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Racial Codes and Spatial Order in Smart-City Rio de Janeiro

Sat, September 2, 9:00 to 10:30am, Sheraton Boston, Floor: 3, Clarendon

Abstract

This paper considers entanglements of information technology (IT) with urban space in contemporary Rio de Janeiro. Late 20th-century urban theory recognized IT as critical to organizing the geography of globalizing cities around the logic of transnational capital (Sassen 2001; Castells 1989). These contributions ruptured prevailing definitions of the city as a territorially bounded entity. Experiments such as the Rio de Janeiro municipal government Smart Cities initiative suggest that digital information is forming part of an infrastructural nexus based on engineering control over the city, making it more responsive to disruption. Set up for rapid response to disasters and breakdowns such as flooding, mudslides, and power outages, the Center of Operations is in effect a control room powered by computer algorithms that process past and current data to anticipate real-world events. In particular, Grupo Pensa, an elite think tank within the Center, engages with the implications of developing neural network models for urban theory. A new, or rather renewed, notion of the city defined by cyclical movement becomes the normative imperative of smart-city managerialism. Using research in the Center and at points of remote sensing, this paper will examine how digital models re-centralize urban planning and management. The Rio case illustrates a broader movement interweaving three forms of code—algorithmic, legal, and racial—through the production of a digital archive to manage urban metabolism. This paper brings the technopolitics of smart cities to bear on a distinctly Brazilian history of surveillance of black bodies. The entanglements and collisions between virtual and material worlds inflects debates over urban STS, the politics of design and planning practice, and the legacies of social control in Latin America.

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