What We Talk About When We Talk About Technology
In this first installment of a four-part series, we spoke with six scholars about how they think about technology in relation to the city and the urban. We drill into the etymology and anthropological implications of how technology really operates in our daily lives, and preview some of our discussions in the series.
We could have created an entire show focused on this topic! But instead, we’re taking a wide-angled and ecumenical approach to general topics in urban studies. We hope to expose scholars, students, and practitioners of urban studies to diverse research methods and approaches to these themes. Each episode will be accompanied by a suggested reading list based on our discussions, and we welcome suggestions for future guests and topics!
Guests
David Banks, SUNY, University at Albany
Ryan Burns, University of Calgary
Ayonna Datta, University College London
Shannon Mattern, University of Pennsylvania
Erin McElroy, University of Washington
John Stehlin, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Reading List
David Banks (2023), The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America
Ryan Burns & Grace Wark (2020), “Where’s the database in digital ethnography? Exploring database ethnography for open data research,” Qualitative Research 20:5.
Ayonna Datta (2018), “Postcolonial urban futures: Imagining and governing India’s smart urban age,” Environment and Planning D 37:3.
Shannon Mattern (2021), A City is Not a Computer: Other Urban Intelligences
Shannon Mattern (2015), “Mission Control: A History of the Urban Dashboard,” Places.
Erin McElroy (2023), “Dis/Possessory Data Politics: From Tenant Screening to Anti-Eviction Organizing,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 47:1.
John Stehlin (2018), “Urban Platforms, Rent, and the Digital Built Environment,” Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture.
Credits
Many thanks to the Lindy Institute for Urban Innovation at Drexel University, the managing editors at Urban Affairs Review, and our guests for sharing their time and insights with us. The show’s music is “Hundred Mile” by K2, courtesy of Blue Dot Sessions.
Producer and sound engineer: David Weems, Drexel University
Executive Producer and writer: Emily Holloway, Associate Managing Editor, Urban Affairs Review.
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Shannon Mattern
Of course, a dashboard, these multiple screens on a kind of a wall in front of this or on our own devices clearly fits into our contemporary understanding of what it constitutes technology.
But the earliest manifestation, at least at kind of its in terms of its linguistic use, would be a mud flap on the back of the carriage that prevents mud from being splashed up into the vehicle. And there that seems to be kind of denotational, very different from the dashboard as we think of as an interactive screen, but it also has a kind of a very helpful resonance because it reminds us that when we frame what we want to know about the world, when we frame data streams in ways that are supposed to make them easy for consumption or actionable for us as users of digital dashboards, we're in a way, kind of keeping the mud out. The mud is anything that would sully our perception or our judgment. So that mud, that kind of bracketing out or shielding the mud is something that happens in both that earliest manifestation of the dashboard on a horse drawn carriage and even our contemporary uses of dashboards today.
Emily Holloway
Hi, this is Emily Holloway. You’re listening to UAR Remixed, a new podcast by Urban Affairs Review. In this four-part series, we’re taking a wide-angled look at the relationship between cities and technology. In our first installment, we’re going to try to answer the question: what is technology?
The explosion of surveillance tools that emerged during the pandemic and lockdowns, along with the ubiquity of social media and growing concern over AI have all raised important questions about how cities use technology to manage, govern, and optimize urban life. We spoke with six scholars who take different approaches to these questions.
Erin McElroy
Like, technology technically means the study of a technique. You know, and not to become all etymological, but I do think that there are ways that we should think about what does it do in terms of mediation and not to fetishize it as the be all end all.
Ryan Burns
OK, so there are two answers to this. The kind of scholarly academic answer would acknowledge that technologies are sort of extensions of ourselves, both our bodies and of our societies and communities. Bruno Latour said, “Technology is society made durable.”
Ryan Burns
So, for example, a hammer has always been a technology. A prison is a very famous use of technology with a lot of social and political implications. The second, a little bit more relatable answer is that technologies are digital – that typically in everyday circles, in everyday conversation technologies are understood as digital tools that help make our lives a little bit easier.
Ayona Datta
I think I would say technology starts with like even with the with the cart where you invent the circle, the wheel, and that is a form of technology. It's in which something inanimate becomes a tool for us to improve our lives.
I think I see technology now in a much wider spectrum of things that are possible with improving, improving the ways, improving the tools that we use to lead our everyday lives and currently of course, our city is a very important tool.
David Banks
I guess I would define technology as either a practice or an artifact that saves labor or provides joy. I would add also, because it doesn't have to be completely utilitarian, games are a technology.
Shannon Mattern
Technology can be of course the things that in general parlance today you would think of as defining technology: apps, smartphones, computers. Artificial intelligence, for instance, but I would also include things like the wheel, clothing, buttons, zippers. Whisks, spoons, language could even be a technology in some sense. So I realized, just as with so many other words like infrastructures, for instance, which has become a really capacious elastic term, there can be some danger in making technology also so capacious. But I think it's also very helpful to recognize that so many things that go beyond the purely digital, or the things that are coming out of Silicon Valley, it helps us to remind us that in many cases, the things that are so cutting edge today are to some degree reinventing the wheel. They're just providing a more data-intensive, extractive, and commodified and kind of proprietary way of doing things that we actually for hundreds, if not thousands of years, have actually had technology to do. So it kind of humbles, I think, in a productive way a lot of the high-tech stuff that we tend to use as shorthand for tech in general today.
John Stehlin
This is like bringing me back to my qualifying exams. Yeah, I mean, I guess I have to like draw on my old advisor, right? Dick Walker. Right. So, like, I mean there's the aspect of sort of the, the ultimately, it's rooted in transformations in like human social labor, right? So, it's not just, you know, physical materials and how they're organized into machines that are labor-saving or capital-saving even, but also the way that they depend on and then create kind of changes in the social division of labor. How things are actually done, what becomes possible.
Emily Holloway
Lots of variety in their responses. But certain things keep coming up like efficiency, optimization, labor-saving. It’s also clear that technology isn’t limited to what might first come to mind, like computer hardware and software. Technologies organize and order. They mediate the world around us. They can be as small as an IBM nanochip – a mere 2 nanometers across – or as diffuse and massive as New York City’s wastewater treatment system. Technology can be tangible and intangible. It can be an object or a practice, but really it’s both. You just heard from John Stehlin, who thinks about technology as a kind of fulcrum for social relations.
John Stehlin
My name is Jphn Stehlin. I'm an assistant professor at University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and I teach in the area of urban geography, economic geography, environmental studies, sustainability studies and my research sort of hovers around the question of sort of the political economy of mobility in cities.
One of the things about cities that I kind of land on is that kind of the reason that a city exists is it's not very efficient, right? Like it's actually where all of these different infrastructures meet, right? It's where there's a kind of very complex social division of labor, so there's a diversity of kinds of activities that don't all line up. Maybe they have positive spillover effects into other activities is what I'm always trying to teach my students about. But ultimately, like, they're inefficient, right? That's why they're these big knots of humanity, right? Rather than these sort of like, smooth, linear organizations of, like, just getting things from point A to point B, right? It's the roundaboutness, right? And this is like what I'm, you know, I'm thinking about like Alan Scott and Michael Storper, right, the sort of like increasing roundaboutness of production, but sort of human activities at large is what leads to or reflects this sort of very complex social division of labor, right, and to me, that's the sort of the bedrock of technology in a way, right? Because it's not machinery, right? It's also transformations in human organization that allow that machinery to actually be used to, you know, in a Marxist sense, like generate a social surplus, right, that is then privately appropriated.
Emily Holloway
At the top of the episode, you heard from Shannon Mattern, whose creative and thought-provoking writing on cities and technology was published a few years ago in a volume titled “The City is Not a Computer.”
Shannon Mattern
So hi, I'm Shannon Mattern. As of January of this year, I have a new mouthful of a job title. I am the Penn Presidential Compact professor of Media Studies and the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. For 18 1/2 years before coming to Penn, I was a professor of media studies and anthropology at the New School in New York, and most of my work, as you can probably tell, I've been across a bunch of different disciplines, so that's really what my work is.
Emily Holloway
Shannon’s expansive work also looks at the historical role that certain analog technologies have long played in organizing and mediating urban life. You heard earlier from her about the origins of the dashboard, which helps users to filter through and prioritize information. Dashboards can take lots of different forms – take public libraries, for instance.
Shannon Mattern
So the libraries were my, when I was doing my dissertation 20 or so years ago, I really wanted a case study or a concrete area of study that combined my interests in information, media, and architecture and urbanism. And it just so happened that the Seattle Public Library was under development at that time, and this was a city, namely Seattle, obviously, that was just starting to put itself on the map as a global city because of the concentration of the tech industry there, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. Of course some of them have been there for a while, but it was just kind of getting global resonance in a new way at the same time, those very industries were supposed to be spelling out the demise of the public libraries and institution. At least, that's what some of the skeptics predicted would happen, because now that we had all the world's knowledge at our fingertips in our pockets or on our home computers, why would you need a library anymore? That, my argument was, offers a very limited understanding of what knowledge is worth knowing because not everything has been digitized. There's plenty of stuff that's proprietary that's behind a paywall.
So I then extended to my first book, I went around the country and studied 15 different cities that were designing new public libraries just to see how these different approaches to design, how different communities are engaged, how place plays a role in determining how these, this institution physically manifest on a landscape in a city somewhere.
Emily Holloway
Shannon, I’d love it if we could get into your book a little bit – maybe even just explaining the title and how you came to it. Metaphors play such an important role in framing how we interpret and understand the world around us, but unpacking why those metaphors make sense seem to be even more important.
Shannon Mattern
So I wrote an article, maybe 10 years or so ago now, called a “City is Not a Computer,” because I was asked to write for an edited collection, a chapter about how the city is an operating system. And I was, you know, I did all my research, preparing to write that. And I realized like yes, there are operating system-like dimensions of a city. But it is also so much more, and this is such a limiting metaphor, and it is so pervasive in a lot of smart city development at the time, which I think actually had deleterious effects. Or if you think that everything about a city that is worth managing, worth monitoring, worth administering, worth legislating is computational or is computable that brackets out all kinds of stuff that are really vibrant. What makes the city function well. What makes it equitable, what makes it sustainable or resilient, for instance, not everything can be counted essentially. So, what I ended up submitting for that book and then became the impetus for an article and then became the titular article for this most recent edited collection, or the titular chapter that is, is how a city is somewhat computational, but it's also way more than that. So a city is a computer, but it's also not. And just as we were talking about thinking capaciously about technology, I wanted to do kind of a genealogy and environmental scan to see the myriad metaphors that humans in various parts of the world. I wish I were more of a polyglot, read and spoke different languages to see if there are other metaphors that exist in other regions of the world too, but just try to do historical survey to see the different metaphors that were prevalent. It's not even as if it's a genealogy or a teleology that one supplants the other. We can have multiple metaphors going simultaneously, and I think that's not a bad thing because it shows us that a city has multiple things at the same time. So, I was tracing and my tail of the evolution I was tracing it through the various metaphors that were used that were really much very much informed by the zeitgeist, the pervasive ways of thinking, and especially the pervasive technologies of their time. So, when steam engines were all the rage and were transforming the transportation industry, we think of the city as like a steam engine. When for example, germ theory came into being in public health, we start to realize that it's not just bad stuff in the miasma that's causing people to get sick. It's actually germs in our bodies or having a better understanding through physiology, the development of medicine, how the body works. Suddenly we start to think about our cities is having respiratory circulatory excretory systems, etc. So whatever new, it wasn't just the role of science, it just whatever pervasive new developments or models of thinking about the world really, were applicable in multiple domains, not just thinking about cities. You know like, what are these different metaphors and how do they help us to understand in layman's terms? Again, how do they humble our understanding what exactly an AI is if you realize that it's just a sophisticated data-driven way to do the same kind of -- what's the adjective I'm looking for? Kind of brutal work that management consultants do, to look at social organizations purely in terms of efficiency and cut the fat.
Emily Holloway
Shannon gave us such great insights about how our framework for understanding a city – as a machine, or an organism, or a computer – can also set up how solutions are developed to solve its problems. And really, much of this just comes back down to being critical about how we know what we know, and why.
Ryan Burns shared some context on his own research in Calgary, Canada, which looks at the open data platform that the city has created. Ryan, it’s so nice to talk to you. Can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you’ve been working on?
Ryan Burns
Yeah, I'm Ryan Burns. I'm an assistant, sorry associate professor, at University of Calgary in Calgary, Alberta, in Canada. And I study the social and political implications of new technologies, oftentimes thinking about the geographies of how technologies unfold and are developed and implicate people. I've looked at this in a number of areas, digital humanitarianism, smart cities. I'm looking a little bit more in extractive energy right now, but I have a lot of ongoing projects, a lot of balls in the air.
And so I started thinking about the politics of that, about how open data are typically data sets and data repositories collected by and curated by city or municipal governments, and then just simply pushed out to the public. And so that then tells a lot of politics. It sounds very straightforward and very simple, but there's a lot of politics involved there. For example, I cannot produce a data set even as a scientist. I cannot produce a data set and put it on the Calgary Open Data platform. If the Calgary city government releases these data sets in the interest of being accountable and being transparent, then there is very little process by which we guarantee that the data sets that are released are actually the ones that are best used to hold the city, transparent and accountable and so on. We don't get to say, well, what we actually need is police arrests or something like that or other data sets that might not be on the open data platform. For the record, I don't know if that specific data set is on the open data platform or not, but the general idea applies. And so I've approached this methodologically through qualitative methods consisting of interviews, participant observation. I've actually organized a few community outreach events and networked and built collaborations with nonprofit organizations, community associations, and charities across the city of Calgary and part of this is what I've called the database ethnography. The database ethnography is sort of a way of bringing ethnographic methods into the digital sphere and so part of that has just been a lot of community involvement, community engagement. And working with non-city officials to see how data circulate in smart cities. The main idea is that by very similar to traditional ethnographic methods, by dwelling in a place, in this case the database, by dwelling in a place, you get to learn a lot more about the social relations that form how it looks. And how society or social structures look, or how knowledge, people, places come to be encoded in a database as data and data models and so on.
Emily Holloway
Ryan, you bring up such an important point about how technology – in this case, a city-sponsored database – can tell us a lot about the social context that it operates within, just based on the information that it deems significant or meaningful and the ways in which it is created and disseminated.
We also talked to Erin McElroy, who is here now.
Erin McElroy
So I'm Erin McElroy. I'm currently in Austin, TX. I'm an assistant Professor of American Studies at UT Austin. I'm about to begin a position at University of Washington in Seattle as an assistant professor of geography, so I'm in transition between two universities and two different departments right now. I'm also a co-founder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project which I helped start in 2013 in San Francisco. So, it's 10 years old right now, and that's a collective with chapters in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, and Los Angeles. And we produce maps and data visualization work, digital media work, and even tools and software to support housing justice organizing that takes place on the ground in those three locations and then I also have been doing work off and on in Romania over the last 10 years or so as well. I'm having to do it housing justice, organizing, and also critiques of big tech and what I described as Silicon Valley imperialism.
Emily Holloway
Erin, do you think you can unpack what Ryan was getting at a little bit? Like, what do you mean when you talk about knowledge production?
Erin McElroy
Like, technology technically means the study of a technique. You know, and not to become all etymological, but I do think that there are ways that we should think about what does it do in terms of mediation and not to fetishize it as the be all end all. You know, David Harvey has an interesting piece from I think it's like 2003 or something on techno-fetishism and maybe is making the point that Landon Winters and some others have made, that you know is technology inherently good or bad? No, it's more like what is it doing and how is it being mediated? And I think his point is like, we can say that the automobile has, you know, vastly changed the world, but has it or has capital? I mean, of course he’s bringing in his Marxist perspective, which I agree with there. And so I think that again, when we think about feminist knowledge production or situated knowledge production? It's it becomes clear that it's not necessarily the technology the technology is doing things, but there are people who have created the technology. There's data that's, you know, being fed into the technology, and different effects materialized that aren't universal and that are going to look really different in different locations. And even though scaling and universality is kind of the fetish of the so-called tech industry, like a one-size fits all sort of thing, but yeah, I've been really interested to think about what are different technologies doing or mediating, as you said in in particular contexts and conjunctures. Because I'm an anti-capitalist and I am always interested in how different capitalist dreams and desires and kind of techniques of profit-making and accumulation can undergird the way that we assume technology to inherently work but in ways that we don't always see. So, I'm interested in kind of unpacking some of the mechanisms that allow technology to reproduce capitalism.
And I mean, there's there have been different debates too, at Marxist theory, like is the origin of capitalism something that has to do with innovation, and that's something that, you know, I'm not going to rehash all of these kind of very dry, old debates. But I think there is something, you know, that's been debated for a while, like how much does capitalism require innovation? And then there are other schools. Not as I suggest, and ones that I very much agree with, vis á vis Black Marxism and also the framework system in, so we need to understand the way that capitalism has always been racial and racialized, and racializing and has always also required, often invisibilized labor and exploitation, and colonialism. And so I think I'm always interested in the ways that those projects basically use property as a technology in order to accumulate wealth and power by subjugating and exploiting people along what are now pretty familiar race and class and also gender lines unevenly.
Emily Holloway
So in a lot of ways, I guess this even gets back to Ryan’s definition of technology earlier in the episode. Technology is, as he put it in the words of the anthropologist Bruno Latour, “society made durable.” And technology is a way that knowledge is mediated or translated. So specific kinds of social relations – like capitalism or colonialism, as Erin was just explaining – are embedded in how we interpret and understand, or KNOW, the world around us. And we develop tools that harness and apply that knowledge to make life more efficient, or easier, or for whatever kind of objective – but that objective really ends up serving whatever social context produced it. So certain technologies – like, let’s say, social media – play an important part in cultivating a shared understanding of what is valuable or meaningful. David Banks’ new book The City Authentic digs into this dilemma to explore how the cultural weight of authenticity has had significant impacts on the economic transitions of small postindustrial cities.
David Banks
My name is David Banks. I am a lecturer in the Department of Geography and Planning at University at Albany, SUNY, and I am also the Director of Globalization Studies there, and I just finished publishing my first book, The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America, and since then I've been mainly interested in my garden.
Emily Holloway
How do you put a price tag on vibes, David?
David Banks
Yeah, a possible runner up for book title would have been the vibe economy, you know. And yeah, how we put a price tag on vibes is really complicated. It doesn't sound like it should be, but it is, right? Because there's some stuff you're not supposed to put a price tag on. Either because it hurts the authentic feel of a place like these if stuff gets too expensive, then sort of definitionally, you're going to limit who can enjoy it, and authenticity usually stems out of a kind of diversity. So there's some stuff you can't put a price tag on, but then you but you do definitely put a price tag on scarcity, and you put it on things that you also want to show value so you know some things that where price tags show up are on, you know, neighborhoods that are becoming, you know, popular and up and coming. And gentrification stems from that. But I also find a lot of interest in places that or things that don't put a price tag on it.
Emily Holloway
Can you talk about that a little more? Like, is authenticity one of those, you know it when you see it kind of things? Is it universal?
David Banks
The things that signify as authentic are generally things that feel like they aren't contrived for your own interest. Right, so if grandma's apple pie or an old brick building, right, if you if you come to like those things then they appear as authentic to you because they existed, were built, were conceived before probably you were in existence or definitely without your prior knowledge, or with you in in mind. And because it's sort of that thing came into being without you know, thought of you, then it feels like you've discovered it. It's not something that an algorithm or some marketing manager like thought you would like. And it's because of that agnostic view of the subject, the viewing subject that makes it feel authentic. As soon as you start to pick up on the idea that this is something that was presented to you so that you would like it, that's when authenticity starts falling apart. And when it does start falling apart, you start picking up what I call predictably unique, which means that, you know, it's a thing that is just like slightly different for you, so that it triggers the “Ohh this is a new thing” kind of feeling in you but yeah. Then when you think about it, it's kind of like, you know, like a riff on this other thing that I saw somewhere else. So, you know, in lots of cities it'll be like maybe a local cuisine or like, a hyper local cuisine. Like around here, around New England and upstate New York, they're like tiny hot dogs and it went so far as like in the last mayoral race, like the candidates were asked, like, what their favorite hot dog stand was. You know, that's sort of like narcissism of small differences can both feel authentic because it's like, oh, you know, if you're from around here, you have a favorite hot dog place, that's sort of like a little joke that you can you can have, but it it's also I think that only makes sense because it's also kind of serious and that you can take that a little seriously or at least have some sort of loyalty to something as silly and trivial as little hot dogs and that can register as authentic.
Emily Holloway
We’re going to hear more about how social media plays a role in cultivating and marketing authenticity from David later in the series. But next time, we’ll be talking about smart cities.
Shannon Mattern
I hope that's a fair phrase of what they're talking about, but honestly, I’m really tired of that term. I am hoping that I will not have to write anything about that term ever again.
Ayona Datta
Do you know what's a smart city? Because we still don't know what a smart city? And our answer was, you know what? Even we don't know, because there's just so many definitions of a smart city. But when we did our workshops with the citizens, we were given a really fascinating description of smart and one of the representatives from the Slum Improvement Committee. They said to us, I don't think smart is about technology. I think smart is about making do the best with what you have and in a way that's also about resource efficiency.
Emily Holloway
You’ve been listening to UAR Remixed, a podcast by Urban Affairs Review. Special thanks to the Lindy Institute at Drexel University and the Editors at UAR. Music by Blue Dot Sessions. This show was produced and mixed by David Weems and written, hosted, and produced by me, Emily Holloway. Don’t forget to subscribe, share, and rate the show wherever you listen to podcasts. Please visit our website, urbanaffairsreview.com, for more information about the journal and the show, and sign up for our newsletter to get updates. See you next time.