 Mae'r cyfnod o'r dda i ddechrau efallai ei ffodol o'r dddangor cyfnodwyr o'r lleol yn y byddian nhw. A dwi'n gwybod i'n mynd i'n gweithio ar y cyfnodd o'r cyfnodd ar gyfer unrhyw o'r cyfnodd o'r berthynas, dylunio a'r cyfnodd o 4 o 5 miliwn ar gyfer mylywyr i Berlin. Ond yn y cyfnodd y dygedig, ydy'r cyfnodd yn ffawr i'r ffordd, ac mae'r digital yn mediadio'r ddaeth i ddechrau'r ddechrau'r llun o'r dîm. Ac mae'n rhoi unrhyw ysgolion sy'n gyfnod yn y gyfnod i'r rhaid a'r ddodd yn ysgolod, ac yn y ddodd yn y ddechrau'r ddechrau. O'r ddodd yn cyfrifiad bod y cyfrifiad oedd ymlaen nhw yw yn ffiondiad a'r cyfrifiad i ddodd yn cyfrifiad, a 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 digitised infrastructure and digital infrastructure, we're just seeing 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 Geograff is 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 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. Those 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 realise that the always-on, switched-on infrastructural city is always, always linked to those flows. Historically, a lot of people at Marshall McLuhan thought the city was anachronistic, it 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 Pauli, 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 in 1964 must inevitably dissolve like the fading shot in a movie. So why has that not come to pass? We are now living in the most urbanised age in the history of our world and it's the most digitised age in the history of our world. My argument is that's not a surprise. My argument is that digital media, digital technologies facilitate urbanisation and relate really closely and subtly to the fact that we're all here today. If media were 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. These new media, and this is going back to 1990s, 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 re-animate and reorganise 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 geostationary 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. I want to move now onto 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 organisations, place marketing organisations, 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 IT corporations, it's coming out of the cities themselves and the real estate organisations 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 optimisation, 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. 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 centre of digital innovation and so on. Is it 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's actually employed futuristic sci-fi script editors and thinkers to say how can we look like the future? The final point I want to say about the smart city idea is that it's asocial, 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 are 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 cities tend to be discussed casually as if it were self-evident that all one needed to do was to finally solve the city. Remember the IBM quote earlier on? It's to weave sensors into the urban fabric by the million, to all the relevant social networks for geotagged utterances and apply just the right analytical algorithms to the ever-mounting tally of tetrabytes 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's there, in other words, which I think is getting it entirely wrong. There are some much more interesting and challenging grassroots social activist platforms. There's a long history of those that 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 Nold 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 mobilising for environmental and social justice. So I hope this hasn't been a too grim and too paranoid sense of the network and the digitisation of urban space. What I hope I've given you a flavour 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 all sorts of ways by a new set of infrastructures. So thanks very much for coming.