Four Questions
How should arts and culture being recognized, in the discourse on cities of the future (smart or otherwise)? Why is it necessary to have a cultural perspective in the global smart city discourse?
The ‘smartness’ of the city is currently identified as a result of the collection of data flows and the subsequent resultant algorithmic optimization of management of resources. This linear processing comes as an outcome of the dominant Technological Rationality imposed by the artificial thinking devices since mid-Twentieth century. Nonetheless, cities exist as a reflection and built co-agent of the embodied perceptions and daily endeavors of anonymous citizens. Arts and Culture remain the guardians and advocates for the participation of human individuals, the proud transmitters and bearers of nuances, biases and human-scale vibrations.
How should/can we talk about smart city and urban transformation beyond technology and infrastructure?
The evidence of a process of climatic and environmental change is slapping blatantly the foundations of our techno-friendly society. Technology, infrastructure and binary values, ought to be overlapped by a series of intangible human layers. These layers should be made more and more perceptible in a growing humming of liveliness.
What is the connection of arts and cultural practice and technology in (future) urban societies?
Arts, Culture and human values will step forward as the parameters to determine the outcome for a better or worse blend of future cities and nature. The more future urban societies filter Practice and Technology through the common body that the city enacts, the more participatory and humane they will be. Feelings and perceptions as part of our main urban infrastructure; the world in harmony with the planet.
Please share your expert prediction or utopian view of the city of the future.
We can’t draw a still frame of the city of the future. However, we see a need for transformation/reversion of the race for a simple linear efficiency and optimization of resources. People are not binary, people are ambiguous and subjective. Finding ways to use, reuse or no-use resources can open up a different path. Both the perception of sound and the city don’t occur in a precise moment, it’s a continuous, non-linear, complex, polyphonic body experience that blends together past, present and future, full of nuances and uncontrolled parameters.
The ‘smartness’ of the city is currently identified as a result of the collection of data flows and the subsequent resultant algorithmic optimization of management of resources. This linear processing comes as an outcome of the dominant Technological Rationality imposed by the artificial thinking devices since mid-Twentieth century. Nonetheless, cities exist as a reflection and built co-agent of the embodied perceptions and daily endeavors of anonymous citizens. Arts and Culture remain the guardians and advocates for the participation of human individuals, the proud transmitters and bearers of nuances, biases and human-scale vibrations.
How should/can we talk about smart city and urban transformation beyond technology and infrastructure?
The evidence of a process of climatic and environmental change is slapping blatantly the foundations of our techno-friendly society. Technology, infrastructure and binary values, ought to be overlapped by a series of intangible human layers. These layers should be made more and more perceptible in a growing humming of liveliness.
What is the connection of arts and cultural practice and technology in (future) urban societies?
Arts, Culture and human values will step forward as the parameters to determine the outcome for a better or worse blend of future cities and nature. The more future urban societies filter Practice and Technology through the common body that the city enacts, the more participatory and humane they will be. Feelings and perceptions as part of our main urban infrastructure; the world in harmony with the planet.
Please share your expert prediction or utopian view of the city of the future.
We can’t draw a still frame of the city of the future. However, we see a need for transformation/reversion of the race for a simple linear efficiency and optimization of resources. People are not binary, people are ambiguous and subjective. Finding ways to use, reuse or no-use resources can open up a different path. Both the perception of sound and the city don’t occur in a precise moment, it’s a continuous, non-linear, complex, polyphonic body experience that blends together past, present and future, full of nuances and uncontrolled parameters.