Urbanizing Technology: The Mobility Complex : Audi Urban Future Initiative

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Urbanizing Technology: The Mobility Complex

At the Audi Urban Future Summit on September 12 in Frankfurt / Main, AUDI AG Chairman of the Board of Management Rupert Stadler announced funding for the academic research project “Urbanizing Technology: The Mobility Complex”, to be conducted at Columbia University in New York. Renowned economist and sociologist Saskia Sassen will be directing the project at the Department of Sociology. Sassen is Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia and a member of the University’s Committee on Global Thought.
Through its support for this research project, the Audi Urban Future Initiative is providing an active impulse to the global discourse on this social issue.

URBANIZING TECHNOLOGY: WHEN THE CITY TALKS BACK

Ours is a time when cities have become a key space for large-scale adoption of new technologies. Most of these technologies are not necessarily developed with the urban environment in mind. My aim in writing this text is to experiment with the notion that under these conditions, it becomes critical to urbanize at least some of these technologies. What might it mean to urbanize technology? Indeed, what might it mean to urbanize the car, a technology that is not urban in itself, yet interacts intensively with urban space? The car is, after all, a technology that is designed to close long distances – such as those between suburbs, neighborhoods, and more distant destinations
– not for moving at a crawl through crowded city centers.

One core assumption in my work on urbanizing technology is that the specific technical capabilities of interactive technologies realize their utility value through ecologies that include more than just the technical: They also include the logics of users, which can diverge significantly from the engineer’s logic. This divergence can become particularly intense – and especially variable – in the case of cities, given the multiple socioeconomic and cultural worlds and subject -
ivities they encompass. The city, a complex mix of physical and social components, can transform technologies, make them its own – making it arguably the ultimate “hacker” of complex technological systems, if we understand hacking here in its original sense, as entering or altering a closed technical system.

One discussion of this mix of conditions can be found in a short piece with a self-explanatory title: “Talking back to your intelligent city.”¹ Excessively closed technical systems, such as those that can develop in the case of the technologies being used in intelligent cities, are at high risk of obsolescence precisely because they generally lack the flexibility to register the way users might keep diverging from the engineers’ intentions – there is not much of a feedback loop beyond pre-programmed options. The greater the number of this type of intelligent systems are installed in a city, the more the city itself is at risk of becoming obsolete.

Historically, I find that it is the combination of incompleteness and complexity of major cities that has enabled them to outlive enterprises, kingdoms, and nation-states. And it is the rather closed formal systems at the heart of the latter that have made them rigid and more susceptible to disintegration. One implication of this development is that the new trend toward installing a growing range of closed, controlled intelligent systems in cities puts those cities at risk of becoming obsolete themselves when the technologies become obsolete. The DNA of the city is more akin to open source technology. An approach that takes this factor into account would enable interactions between the technology and the user beyond those already pre-programmed within these systems.²

In my work I find the city is one window into understanding successful technological inno- vations for urban systems and urban life. When it comes to what it might mean to urbanize the car, we have more questions than answers at this stage. One way to urbanize the car is the development of advanced mobility spaces. A whole host of new technologies are already fostering the creation of mobility spaces that can alter the role of the car. In an advanced mobility complex, the car might become a mere people-carrier, with much of the work toward advanced technical and engineering innovations going into the larger mobility complex. It could work along the same lines as the now-famous system of bicycles in Paris: full availability in the city center, no proprietary claims by users. It would mean much of the capacity that is currently embedded in the car would shift to the mobility space. This in itself represents a complex engineering and regulatory challenge.

There are challenges in getting to the heart of the tension between cities as complex but incomplete systems and the proliferation of intelligent systems being installed in the city. It requires not only understanding the features of cities, but also “seeing” the issue as if one were a city. Seeing like a city means juggling the diversity of elements that constitute urban space, which inevitably means a multiperspective approach. The city is a

generous partner in this work: it offers a lens into larger realities, many non-urban, that may now have an urban moment in their trajectories. This type of analysis keeps us from simply being technologists. It helps us factor in the friction and obstacles facing even the most advanced technologies when it comes to implementing technologies in urban environments.

One critical factor in this type of analysis is that the car, the airplane, the computer, the program, and more, each delivers its utility through a larger assemblage of diverse elements. The latter involves multiple features not only of, for instance, the car itself (various technologies, engineering advances, the physics of materials), but also of the larger setting (habits, systems of ownership, changes in work and family life, etc.). Let me venture a hypothesis: it is this that has given the car its longevity and its flexibility to keep incorporating change of all sorts, from tech- nological and engineering advances to broader social changes. Each and every technology faces eventual obsolescence – except perhaps for the most elementary technologies, whose longevity resides in their being basic tools: the hammer, the shovel.

Across time, cities have complicated the straight forward implementation of technologies. The mix of urban materialities and people’s cultures in the city is not quite predictable, and hence can unsettle or disrupt the best designs – whether they deal with a vast structural transportation system or a pothole detection wiki. As a lens, then, the city allows us to grasp the diverse interactions between users (whether systems, organizations, or people) and the design and implementation of the technologies used in cities.

Saskia Sassen