Final BRIDE event on August 23, 2023, in Delft

 All good things must come to an end. On August 23, 2023, we will celebrate the closing of the BRIDE project with a smaller academic event at the TU Delft. Please join us and register at

https://www.aanmelder.nl/bride-closing-event

I look forward to looking back at four intense years of work on smart urban infrastructure.

Philosophy of the City update - April 2022

It has been a while... and some great videos came out. For example, here's a great clip about the MX3D bridge in Amsterdam:

The really, really important news is, of course, that there will be a Philosophy of the City conference: 20.–22.10.2022 Turin, Italy. You can find the CfP here and submit your abstract here. (We are still struggling with the Philosophy of the City website. Sorry!)

To be on the safe side: Let me repeat... Philosophy of the City. October 20-22, 2022. Turin, Italy.

Of course, there are also new things to read, like the wonderful special issue "Philosophy of the City" of the East Asian Journal of Philosophy (edited by Sanna Lehtinen and Tea Lobo).

Tea Lobo also was so kind to invite Sage Cammers-Goodwin and me for an interview for her vlog:

Shane Epting most likely also has a new book out. He did two last year. Hence, the writes books quicker than I do blogs ;) - Check out his publications on his super-cool new website with great pix.

Last, but not least, we will host a Datathon on May 13, 2022. The event is part of a small grant, which we received for a BRIDE legacy project from DesignLab. At the event, we would like to learn how people make sense of smart city-data. So, if you want to play with the data from our bridge and help Sage Cammers-Goodwin with the final part of her PhD project, feel free to register online.

That's all folks! I am sure that I overlooked something. Sorry!

 

Philosophy of the City update

One of the typical pitfalls of blogging is that one starts to fall behind and never comes back to writing, because there is so much catching up, which needs to be done. At least, this is what happens to me. And I want to break the curse today. So, here's a brief update on current publications and a bit about the Philosophy of the City Research Group.

Let's start with the Philosophy of the City Research Group: As you may already have notice our website is down. As things currently stand, we will not be able to reclaim our domain before Spring 2022. Hence, we have a new domain: www.philosophy-of-the-city.org

For now, the URL will take you to the "About us" section of our last conference website. Expect a new website to pop up soon-ish, which is likely to include information about our first "back to meatspace" conference in fall 2022, which will take place in Europe.

There are also some publications from our ongoing research projects, which I would like to mention: Sage Cammers-Goodwin and Naomi van Stralen published Making Data Visible in Public Space, which contributes to the BRIDE project. And from FRAME-PRO, we have to report a joint publication on Earth observations and statistics: Unlocking sociodemographic knowledge through the power of satellite images for which Isaac Oluoch contributed a wonderful ethics section.

With BRIDE we are also preparing a panel for the next edition of the Computer, Privacy, and Data Protection-Conference (CPDP) in Brussels (Jan 27, 2022), where we will discuss who can and should take responsibility for IoT in public spaces. You can find out more about the panel on the CPDP website.

We also received an additional grant from DesignLab to work on a legacy project for BRIDE. Expect a hands-on hackathon on smart urban infrastructure to happen in Spring 2022.

Finally, and a bit off topic, we are hiring a postdoc for the Disastrous Information-project. In the project, we are exploring how the use of AI and Maschine Learning shapes humanitarian aid practices. The postdoc position will help us to get a better grip on the existing and desirable legal and institutional design for making responsible use of geo-AI in Malawi and its neighboring countries. If you are interested or you know someone who might be interested: Here's the job ad.

Technology and the City panels @ PHTR conference

To celebrate the publication of our edited volume Technology and the City: Towards a Philosophy of Urban Technology, we will host two sessions at the Philosophy of Human-Technology Relations Conference (4-7 November 2020).

In the first panel (Nov 5, 12:15), EL Putnam, Kevin Mintz, Taylor Stone, and Ryan Mitchell Wittingslow will present and reflect upon their contribution to our book. You will find the abstracts below. The session will be chaired by Pieter Vermass, the current president of the Society for Philosophy of Technology and one of the co-editors of our book.

The second session (Nov 5, 14:15) will be a workshop organized by Sanna Lehtinen, Taylor Stone and myself which aims to identify future urban technologies which will shape and will be shaped by life in the city. Ideally, the exercise will lead us to the first outline of a future research agenda for the philosophical exploration of urban technologies. Of course, the presenters from the first panel will join us.

Needless to say, there are more sessions and presentations at the Philosophy of Human-Technology Relations Conference (4-7 November 2020), which are of relevance for our domain: For example, on Saturday, Nov 7, 12:30, a panel on "City & Architecture" will feature talks by Tea Lobo, who also contributed to the book project, and a presentation by our colleagues from the Designing for Controversies project. The session will also feature a talk by form PSTS-student Hidde Kamst, who wrote a wonderful thesis on citizen-participation in smart cities initiatives. I am also looking forward to the workshop on "Designing Frictions for Active Technological Environments" co-organized by our co-editor Margoth González Woge and yet another PSTS alumni, Samantha Valenzuela.

I hope to meet some of you at the event! We will continue our series of launch events for the book in December 2020. And here are the abstract for the City and Technology session:

EL Putnam: Locative Reverb - Artistic Practice, Sound Technology, and the Grammatization of the Listener in the City

There are various ways that artists use technology in exploring the relation of sound to the urban environment, which has different impacts on the listener in relation to place. The rising prominence of these works is connected to a broader sonic turn in urban studies and art, underscoring a rising emphasis on the influence of sound on multisensory experience. Using Bernard Stiegler’s consideration of technology as pharmakon (or the condition of duality in which something is both poison and cure, bringing both benefit and harm), and his definition of technological grammatization, how artistic use of technology mediates the relationship of the urban environment to the listener through sound is studied through a pharmacological approach in order to nuance the possibilities of artistic critical engagement, emphasising how this can include unintended consequences of re-enforcing certain listener behaviours. At the same time, considerations of how artistic repurposing of listening technology can provide new modes of urban engagement are taken into account, where sound offers the impetus for what Brandon LaBelle (2017) refers to as sonic agency.

Kevin Mintz: Universally Designed Urban Environments - “A Mindless Abuse of the Ideal of Equality” or a Matter of Social Justice?

In “Justice and Nature,” Thomas Nagel rejects the claim that social equality requires the universal design of urban environments to accommodate people with disabilities. Universal design is a movement in architecture and other arenas to minimize the need to provide individual accommodations for people with disabilities by designing environments that are accessible to a wide range of individuals. I advance that Nagel inappropriately categorizes universal design as a matter of humanitarianism or charity. He miscategorizes universal design in this way because he wrongly assumes that the inaccessibility of public facilities results from an impairment itself rather than the inaccessible design of urban environments. I argue that for people with disabilities to receive equal access to a city, universal design must be a central consideration in urban policy and construction. I also suggest that assistive technologies are necessary to the realization of universal design. These technologies are critical to facilitating responsible design, and relational autonomy for people with disabilities. In situations where universal design is impractical, cities should aim to retrofit facilities for disability access as a matter of justice whenever feasible. My presentation will further address how my argument has implications for urban design in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. Efforts to promote social distancing also provide opportunities to improve the accessibility of public facilities and urban modes of transportation for people with disabilities, particularly theme parks, restaurants, and airplanes.

Taylor Stone - Dark Acupuncture and the Possibilities of Responsible Urban Innovation

Building on the contributions of Technology and the City, this presentation will explore if – and how – the philosophy of human-technology relations can contribute to urban planning and design, and vice versa. This will be discussed mainly via my contribution to the volume, which outlines strategies for incorporating environmental values into nighttime lighting. One strategy refines the planning theory urban acupuncture to foster positive experiences of darkness, offering new possibilities for urban lighting. Beyond serving as a provocative moral and aesthetic argument, this creates opportunities to work with designers on the realization of responsible lighting strategies. To exemplify this possibility, two collaborative projects will be presented that translate the concept of dark acupuncture into site-specific design proposals. The first is a lighting master plan for a park in the Netherlands. The plan focuses on wayfinding and the re-design of light-dark transition zones (specifically adjacent highway underpasses), to create a dark habitat within a densely urbanized region. The second is a design concept for a pedestrian bridge in Jakarta, Indonesia. To draw attention to the impacts of light pollution, the bridge lighting has been re-designed to resemble an unpolluted night sky – meant to convey an environmental message via an immersive experience. To conclude, generalizable insights will be sketched regarding the interaction between the philosophy of human-technology relations and urban design. In particular, a future direction for the philosophy of urban technologies will be proposed: taking ideas off pages and into the streets.

Ryan Mitchell Wittingslow - Authenticity and the “Authentic City”

Thanks to the transformative power of information and communication technologies, smart cities purport to offer managers and bureaucrats a more harmonious and efficient means of reducing traffic, managing assets, and increasing public safety. However, I am dubious of these utopian sentiments. Indeed, I argue that the benefits that smart cities purport to provide cohere poorly with a number of our shared phenomenological intuitions about the relationships(s) between authentic experience and technologised society. While many of these intuitions are, strictly speaking, pseudo-problems, they deserve our attention. The belief that technologised urban spaces somehow corrode our potential for authentic experience is one that carries enormous power, as Charles Taylor argues, authenticity is nothing less than the contemporary moral ideal. Consequently, it indelibly colours the relationships that we forge with our artefacts. These issues will only grow more pressing as our ‘dumb cities’, already so opaque to experience, give way to hyper-technologised ‘smart cities’. However, it is possible to design our way out of these pseudo-problems. Assuming we accept my argument that the distinction between authenticity and the device paradigm is premised upon a certain kind of category error, there is no categorical or definitional reason why it is not possible for urbanised, technologised spaces to feel authentic, whether by virtue of their aesthetic properties, or because they facilitate ‘authentic’ behaviour. Indeed, I argue that ‘inauthenticity’ is an aesthetic rather than an ontological category (much like ‘ugliness’, or ‘boring-ness’), with feelings of inauthenticity serving as evidence of a basic failure of design.

Philosophy of the City Round-up (Feb 2019)

The Call for Papers for the Philosophy of the City Summer Colloquium on Urban Aesthetics has been a great success. Thanks, everybody for sharing!

The Call for Papers for the Philosophy of the City 2019 conference is open till June 1, 2019. I hope that the meeting will receive the same amount of attention.

For your reading list: My colleague Mark Ryan has published an interesting paper on the ethical aspects of smart city projects (Open Access).

As for my activities: I will attend a seminar on Housing and Values at TU Delft on March 13/14, 2019, and will deliver a keynote at the event „The future city: boring or bombastic?“ (Future City Foundation, Amersfoort) on April 5, 2019.

Finally, since it looks like the „Philosophy of the City Roundups“ are becoming a regular thing: Feel free to send me pointers to events, publications, and activities! I am happy to include them in the next round.

Symposium "Politics & technologies of the city" at OZSW conference 2018

OZSW conference 2018

The annual conference of the Dutch Research School for Philosophy (OZSW) will be held at the University of Twente on November 9 and 10, 2018. The conference will feature a symposium on "Politics & technologies of the city," which I have co-organised and will chair.

About the symposium

While the 21^stcentury has been named the century of the city until very recently the city has remained an under-researched subject within Philosophy. More preciously, since the rise of the modern nation-state, political philosophy became more interested in states and the interplay between states. Within Philosophy of Technology, too, the city hasn’t become a dedicated subject of its own rights. Only recently, philosophers started to pay close attention to (a) the shifting role of cities as political actors and (b) the vision of the “smart city.”

In our symposium, we will combine contributions from Political Philosophy and Philosophy of Technology to stimulate a discussion about urban politics and the role of technology in the lives of urban dwellers.

What is the Point of “Urban Justice”? - Access to Human Space

Author: Bart van Leeuwen (Radboud University, The Netherlands)

For some time now, the philosophical reflection on the meaning of social justice has broadened its scope from the domestic realm to the global realm. Global justice theory is timely, given the process of neo-liberal globalization, a widening of the global income gap and the fact that political philosophy traditionally has been focusing on the nation-state. However, the process of globalization also developed into a different direction: it went hand in hand with devolution, urbanization and the formation of global or world cities. A number of recent books written by social scientists acknowledge this by dealing with social justice on the level of a societal unit very different than the global or the national one, much closer to our life worlds and also more of less disregarded by mainstream political philosophy, namely the city (Brenner, Marcuse and Mayer, 2012; Dikeç, 2007; Fainstein, 2010; Harvey, 2009; Marcuse et al, 2009; Mitchell, 2003, Soja, 2010). Amongst the themes discussed here are: neoliberal-capitalist displacement and dispossession, gentrification, a reliance on market processes and an obsession with economic growth, the disregarding of the rights of homeless people, lack of citizen input, lack of tax base sharing (esp. in the US), lack of affordable housing, lack of public services in certain quarters, social and ethnic segregation and so on.
The recent publications in which these theme’s figure suggest that “the city” is indeed a relevant unit of social justice.
The main question that I want to explore in this paper is how these themes and questions should be framed theoretically. Do these recent books show or indicate that conceptual innovation is needed here — do we need an urban theory of justice — or is it a matter of applying existing theories of social justice to the urban context and if so, which kind of theory would be most appropriate?
First we will explore the question to what extent urban justice simply is a function of the aggregate level of state justice. Before we think about the contours of a theory of urban justice, we first have to be clear about the kind of normative questions that are related to the urban frame (§ 2). Next we will home in on the more substantial question of the paper, namely what kind of theory would be most fitting. After outlining some shortcomings of two existing approaches to urban justice (§ 3), I will argue in favor of a recognition-theoretical approach to urban justice. This approach to the just city is promising because it allows the articulation of a conception of human space. Human space is a normative conception of space that is structured by different patterns of recognition, namely care, respect and esteem, and that is embodied both by physical structures, institutions and intersubjective relations between individuals and groups (§ 4). This approach might be promising, but it does not produce ready-made answers to the central moral challenges of cities today such as segregation, gentrification and homelessness. What can be shown, however, is that it is able to articulate what is at stake in these challenges from the moral-political point of view (§ 5).

Infrastructures as Structuring Practices

Author: Marcel Müller (University Darmstadt, Germany)

Building on Sartre´s concept of praxis, I will address the question, how do large scale human-technology ensembles structure the conscious and unconscious actualization of human praxis?
In his “Critique of Dialectical Reason,” Sartre emphasizes the dialectical relationship between human beings and world. For the later Sartre, praxis is a transformative process in which human beings satisfy their needs and serve their interests by changing the material or mental conditions they are situated in as human beings in order to preserve their future selves. But these needs and interests themselves only become obvious because they are products of close interactions with material and/or mental conditions. The most important aspect for Sartre is, that human beings change their material conditions in such a way, that the world itself becomes the passive residue of these very needs and of the strategies that were employed in order to satisfy them.
This concept of praxis can help to understand the intricacies of human-technology relations. Since Sartre considers praxis to be a transformative act in which human beings materialize their ends in the world, he also considers technical artifacts to be such frozen and materialized ends of praxis as well. Technologies play a major role in this process since they mediate material conditions and needs in a very specific way. As means, technical artifacts open up different practical fields. A practical field is a set of possible practical interactions, that is mediated as such under material or immaterial conditions and future ends. But since technical artifacts are considered to be materialized ends, their employment changes the way the transformative praxis is actualized.
Sartre believes that alongside every praxis a form of habituation takes place through which successful strategies and utilizations of technical artifacts are passed on through time. Every success or failure leads to rules and norms which are again materialized in the way further praxis is actualized through technical artifacts. Sartre calls this form of habituation hexis, greek for disposition. In this hexis not only strategies but also norms and moral values are preserved.
Sartre’s thoughts may not only be employed for individual technical artifacts but also for large technical systems like infrastructures. Considering the role of infrastructures as lifelines of society, they can be regarded passive residues of human needs. They constantly provide users and experts with past decisions and strategies. Sometimes old structures under cities influence the way modern cities have to be planned and built. Infrastructures not only do this because they are fortified structures but because their design provides specific ways of how planning and building praxis can be actualized.

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace: Liberal Democracy and the Smart City

Author: Ryan Mitchell Wittingslow (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, NL)

In his poem, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”, Richard Brautigan proposes governance by machines. Instead of democracy, he writes, we will have a “cybernetic ecology” where animals and computer co-exist in “mutually programming harmony”. The cost of this service is but a small thing. We need only offer our liberty to Brautigan’s titular “machines of loving grace”.
Although it’s been a long time since 1967, the utopian impulse that the poem articulates—the notion that we will be fitter, happier, and more productive if we allow ourselves to be administered by intelligent machines—remains compelling. Within the domain of urban design and planning, this impulse has recently expressed itself in a suite of proposals concerning what is called the “smart city”: that is, using information and communication technologies to autonomously manage municipal systems with the aid of sensors and actuators managed by artificial intelligences. Pilot programs are already underway in a number of Dutch cities, including Eindhoven, Utrecht, and Assen.
At least among philosophers, some of the flaws inherent in this view are well known. Machine learning algorithms possess politics just like any other artefact. The mere fact that these algorithms demonstrate some degree of autonomy by no means implies that they do not inherit the cultural and epistemic biases of their creators and users. There are, however, other concerns associated with optimising the panopticon. To that end, I will argue three things.
First, I will argue that liberal democracy is inherently, and necessarily, both slow and inefficient. This inefficiency is not a flaw. While the collectivist nature of liberal democracy means that decisions are almost always rendered less quickly than in authoritarian forms of rule, this very slowness helps guarantee that new policies and new behaviours are given sufficient deliberative scrutiny. It is upon these profoundly inefficient deliberative and aggregative procedures that the legitimacy of liberal democratic systems is premised.
Second, I will argue that the introduction of smart systems into liberal democracies threatens the integrity of these procedural norms. Although the use of artificial intelligences to swiftly and opaquely replace deliberative decision-making processes could produce positive outcomes in certain domains, it also directly compromises the necessarily slow, methodical, and dull processes that typify liberal democratic governance. This, I argue, poses an indirect challenge to the legitimacy of both democratic decision-making and the legitimacy of the institutions that help constitute that decision-making process.
Third and finally I will argue that the predictive nature of smart systems abrades uncomfortably against liberal democratic justitial norms such as the presumption of innocence, freedom of will, and notions of human dignity. Furthermore, decision-making artificial intelligences themselves pose a challenge to the rule of law, in that they cannot be subject to the laws they enforce. This, I claim, poses a profound challenge to the legal and political achievements upon which liberal democracy is premised.

PhD position on smart urban infrastructures at the University of Twente

In Summer 2018, our project "Bridging data in the built environment" (BRIDE) will officially start. The project brings together scholars from TU Delft (Neelke Doorn, Gerd Kortuem, Aimee van Wynsberghe) and the University of Twente (Peter-Paul Verbeek, Nirvana Meratnia) and the great team of MX3D to work together on a 3d printed IoT-enabled bridge to be placed in Amsterdam. We get additional support from the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions, the IoT Privacy Forum, the Foundation for Responsible Robotics and other parties.

In Twente, we are looking for a PhD candidate for a joint doctoral project at the intersection of computer science and Philosophy of the City. I (Michael Nagenborg) will be the daily supervisor of the project.

We are looking for a candidate with a master degree in Computer Science with a strong background in Internet of Things (IoT), especially in (big) data analytics, with a demonstrable interest in urban research (e.g., Philosophy of the City) and the willingness to engage in research-by-design methodology.

Applications are due by May 31, 2018. You can find the official advertisement on the website of the University of Twente.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions about the positions. And please help us to spread the word!

Philosophy of the City Summer Colloquium 2018: Sneak preview

While we are updating the Philosophy of the City website, here's a sneak preview of the talks and the papers to be discussed at the Colloquium... There is a limited number of seats reserved for guests, who will not present but may engage in the discussions. If you want to participate, please register at our website.

Philosophy of the City Summer Colloquium 2018: Technology and the City

University of Twente (NL)

Conferentie Hotel Drienerburght

Monday, June 11, 2018

Local keynote 1: Philip Brey (University of Twente): Technological Transformations of the City and Its Functions

Papers:

• Hans Voordijk (University of Twente) and Steven Dorrestijn (Saxion Enschede): Smart City Technologies and Figures of Technical Mediation
• David Murakami Wood (Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario): Can there be genuine human flourishing in the data-driven smart city?
• Brandt Dainow (Maynooth University, Ireland): Binding the smart city human-digital system with communicative processes
• Thilo Schaefer (University of Toronto): Sidewalk sensors: the implications of modern technology for urban public space
• Bart van der Sloot (Tilburg University) and Marjolein Lanzing (TU Eindhoven): Living Laboratories: Watching and Changing the Behavior of Smart Citizens

Tuesday, June 12, 2018

Papers:

• Steven Vogel (Denison University, Granville, OH): ’Let’s Look Under the City’: On the Hiddenness of Infrastructure
• Mark Thomas Young (University of Bergen): Invisible Structures - Maintenance, Repair and the Experience of Infrastructure
• Jonathan Maskit (Denison University, Granville, OH): “The Accursed Share”: Cyclists and Traffic Controls
• Milos Mladenovic (Aalto University, Helsinki): Explicating hidden moral dilemmas of self-driving vehicle technology development
• Gerald J. Erion (Medaille College, Buffalo, NY): The City as Medium: Marshall McLuhan and Urbanist Philosophy
• McKay Holland (Georgetown University, Washington, DC): Urban Social Ecology: Constructing Niches to Promote Possibilities
• Margoth González Woge (University of Twente): Smart Environments - Exploring the Relevance of a High-Tech World
• Marcel Müller (University of Darmstadt): The Concept of ‘Lifeworld’ in Philosophy of Technology

Master students’ panels:

• Selen Eren (University of Twente): The Techno-Political Order of Smart Cities: An analysis through the Arendtian understanding of politics
• Zeynep Yavuz (University of Amsterdam): Probing the Limitations of Digital Representations: The City as Humanistic Experiment
• Lorenzo Olivieri (University of Twente): Smart cities and the colonization of everyday life: playful moments for the information cage
• Denise Suzanne Antoinette Maria Op den Kamp (University of Twente): Smart Infrastructure – A Research on the shaping agency of the WiFi sensors project in Enschede

Public keynote lecture

Ekim Tan (Play the City, Amsterdam): Play to plan

Wednesday, June 13, 2018

Local keynote 2: Peter-Paul Verbeek (University of Twente): Technopolis and technopolitics: smart cities and the digitalization of democracy

Papers:

• Udo Pesch (TU Delft): The Relevance of Arendt’s Work for Understanding Public Space
• Ryan Mitchell Wittingslow (University of Groningen): Authenticity and the „Authentic City“
• Shane Epting (University of Nevada Las Vegas): ICT and Water Resource Management for Urban Sustainability
• Taylor Stone (TU Delft): Towards a Darker Future? Designing Environmental Values into the Next Generation of Streetlights
• Sanna Lehtinen & Vesa Vihanninjoki (University of Helsinki): Aesthetic Perspectives to New Urban Technologies – Conceptualizing and Evaluating the Technology-Driven Changes in the Urban Experience

Lachlan Urquhart: Designers are regulators

To celebrate the tracks on technology and the city at CEPE/ETHICOMP and SPT 2017, we will publish a series of interviews. The second interview is with Lachlan Urquhart. He will be presenting his paper titled ‘Ethical Dimensions of User Centric Regulation”’ as part of the ICT and the City track as ETHICOMP/CEPE 2017. The interview has been conducted in May 2017.

What should our readers know about Lachlan Urquhart?

I’m a Scottish researcher based in Nottingham, UK at a multidisciplinary research centre called Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute. My research sits at the interface of Information Technology Law (particularly privacy/data protection and information security law), Human Computer Interaction and Computer Ethics.

I did my undergraduate in law at Edinburgh, my masters in IT law at Strathclyde, and my PhD here at Nottingham in the Horizon Centre for Doctoral Training, School of Computer Science. It’s a great place for doing multidisciplinary research as I spent the first year of my PhD doing a quasi-MSc of modules from science and technology studies, human computer interaction and human factors engineering through to statistics, programming, mobile app building and geospatial information services. This really opened my eyes to how other disciplines work and got me thinking about new directions for research. I was also based in the Mixed Reality Lab (MRL) here at Nottingham, surrounded by sociologists, computer scientists, artists and musicians looking at what it means to live with ubiquitous computing. Being at the edge of what is going on technically makes for interesting legal research too!

What has brought you to the city (as a research topic)?

I got increasingly interested in smart cities during my PhD when I helped Lilian Edwards organise a major Smart Cities conference at Strathclyde University a couple of years ago. Following this I edited a special edition of a UK IT law society magazine, Computers and Law, dedicated to contributions from the conference. I find the work of people like Rob Kitchin particularly influential because it surfaces concerns of citizens in the wider narratives about how urban life is changing as computing is embedded into the built environment. It also links to my other research interests in surveillance studies eg following David Murakami Wood’s UbiCity project, design eg environmental criminology/situational crime prevention and even work I’d done a few years ago on privacy implications of domestic drones.

I also have colleagues at the MRL doing research on adaptive architecture, so we’ve had many discussions about the legal and ethical implications of this too! Most recently, as I’ve also been working in the area of privacy by design for the domestic internet of things for a while, I’ve recently started looking to issues around Industrial Internet of Things, particularly cybersecurity considerations, and that brings us back to the realm of critical infrastructure and, linked to that, smart cities.

In your paper, “Ethical Dimensions of User Centric Regulation,” you argue that it’s about time that designers need to be recognized and thought of as regulators. You seem to take “Code is law” quite literal, right?

Yeah, Lessig is a big influence in IT law, so a lot of my LL.M was spent reading all his work! During the PhD I started to question this notion of code is law more, thinking what a turn to the design community to help solve tough regulatory challenges might actually mean in practice. We see drive towards IT design in the law, for example in Article 25 of the new EU GDPR, but what this means in practice is more difficult to anticipate. This informed my PhD work where I looked at how to situate the role of IT designers in regulation from four perspectives, namely - conceptually, legally, empirically, and through a design intervention. At the conceptual level, as in the ETHICOMP paper, I argued the case for why designers are now regulators. I focus on the HCI community, unpacking how their proximity to end users as a route for establishing their regulatory legitimacy, for example through participatory/co-design approaches. I also wanted to look at this from another level using legal case studies. So, I focused on smart meters and domestic internet of things as two complicated cases for privacy by design thinking about how the legal rights and responsibilities of different actors, from end users to third party marketers, play out. I was particularly interested in frameworks regulating access and control around personal data flows. These case studies were useful for thinking about the legal challenges, but I also wanted to understand what privacy by design might mean in practice for the internet of things, so I did a range interviews with experts from IT law and design, to get a sense of the challenges these concepts face in practice (as they are both emergent, nebulous terms). Similarly, I was involved in developing a design tool, a set of ‘ideation cards’, that translates the new GDPR into a more accessible, physical playing card based format. These cards were developed, tested and evaluated with different settings, from start-ups/SMEs to larger organisations ! Cumulatively, this work gave significant practical and conceptual insight as to what it might mean for designers to be regulators, how concepts are negotiated around, where strengths and weaknesses lie, what motivations exist and so forth. In any case, I think as law increasingly turns to design to help deal with challenges of regulating emerging technologies, we need much more dialogue and support to bring these communities closer together.

Unlike design, the process of law-making is delegated to institutions under democratic control. If we take the idea of “designers as regulators” seriously, doesn’t that imply that we need more democratic control over the design process?

That is one of the key tensions here. As regulatory increasingly involves non-state actors, and the law is pushing IT designers to be involved in regulation, I think the challenge is how to understand the scope of that role and make it legitimate. Translating traditional metrics of public accountability, like due process, is one approach, but I’ve been focusing on understanding what new approaches IT designers can offer as regulators and how this may establish their legitimacy. By focusing on a particular IT design community, Human Computer Interaction, I’ve argued their proximity and focus on needs of end users is a route forward. They are in a position to understand user needs from IT through tools like participatory, co or value sensitive design. When repurposed to understanding regulatory needs, for example around user rights, the designers and their tools can go beyond top down understandings of legitimacy, to engage with practices, relationships and routines of users at a more situated level. This helps get a sense of how technologies impact users in different settings, going beyond top down approaches of traditional regulators, where specificities of different users are often neglected. Designers also have scope for action, as these findings can be reflected in design. How they respond is bounded up in how ethical or legitimate their actions may be deemed. They can inform regulatory interventions mediated by the technology, although there are still limits to this because of the disconnect between how a technology is used in practice vs how it is designed. Nevertheless, understanding how to build awareness, engagement and supporting reflection of IT designers on regulatory dimensions of their work is an important line of inquiry.

Besides your own work, what readings would you suggest for someone interested in your topic?

Where to begin… here are some books/papers I found particularly influential:

• L. Lessig Code v2.0 (2006)
• A. Murray Regulation of Cyberspace (2006)
• R. Leenes “Framing Techno-Regulation” (2011)
• J. Black Decentring Regulation: Understanding the Role of Regulation and Self-regulation in a Post-Regulatory World (2001)
• M. Hildebrandt & B.J. Koops The Challenges of Ambient Law and Legal Protection in the Profiling Era (2010)

In a nutshell, what would you recommend to municipalities with regards to smart city technologies?

Engage with citizens as users to get a situated understanding of their needs and respond to those. Avoid treating the city purely at a macro level, but instead engage with different settings of technology deployment and how these interventions might shape the practices of communities (for better or worse).

Technology and the City: Two tracks at upcoming conferences

The next weeks will be packed with exciting talks and stimulating discussions on technology and the city! Two major conferences will feature dedicated tracks on the role of technologies as part of urban existence.

The joint CEPE/ETHICOMP conference will be held in Turin from June 5 till June 8 in Turin. Shane Epting, Anders Albrechtslund, and I have co-organized a track on „ICT and the City,“ which will feature the following contributions:

• Margoth González Woge: Smart Environments: rethinking the boundaries of human and environmental enhancement
• Lachlan Urquhart: Ethical Dimensions of User Centric Regulation
• Brandt Dainow: Where does the city really end? Redefining Smart Cities and their ethical dangers
• Olli I. Heimo, et al.: Ethical Problems in Creating Historically Representative Mixed Reality Make-belief
• Laura Fichtner: A Smart City of Flows: How Smart Cities Can Shape Urban Experience and Creativity

The program and the abstracts can be found on the conference website.

The bi-annual conference of the Society for Philosophy and Technology (SPT) will be held in Darmstadt from June 14 till June 17, 2017, in Darmstadt. For SPT 2017, Remmon Barbaza, Margoth Gonzalez Woge, Taylor Stone, Pieter Vermaas and I organized a track on „Technology and the City,“ which fill bring together the following contributions:

• Sara Eloy and Pieter Vermaas: Over-the-counter housing design: the city when the gap between architects and laypersons narrows
• Taylor Stone: The Morality of Darkness: Urban nights, light pollution, and evolving values
• Giovanni Frigo: ‚Green Buildings’ in the City? A Reflection about Technology, Sustainability Indexes, and Energy Ethics
• Felipe Loureiro: Binding Surfaces: Architecture and The Interplay of Walls and Screens
• Michael Nagenborg: Elevators as urban technologies: Past, present, and future
• Vlad Niculescu-Dinca: Towards a sedimentology of infrastructures / A geological approach for understanding the city
• Alessia Calafiore, Nicola Guarino and Guido Boella: Recognizing urban forms through the prism of roles theory
• Shane Epting: Automated Vehicles and Transportation Justice: Two Challenges for Planners and Engineers
• Diane Michelfelder: Urban Landscapes and the Techno-Animal Condition
• Remmon Barbaza: Metro Manila: A City Without Syntax?
• El Putnam: Locative Reverb: Artistic Practice, Digital Technology, and the Grammatization of the City
• Margoh Gonzalez Woge: Technological Environmentality: technologies 'absent presence' in everyday environments
• Brandt Dainow: Philosophical Framework for Smart City Analysis
• Qian Wang and Xue Yu: Technology and the City: From the Perspective of Organicism
• Jathan Sadowski: Parameters of Possibility: Envisioning and Constructing the Smart Urban Future

Of course, we are excited about the recognition of Vlad Niculescu-Dinca's work, who won the SPT’s Early Career Award for his paper. The track will also feature talks of the current president of the Philosophy of the City Research Group (Shane Epting) and the Vice-President/President-Elect (Pieter Vermaas).

Check out the conference website for more information.

To celebrate these events, a series of interviews with participants of both tracks will be published on this blog. Stay tuned for more good things to come!

Video recording of Smart Cities panel @ CPDP 2017

Video recording of our session "Surveillance and Privacy in Smart Cities" (organized by David Murakamie Woord, chair: William Webster, presenters: Michael Nagenborg, Maria Murphy, and Gemma Galdon-Clavell)