IN-PERSON Barcelona Livable Cities. Section A

Abstract

Our talk will present an interpretive reading in fiction books, whose plots take place in urban spaces and can serve as criticism of the “smart cities” field. The term “smart city” refers to the integration of digital applications into urban spheres to improve efficiency, governmentality, sustainability, and even convenience. The smart city field is based on digital axiomatics, which, through quantification and computational processing, aspires to achieve complete knowledge of everything that happens in a city, from its infrastructure to its residents’ behavior. Like rich ethnographies, urban fiction describes human characters and their social interactions in ways that indicate a passion for and exercise of mundane urban wisdom. While the dominant characters in the smart city field focus on marketing the potential of digitally coding the urban scene, the urban plot presents the chaotic character of daily life in cities, a chaos that cannot easily surrender to coding. In our analysis of several literary characters and interactions, we will conflate Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “Minor Literature” (following their reading of Kafka) with the industry’s concepts of “Big Data” and “Artificial Intelligence”. Based on Deleuze and Guattari’s argument that “there is nothing that is major or revolutionary except the minor,” we will show how “small data” that is produced continuously in the urban plot (in blurring the private and public, in subjective classifications, in multisensorial-based interactions, in the intermingles of clarity and illusion) has the potential to challenge big data and smart city applications.