Seeing Urban Technology: Legibility, Politics, and Action

SCI 6519 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

Seeing Urban Technologies asks how planners and designers can see, understand, and shape urban technologies: the data-driven, sociotechnical infrastructure through which cities are planned, operated, and governed, from autonomous mobility to the algorithmic management of energy grids and real estate portfolios. These systems produce enormous public consequences in contemporary cities, increasingly influencing how power, access, risk, and resources are distributed. Yet their workings can be difficult to discern, let alone reshaped, from the places where their effects are felt
This experimental seminar aims to develop new ways of seeing and acting on these complex systems. Students will learn to trace relationships among these systems’ constituent parts (from physical infrastructure to data and software, institutions, and financial instruments), examine the assumptions embedded in particular artifacts, and make these relationships and assumptions legible to others. The course treats legibility as both a design challenge and a political question. Who makes a system visible, to whom, and for what purpose? How can a map, diagram, or public explanation produce public knowledge? And under what conditions can public knowledge support collective or institutional action?

We will explore these questions through critical readings, discussion, and examining work by designers, artists, scholars, and activists who have made opaque systems subjects of public inquiry. Students will study methods ranging from system mapping to the close reading of technical artifacts. They will also consider where familiar planning and design tools, often developed around bounded sites and physical objects, need to be extended or reimagined.

Our primary site of investigation will be a particular category of urban technology – the technologies of climate risk. These are the models, data platforms, insurance products, and land use rules used to measure, price, allocate, and govern risks such as flooding and wildfire. A risk model, for example, may translate uncertain futures into a map or score that informs decisions by insurers, lenders, property owners, and public agencies. Students will ask what assumptions enter such a model, who can inspect or challenge its outputs, and how a prediction acquires the authority to shape a city’s future. This focused case will allow us to develop methods that students can carry into the study of other urban technologies.

A creative project will run through the course. Students will map a climate risk system, closely examine one of its artifacts, and trace how a representation of risk enters a consequential decision about the built environment. They will then propose an intervention at a specific point in that chain. The final product might take the form of a system map, a knowledge wiki, public-facing media, or another medium suited to a particular audience and decision. Students will make a case for how their work creates a leverage for collective or institutional action.

The course ultimately asks what role planners and designers can legitimately play in shaping urban technologies, and how their skills in research, representation, and design might help make their consequences more open to democratic contestation.