stories of resistance. Their new counterpoints, a San Francisco Bay Area Atlas for Displacement and Resistance forthcoming next year, provides additional historical and critical context to their map work. Quote, you recognize the importance of maintaining a critique of the tech boom 2.0 and the dispossessioned insights, the author's right, but it's important for us not only to de-raccinate displacement from its historic roots. In other words, they wanted to use the book to provide all the historical context you can't get just by looking at a map of contemporary data, in other words. So this new book will examine such factors as indigenous geographies, environmental racism, transportation and infrastructure, migration and speculation, and their dislocation series, which includes a zine and public workshops allows them to use art space methods to amplify the narratives and resistance of communities facing displacement. Dislocation, they explain, was born out of an interest in humanizing data made visible by our quantitative maps. Committed to challenging traditional notions of where knowledge resides, the project foregrounds the voices of those often left out of the official historical record. McElroy and Menissa Marwa describe their realization that archiving, map-making and political organizing can be intertwined and symbiotic, treated as important tools in an arsenal of tactics and strategies for resistance, placemaking and political community building. The Hyderabad Urban Lab operates under a similar premise. They generate urban research through maps, classes, exhibitions, manuals and social media, and by connecting with other community groups and social movements. So kind of the multi-platformness and the networkness of both of these organizations are quite similar. So both practices recognize that ultimately it's not really about the map and this brings me back to that edited collection about crowdsourced mapping in the global south that I mentioned at the very beginning. One of the things I most admired about the book was that its authors, who dedicated years and careers to activist mapping, acknowledged that maps alone are rarely sufficient to achieve social and environmental change, to effect policy reform or to incite political revolution. Instead, crowdsourced collaborative mapping, revolutionary as it might have been as its inception, is best framed as merely one tool, albeit a critical one, for rallying local and global communities, for lobbying politicians, and for deploying resources on the ground, for inciting the exchange of embodied skills and knowledge. It's not really about the maps. It's about the larger atlases and cartographic assemblages they generate. It's about how those maps can help us plot out more inclusive, engaged, justice-oriented spatial practices. It's about the archives and the small local living data sets that are created and engaged to create the map, in which we then serve myriad other purposes beyond the map. It's about the public processes through which the maps arise, and the publics that emerge around them. It's then gone on to do other many non-mappy things. It's about the inevitable partiality or excesses of our maps and how they create productive moments of contestation, as Nidhi Srinivas and Edward Rassozowski described them, to give people an opportunity to imagine different forms of society, to engage politically with their social world. It's about the acts of care and practices of maintenance required to sustain those maps in their communities. It's about the embodied practices of activism they inspire. It's about the new worlds they create. That's all I have. Or the human side of the group, the individual or personalities, but it's about the values and motivations of the organization that they're in. So then as somebody who wants to study materiality and technology and reasonable planning expertise, I wonder what would be your advice to how would blend into points, looking at map size or unit analysis to critique versus the binding, which is that they merely reproduce forms of deception in a simple, like every other technology that we use. And so how would you make the leap? Well, I think the critiques that acknowledge at the map to really just kind of reproducing the party line or kind of re-inscribing hegemony are based on, or not, are often based on a really delimited analysis of a specific event. So you might go to one public planning meeting and see how the conversation shifts over the course of the event. You realize that ultimately, nobody's voices were heard, not the case changed. Whereas if you look at kind of this larger suite or ecology of media that are kind of playing into one another, especially with like the anti-addiction project of the hydrobad lab, the fact that the maps are kind of networked into other media that serve functions that a map alone can't serve. So you have the book that provides the historical context, the zine that allows for kind of more collage forms of knowledge production, the oral histories that capture voices that you can't capture in a mute map, for instance. So just looking at how these different kind of media formats can productively inform one another of their affordances and limitations, I think is maybe something that allows people to regard these two last examples as doing particularly well. But in terms of even in a less than ideal situation, one thing that I think maps really do help, which Berkshire Baker and Fernando Contelli-Decaster of knowledge is that it gives people who might have a very hard time wrapping their head around something like zoning, a concrete thing to think with, a thought object, a familiar kind of recognizable territory to push back on, even if they want to disagree with the map, if it's a familiar terrain, that they feel they have some kind of right to have an opinion about or some grounded knowledge in. I think it's a nice kind of conversation starter. It's especially if it's rendered roughly where there isn't a high barrier to entry, people feel compelled or entitled to offer their own kind of informal knowledge and embody local knowledge onto a substrate like that. So I think those are among the rhetorical and political values of using maps and that's like a larger process. And I'd be curious to see what other people have to say about this too, because I'm not, the expert on this, and I, you know, this is the first draft of something that hopefully will be revised. So does anybody else have any responses to this question? So the chemistry example where it was like, everyone knows what the problem is that is on this map. I was curious also about the sort of timing of these processes and who's initiating them as a question, because I was just at a conference where some people were only looking at what was anyway, so that you only showed up to the things that they were doing. We were getting all the data that I'd like people to measure up and the next person we know is a different project and they had, she was talking about a room full of 100 people. And the difference that they could sort of come up with in question and answer is, one of them was like a university trying to like start a conversation and the other was the university going into an existing conflict and sort of doing this kind of material work around people who are in that team and who already were trying to figure out ways to market the data to deal with densification I think. And so I guess your question here is sort of in particular the difference between like a map that is flat on the table and the dynamic map that you can adjust. So I guess I might follow the question of this sort of, how is the new kind of mapping going to go now? Which algorithm could also just, someone's ability to like change the map in real time? And it does that also make a map or use more or a tool more or less useful in a new kind of sort of thinking that they're not going to be in a way and it also just like put out a map and then really get this like. So yeah, they all have their own rhetorical potentials. I mean you can imagine being in a planning meeting where some people are kind of altering in real time the height of the building to see what kind of a shadow would pass on the rest of the neighborhood or how altering other variables would have kind of immediate impacts on the surroundings. That's something you can't really show in sort of a credible form if you're dealing with a paper base kind of posted in stickers kind of map. So there is some type of credibility of information, trust maybe invested in kind of live, quantitative, but there's also misplaced trust in kind of model of quantitative data as well. So there are different kind of conversations that each of these different forms make possible. If you do, for all the possibilities of the live data modeling, there's also a sense of black boxness. Like a public can't marshal a data set to figure out how they can't do the physics in their head, essentially figure out how this one tiny change will change my neighborhood. And there's also a faith, blind faith put in the quality and methodology through which the data were derived and the way it's modeled. So there's a kind of an opacity in that sense that in a way disenfranchising to some degree. So there are trade-offs in these different models. Can you touch on the fact that some agencies or entities have community involvement just so they can promote that they involve community? And that seems undesirable. So how do we either disincentivize that or test that they're actually involving community so we can kind of change that mechanism and create real community involvement? And not just something that's good for PR or good for advertising or project or planning. Well, this is something that Kili and Rihanna, who I mentioned, actually produced this guide and over the course of working with a federal agency that will go unnamed, he ultimately, by working with them through lots of struggle, apparently many members of the team threatened to quit over the course of this collaboration. But through a painful, elongated longitudinal experience, they ultimately convinced that not only was their work going to be better received by the community. It's a really problematic term, unless it's theorists who kind of, again, there are scare quotes galore in this whole presentation, but it was painful, but ultimately convincing that organization, federal agency, that it was advantageous to their practice. Even if it slowed it down a bit or added additional friction that they might not want and created a guide for them to be able to implement it in future projects. So that's one kind of very pollyannaish way of going about it. But again, I would like to throw it open to you if you can think of other ways to incentivize. And this is also based on the assumption that community involvement is always a good thing. Maybe there are some hypothetical cases in which it's not. You mentioned all of the different site, site, block, lab, citizen calendar. And I just wonder if how many similar things are there at the end? There are a lot. I looked at quite a few kind of literature of you and surveyed the field type of articles that look at hundreds of similar participatory planning platforms. Well, we didn't use a site or anything that gave a permission to be contacted. In some cases, no. In some cases, like if you are inhabiting or walking through visiting the someday sidewalk Toronto, if ever exists, by entering the space, you will hear by consent to allow your data to be harvested. One of the things they developed recently and they published in April, I think it was, you can look at the sidewalk talk medium channel to see this is a series of icons, stickers, QR codes will put on things to let you know where your data is being harvested and how and whether you can be identified or not. So if the presumption is that it's happening, we're gonna let you know it's happening, that's us doing our due diligence, but you can't really opt out by walking into the space you have opted in. We can even go here and then over there. Question in that one. So, definitely, we do have a data task that supposedly they will publish the data in fact form, like if a staff is not in fact up what they're doing, and supposedly it's supposed to be independent, and they're also gonna be suggesting that the government officials can average that, like you're seeing data on what part of the copyright and like, average it, and it's kind of value out of the other, possibly. And also, in response to your super insightful, super inspiring, thank you for that. Now, I feel like there are two layers to what you're saying. The first layer is like more, because I also read your series on digital expressions, which are really, that Dan has a piece on that, and I, yeah. But I feel like that's more to this layer in that it's very, like, about tech in like, well, infrastructure, it's more about infrastructure. I feel like for me, personally, I'm not a cynical about the simplification of infrastructure design, just because from my point of view, from my perspective, it's just like, a lot of the technological investment actually started from accessibility investments, like a lot of the new technology we have now, that's theory, or speech definitions of people, of life people, to be able to communicate, and homework was originally designed so that, like, it's not as strong a design to that wheelchair to our consumers. So it's like, I do see an innate as it is with some of the, some of the traditional infrastructure, just because it does provide the opportunity for people with either mobility, issues, or like, with, you know, hearing issues or whatever. And another layer, as we were talking about, is more regarding environmental compensation, and I mean, literally, I think that's where it gets tricky, just because you're talking about, you know, because it's hard to plan on this temporal scale out to a map. So, Desi Desi, we talked about the collage forms of some of the data, and also our history of indigenous narratives. I guess the problem that arose to just, like, shorted, like, you know, with all this redistributing of, you know, the inward knowledge that can only be used through time, but in that, out to a map, I can see the problem at it. I can see the problems used at that. Yeah, so, today, I can, I'm 11 in a year, but I am more positive of optimistic about the image of this part. You're definitely right. And a lot of, I guess, I am guilty of this. A lot of people who write about smart technologies who kind of just start from a position of cynicism, which is maybe not fair. There was a piece I wrote last year about kind of precision medicine. There was this NYU was gonna be doing this research project called The Human Project, where they're gonna collect data from, I think, 110,000 New York City residents and connect it to the work that, like, CUS was doing to have live public health data informer of in planning as if there's kind of like a direct correlation between if you change something in a neighborhood, you automatically change the phenotype of the people who live in it. It's kind of a simplistic, reductivist way of, but it sounds a little scary, kind of in terms of, like, threats to data privacy, the premise, the methodological premises on which it's based, but at the same time, if precision medicine can improve the livelihoods of people who are suffering, there are pros and cons to all of these. That's a very kind of reductive way that I'm summarizing your comment here. So I probably should incorporate a few more kind of hopeful moments in this piece, recognizing that it's not all doom and gloom, but, and I also appreciate your reminding us that a lot of new technologies are developed out of kind of accessibility research. So Maura Mills at NYU is one person who's worked really, make sure history and disability is an integral part of thinking about what makes new media. Hi, thank you so much for this talk. I think that others have been sufferers from a total spatialization, and I think that, you know, we sink and that it sat down and its power behind it is a very valid thing to say. I've been in India for the past three, four years looking at the private part of mapping and planning processes. And often what I realize is that it's not just unintended consequences of transparent mapping processes, but unintended benefits. So one example of that was mapping done by the Calcutta Municipal Corporation in a street, which then vendors used to rationalize their claim of their space, right? So it was just the map they made visible in the back of the paper there. The same thing happened in Orissa where the state actually used drones to map property to view up like any of the facts, and that was actually used as a claim by informal settlements as a way of property, right? So I can, not make a question, but rather a question, is that often technologies have spin, right? They have these unintended elements into them. And do you feel that in Cycloclabs or in other smart city experiments in North America where communities might not be in the driving seat in mapping, which is often where the power is expressed in what is controlled in the map and outside the map. But what is in the map? Does it have unintended benefits and do communities that appropriate that map use that for their own purposes? That's something that you saw in the research. So a map that is made kind of in the context of like a development project or kind of a city-sponsored organization is then taken on by a community and used for their own purposes. I am sure I'm trying to think of some examples if anybody has any ready-to-hand, throw them out there. But often just these technologies are, you know, these are just who creates them. Right. The power is mediated, right? One example I'm thinking of is Sarah Williams, who used to work here in this, what's called, what's Laura Kergan's lab? Spatial, is that a special research? Yes. So Sarah Williams used to be here. Now she's at MIT. Her, we were on a panel together at the Center for Architecture last Thursday, where she talked about this, the digital metaches. So informal transit systems in Nairobi, correct? So mapping those allowed for these, again, we're gonna put scare quotes around informal too. We assume that there are these disorganized ad hoc, fly by the sea through a pants enterprise. When you map it, you realize like, there's a real business logic here. And whether you realize it or not, you actually planned a very rational logistical system with these 10 or 20 independent systems doing their own thing by kind of carving out your own terrain. You ultimately have a pretty good coverage of the city as a whole. So the mapping project, which was done by, I'm assuming, government funding and Western educational institutions dropping into an area of the Global South ultimately became a tool that was very useful to otherwise disenfranchise populations. And other cities have been asked for similar maps to be made and marginalized populations in those cities, like women who want to map their experience of sexual violence, for instance, or disabled populations want to have their say in essentially incorporating their own spatial experience into the map as well. So that is one kind of very recent thing that's been recently in my mind that I think exemplifies what you're talking about. And if anybody else has other examples. So I do have in some footnotes, there are lots of examples of kind of indigenous maps being used to stake land claims and actually being permissible. Either GIS maps or in some cases, traditional forms of cartography, which are often registered in a Western epistemological context have been permitted in courts of law in Australia, for instance, and they have succeeded in allowing for kind of first nations, indigenous peoples to stake a claim against kind of an extraction company, for instance. So there are lots of good cases that I probably wrongly buried into the footnotes here. Sorry, it's not about the kind of good, bad boundary here. I think it's the fact that if something is spatialized into the space, often it is done for reasons of power, often there are things that are not in control of Google when it does it inside of a cloud, right? I mean, I'm definitely critical of what Google is doing, the fact that it's collecting that consent data and information, but are there things that can be done by those that are on the ground at the moment to then reverse it back, right? And make a claim to the space using very technologies that are erasing them from it. I don't know, it's a question for me because I feel very powerless in the face of big data coming into these cities. Well, you can see it in Hong Kong, for instance. You have like facial recognition technology or other types of surveillance technology. So you have to understand the logic by which they operate and counteract it, like produce the counterwaves to cross it out essentially. So we can think of other examples of protest where this type of reverse machine logic is used as a form of resistance. We could try to think about examples in the mapping world where that pertains as well. To just to add on that, the whole social credit system isn't always that accurate because say that you're not Chinese or Asian, you're not in the system and it's just going to match your face to the closest assembly, the person that's like, look, we're close to you. And that person, we've got to take it, if you jaywalk. So the technology is not always 100% unique. Right, but if you kind of know the principles on which it works, the fact that it actually has to get a good look at your face and you can use lasers and kind of obfuscating makeup to mess it up intentionally, you're going to already play on an existing imperfection to make it totally not work. In that kind of space, you can also, because there's kind of lack of intentionality to a certain thing, you can also kind of discover things through technology. Or you can use technology for other things, for directionally. And there are lots of examples of like critical engineers and critical designers who, knowing the logics by which different technologies operate, can find ways to make them do things they were never meant to do, kind of embodying a totally different ideology as well. So a whole world of like the Tiga brains and Sam Levines and that whole world of artists and critical practitioners, they, I think, are doing some of the work that you're referring to also. I think you're like really registering, it's coming out of kind of the actual development suppressor design. It feels like a designist that is sort of a subsumed under the power structure of like, this is actually a suppressor, like, well, it might actually be more creative. And when you're talking to like, you see there any like space for like, in the study to push back. Or, there can be a responsibility in mobilizing some of the studies or alternative training of the studies. So like, in some ways in which like, there's another narrative to like, the studies that matter is clearly institutionalized. Like, is it, or is it, for instance, do you see a kind of push back? I wouldn't like to find some more examples of that. I mean, I started this project, so there was sort of thinking about like, civic design and the aesthetics of like, the way you use aesthetics to beckon people into a process was something that was really appealing to me. I wrote my dissertation almost 20 years ago down at the design of the Seattle Public Library. I followed the whole Office for Metropolitan Architecture project process. And then for my first book, I went around the country and looked 15 cities at the design libraries and looked at how they essentially designed the public process. And found that some of them who used a lot of like, photorealistic imagery or inscrutable models, essentially pushed people away. Because they felt like, you figured it out already, you don't need us. Or you wouldn't know how to read the materials. And became really interested in how you can use kind of low-fi materials to interpolate people and create a hospitable space for conversation. But then seeing how that same aesthetic can be so easily co-opted under a different rubric. I would love to think of examples where you can kind of again use this counter logic. As with technology, if you can use a counter logic of index cards or postage notes or whatever the aesthetic might be. Just even the color schemes that they're using there. There's like an affective thing they're trying to cultivate through that as well. So again, if you, anybody have any ideas? I think this will be too much. But I think that aesthetic feeling up to it, that the Google app comes from that whole line with you, you know, standard, just a little thing of like you know, the rent-and-miss and the sort of hand-made-ness. Yeah. That there's obviously co-opted. But I guess the question that builds on that is, I don't know, how do you create what for example, this is a project like where you know, like some way of sort of reclaiming that sort of whole, loose line kind of feeling that they're deliberately portraying. I'm not sure if they meant it or they're just, it feels so, in Google's case, so terribly cynical in some of the other examples. So like, well, maybe they're both more unique than just Google. Well, there are some examples of kind of Torontonian and I'm not sure what to call people from Montrealers. Montreal Light, graphic designers and design communities who are building kind of like small little magazines or responses to a lot of the stuff they're doing. In some cases, kind of taking and deterring or co-opting the aesthetics of sidewalk. So there are a couple examples there where Michelle Champagne, I think, is somebody who might know through Twitter and then kind of in real life a couple times. But she and Bianca Wiley, I think, and some other folks, I'm not sure if they're all working on the same projects, but there are some people who are thinking about doing like counter-publications or using some of the same kind of aesthetics of communication in just in a different kind of smaller local context. And maybe it means something totally different. Even if it looks the same, if it's made by a different entity with a different intended imagined public, maybe its politics are different. I also think there's like another class in aesthetics that sort of like disrupts the place with the actual qualities themselves too. Like for example, like for some of the renderings, like those ones are I think a little harder to imagine that as an example, but like there's some people at CB Dassel out there that is a project by an artist where like it basically, it's like hairstyles and makeup that like obfuscates like your face. And so it totally like removes you from like a specific computer vision algorithm that's used to like identify people. And so I think there's this weird gray area that's emerging of aesthetics that actively exploits some of these tools that are being used. Yeah, this is kind of what I think we were maybe alluding to when we were talking earlier about people understanding the logics by which machines register voices and faces and using things like makeup and clothing to obfuscate that, to thwart it. I don't think so. So something that we've been thinking about in India is the incompetent surveillance stage, right? So if you've learned about the Aadhaar system, which is this kind of unified single security card, which is linked to GIS and the platform connection linked together, who is receiving social security at what is their address. It's a significant system. But often the system is very poorly built, right? It often breaks down. It often doesn't have layers mapping onto each other. It often doesn't work. Is that something you see happening here as well in the sense that because these are quite complex infrastructures, it actually takes a lot of energy and maintenance to keep them going. So they're quite prone to collapse. Well, just even the idea that in your entire maintenance system is going to be based on having every park, every pipe, every water fountain, speaking to some uber map that is going to maintain kind of seamless connectivity at all times. That's quite a leap of faith, I would say. And I think we find that a lot of our kind of assumptions of seamlessly, what's we're looking for, omnisciently operating systems are still based in science fiction today. I mean, this is where even the dreams of 5G is once we get 5G, that can finally make possible the seamless connectivity that we actually need to realize these visions. So the dreams are always deferred with the next kind of new infrastructural update. So I think there's a matter, a degree of incompetence to even outside of India, that presumptuous like facial recognition doesn't work. We find that DNA testing in which we pay so much faith that often doesn't work in terms of forensics and even in terms of genealogy. You look like you want to say something. Oh, okay. Yeah, so a lot of these things that we presume because of the science-iness of it are these unbiased infallible systems actually do have a lot of methodological problems and error, they're error-prone. That's a great question. That would have been nice to kind of be on the ground to have this whole process to actually do field work, to interview people, to find over multiple times. People wouldn't have to admit, you know, I like being deceived, or I know I'm doing something as I'm wasting my time for these meetings, I know nothing's gonna come of it, I'm not gonna say anything, but. This is a process that has to do with the program and has either of worked or not worked in different cases, and now it's nearly proceeding on to the end of this panel. And I'm just gonna walk the line. I, yeah, that would require, you know, like, ethnographic work to figure out some of that stuff to find people's motivations and degrees of like the faith they put into this process. I think that the people, I know at least, have participated in a lot of these public processes because they're curious about it, they're skeptical and curious about it. They go in kind of with not even critical optimism, but knowing about all of the tricks that are being pulled and all of the strategic decisions that have been made because they wanna see, they're kind of almost doing kind of auto ethnographic research by participating in it. Then they're, that's why there's been so much public outcry against it. So I think there's a lot of kind of generalized public distrust or cynicism about the project, but there's also a good portion who, again, whatever they think about the genuineness of sidewalks motives, still think ultimately, it's kind of like the way that some of the people on the right in our country kind of believe in the president, all of his falseness, because the ends of his means serve them well. The same case maybe in Toronto, that you're willing to put up with the duplicity of the falseness because you're gonna get kind of an economic boom in your backyard somehow. So that was super rambly, probably don't make any sense, but that's, I don't know, that's my coda to this afternoon, I guess, thank you. Thank you.