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.
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!
The edited volume on „Technology and the City“ is taking shape. After an intense meeting of the editors, we have invited a total of 39 authors to submit a draft chapter. Since some of the chapters are co-authored, we expect a total of 25+ chapters, which will be presented in four sections:
While most of the authors are coming from Europe (with multiple contributions from Scandinavian countries and - little surprise! - the Netherlands), we are happy to work with authors from the Americas and China, too.
We aim to have the book published in 2019. While most of the process will have to remain invisible, we appreciate your moral support in making a (hopefully) fundamental contribution to our field. Stay tuned!
After the summer break, we continue our series of interviews with scholars from the tracks on technology and the city at CEPE/ETHICOMP and SPT 2017. The third interview is with Laura Fitchner. She presented her paper on "A Smart City of Flows" at ETHICOMP/CEPE 2017. The interview has been conducted by Margoth González Woge in Summer 2017.
Could you tell us who you are?
I’m currently a researcher in Ethics of Information Technology at Hamburg University in Germany, where we study the societal and ethical aspects of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the Internet. I’m looking at some of the issues we face with the technological developments that are happening, for example concerns about cybersecurity, privacy and surveillance. I’m interested in how we create the rules and technologies that make the Internet work as it does and in how the Internet shapes the way we experience, communicate and live together.
What did you present at the Conference?
I presented and discussed some ideas about smart cities that have come out of my reading of Manuel Castells’ writing on the “space of flows”. The main idea is that ICTs are reshaping spaces in an important way. Castells makes a distinction between space and place: while place is like a container, a space is defined by and through what he calls “time-sharing practices”, so through social relations and interactions. When ICTs restructure and shape our relations and how we interact with others, they also restructure space and, when it comes to smart cities, in particular urban spaces. Often, the goal of smart city applications is to improve processes in the city in order to make them more efficient and predictable. While this can help solve some of the issues we encounter in urban life, there might also be some downsides to this logic. In the paper I explored the idea that when algorithms solve problems for us and regulate our interactions in too smooth and too efficient of a way, there is also something valuable being lost. Cities have historically always been very creative places; this creativity partly also springs out of the characteristics of city life, its deviances, unexpectedness and frictions.
As a trained engineer, did you receive any training in ethics? How did you become interested in politics/ethics?
During my bachelor in engineering I was looking for a student assistant job. I wanted to do something different, so I started working at the Institute for Technology Assessment and System Analysis (ITAS) in Karlsruhe which analyses social challenges that science, technology and engineering pose. I liked the work they were doing, so I decided to continue in this direction. I took a couple of courses from philosophy, ethics and social sciences and searched for relevant Master programs open to people from different backgrounds. I found that the PSTS program at University of Twente was a great option.
What kind of challenges have you found while doing interdisciplinary research?
One big challenge is getting acquainted with the relevant discussions and methodologies of different disciplines. You really have to learn how to get into a new or foreign topic, but also how to communicate with and across different audiences and create a suitable vocabulary for your work. One of the great things about being an interdisciplinary researcher is that you can be very creative in your research, because you can combine different approaches to create something new and sometimes even transcended the old protocols.
What pressing problems worry you? What excites you about technological developments?
I like the idea of technology as an evolutionary process. We can model it, but we can’t completely steer it. I share the excitement many feel about all the possibilities the Internet offers to us and I’m fascinated by the impact technological developments have on our lives and societies. It’s incredible that we are now able to access so much information in no time, learn about things we couldn’t have dreamed of before and stay in touch with our loved ones far away.
Currently I think a lot about cybersecurity, data protection and surveillance. Questions I wonder about are for example what happens with all the data that is collected about us and our behavior? And how do algorithms use this data to decide what we see online? How vulnerable will our societies become by fully relying on ICTs? I think there is a growing ICT infrastructure everywhere that has important social consequences but is often invisible to us. Based on data that is collected about us online, algorithms are starting to make decisions for us and regulate what we see and how we interact with each other. The ads we see and the jobs that are advertised to us online can for example be targeted towards who the algorithm thinks we are or what we care about, and sometimes they are even just based on where we live. I think as technologists and engineers it is important to understand that we are creating realities and embedding our values in the technologies we design and implement.
Editors: Michael Nagenborg, Margoth González Woge, Taylor Stone, and Pieter Vermaas
The book will be published in the series “Philosophy of Engineering and Technology” (Springer).
All over the world massive investments are being made to realize visions of the ‘Smart City.’ Technology plays a central role in making future cities more sustainable, to make urban governance more transparent and just, and increase the efficiency in various sectors ranging from transport to education. What is often overlooked in the process of making cities ‘smart’ is the fundamental role of technologies in the urban lifeworld. Philosophy of Technology can help understanding this role and by this contribute to a more sophisticated thinking for developing smart cities. The contributions in this volume map out how technologies are used and designed to plan, maintain, govern, demolish, and destroy the city and its part. They demonstrate how urban technologies shape and are shaped by fundamental concepts and principles, like citizenship, publicness, democracy, and nature. And, they explore how to think of technological mediated urban space as part of the human condition. The volume will thus contribute to the much-needed discussion on technology-enabled urban futures from the perspective of Philosophy of Technology.
The studies and insights offered in this volume will also open the discussion on the particular methodological challenges for Philosophy of Technology to do justice to the city.
We invite abstracts with a length of maximum 1.000 words. Each chapter in the volume should have a length of between 8.000 and 12.000 words (including reference).
All abstracts will be reviewed by the editors. Chapters will be reviewed by the editors and peer reviewed by the contributors.
Due dates for abstracts: November 1, 2017
Notification of acceptance: December 1, 2017
Submission of the chapters: March 15, 2018
Due dates for reviews: April 30, 2018
Notification of final acceptance and feedback to authors: June 15, 2018
Submission of revised chapter: September 15, 2018
Publication of edited volume: Spring 2019
Please, submit your abstract by email to: m.h.nagenborg@utwente.nl
The abstracts need to be prepared for blind peer review. Please, include a short CV in a separate document. Authors should also indicate if they consider including images in the final publication.
Michael Nagenborg, University of Twente (NL)
You can download the Call as PDF from my German web site.
To celebrate the tracks on technology and the city at CEPE/ETHICOMP and SPT 2017, we will publish a series of interviews. The first interview is with Dr. Diane Michelfelder. She will be presenting her paper titled ‘Urban Landscapes and the Techno-Animal Condition’ as part of the Technology and the City special track as SPT 2017. The interview has been conducted in May 2017 by Taylor Stone, one of the co-organizers of the “Technology and the City” track at SPT.
Can you tell us about yourself? Who is Diane Michelfelder?
By trade, I am a philosopher. Specifically, I am professor of philosophy at Macalester College, a liberal arts college in Minnesota. Much of my research, as well as my teaching, takes place at the intersection of 20th century European philosophy and the philosophy of technology. When I was in graduate school, I never gave a thought to the philosophy of technology. But, when I came out of graduate school and got my first job, it was at Cal Poly, so a natural spot for that interest to develop. I had the good fortune while there to participate in a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute at Penn State, directed by Carl Mitcham and Leonard Waks on “Rethinking Technology: The Philosophy of Technology since World War II.” As the familiar expression goes, that changed everything. It led to my becoming very involved in the Society for Philosophy and Technology. I was SPT president from 2007-2009, and since 2014 I’ve been the Editor-in-Chief of SPT’s journal, Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology, along with Neelke Doorn of TU-Delft. I am also quite active in fPET, the Forum for Philosophy, Engineering, and Philosophy, an informal society which I helped organize and which meets in alternate years to SPT.
What brought you to ‘the city’ as a research topic?
Good question. One strand of my interest in “the city” as a research topic, especially when it comes to matters such as the Internet of Things, self-driving vehicles, and the goods they promote, is tied to the philosophy of technology. But I’m also interested in the city from another perspective. Once I lived in a small rural town with no stores and no postal delivery service. It did though have lots of wildlife, and for some reason—maybe I really missed living in an urban environment?—I got to thinking about ethical issues related to urban animals, particularly about what kinds of responsibilities we have toward them. While these two strands of interest might seem quite different from one another, I think they have something in common. As cities become “smarter” by becoming more driven by algorithmic representations, some values become more pronounced and cultivated, while others become at risk of getting passed over and ignored. It’s the latter that I’m interested in the most. I have a recent paper, “Risk, Disequilibrium, and Virtue” about this, in Technology in Society. It’s the same with urban wildlife. They are the Instagrams of the animal world—here one moment and gone the next. They are also not easily amenable to being categorized, and so as a result they’ve tended to slip under the radar of philosophical inquiry.
Your forthcoming paper at SPT 2017 – ‘Urban Landscapes and the Techno-Animal Condition’ – will focus on how technological artifacts reinforce perceptions of wildlife as non-human ‘Others.’ Can you elaborate on how technologies perpetuate and/or reinforce such perceptions? What sorts of ethical concerns, both salient and obscure, do you see arising from this?
There are multiple ways in which technologies act to reinforce the perception of wildlife as non-human others. For example, think of the popularity of webcams found across the US that are focused on the nests of breeding pairs of urban eagles. The hatching, feeding, and fledgling of the baby birds has become a kind of public spectacle; we eagerly click on our tablets or iPhones to watch them but do not necessarily draw closer to them, and vice-versa, through this activity. Images from trail cams arguably “otherize” wildlife even more than webcams, as they capture an animal’s movements in black and white, which makes a creature such as a cougar appear to be more sinister than it actually is. Technologies like these, launched with good intentions, can also work to feed the perception that urban wildlife are little more than pests to be relocated or eradicated. Probably the poster child for this was the initial 2002 rollout of Toronto’s “green bins”, which, for the city’s raccoons, amounted to having a food truck located at every household intended just for them. But urban wildlife corridors, constructed with the best of intentions so that animals can move and forage freely, can also “otherwise” wildlife by keeping them apart and invisible from human city dwellers.
Have you encountered any urban designs, artifacts, or policies that promote and facilitate positive interactions between humans and wildlife, and that can be seen as an example of best practice?
One of the developments I find promising has to do with changing perceptions and policies in the US regarding feral cats. An organization that comes to mind here is Alley Cat Allies. ACA accepts as a basic premise that we have positive moral responsibilities toward feral cats, including giving them protective shelters so they can better survive during the winter. City officials in Atlantic City, New Jersey, for example, turned to ACA to control the populations of cat colonies through trap-neuter-release rather than by exterminating the cats as though they were pests. Since these cats congregate under the iconic boardwalk in Atlantic City, they are routinely seen by tourists, who in turn have the opportunity to learn more about the work of the ACA. More recently, some city humane shelters are adopting out feral cats as “working cats” who have “jobs” controlling rodent populations in technological habitats such as warehouses and the like. And building urban parks along abandoned railroad tracks is a great way of bringing people, wildlife, technology, and nature together. The High Line in New York really stands out here, but there are others like it as well.
Another creative use of technology with regard to urban wildlife is its use in just figuring out where wildlife are actually hanging out. That’s the aim of Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo’s Urban Wildlife Conservation Program, which just a few months ago went national in scope. It uses motion cameras and audio equipment set up in and around Chicago to do a “wildlife scan” four times a year lasting for eight months each; they have over a million images which citizen scientists can identify online. Imagine the maps that could be created from this big data set! Just making urban wildlife more visible by such means could contribute to individuals and communities assuming positive responsibilities for their well-being.
Central to your paper is the role of technologies in human-wildlife relations. How has the philosophy of technology engaged with animal and wildlife issues to date? Do you see a gap here, or need for further work by philosophers of technology?
More generally, your paper can be seen as a work of both philosophy of technology and environmental philosophy. What opportunities and challenges do you see for interaction between these fields of research? And, how do you see city-focused research contributing to (or hindering) their interaction?
From their beginning in the 1970s, inquiry in the philosophy of technology and environmental ethics developed along two separate tracks. Apart from raising questions about our relations to animals in the context of agriculture and biotechnology (I’m thinking primarily of Paul Thompson’s work here, of course), the philosophy of technology has understandably tended to take engineered objects themselves as its main focus of consideration, whether epistemological or ethical, and conceded interest in animals to other disciplines. Even when its investigations have expanded to look at issues related to the environment, such as the relation between technologically intensive ways of living and climate change, animals have been neglected. One philosopher of technology who is interested in expanding philosophy of technology’s tent of inquiry to include thinking about animals is Ashley Shew Heflin. Ashley wants to shift our perceptions to give animals their due as tool-users and to show how including animals within the “tent” can make a difference for understanding what it is to be homo faber. But to go back to your question about whether there’s a gap in current philosophy of technology with respect to animals, the answer is: Absolutely yes. I hope the approach I’m taking of adopting the city as a starting point in thinking about our ethical responsibilities toward urban wildlife would be a step toward addressing that gap as well as helping to bridge the fields of philosophy of technology and environmental ethics themselves.
Besides your own work, what readings would you recommend for someone interested in the relationship between cities, technologies, and urban wildlife?
Sure, I have a few suggestions. Clare Palmer’s seminal article Placing Animals in Urban Environmental Ethics (2003) is a must-read, along with her 2010 book Animal Ethics in Context. Sue Donaldson’s and Will Kymlicka’s Zoopolis, their thoughtful and provocative study aimed at developing a theory of animal “citizenship” is another key work. I’ve certainly been inspired by (as well as critical of) their view that urban wildlife are “liminal creatures”—neither truly wild or truly domesticated—and what follows from that with respect to what we owe them. Erin Luther’s Tales of Cruelty and Belonging: In Search of An Ethic for Urban Human-Wildlife Relations (2013) — which takes an incident involving Toronto’s raccoons as its point of departure — and Thom van Dooren’s and Deborah Bird Rose’s Storied Places in a Multi-Species City (2012) are also well worth reading. Both of these papers take seriously the idea that urban areas offer the possibility of “shared places” within which humans and wildlife can fruitfully coexist. From a “feet/paws” in the field research angle, there’s a lot of interesting work being done by the Center for Urban Resilience.
What recommendations do you have for either urban designers or citizens regarding how to engage with urban wildlife?
Riffing on the title of the most recent book by Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, I wonder: Are we smart enough to design “smart” cities with attention not only to the interests of their human inhabitants but of urban wildlife as well? In the rush to make cities “smarter”, I worry they may end up being less hospitable and less friendly to urban wildlife than they already are. So for urban planners, policy makers, and all others involved in creating the AI-driven elements of these cities of the future, I’d recommend being vigilant to make sure that designs work to promote the interests of both human and non-human animals who inhabit these spaces. Recently I read, for instance, that the sensors on Google’s self-driving cars can’t detect a squirrel crossing the street in front of it, and so wouldn’t slow up to avoid it. That’s simply not acceptable. On a more positive note, I also saw while on a recent test drive in San Francisco at night a self-driving Chevy Bolt appeared to slow down for an animal crossing the road. What sort of animal? You guessed it… it was a raccoon.
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:
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:
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!
