 Welcome, welcome everyone, it's really a great pleasure to have all of you here today trickling in. It's pretty good, I think 9.30 on a Friday you have to admit and I should note though that the event has been kind of full in terms of registration for weeks now, so hold on to your seats. I think that this is really a wonderful recognition of the importance of Laura Kergan's work, her teaching and her research practice that she has led through the Center for Spatial Research. The Center for Spatial Research or CSR was founded soon after I became Dean in 2014, so this conference is really marking a kind of moment and it was created thanks to the Mellon Foundation and its Architecture, Urbanism and Humanities Initiative. Already then it was clear to me that the Center and Laura's leadership would become not only essential to this school and to the field of architecture, but more importantly that it would enable much needed bridges across the university, its disciplines and practices. Architects draw more than they build, we like to say here at the school, and drawing things together, rendering visible the invisible relations that organize our lives, our social interactions, our movements, the making of our cities and the ways of knowing as the title of this conference suggests has become an essential skill we can contribute as architects beyond our specific disciplinary expertise and to other disciplines, enabling new collaborations to produce new forms of knowledge, of practice, but also of critical engagement. And it's precisely this last possibility, the drawing together of both criticality and engagement that renders the Center for Spatial Research's contribution so important at this time. Neither taking data, technologies and science for granted as new positivists and technocratic approaches are promising us brighter, smarter cities for the future, nor retracting into an illusory critical distance from those technologies which we have become fully addressed by and embedded within, as Kergan has said. The Center for Spatial Research is drawing new lines of inquiry and opening up new hybrid spaces for engaged scholarship and research which are at once outside and inside, close up and at a distance embedded and critical, bringing together architecture, data science and the humanities to form new ways of knowing the spatial, social, political and ethical dimensions of data technologies, their potential and consequences. Amongst the numerous interdisciplinary collaborations that the Center has enabled already in a short time are the creation of an interactive map using historical census of New York City with mine guy and Rebecca Cobrin from the history department, the collaboration with the Columbia Global Centers, GSEP Studio X in Arman and other cultural organizations in the Middle East to create a cultural initiative urban platform. The 2017 launch of the Brain Index commissioned by the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute and designed in collaboration with Mark Hansen at their journalism school and most recently the launch this spring of points unknown, a series of collaborative workshops and courses that introduce mapping and data visualization to journalism students as investigative and storytelling tools. The Center has also had great impact already on both GSEP and GSAS's curricula integrating new interdisciplinary courses that have created bridges between the architecture school and many other schools here on campus. Future work will no doubt continue to intensify these collaborations and grow the network even beyond the university. Many of you here are coming from many other disciplines and practices and it's really sort of meaningful to have you all here at GSEP and so on this note I'd like to introduce Laura Kergan. Thank you. Thanks so much Amal for the generous introduction and in general for your support of the of the Center. I'm going to repeat just a few things as well that Amal said. So first thank you all for being here. We're so excited that we're going to be in this conversation today and we're here thanks to the ambitious initiative of the Mellon Foundation in architecture urbanism and the humanities which is actually a consortium of more than a dozen universities committed to linking the essential but too often separate fields of inquiry. At Columbia the foundation has helped establish us the Center for Spatial Research now in its third year. Thanks as well to Amal. Really it couldn't have happened without your support and your enthusiasm for this project even just in hosting this event and thanks as well to my partners in the humanities first Sharon Marcus and now Sarah Cole for their essential work in making the humanistic side of the project actual rather than merely inspirational. I'd like to take a moment to dedicate this day to Hilary Ballin who was a senior advisor to this initiative and a longtime professor of art history at Columbia before she moved to NYU. She shared my love and suspicion of maths and their usefulness in urban research. She was a generous force in helping us define the mission of the center. We miss her and her spirit is with us today as well as beyond this day. And I welcome Diane Harris who is in the audience already a friend of the Beall Center here at GSAP who follows Hilary in heading up this initiative and we're excited to be working with you in the future. So if you look at our website, how do I go forward? No, yeah. If you look at our website you'll see that the work we present there is very similar in tone to the work many people who are presenting today in this conference. So what is that tone? I can try summarize it this way. I received an email yesterday from someone regretting that she had not answered our invitation because she said all things relating to smart cities end up in her spam folder and I promise you she'll be here later today. But this I would say is pretty much the opposite of a smart cities conference. Most of those people think that they know what cities are, what it means to run them smartly. We are here to ask what our cities, where do they begin and end? Who is allowed in and out of them and how do we come to know them? How do they become the object of knowledge but also the producers of that knowledge as well? Today the generation and deployment of data is at the forefront of projects to reshape the cities for better or for worse. As a consequence, responding to urban change demands critical literacy in technology and particularly data technologies. This conference addresses itself to the deep ambivalence of interventions in the urban as it explores the ways that knowledge regimes have impacted our built world. So we'll hear many viewpoints today and I don't think it's too risky though to say that we have in common a commitment to both working with images, numbers and with words and doing that critically as Amal has already pointed out. I for one am both mesmerized and suspicious of the tools and methods we deploy as well as the images and maps we produce. So we write about them, contextualize them, expose their origins, algorithms and biases. Although there's a lot of technology in the room and technical knowledge on the stage, we share a sense that the strategies and passions and rigors of the humanities are essential to work we want to do with and in our cities. The use and abuse of spatial data continues to grow and to challenge us as scholars and in our daily lives. From satellite navigation in cities, to the news we read, to our place-based neighborhoods and our communities in which we involve multiple networks and spaces, to complex military apparatuses and to the surveillance of our borders. In fact, two people are not at this conference because of just that today. So today we have speakers who are artists, designers, architects, urban planners, anthropologists, African and African diaspora historians, experimental and human geographers, media theorists, historians, literary theorists and more. When approaching urbanism, interdisciplinary work is inevitable. And in order to understand the set of questions we put forward in the prompt, we need this very type of group that is gathered here today. We are really looking forward to this today and the exchanges as well as discussing how all the panelists work will have an influence on our own in the next couple of years. So before I hand over to a really great group of speakers, I just want to say something organizational about the day. This morning we have two panels and then Wendy Chun's keynotes and she's also brought some students with her. Where's Wendy? Okay. This afternoon we have three panels and then Trevor Paglund's keynote. He's at the back somewhere over there. Keynote lecture and then a reception. There'll be a few breaks between panels which we'll announce and it is essential, really essential today that we keep our schedule because we have the auditorium until a certain point. So the link for the schedule is here and there's a handout as well, which if you prefer paper and not looking at your cell phones all day, please use that. So lastly, it really is really I mean firstly. Thank yous. So the first one goes to Dare Broly. Stand up. All the panelists already know her. She's done an amazing job of researching and organizing the day. Thank you. Thanks to Lila Cavaliere. I don't know where she is. She's probably some, there she is at the back. For her event organization, since her arrival at Columbia, all events have started running on time. In fact, I tried to delay her this morning. She said, no. So today will be no exception. Also, thanks to Paul Amitai and Stefan Bodeker for making sure the conference was really well publicized. We are so happy it's resulted in all of you being here today. And thanks also to Richard Bay for this digital first graphic design and the poster. He's everybody, I don't know if he's here in the audience, but he might be later today. And thanks to our students also who are helping all day with the reservation list, amongst other things. And also to Shannon Worley, who you will notice during the day Instagramming and tweeting from the floor. If you want to join her, please use the hashtag at knowing cities. Thank you. OK. And I'm also introducing my dear friend Felicity Scott, who's going to moderate the first panel. And Felicity and I have the habit of somehow replicating each other's work. She always does the way, way prehistory of critical data. And I'm like, always wait. I'm the present. Sorry. OK. Yeah. So welcome to the first panel, which I'm moderating. As Laura mentioned, we have three really fantastic speakers. In this panel, Shannon Matten, who's right here. Anita Sechan and Art Halpern, whose papers are going to trace out a type of broad temporal arc in the technical mediation of information or data concerning cities. Concerning, I should say, operating within cities information related to cities design, to their inhabitants, to their function, to their forms of governance, their appearance, their visibility, surveillance, et cetera, as well as the forms of life cities support or seek to prohibit or regulate. Indeed, as Shannon's work reminds us, this nexus of media technical infrastructure and how we know or act upon cities is not in any sense new or unique to recent decades, but has been embedded in and informed the epistemic and material conditions of the urban domain for millennia, if not always determining the conditions in a direct manner. But what this nexus of technologies and cities includes and looks like now, how it functions, who participates, who pays, and how we can even begin to recognize and conceive its role have changed considerably, as has its ethical political valence. So Anita and Art's papers will in turn draw out a series of further aspects of this complicated and variegated intersection of cities and technologies as they have transformed in somewhat more recent decades. So together, these papers will help us identify and unpack some of the historical and contemporary contours of this nexus, again, of media technical infrastructures and the urban, as well as some of the key questions at play, while also helping to provide something like a platform for a type of measure of what have changed and what has persisted. So I'm going to very, very briefly introduce the speaker in the order of their presentations, after which I'll hand the podium over to them, and then following their presentations we'll convene at the table for conversation to open it up to questions from the audience. And you can refer to the website for a little bit more detail about our speakers. Should you need that? So to begin, Shannon Matten is Associate Professor of Media Studies at the New School, and her work is very much focused on architecture and urbanism. Her books include the New Downtown Library, which involves Seattle, amongst other projects known very well to this audience, Deep Mapping and the Media City, and Code and Clay, Data and Dirt, and she has a regular column in the magazine Places, well known to GSEP audiences. So Anita Sechan is Associate Professor of Communications in the Department of Media and Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois in Urbana, Champaign, and her work addresses information technologies in the context of globalization, often with a Latin American focus. Her book is titled Networking Peripheries, Technological Futures and the Myth of Digital Universalism. Art Halpern is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University. Historian of Science by Training. Her research articulates complex connections between computing, cybernetics, data visualization, architecture, and design, and her book is titled Beautiful Data. It's a beautiful title. So under the rubric then of this nexus of technology and cities, the panel is going to bring together disciplinary expertise from a series of intersecting but distinct fields, media and communication studies, anthropology, the history of science, information science, art and design in different configurations. And so I just wanted to say it's a variegated field of research and one which I've been sort of struggling with or I'm using over in recent months while digging around in the UN archives and actually some other archives to recover the rather remarkable story of a film apparatus, actually a film and sort of slide tape apparatus that the UN seek to produce in the context of the Habitat Conference in Vancouver in 1976. And it was quite literally a project to sort of govern governments through what they considered new media. I argued it was new media, particularly for governance. And it was also just to point out an attempt to govern governments in the way they understood and regulated things like informal settlements following shifts in World Bank policies in the early 1970s. So I'm really looking forward to this panel. But right now I'll hand it over to Shannon. So thank you very much. It's truly an extraordinary lineup of speakers. So I want to thank you and it's an honor to be a part of it. So thanks very much to Laura for organizing and to Dr. Dare, it's been an absolute delight to work with you and Felicity, thanks so much for monitoring the panel and for the nice introduction. Okay, so we are living in many regards in exceptional times. Yet little of it seems progressive. We have a petulant baby in the Oval Office. The Cold War has returned. Evils and neuroses long thought buried have resurfaced. Walls and moats, fists and fire bombs are our diplomatic tools. Science is suspect. If anything, the last year has been a populist lesson in historiography. History certainly is not a unidirectional march toward progress. With so much hope lost on the national front and in the global community, many have invested in the city as a potential locus of progressive action. The sanctuary, the bulwark of sustainable practices, the place where mayors and municipal institutions can potentially make a difference. And they can do so thanks in part ostensibly to their embrace of efficient algorithmic governance, empirical data-driven endeavors and empowering digital equity, civic tech and open data initiatives. Yet in some cases, despite our broader historiographic reckonings, the proponents of these programs, particularly their corporate partners, practice a willful amnesia. Narratives of innovation and disruption depend upon convenient disregard for the past or a marshaling of that past in a rewriting of history that positions their work, the corporation's work as its apotheosis. Thus, our contemporary ways of knowing cities rely in part, undelivered, if perhaps subconscious forms of unknowing or revisionism. But there's a rich material body of precedent to draw upon. As I argue, sorry for the promotion, self-promotion, as I argue in my new book, Cities, including many far afield from contemporary data hubs and research and development labs, embodied network smarts and forms of ambient intelligence well before we implanted sensors in the streets. Yesterday's cities, even our earliest settlements were just as smart, even though theirs was an intelligence less computational and more material and environmental. For millennia, our cities have been designed to foster broadcasts, and I'm putting all these terms in scare quotes, they're kind of presentisms. They've been wired for transmission. They've hosted architectures for the production and distribution of various forms of intelligence and served as hubs for record management. They've rendered themselves readable to humans and machines. And they've even written their source code, you might say, their operating instructions on their facades and into the urban form itself. They've coded themselves both for the administrative technologies or proto-algorithms that oversee their operation and for the people who have built and inhabit and maintain them. Acknowledging these histories is more than just a rarefied academic concern. There's more at stake here than historiography. To paraphrase the organizers, to paraphrase that is the organizers of today's conference, knowledge regimes have impacted the built world. And those knowledge regimes are often shaped, contained, preserved, and distributed through the prevailing technologies of their time. Technologies inform and are informed by urban epistemologies. And together, they're writ large in the material city. Again, to co-opt a phrase from Laura and Dr. Dara, an apt phrase from the conference organizers, technology mediates the ways that knowledge, power, and culture interact to create and transform the cities we live in. And we're not just talking about modern computational technology as many media and urban and cultural historians have acknowledged. Archaeologists can also tell us a lot about the city's history as a mediated environment. And furthermore, they can expand our understanding of what has the potential to serve as a medium or even what constitutes urban data. Archaeologists have found communicative potential in things like brick walls, stone structural elements, dirt mounds, bone tools, and even cities writ large. By examining how cities themselves have served as media and how they have been mediated across time, we'll see how media materialize in and through urban practices and processes, how they're the products of their urban environments and their human creators and users, and how those urban processes are agglomerations of various media, stones and bones, streets and circuits, plazas and people. I really like alliteration, you will see. So in my remaining time here, I'd invite you to join me in digging backward in time to examine how various historical or what we might reductively call old media forms have been given urban form. How their logics and politics and aesthetics have scaled up into the city. So let's start with some relatively recent technological resonances. Since the mid-19th century, many cities' atmospheres have been charged with electric and electromagnetic telecommunications, telegraph and telephone wires and radio waves. New communication systems remade cities around themselves. They incited the erection of new towers and broadcast buildings, either grandiose structures shrouded in mythology or humble shacks, and they frequently darkened the streets with their rivers of wires. While the city offered up a vast listening public and consumer base for broadcasters and service providers, the material city also presented material barriers to their operation. Its skyscrapers were ideal purchase for antennae, while they also impeded the signals dissemination that is. Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier imagined that these new technologies would transform urban morphology, allowing for greater decentralization. Yet many historians argue, suggest that those telecommunications technologies had both centripetal and centrifugal effects. Concentrating businesses near the telecom exchange buildings where customers could quickly access financial data and avoid signal attenuation, while also allowing for the dispersion of manufacturing and shipping facilities. They also permitted company employees to settle out along the streetcar lines, where there were only a phone call away from the downtown business office. There's even some speculation that the phone made the skyscraper a functional place of business. Without mediated means of communicating between floors, supposedly, we would have needed countless bays of elevators to shuttle messenger boys by delivering memos between the floors. So many elevators, in fact, that they would have eaten up the entire floor plate, or most of it. Architectural historian Emily Bills argues that even Los Angeles, that sprawl so often attributed to cinema and cars, owes its morphology to the telephone, which she calls the first form of infrastructure to efficiently and effectively bind the greater Los Angeles area into a comprehensive, multi-nucleated hole. While the early telephone networks organized a hub and spoke model, connected while the early telephone networks organized in a hub and spoke model, connected LA's downtown to its outlying agricultural areas, it didn't connect those agricultural communities to each other. And those farming communities and growers associations needed to share information with each other about weather, harvest, freight, and other business concerns. So they created their own phone lines, and the communities grew around them. Farm grown phone networks, thus seeded, lots of agricultural puns here, LA's further decentralized development. We might say that telecommunications topology of derricks and switches and wires and exchanges reflected a market epistemology, a way of knowing and operationalizing the city to facilitate the dissemination and operationalization of business information, and to satisfy new domestic and commercial telecom customers. Of course, this market-driven way of knowing the city certainly isn't new. The fact that the city has served as a mediated space of exchange, of goods and services and information, has long impacted its material form and its inhabitants' lives. New technologies exposed those inhabitants to new sensory experiences, new ways of listening in public, new ways of knowing their cities through sound. Brian Larkin, a Barnard and Columbia faculty member, writes about the arrival of colonial radio in the 1940s in Nigeria. Loudspeakers installed outside the emirate council office in the public library, the post office, and other public places, brought music and words uttered in British accents and intended to win Nigerians over to, quote, the power and promise of modern life, end quote. For centuries in the Islamic world, the call to prayer and, more recently, recorded sermons have resounded, mixing with the urban din, providing a means of spiritual orientation for the faithful and particularly in spiritually diverse cultures inciting debates over spatial and sound politics. After centuries of dispute over the heights of minarets and the position of the musin who issues the call, some cities responding to complaints of noise pollution have decreed that those calls be broadcast via radio rather than cast into the urban air. The urban infrastructures of telecom have proven themselves quite adaptable, retrofitable, for an internet age and a terrain of connected devices. The new topologies of ethereal cellular telecommunications and arrays of connected things still rely on networks of wires and poles and other material, often metal gadgets. Our bodies can flow through the streets with, quote, seemingly seamless coverage, never suffering a lost connection because of a Byzantine array of hardwired and teni bolted to rooftops and facades, knit together with millions of seams, beaming imperceptible, but still very much material waves should all that populates the streets below. We inhabit a data space defined by various levels of intersecting protocols that direct our connections, facilitate your close-off access, and thus subtly shaped the geographies, both informational and physical, that we are then able to explore. Amidst such indecipherable proprietary and even exploitative co-optations of the electromagnetic spectrum, we find some communities taking a claim to their own frequencies. While pirate radio was particularly prevalent in the 1960s, we see today around the world a resurgence of low-powered radio, resolutely local stations, often committed to homegrown music and community news that in conflict zones in particular becomes a lifeline. Even those informal broadcasts still rely on the city as an infrastructure. As Matthew Fuller writes of London's tower blocks, quote, the thicker the forest of towers, the more antennae perched above the city, the more the radiant city botched, radiates, end quote. In such botched cities where so much of the world's population lives, pirate radio sounds out the disjunctive, mitchmatch, time slippage, grafting, and hacking that characterize urban survival. The city might be botched and broken up as he describes it, but still it resounds. Improvisatory resounding and listening constitute ways of knowing. Wired or unwired, concentrated or dispersed, smooth or striated, the media city resounds as it has for millennia. So let's jump back a few decades, or sorry, a few millennia, much more than decades. Whereas today, some governing bodies find it more efficient and convenient to delegate the work of listening and decision-making to the machine, allowing an algorithm to seemingly impartially turn through the ethical and moral dimensions of governance. Such matters of computation were born matters of deliberation or decree. Cities have historically provided space, either deliberately or accidentally, for the verbal, that is, articulations of democracy or dictatorship, and the vocalizations and bodily performances of public demonstration. Through archeoacoustics, we can understand how ancient Athens law courts, stoa, and auditoriums cultivated orators' delivery and their audience's engagement. The geometry and materiality of different spaces engendered particular forms of deliberation, styles of delivery, and ways of knowing. Even the ideal city itself often called for a particular infrastructure for the exchange of information. Aristotle prescribed a city that would contain no more people than could hear a herald's voice. Archeologists and classicists in seeking to understand how the Roman Forum functioned acoustically as a space of speech and pageantry have acknowledged that their own ways of knowing these ancient cultures and the ancient's means of engaging with the content of a proclamation or eulogy relied on much more than the verbal script. These were multi-sensory affairs and the Forum and other spaces created a formal tableau that assigned status to different sensory experiences, the smells of bodies and food, the heat of the sun, the visual and textural cacophony of statuary and epigraphy that covered these public artworks and buildings. Despite both ancient and contemporary planners' attempts to create cities as spaces of formal and visual order and acoustic harmony, spaces known through reason and rationality, we also know our cities to be terrains of cacophony and at times productive chaos. Voices of demonstration and collective descent have long punctuated urban soundscapes, transforming streets and squares into resonance chambers for protest, places where counter-epistemologies are produced. The particular material properties of those urban gathering spaces and their codes of operation also inform how collectives form and how voices resound there. Sites of infrastructural convergence are symbolically rich, often reinforcing the political messages of the people demonstrating there. But gatherings often also coalesce in underutilized marginal spaces, terrains vague as Sasuke Sasan argues, threatened and otherwise invisible groups can become in present to themselves there and to others unlike them. Those invisible groups can also make their mark on the city in graphic form, through of course graffiti and as I noted earlier, pigography. Jane Webster notes that individuals at all levels of Roman society, including slaves, made literary and non-linguistic figural inscriptions both painted and carved on the city's surfaces. Such inscriptions have long served to codify architectural functions, proclaim power, mark territory, evoke beliefs, profess allegiances, direct ritual, announce laws and identify those who are welcome and unwelcome. The Islamic world has a particularly rich of epigraphic tradition in a largely an iconic culture that is one that forbids the creation of images of sentient beings, Yasser Tabas explains. Public inscriptions were by necessity one of the primary visual means of political and religious expression and one of the few ways for a dynasty to distinguish its reign from that of its predecessors. The aesthetic properties of those public texts, their color, materiality and form have played a key role in how and what they communicate. These scripts function haptically rather than merely visually. For instance, Taba explains, the fluorated kufic script, sometimes ornamented with gold and glass mosaic, was deliberately ambiguous. It was both boldly visible and incomprehensible, seemingly inclusive and transparent but ultimately obfuscatory. This urban code was encrypted. Those Roman and Islamic inscriptions and early form of urban markup we might say were often encoded on the humblest of geologic substrates. Many came to recognize over the past two years that their immaterial media are resolutely material and that their virtuality and seeming artificiality are dependent upon natural geologic components, copper, coltan, tungsten, silicon. Urban history manifests this entanglement. Mud and its material analogs, clay, stone and brick and concrete have supplied the foundations for our human settlements and forms of symbolic communication and bound together our media, urban, architectural and environmental histories. Some of the first writing surfaces, clay and stone were the same materials used to construct ancient city walls and buildings, whose facades also frequently served as substrates for written texts. The formal properties of those scripts, the shapes they took on their clay or parchment or paper foundations were also in some cases reflected in urban form, how the city molded itself from the materials of the landscape and this is from research of Brinkley Misick who also teaches here at Columbia. And those written documents have always been central to city's operation, their trade, accountancy, governance and culture. Think of all the other print-based forms of urban media that embody urban epistemologies and program the material city, newspapers and their architectural columns, filing cabinets and the enormous file of the skyscraper itself. Early architectural treatises and their prescription of particular repeatable spatial forms, legible building facades and urban forms and libraries full of books. These media represent entire chapters of technological and urban history that we simply don't have time to explore here, but they too profoundly impact the way cities are designed, built, administered, experienced and understood. We've been predicting a paperless era for decades but there's still, but print is still here. Independent bookstores are experiencing a renaissance, our city's host vibrant niche publishing cultures and the exchange and display of print material in public spaces affords many urban dwellers a means of carving out a commons amidst increasing corporatization and platformization. Media technologies, both old and new, analog and digital have to quote again the conference organizers mediated the ways that knowledge, power and culture intersect to create and transform the cities we live in. And even as we focus on the digital and data driven, it's important to recognize that these are data too. That the old and analog are still present and active, they are as Raymond Williams explains, residual, formed in the past but still active in the cultural process, not only and often not at all as an element of the past but as an effective element of the present. We're still talking and listening and reading and writing and printing and filing. Our cities past and present mediate between various manifestations of intelligence, legal codes and copper cables, inscriptions and imaginaries, algorithms and acoustics, public proclamations and system protocols. They're both old and new code and clay. A city that knows its dependence on both ether and ore is better equipped to accommodate temporal entanglement and epistemological plurality. A more capacious historically attuned ways of knowing our cities and of generating and operationalizing urban intelligences produces cities that are ultimately much smarter or we might say wiser than the sum of their intelligent parts. So, thank you. Thank you. Now, now, now. Okay, well, good morning everyone. Thanks to Laura Kergan and to Dare and to Felicity as well for the lovely introduction. So just to begin, how does the internet come to know you? I want to suggest that interrogating this apparently simple question is central to the matter of studying the means and ways of knowing cities being developed today. More precisely, the promise of how network environments are being reimagined as intelligent sensing spaces has as much to do with how cities can be remade into intelligent and self-ordering infrastructures as how the everyday urban actor can newly emerge too as a knowing navigator. One who now empowered with data channels and information feedback loops comes to send self and city distinctly, managing an ever mutating complex of urban systems, spanning transportation, utility, security and economy that can at last be revealed even if only momentarily as verifiably useful and reliable manifestations of urban form. Without a doubt, algorithmic infrastructures have played central roles in this shift. A media theorist Wendy Chun has underscored as much in writing about the relationship of code to crisis events and the increasing reliance on computational code as the privilege means to temporally anticipate and avoid crisis, to automate in other words, an enforcement of safe living. As she writes, quote, if voluntary actions once grounded certain norms now technically in force settings and algorithms do from software keys designed to prevent unauthorized copying to iPhone updates that disable unlock iPhones that disable unlock iPhones and from GPS tracking devices to proxies used to restrict search engine results. Today, moreover, she writes, quote, software codes not only save the future by restricting user action, they also do so by drawing on save data and analysis. They thus seek to free us from danger by reducing the future to the past, that is to a past anticipation of the future, end quote. The temporal work involved in knowing users today in efforts to avert crisis, whether self or externally sourced has not been minor and indeed as privacy right groups have observed, this has involved the plumbing of users' data trails and analysis of social networks, tracking of life events, minor or major or unlike, and a correlation of platform activities to identify patterns alert for potential emergencies and as Chun writes, quote, to cut through the constant stream of information to differentiate the temporarily valuable from the mundane and to offer users a taste of real-time responsibility and empowerment, end quote. Cities, however, also reveal a parallel dimension to the temporal work of code ecologies, demonstrating how network environments have not only reordered the experience of time, event, and crisis, but have also redefined spatial orientation, refiltered geography and the experience of co-location and transformed the condition of feeling lost or even simply feeling left out of place. One doesn't need to be in South Korea's Incheon in the depths of Silicon Valley or in the heart of self-driving car-enabled zones. Discrete sites that prototype aspirational smart city functions to have an interface that reminds you how you never have to feel lost, abandoned, or delinked from what could be relevant proximate sites of valued objects for you again. Google announced just this. When it launched a new version of its Google Maps application and pronounced the end of the era of single standardizable maps and the beginning of the age of the endlessly responsive, personalizable, and adaptive geolocation. As a company enthused, quote, what if we told you that during your lifetime Google could create millions of custom maps, each one just for you? In the past the map was just a map. What if instead you had a map that's unique to you always adapting to the task you want to perform right at this minute, mapping experience that helps you find places, including places you never would have thought to look for, end quote. Not unlike PageRank, Google's online search algorithm that's dominated the market by taking some 200 signal inputs from individual users, everything from where you're logged in to what browser you use, to what you search for and expressed interest in before, Google Maps could now determine who you are, predict your navigation needs, what kinds of sites you'd like and should attend to, and so too, determine which ones you wouldn't. Those should be the privileged, avoided, hidden, or removed from your navigation stream altogether. Google CEO Eric Schmidt professed back then that it got closer to the kind of product experience he believed users were looking for, for Google that can quote, tell them what they should be doing next, end quote. Such forms of information manipulation, redoctoring, and the explicit emission of data as a means of suppressing difference and excluding sites of potential conflict with the projected tastes and profiles of individual users, troubled other internet actors, up where they found their Eli Pariser, famously warned such functions would amplify what he observed to be the quietly polarizing and stratifying effects of filter bubbles, or what he termed to be the re-engineered information ecologies explicitly designed to keep a user locked inside and occupied by their own interests, spaces that function as a form of quote, invisible propaganda, indoctrinating us with our own ideas, amplifying our desire for things that are familiar, and leaving us oblivious, he said, to the territory of the unknown, unquote. The recent series of national election upsets gripping Western democracies now with a specter of fake news, disinformation campaigns, computational propaganda, and the supposedly surprise rise of extreme right parties have turned filter bubbles more recently into objects of global debate. Alongside have been new questions on the effects of big data and whether the explosion of limitless data streams that were promised to bring us closer to a total indexing and supposed interconnecting of reality necessarily worked to amplify the value of critical code signals, critical information signals, or whether they instead remade signal into a new form of attention-demanding noise, a form that could be used to bury and silent signs of other realities for users, including ones that might have defied the soothing comfort of ready-made explanations and the already known preconceptions of the self-empowered navigator. Publicly, social media sites and companies have started to acknowledge the effects of filter bubbles. Mark Zuckerberg's humanitarian manifesto was released not long after Google announced its application of a new feature snippets function in Google as new fact-based content to recalibrate page-ranks custom returns. But while industry giants continue to insist on necessarily play key roles as part of the solution to growing evidence of social polarization, there continued self-references and projections in the case of Facebook, for instance, of acting in the interest of a presumed shared global community so that, quote, our community can have the greatest positive impact on the world, end quote, makes one question whether such companies are able to move beyond a certain key conceit, the one in which they presume they already represent the force best positioned to bring the greatest positive impact on the world. It begs the question that is, if they too are able to move beyond their own deeply built and reinforced filter bubbles and might instead be able to imagine worlds where varied unknowns, unpredicted, but embodied others, and not their own platforms, might instead serve as central connective forces and alternative and creative re-worldings. So for this next section, I wanted to open with a scene from one data-driven startup in Lima, Peru, the Code Academy Laboratoria, that's been celebrated particularly within global tech sectors for transforming professional classes and rapidly retraining women from at-risk zones in Latin America, cities for employment into employment-ready coders in just six months. Code academies like it began making a flurry of headlines less than a decade ago for responding to the reported global crisis of a shortage of coders. Central to this was demonstrating the apparent market viability too of among other things creating accelerated ventures to teach programming in a fraction of the standard time university degrees normally require. Sometimes in as little as two or three months. At a recent graduation ceremony in Lima for one of Laboratoria's latest cohorts, the motto of the company on the power of code to transform both individual students and urban ecologies alike is palpably channeled throughout. The event hosted in a packed auditorium in the manicured tourist district of Miraflores opened with a familiar triumphant soundtrack from Star Wars with text flashing on the screen of how in a galaxy far, far away the students of Laboratoria were called upon to transform code work. It was followed by a virtualized three-minute video of a morphing network graph representing the class's collective activity in their shared GitHub repository, a code-based archive representing all the students' lesson work and code commits over the course of the bootcamp. The video represented in other words six months of collected student activity compressed into a three-minute network visual. The first-minute steady whirls of movements mesmerized the audience, making up, made up largely of students' family members hailing from neighborhoods' hours and in some cases, days worth of travel away from Miraflores's upper middle class district. In the final seconds, the graph suddenly burst into an explosion of rapid whirls that represented the two hackathon events organized for students to work with actors from Laboratoria's network of over 400 regional corporate companies. The students back-to-back all-nighters, hackathons, that is, events of intensified on-site competition with the potential of earning employment now memorable became back to life for students in the flurry of data streams, rapidly stretching and looping out before them. Alongside larger industry actors, data-driven startups like Laboratoria have worked then to prototype the presumed proximate future of ubiquitously connected environments that now empowered with new tools of data analytics and prediction systems can work to optimize results in the artificially compressed space of the urban bootcamp. And while Laboratoria's work turns on reputed capacities for managing thousands of user profiles, to weed out thousands of applicants per cohort and mine information pools for key signals that best ID viable talent and enable the company to rapidly and even automatically respond to individual learners' needs, the company has also been touted for being more than typical Code Academy and for being a startup that's worked to no applicants and in fact the city ecologies where they're based differently. This because since its founding in Lima, Peru, five years ago, all the students have been young women hailing from economically challenged sectors of Lima. In Lima, the first city where the company set up offices, this means students are typically first generation degree learners hailing from the city's most peripheral districts and pueblos jóvenes or new settlement zones where new families migrating from the Andes and remote jungle regions often begin to settle. For such learners, two hour long commutes to classes in a single direction and paths that weave across Lima's varieted traffic and vast zones of cultural and economic divide are routine. And they are only among the first among many layered complexities Laboratoria students are required to manage as their own routines of knowing the city on a daily basis in order to invest in and train for their futures. Mariana Costa Checa, Laboratoria's 29 year old co-founder neatly sums up its work in redefining the city in another way saying quote, what we try to do is go out and find talent where nobody else is looking for it. So we try to identify young women who haven't been able to access quality education or job opportunities because of economic limitations and train them to become the most awesome web developers they can be and then connect them with employment opportunities in the tech sector, end quote. Such work of filtering out talent and the under tapped potential for success in the city is key to what's made Laboratoria a darling in the world of social enterprise today. Earning it in its short five year existence, multiple international awards and tech and development including the 2014 Kunan Prize, the 2016 Google Rise Award, have also run one multi-million dollar backing from venture capital sources from Telefonica to Google. And notably, they earned a two million dollar in our American Development Bank investment to support the growth of new projects in Chile, Mexico, and other areas in Peru. Last year they also gained prominent global visibility as one of only three awardees distinguished at the Global Enterprise Entrepreneurship Summit, an annual conference hosted by the White House and not moderated that year by Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and then US President Barack Obama. All this has additionally accelerated the expansion of Laboratoria startup sites and mounted pressure for faster intake, decision making, and responsiveness within each site to heighten success rates. Having begun in Lima just five years ago, the company expanded to three new cities, Mexico City, Santiago, and Arquipa, Peru and has now slated to open three more offices in Bogotá, Colombia, Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Guadalajara, Mexico for total seven sites with the objective being to expand to some 10,000 graduates per year across the network. This means that it will have to grow graduation rates exponentially 20 times over by the year 2020. At this rate of frenzy's growth, it's hard to believe that the company began just a few short years ago as a project among four friends, half of them graduates from the same elite master's program in the US Ivy League University who first trained a class of just 12 women coders at the beginning. But last summer, in Laboratoria's classroom, a converted floor of a high-rise office building in the middle of Flores, Irmin Marin, one of the Chairs Medical Founders speaks to the cohort of 50 students without any hint of concern of the bright future as they'll face. Even if he may no longer know the names of any of them individually, he can walk nostalgic and channel his own early experiences in tech, assuring the class, great things were soon to be in store for them. Quote, there are thousands of things that are going to happen in your lives from meeting super cool people to being able to travel to definitely having opportunities to learn even more than you've come to learn here. And above all of being able to have control to define your future, end quote. Marine, however, also underscores what appears to be one key shift in the age of big data on the importance of making the right choices for themselves in managing space and time alike. Data-driven conduct after our channels new possibilities of microattentivity to the constant feedback loops and an experience of self as now embedded within fluid interactive spaces even when the self is offline. Here's Marine, for instance, coaching students on the importance of their choices on using time and space. Quote, it's a fact that a person takes about 26 minutes to recover when there's an interruption in work. It's a huge problem because imagine if you're interrupted three or four times, we're talking about an hour or two hours of work that's lost and productivity that you fail to develop. And obviously there are ways to limit that to learn to manage my time well and organize my workspace, end quote. Marine's comments underscore how once consciousness of time and space can get parsed and micro segmented to the tempo of local decisions, data points, and moments and sites of potentially impactful action. Where products of good decision-making might once have required months to identify, under logics of data conduct, now it seems even a minute can be used badly. As Marine advises, self-organizations should start, quote, before starting your workday or maybe even the night before when you have the opportunity to quickly check emails. Since there are already people on things that are happening without you and you don't want them to have to depend on your being there to continue, end quote. But it's this next tip that I find most unexpected. As he reminds students, quote, another important strategy is to use commute time and to go from home to work in a more productive way. And there are a lot of things that can be done, like trying to use that space to be able to have meetings. Since today, a lot of jobs work remotely. So you can have meetings on the phone or use your phone for other digital conferencing that you could do during the commute. For many of us commute times are long, right? More than an hour. So that's time that can be used to accomplish things for work and not wait until you get there. It's just a matter of organizing, end quote. For all laboratories celebrated data management and for all of Marine's own micro attention to time and space down to the optimal use of each minute and optimized use of even small micro spaces. Marine seems to have entirely lost sight of a larger picture. He misses, in fact, what even the most novice first-time visitors to Lima or even just a Google image search might notice. That the micro and public buses that the city is infamous for and which are the most common popular forms of transportation used by the vast majority of Millennians traverse the city. We'd be almost inconceivable spaces for workplace activity in almost any form. When laboratory students reference their typical commute of two hours, this consists of two hours of standing with one hand gripping a handrail for balance and the other gripping a bag of possessions and the other. Bodies of travelers are pressed together side by side and most commuters require an exchange between multiple bus routes, so there's almost never a still uninterrupted stretch of time. And even if a free seat by Miracle were to be encountered to imagine the possibility of a hands-free experience, the cacophony of rush hour traffic, a mix of horns, motors and the insistent haulers of Gombe drivers sparking out routes, we drown out any conversation. Marine's own commute to work consists of a 15-minute walk through the picturesque upper-middle-class neighborhood of Middle Flores to Laboratoria's office space. But I can't help but wonder for as much personal coaching and data collection on students at Laboratoria as Laboratoria dedicates to get to know its coders better, if the blindness to even the basic complexities of life for Laboratoria students isn't something that itself is pre-designed. Could it be that the company's message of the power of individual training empowered by access to the right information and choices around technology can only be sustained so long as it can keep attention away from the real and varied local complexities that differentially shape the lives and daily work experiences of their students? So long in other words, as it can manage its own management of time and attention across space and keep too much care from accruing around the lives and diverse lived experiences of individual students who enter at their classroom. I obviously don't mean to answer that in the last minute I have here. My means of closing, I do wanna underscore how powerfully and under-sullied narrative of transformation through code can operate and how much it can be used to speak in the interests of the future of city and user alike. At least as much as the work of connecting environments to self-manage internal systems as a privilege means and measure of the knowing city then is perhaps the work done at once to discount and filter out information pools, to unknown and omit awareness of key aspects of human experience but here now virtuously pursued as necessary and even indispensable means of managing the urgent demands of scale, space and speed. Thanks. Well thank you Laura and Dare and Felicity for the beautiful intro. So I'm gonna go really fast as usual and also probably this is more about not knowing than knowing a whole lot but I'm really interested in uncertainty and the forms of kinda, the epistemologies of speculation that are currently kind of transforming environments so I'll just get going. And people can also ask me cause I'm working at a lot of the sites that I'm showing you but I'm not gonna necessarily talk about them. So from the tailings of large open pit mines to the omnipresent data centers where they're seeming infinitive data to the over concentration of capital in the hands of the few we appear to be in an age of dense accumulation filling the weight of what once seemed so light. The internet and information as all the speakers coming before me have become concrete literally utilizing the sand and materials of our earth to transmit data in a manner not so different than constructing roads and buildings. So much weight makes this dream of being plastic, light, mobile, modulatory, capable of bearing these materialities while continuing to sustain the technical and economic fantasies of eternal growth and novel change. It's perhaps a little surprise then that since the 1970s it is the word resilience and here's a bunch of population derivation curves from a famous article by C.S. Holling that kind of really introduced resilience into eco environmental management. This has become the figure of hope for planners, entrepreneurs, policy makers and environmentalists alike. Resilience is a system's ability to absorb shock and continue functioning. The 1970s also marked the rise of another myth, reality that of finance capital and derivation. The derivative pricing equation has a lot of nature in it. It's basically a random walk over imposed with a normal curve and that's supposed to be those are supposed to be little bouncing bubbles for some reason today, it's not bouncing. And actually one of the interesting things about this talk is you can see a lot of little equations and funky really badly made graphics all could help me with. But actually part of it hints to a representational problem that I'm actually not sure how you actually show some of these phenomena and even what it would mean to visualize or sense and counter with some of these infrastructures. So this equation basically allows you to adjust time to bet on uncertainty so you can basically make bet at randomly organized times and set arbitrary prices that actually ever having to know what actually happens to the underlying security. So finance is often presumed to be feather light and mobile and attached to earthly matters while financial instruments are often argued to be detached from social and material processes that make commodities understood as money making more money as the recent 2008 crisis demonstrated nothing could be further from the truth. Derivatives are financial instruments that allow a certain amount of something, mortgages, furniture, whatever to be traded at some point in the future on agreed upon price. One can also for example also bet on the cancellation of an order or some other event changing the future price the underlying commodity or security and so forth. The result is the size of the derivatives market far overshadows the actual world's gross domestic product by now exceeding the world's GDP by 20 times. These markets have grown exponentially by 25% per year over the last 25 years. So they're the largest economy on earth. What then is the relationship between speculation and resilience and extraction? How might we think together the seeming incommensurability of the material weight and geological timeliness of our earthly actions with the speed and mobility of globalized computational and machine-traded capital? And what does knowing even mean in a world of machine-traded data ungrounded in representing any final endpoint or in representation perhaps at all? These questions emerge for me quite risterly in the course of doing fieldwork on the topic of logistics in smart cities. Anyone who knows me knows Songdo and has seen this picture. I became concerned with the forms of speculation and hope to continue to facilitate the ongoing penetration of computation, both in terms of smart cities and grids, logistical systems, mining. I've been hanging out these gold mines and melartic that are also smart. You might be surprised to hear about and of course smart finance. And what's interested me in going to all these places that are also smart is how we're being pessimistically computationally optimistic. So just to offer a little case study, here's the marketing for Songdo, pretty cliche standard stuff. So on one hand we have the unspoken admission, right, of an environmental or ecological disaster, some sort of crisis that's coming in terms of environmentalism. So all this ubiquitous computing is gonna be green, it's gonna be sustainable, it's gonna be resilient. And that greenness is accompanied with a kind of faith of unending financial and economic growth. So we've ended up with this kind of strange little equation and part of my method is I make up all these funny equations but they're parts of trying to just think about how to map out these phenomena that are operating together where we have bandwidth as in rates of bits transmitted usually over some fiber optic cable equals resilience has come to equal life itself. And in fact there's another few set of little equations that I've sort of invented and I'm gonna talk about today which is how has extraction in all its many derivative forms including mining plus resilience usually equated with smartness plus a bit of speculation come to equal hopefulness. The end of the world has never looked better or more profitable. And so this phenomenon kind of calling resilient hope and I'm actually quite desperately concerned with both how to map and also intervene in its forms of violence. So essentially one of the other things that interests me though in this endless hopefulness is the way that the end never seems to arrive. So despite the admission of global warming in all these crisis there doesn't actually when asked about cities like Songdo that are supposedly they're actually grafted out of the South China Sea and are like under sea level and are financially not like not doing very well at the time when people ask like so if this fails the engineers at Cisco as well as the developers at Gale would say it's just a testing ground and experiment experimental repeatable prototype. In fact version 2.0 is already being rolled out in Malaysia and Ecuador. And one of the things that has come to interest me is how this concept of test bed and time management mirrors the forms of derivation that are incorporated into things like the black skulls derivative pricing equation so that, I'm trying to get this to, I want, I want, okay. So for whatever reason they won't bounce. But anyway, upon this devolatility how these forms of derivation and bedding kind of mirror our forms of design. So we swap, derive and circulate while we demo prototype and version and our design and architecture fields. And in the course of this talk I'm gonna talk about three operations that I think underpin this resilient hopefulness that marries this sort of process of swapping and deriving that mirrors the architectural and design processes that we go which are hoping, demoing and deriving. And so I'm gonna start, so in order to do this I'm gonna talk about two case studies from my work one from India in Kolkata in Chilaguri and Kolkata in West Bengal, Foothills of the Himalayas and one from New York City that you're all quite familiar with but I like to show things people know. So while seemingly desperate I think thinking through them will help us think through some of this condition and what's at stake in it. So in March of 2016 I went to West Bengal to investigate both urban development in Kolkata and how Chinese capital is reformulating territory. And for some reason nothing is, okay. And what you're seeing here is a scene of actually bouldering at the base in Chilaguri at the base of, it's in the Himalayan flood panes where people are basically removing and extracting rock and sand for concrete. Some 500 kilometers south is the city of Rajarat in Kolkata which you're seeing here. It was supposedly going to be designated as a smart city but it never finally got to designation and in fact most of the infrastructure is not, it was never completed like there's no water hookups, there's, it's not even clear that the fiber optic in the Telcom infrastructure has been hooked in. However, none of this really matters because all of it is heavily leveraged and credit debt swapped and most of it is being bought over by foreign investment and kind of flipped over. The result of this development even though much of it's empty is however the dispossession of some 30,000 people end up in these informal settlements or under working under deplorable conditions at the Kolkata port. And of course in order to construct these complexes demands a whole lot of concrete which continues to drive the annihilation basically of the Himalayan flood plans at which point the rivers are basically sinking and this is threatening the entire river system and the Ganga throughout India and Bangladesh. So I'm trying to think about this form of speculation in relation to scenes of ever, ever greater hopefulness. So mirroring these scenes of graphic territorial scale violence or another set of marketing technological and logistical endeavors that take part in a positive speculation of precarity and environmental destruction. So speaking of liquidity and rising waters in particular let's recall the recent economic crisis of 2008 I guess not so recent any longer. And not long after one of the more astounding demonstrations of hopeful speculation focused on the future devastation of New York City that rising currents exhibit at New York's Museum of Modern Art took place and incidentally moments before the real hurricane Sandy hits. One of the most popular projects exhibited was Oyster Texture by Karl Arif which I believe is now actually being implemented off of Staten Island. The project basically envisioned recruiting Oyster beds as sort of nature against nature and nature with lots of little scare quotes here to kind of defend the city against these rising waters as well as perhaps to clean the water. The very recruitment of our and other organisms body for and as infrastructure poses historically situated questions about what makes this new mode of managing speculation populations and futurity novel and how these forms of speculation are related to the discourse of resilience in this case making Manhattan resilient to climate change. The irony of course is then serving the infrastructures that Oyster slowly die off as a result of their dirty and unhospitable environments and this is even actually by design. And right now the Oysters in general are being threatened simply due to rising water acidity due to CO2 and changes in temperature. So the state of being used to death perhaps even goes beyond the terms often invoked to critique new liberalism such as extraction and subsumption. I'm trying to think about that. This death however is beautifully rendered. So what I'm concerned with is not the quality of the project which actually could be very, very good but actually the aesthetics that are accompanying this sort of envisioning of this negative future. And in fact this feature is being most definitely hopefully speculated. The opening statements of the actual contemporary arts of the catalog are actually bountifully optimistic. So MoMA and PS1 joined forces to address one of the most urgent challenges facing the nation's largest city sea level rise resulting from global climate change. Though the national debate on infrastructures currently focused on shovel ready projects will stimulate the economy. We now have an important opportunity to foster new research and fresh thinking about the use of New York City's harbor and coastline and as in past economic recessions construction has slowed dramatically in much of the city's remarkable pool of architectural talent is available to focus on innovation which is to say they're unemployed. I love that. And another project that is being shown behind me and the same exhibit New York City Bay and Architects repeats this theme of destruction made visible and aesthetically pleasing with the proposal for new zoning strategies and the literal use of bottom up design strategies such as placing flotation devices on the bottom of buildings and seawalls. The video depicts a storm surge and narrates by way of architectural intervention our survival. As the waters rise new real estate and agriculture opportunities are offered when the big storm finally hits we see individuals. This is great. Here comes the surge. We're growing nice things. Everything's wonderful when people commonly get on top and get airlifted out and there isn't even any wind. It's amazing. Anyway it all looks rather pleasant. However in and there's indeed a fetish for this ruin but I have to say in lieu of both the historical traces of things like Katrina and New Orleans as well as the current situations in Houston and Puerto Rico and much of the world one can't help but ask who's being left behind right under these conditions. So the issue is not per se that some of these architecture and design projects aren't great but it's a question about visualization and actually the encounter with what should be a devastating event right. This brings me to this question. So we have this combined sort of lust for ruins if we will. Here's a tape modern example of how much we like it in Detroit. With the emergence of resilience. So it ties these two things together this Manhattan scene and this Kolkata scene. On the one hand is finance obviously but on the other hand there's a notion of ecology and environment that substantiates these ideas. A concept that we can destroy things in the present and withstand the pain. So resilience has a particular logic. It's not about a future that is better but rather about an ecology that can absorb constant shocks while maintaining its functionality and organization here. It speaks to Anita's work and hopefully Wendy's talk later. So in following the work of Bruce Braun and Stephanie Wakefield it is a state of permanent management without ideas of progress change or improvement. I'm interested in how it's married to certain forms of speculation and both of these are technologies right of managing time in a very particular way. The irony of course as I already mentioned is that all this hopelessness and crisis is actually met with this kind of hopeful speculation. Usually three new forms of temporal management and finance and technology. So real estate speculation can continue to occur on new silk roads and never occupied smart developments even as the Himalayan flood plains are destroyed because in theory the end never arrives but it's simply delayed or more appropriately derived. So resilience plays an important point a thing in many fields. The understanding of resilience that is most crucial to my discussion today and to large scale planning projects and contemporary discourse was first forced in ecology during the 1970s especially in the work of C.S. Holling who established a key distinction between stability and resilience. So the key thing is in his new formulation stability does not equal resilience. This breaks from previous kind of cybernetic understandings of environment as homeostatic or maintaining equilibrium. Working from a systems perspective and interested in the questions of how humans could best manage elements of ecosystems that were of commercial interests such as salmon, wood, et cetera. Holling developed the concept of resilience to contest the premise the ecosystems were most healthy when they returned quickly to an equilibrium state after being disturbed. He called this return to a state of equilibrium stability but argued that stable systems were actually often unable to compensate for significant and swift environmental changes. And that in fact, most systems in nature are not stable. They're not, they don't have equilibrium oriented. As Holling's put it and I quote the stability view of ecosystem management emphasizes equilibrium, the maintenance of a predictable world. So one of the questions here is a new form, a new epistemology of not knowing of non-prediction and the harvesting of nature's excess production with as little fluctuation as possible. In short, Holling argued that stability was often the inverse of resilience. Resilient systems might have multiple states and could change while maintaining vital processes just like our little random molecules that one day will. We'll move. But instead of worrying about preserving individual animals or lives, then resilience upper managers should concentrate on preserving vital processes. So the focus moves away from preserving lives or individual numbers to preserving processes. Furthermore, a fact now clear when you look at strategies to preserve vital systems security, for example. So resilience comes to mean not necessarily the preservation of individual lives but the preservation of operations and processes. So resilience equals operability and liquidity. A lot of change and a lot of circulation. Perhaps this is nowhere best evoked than in Manhattan. This is Manhattan during the real hurricane Sandy. Does everyone know what that one gleaming building is? Goldman Sachs. Someone did the resilience planning. So the system might go down but the vital processes are operating, unfortunately. So what's really key for us though is there's also a question of knowledge. This is a new epistemology of ignorance. The concept of resilience is enabled by a management approach to ecosystems that would flow, as he said. The following for this would be, this is Holling's words, not the presumption of sufficient knowledge but the recognition of ignorance. Not the assumption that future events are expected but that they will be unexpected. So we have a new and perhaps Donald Rumsfeld put it best. They're known unknowns, they're known unknowns. They're known knowns, they're known unknowns and they're unknowns unknowns and today we just don't know. And ignorance has become a virtue to be instated within our concepts to environment and finance and economy. So contemporary planning and finance, of course, take these little random things as an all-purpose epistemology in value. These fields posit resilience as a general strategy if you're managing uncertainty without endpoint while presuming our world is so complex and unexpected that events are indeed the norm. And of course this also signifies the collapse between emergence and emergency. These financial instruments and random walks bet on right volatility in and of itself as a virtue and as a fact. So in this sense the term operates in the interest of producing a world where any change can be technically managed and assimilated while maintaining the ongoing survival of the system even at the cost of its particular components be they individuals, ecosystems or species coming back to our example of Goldman Sachs which is perfect. So this is operation one. So we have hoping, we have resilience and now we have demoing. How do we manage these temporalities in a ways that that end just never seems to show up so we can keep betting on it. Such logics as I mentioned pervade the landscape of large scale computational environments and of course there's a close link to computing here. So returning to the initial example of the imagined never realized high bandwidth smart city of Songdo. Every present state of the smart cities understood as a demo or prototype of a future smart city. Every operation is understood in terms of testing and updating a testing ground. An example, an experimental prototype, repeatable. As a consequence there's never a finished product but rather infinitely replicatable yet always preliminary versions of these cities around the globe that can infinitely basically like never fail because they're never realized and they never really, they're sort of in the subspace. This idea of the infrastructures demo avoids any actual questions of whether this construction impacts the planet, labor or its inhabitants and opens the door to simulate any difficulty or challenge into the next version by way of deferral and derivation. This design logic allows the management and negotiation of risks through swapping, driving and circulating from an imagined origin in a manner that avoids as I said ever having to finally take a counter or take responsibility and the temporality of these things is quite complex. Since we have a random walk assigned to a normal curve you essentially both have a sort of amnesic past that you're using its data anyway but without any historical temporality while you're constantly shorting your bets right on the future. This evasion of encounter with the world happens because the credit has already been swapped or the version already rendered obsolete so that we're always in the next generation mining both of data and minerals before anyone can take time to evaluate the implications. If a prototype fails, which is to say found ecologically or economically suboptimal whatever that might mean since you're only comparing it to yourself or unresilient then this failure doesn't provoke a wide scale structural change in approach the next developments already been planned but rather a modulation of current strategy and assimilation of the adverse event or any form of resistance into the next model while maintaining the basic operation of the ecology or the system within the thing. So derivation and resilience are thus married the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 might serve as exemplar from the logic of the derivative there was no crisis and in fact nothing changed and what is true of finance also often holds today for urban planning and development which brings us to our final last few minutes of deriving. So as I said this concept of resilience is married to a concept of a future that's always a version perhaps a derivative replica of another moment. As Melinda Cooper has noted in discussing weather futures contemporary markets have now produced derivatives they're literally producing value from betting on adverse and unpredictable events in relation to one another rather than as discrete occurrences with lived impacts. So as she says we're traditional derivative contracts traded the future prices of commodities and financial derivatives trades in financial derivatives now trade in futures of futures. You can bet two futures right against each other without ever having to find out what those futures you know what actually happens turning promise itself into means and ends of accumulation so kind of consuming the future into these highly often nanosecond trades in the present time here becomes not a relationship to the spatial circulation of goods labor and commodity but a thing in itself and non-historical but also non-geological or environmental time is time is a pure ecology of self reference. The equation she implies is somewhat new. She argues that if before at least since the 19th century and we must recall that derivatives do come out of colonialism and the slave trade and one of the interesting questions in terms of how do we know our infrastructures and our equations is also how do we produce temporalities and times around these techniques in the present. So derivatives emerge out of the Dutch and British East India company and the slave trades that emerge but Cooper's arguing that if before in the previous histories of insurance and derivation industries value now became some sort of value in the future and time equals to money now we have like a new equation where we basically get dollars out of raw changes in time and speculation no longer is equivalent to prediction so we have no representation of the final endpoint we are making bets and extracting and circulating without it. The future is not one that can be predicted it doesn't rely it uses past data without necessarily using it to predict future action. So financial markets so therefore financial markets hedge bets derivatives can be traded to make profits as I said long before we know the end points of their investments and in fact those who repackage and circulate risks as again with mortgage markets but also with markets and insurance and weather and just about everything else are betting on agglomerations of dispersed risks in futures not on the relationship between the measure substance or stored value in the commodity and the future price. This provokes new practices most significantly around measurements so what do we measure when we're looking at these markets since time no longer equals money rather money drives from time. And as I mentioned it's speculative not. So this logic assumes physical form through engineering and design and the production of test beds, demos and prototypes speculation on a future that's always multiple and aesthetic perhaps that is why the love of animation and re-narration of disaster and all these architectural projects the constant reminder that change itself is a medium for speculation. If the Cold War was about nuclear testing and simulation as a means to avoid the unthinkable yet nonetheless quite predictable nuclear war and end of the world the formula has now changed. This distinction is best summarized in the distinction in oh look finally between it showed up that was supposed to be bouncing the whole time. First laid out in 1920s by economist Frank Knight going tonight uncertainty unlike risk has no clearly defined end points or values offers no clear cut terminal events. What follows is that the test no longer serves as a simulation of life but rather makes human life itself an experiment for technological futures. This uncertainty it beds itself in our technologies both of architecture and of finance. Thus in financial markets as I said we swap drive and leverage never fully accounting for risks in the hope that circulation will defer any need to actually represent or confront it and in infrastructure and engineering we do exactly the same. We prototype develop and demo literally at now urban and perhaps planetary scale in fact yes planetary scales whether in building management systems or creating smart infrastructure which leaves us with a final little equation that I invented which is resilience is now equal changes in actual life kind of assessed by this demo time. So it makes variation in life itself the source of derivative values that it therefore that is constantly extracting. This condition and it's extreme violence brings us back to the condition in Shiliguri now all the videos are over again. So as future risks transformed into uncertainty high technology and particularly as I said smart and ubiquitous computing infrastructures become the language and practice to imagine our future. A future that is becoming increasingly unbearable which brings me to contemplate the ethical and political implications of a world where derivation extraction and resilience are mannered in a manner that has turned the planet and all its forms of life into a massive medium for the development of smart technologies. So the question is what other imaginaries or genealogies can we use how can we interrupt this form. This demands a change of tense and design in politics but also a real question about what it means to have politics and ethics and aesthetics of uncertainty itself. What does it mean? What forms how do we negotiate this new plus demology of uncertainty that in fact dominates our financial and infrastructural and computational infrastructures. So one thing I've been thinking about a lot of course is time itself. How do we create different forms of time, different forms of encounter with the alternative histories that might embed themselves within these algorithms and derivations. I've been thinking about different types of projects that attempt to create different temporalities within spatial and urban forms but I've also been trying to learn from with any ecology how do we actually kind of learn or take about our own systems and how what kind of modes do we have about creating experience around them. So from ecology itself we learn that resilience actually does not equal optimization. The most optimal system is often the least resilient. It can't modify itself. I've also been thinking with people like Anna Tsing about in her woods and mushrooms about like what it means to have care and different forms of cultivating ecology in life but also I've been thinking about uncertainty. Uncertainty is a weapon or weapon tactic for many sides. So today for example environmentalists working against things like the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Pipeline in Canada are tying to change credit ratings and risk evaluations on pipelines or change Canadian bond rating as a mode of also intervening or stopping projects. There's a question also of how one both reveals the uncertainties that are part of life as well as hiding of course your own data from the LDS corporations that exist. And there's many other things I could talk. So I'm going to end there about thinking about how we can think about different forms of temporality and different forms of experimentation that are not merely those of demos and derivation. So I'll end there. Thanks. That's a great way to hope people finish responding amongst themselves. Okay, so we should get going. We're a little over time but we still have 10 or 15 minutes for a discussion and but I did, you know, I framed a couple of somewhat broader questions to pose and given the time constraints I might actually put them both on the table and you can choose to respond to one or the other in a way actually ended on a question that I did want to pose and so we can maybe work around that. But first in a way a question of methodology one that's really motivated by the issue of how information technologies or their effects touch down differently or unevenly in the world, geographically, materially, et cetera. And so Anita's paper had a case study or focus through the laboratory in Peru and the way in which the buses came in to interrupt the type of imaginary of the organizers of that startup to test its sort of limits or mark its limits but also its cynicism. And people also touch down on a series of examples on though and in Calcutta albeit in a somewhat different way and your paper in a way worked in a very different register tracing sort of thematics across a much broader historical and geographical framework in trying to identify a set of issues. So I just wanted to ask firstly, should you wish to? If you wanted to talk a bit about how you think this relationship between the broader claims of the paper and the types of evidence or archives that you draw from in order to make those arguments or what you're thinking about in terms of what the case studies do, how they either propel or also at times might trouble your own arguments, I'm just trying to get you to sort of unpack a little bit of that relationship. And I'm doing so to ask certainly how arguments migrate from one place to another or they don't or what are the sort of limit conditions of that type of work or how do we understand at times a somewhat paradoxical relations between the tendencies of communication technologies to draw disparate elements and places together and we saw that in many of the presentations. Yeah, this is a sort of key ideology of communication technologies that they bring people together. And yeah, this refrains a free flow of information, global villages, connectivity, even of access, access to tools. So I'm wondering how we think the relationship between these types of ideologies and the very particular ways they touch down, as I mentioned, in different cultures and different economic contexts or otherwise sort of encounter the complexities of the world, like what does that do or how do you attend to engage, refuse that? So it's a history theory question to some degree. And the other thing I wanted to table we go to something like this, it's a question about how to think the political tendencies or political ambivalences of the technologies at work in the paper and again, their impact upon things urban, including subjects. And it is a, I mean, we could see it as a way of asking a sort of older question about technological determinism or causality and how to read these relations. But so I guess my question would go this way, how I'm just asking you to unpack some of the ambivalences or potential instabilities at play just to de-sublimate or foreground these parts of your papers and coming from your abstract, you need to, you spoke to the question of dissimulation of amplifying and selecting and of course these work very differently depending on who is doing the dissimulation or amplifying or selecting or do they not? I mean, I guess that's one of the struggles that the laboratory brings up, yeah, who is selecting, who is actually selecting if these women who are coding, what type of agency do they have in this framework? Or in our case, there's lots of different ambivalences but certainly one of them would be something like, you know, how do you think this very cynical mobilization of fear about these so-called crises and our need to actually attend to them? Yeah, and again, you began to address that towards the very end, complicated of course by the trope of the futurity itself opening onto the unknown and the ways in which Hollings complicated that but I, I guess in your case, you know, one thing that really struck me is how you engage with architecture as a field, which almost on the sort of ontological level asks about futures, yeah, about better futures often but the very act of architecture is to make a project to project forward, to think in the future regardless of our ability to know that. So when you ask the question of a discipline that's always, always thinking into these unknown futures how does that, you know, complicate your argument or does it not? So again, just a question about how to what degree the power relations at play or even some of the semantic aspects that your papers address, you know, reversible in the sense of the apparatus at play allowing for different types of shifting or switching and, you know, as we know, one reason that it becomes in, and Shannon and I have this little note here about the democracy or dictatorship that you alluded to in the midst of thinking about radios, use and I think this would be one of the key tropes but, you know, one reason of course becomes important to identify these types of ambivalences at work or embedded within in technologies is that they suggest that they can be put to work or function differently, yeah, that we should also be asking what else can these technologies do? You know, can they produce a type of counter strategy or, you know, be made to work against their intended function and so in arts case also I would say, you know, you might ask the question not of how do you produce a different temporality but how do you occupy the temporality of finance capital? You know, how do you think that embedded there or inherent to that is the answer to how one would update political strategies, yeah, so it would not be the strike or the refusal, it would be the recoding or so, yeah, I'm just, I would ask you to think about the ambivalent position that, you know, you're put in vis-a-vis these, these types of cynicism and operations so, anyway, two questions, one about historical method, how things touch down, how you use case studies in regard to the larger questions but the other, what, yeah, what's at stake? What's motivating the recognition of ambivalences at work in the case studies you're looking at? What's the ambition sort of underlying your, yeah, yeah. Okay, so we can start anywhere, whoever. I think I can maybe tackle those briefly, I hope, because we don't have much time maybe wanna open up to you as well, but I think even though archeology is looking at the deep past or even the recent past, it's still very much about futures because it's the nationalist enterprise in many cases where countries will marshal archeology to essentially establish a tradition that you will then create your future in line with and particularly it's not also divorced from our irrelevant to contemporary technologies because it's particularly if you look at digital archeology, the use of kind of routers and 3D printers, et cetera, kind of marshaling crowdsourced data, sending people with cell phones into conflict zones to kind of three to capture all sides of an at-risk monument, for instance, and then using 3D printers to recreate it as was the case with the Palmyra Arch, which you might know traveled the world, stopped at the Venice architecture Biennale as kind of a piece of mass mediated kind of spectacle itself. So I think that the deep past is very much integrated with futures, shaping futures. And in regard to the archive of archeology, I guess you could say, I think it's really related to the issues of risk and sustainability that Arete talked about because you look at the unevenness of the record, the archeological and the archival record. One of the reasons that it is that certain regions of the world have a kind of impoverished record is because they are in sites of risk and resilience, coastal zones, for instance, places of conflict, places of looting, for instance. So the ability to kind of marshal the archeological record to project a future is impoverished in those cases. And I think this is maybe where speculation is also integrated because I'm looking at the types of things that don't readily lend themselves to repicing or recreation through clearly defined archeological artifacts, particularly if you're thinking about how sensory history happened. You can't look at a photograph or you can't look at, it is involved speculation. There's speculative method and looking at kind of the dimensions, the materiality of a space and imagining how smell and taste and sound would have reverberated in those places, which are very much a part of how politics is enacted. So I think that speculation and time and even the deep past are all kind of integrated into the archeological space itself. For me, on ethnography and ethnographic method, so I mean it's clearly to kind of bring back in the human element and the human voice. So many of our accounts of how big data works and the kind of politics and operations of big data are forms of accounting that eviscerate any kind of human agency and a kind of narration of human presence and responsibility. And if we are going to get to the kind of ethics of care that I think some of the work of people in this room and then also Shannon are gesturing towards, it really does require a kind of re-emphasis and a kind of focus back on the way human actors are behind, are making key decisions and are just sort of subject to this kind of windfall of this changing, constantly mutating ecology and just responsive as opposed to actually, exactly, which also gets kind of second question of how it matters who's behind the filtering. And for sure, I mean for a site like Labradoria, how do you get outside of this kind of thick, thick filter bubble at Silicon Valleyites are creating around themselves in collaboration with a whole other networked ecology. I mean, Labradoria is not exactly Silicon Valley and yet it echoes and re-performs and then reinstantiates that within a particular kind of site as a heroic narrative, one that gets replicated and reinstantiated over and over again because it looks so deeply appealing. But it matters, obviously, that it's that kind of, that's them doing the filtering. So again, when Mark Zuckerberg is like, we are, the kind of best global community, it's not unlike the way Labradoria is performing in its ceremonies and the way it organizes its hackathons, this way of continuously looking inward and refusing to look outward, such that even the most basic matter of fact things, how everyone else is moving around the city like can get ignored. And it really is, I mean, I don't think, the Labradoria kids are, they're not stupid. I mean, they are really, they are clearly hyperactive, they don't sleep, super dynamic, managing reams and reams of different kinds of ecologies and different networks of actors. But of course, in order to do that, they have to kind of create these sorts of ignorance kinds of swaps, you know, sites, spaces and sites because it can't possibly be held responsible and accountable for the thing that is right in front of them. They can't actually enact the real politics of care that they promised to do. So how do we get outside that? We can, I mean, so, and just a very quick note is, I mean, even within the site of Labradoria themselves, part of the reason why it works is not because of data-driven responsiveness from the company itself. I mean, when you watch the kind of enactment of how it is at a classroom of 50 girls who are from backgrounds where a CS101 class would never look like that, not at my university at the very least. But the kinds of dynamics of care, of collaboration that they create amongst themselves, whether it's even just bringing in snacks, selling lunch to each other for something like, you know, three soles, two soles, which is like 60 cents, which makes it much, much more affordable than what you would normally get for lunch, you know, in the Minoflates district. I mean, those are the kinds of, bringing in blankets and like pillows for each other, braiding each other's hair. I mean, it's that kind of thing that creates a different kind of politic of affinity that is part of the under-narrated and divisibilized kind of functioning of that space. It's not because of the data-driven ecologies. Yeah. All right, you have one minute. Okay. I think I spoke enough. You can ask me later. I understood one really interesting, two things really interested me about your question, which is one I think, a lot of ways of getting a kind of critical question around scale, around, oh, sorry, around scale, but how we're kind of negotiating different scales of phenomena, both temporally and spatially, and where we can use those with or together in some sort of diverse way to do things. And then the other thing, like for me, I would say like I'm actually really obsessed with this question of what it means to experiment or like alternative forms of speculative practice, which really prompts me to say like, well, we should have that conversation about architecture and like what forms of futurity are being engendered and how closely or non-closely they marry onto the forms of financialization and other technical infrastructures. So for me, a lot of these case studies are a lot about more like the instruments or tools and really shoddy ethnographer and they're actually totally probably irresponsible. And that's a real question about infrastructural fetishism and like porn, when you go to all these, you know there's a lot of infrastructure porn. And I'm laughing about it, but it's also like a serious ethical and moral question that we have to take up in terms of our own work. And in general, the structure of the research studio, which is always kind of crashing into some site pretty fast and doing something. So that's what I'm gonna say is that I'm kind of interested in that and I use these a lot of times as drivers to be producing these equations or relations that help me put together like histories of ecology and environmentalism and cybernetics with histories of financialization. Like that these allow me to draw together these disparate worlds of architectural and design and practice technical infrastructures and other histories of habitat environment. They kind of just work like that. I've actually been given clearance to take one question from the audience. So get your hands up quickly. Okay, is that Paul? Hi, I'm Brennan O'Rear. I was involved in some smart city design in India in 2014, 2015. And one thing I noticed about panels and around the table in those discussions is oftentimes I'd say almost always everyone was presenting as male. And here everyone at this panel, male, right? And here I see the reverse. So I'm wondering whether and how gender might inflect the disparities you see between smart city conference, perhaps an anti-smart city conference. It's mega production and reproduction, closely married. I have to intervene. Laura's shipping in there. So, I'm gonna have to clear the glass. If anyone doesn't, if no one wants to reply, we can go get coffee. Okay, thank you. That's the vote, yeah. Thank you to the speakers, just to underscore. Thank you.