The digital skin of cities: urban theory and research in the age of the sensored and metered city, ubiquitous computing and big data

A ‘digital skin’ of the city is coming into being. This skin consists of a sensored and metered urban environment. The urban world is becoming a platform for generating data on the workings of human society, human interactions with the physical environment and manifold economic, political and social processes. The advent of the digital skin opens up many questions for urban theory and research, and many new issues for public and urban policy, which are explored in this article

Time in the Age of Complexity

Technically mediated forms of interconnectivity and communication are sustaining complex arrangements through which are emerging more dynamic and interdependent physical-digital relations. This article examines the intensification of time through the lens of complexity theory and argues that increasingly networked infrastructures are moving towards an integrated global complexity in real-time. I suggest that shifts in physical-digital temporality are having a significant effect upon how the `social' is being reconfigured

Drones, Signals, and the Techno-Colonisation of Landscape

This research project is a cross-disciplinary, creative practice-led investigation that interrogates increasing military interest in the electromagnetic spectrum (EMS). The project’s central argument is that painted visualisations of normally invisible aspects of contemporary EMS-enabled warfare can reveal useful, novel, and speculative but informed perspectives that contribute to debates about war and technology. It pays particular attention to how visualising normally invisible signals reveals an insidious techno-colonisation of our extended environment from Earth to orbiting satellites

Pharmakon: From Body to Being

This thesis dossier is separated into the following distinct sections: an extended artist statement; a portfolio documenting artworks made during my MFA candidacy and my exhibit Pharmakon: Acts, Traces, and Maps; and a case study of artist Tony Oursler, whose video and multimedia installations explore the psychological and social relationships between individuals and technologies. Together, they present my exploration of the body’s ‘power of acting,’ or potentia agendi, in relation to the modificatory capacity of technology, or affectus, on the human body. In particular, I investigate the body’s habits, or capacity for habit-building, what Bourdieu calls habitus, and the interconnection between the body and its digital environment, digitus habitus. My installations are built around photographic and video media with which I designed interfaces to allow audience members to engage directly with the disruptive and entropic effects of digital technologies, ranging from cellphone displays to spam, and view the development of so-called digital personas, part of my catalogue of tech-inspired gestures, habits, and faces. The political consequences of the influence of technology are explored in the context of developing resistance to the panoptical interface of technology, a process of mass surveillance and data-harvesting which defines our contemporary relationship with technology. I term pharmakonic those gestures, or technologies, which can offer both further disruption and an opportunity for recircuit, in which the socio-mechanical agency of the body is rewired away from the addictive, decay-driven habits of digital technology towards positive, negenthropic habits

Exploratory Models in a time of Big Data

This paper aims to trigger discourse about the emergence of a new type of social scientific model — Exploratory Models — which draw on Big Data, computer modeling and interdisciplinary research to tackle complex social scientific processes. First, we define Exploratory Models referring to Batty and Morgan and Morrison. We then present changes to the traditional modeling paradigm. We show how Exploratory Models circumvent challenges related to the idiosyncracy, self-reflexivity and acceleration of social phenomena, which limit predictive effectiveness of traditional models. We show that Exploratory Models are better equipped to tackle complex problems due to their capacity to process heterogeneous datasets. Having established that Exploratory Models are predominantly problem- and data-driven, we emphasize that scientific theory is indispensable to their progress. Finally, the development of an integrative platform is suggested as a way of maximizing the benefits of this approach. Discussion concludes by flagging areas for further research

The electric city newspaper: urban age electric city conference (Shoreditch Electric Light Station, London 6-7 December 2012)

In 1879 Thomas Edison invented the light bulb and built the first power station in Pearl Street in Manhattan in 1882, while the German inventor Werner von Siemens installed the first electric elevator in Mannheim in 1880. Since then, electricity has powered – directly or indirectly – the shape and dynamics of urban life. In cities of the developed world, we take for granted that electricity feeds the complex systems which sustain and sometimes spectacularly fail us. In emerging cities of the developing world, a light bulb is still embraced as a symbol of civilisation by some, while others celebrate their urbanity in a visual cacophony of neon. The Electric City is, in many ways, the crucible of patterns of production, consumption and pollution of the 21st century ‘urban age’ as cities struggle with their impact on the social and environmental well-being of the planet. After having tackled the urban economy, health and well-being, violence, security, social inclusion and design at conferences held in – amongst others – Hong Kong, Chicago, New York, São Paulo and Johannesburg, the Urban Age returns to London for its eleventh conference since 2005. We turn our attention to the challenges and responsibilities faced by cities in the digital age as Climate Change and economic pressures continue to define our everyday urban realities. Since its inception, the Urban Age has studied the spatial and social dynamics of over 30 cities in the developed and developing world, collaborated with over 40 academic institutions and municipal authorities and been attended by over 5,000 speakers and participants from urban design, policymaking, research and practice. In London we welcome over 60 speakers from 30 cities in 15 countries across four continents who take part in the two-day Urban Age Electric City conference in the aptly named Shoreditch Electric Light Station in central London – a building that in its own history reflects the connections between power and the city. It opened as an electricity generating station in 1896 to burn rubbish, giving steam for generating electricity with the waste used to heat public baths next door. The motto above the door is ‘E Pulvere Lux Et Vis, or ‘Out Of The Dust, Light And Power’, reflecting a trajectory of sustainable resilience that parallels the themes and issues debated by the protagonists of the Urban Age

The smart city : a rhetorical analysis of actors and their smart city narratives

This thesis introduces and synthesizes the rhetorical narratives of smart cities—a burgeoning field of discourse and practice that adds another “layer” of infrastructure to urban form and function: information and communication technology (ICT). In this thesis, I will perform a rhetorical analysis of two primary actors involved in the smart city movement: corporate actors and academic observers. Rhetoric is discourse, and discourse wields power. Only by observing the multi-faceted rhetoric of the smart city’s arrival and development will we, first, come to lay bare what exactly is happening, and second, better direct and guide technological interventions in urban spaces towards goals that serve the greater good. Technology alone will not define the future; rather, urban futures will be determined by how competing social groups within heterogeneous societies and economies approach, embrace, and speak of the technology that increasingly defines urban form.Community and Regional Plannin