A Brief History of Smartness: Infrastructure, Resilience, and “Smartness”

• In Event: Who Knows? Smart Cities as Epistemology

Abstract

Today, growing concerns with climate change, energy scarcity, security, and economic collapse have turned the focus of urban planners, investors, and governments towards “infrastructure” as a site of value production and potential salvation from a world consistently defined by catastrophes and “crisis”. From discussions about “disaster capitalism” to the embrace of a world after humans, the idea that some environmental, economic, or security catastrophe has arrived, or will arrive, is almost unquestioned. In response, there has emerged a new paradigm of high technology infrastructure development obsessed with “smart”, “ubiquitous”, "sustainable" or “resilient” infrastructures.

This talk will interrogate the different forms of futurity and life that are currently emerging from this complex contemporary relationship between ecology, technology and design by engaging in a genealogy of "smartness" ranging from cybernetic ideas of machine learning in the late 1950's to contemporary smart infrastructures in cities, energy grids, and extraction industries. In doing so, the talk will ask how these contemporary practices in ubiquitous computing, responsive environments, and "resilient" planning are shaping the design of large scale infrastructures and our imaginaries of the future of life.

Author

• Orit Halpern, Concordia University