Andres Luque Ayala´s keynote on the conference Beyond Smart Cities Today, Sweden 2022.

Computing Urbanity: How Politics Change as We Move from Digitally Knowing to Digitally Making the City

This presentation points to the need to question the ontological and epistemological implications of what is now a pervasive computational urbanism. It argues that in order to understand how digital technologies transform the city it is necessary to look at the underlying computational logics involved. By looking at digital processes of operationalization, datafication, sensing, mapping, and prediction, this work subjects the contemporary computational city to critical scrutiny. We argue that these computational logics aren’t simply ways of knowing the city, but rather the making of a particular—and politically charged—urbanity.

The presentation discusses how technical forms of urban knowledge, control, and calculation are never ideologically neutral, foregrounding the profound political, epistemological, and ontological consequences attached to the adoption of computational systems as a privileged template for future urbanism. In such computational city, through the close coupling of crises and the everyday, political debates take a backseat to an operational rebundling aimed at guaranteeing urban flows. With constant information as the new nature of the city, the ontological push of the computational city is so strong that it risks becoming both the ends as well as the means for governing the city. Forcing this emerging digital city to remake itself in the image of its own narrow epistemology, the computational city gives precedence to efficiency and circulatory management over agonistic politics.

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