Grub City – In Praise of Messy Cities, by Usman Haque
There are certain qualities often presented as the benefits of a ‘smart’ city. These include things like efficiency, convenience and security. In order to deliver these qualities, we are told, city managers and businesses (also occasionally, in limited form, citizens) need to have access to as much data as possible. In this vision of smartness, with managers in control of the network and possessing a god-like view of everything that’s going on in the city/neighbourhood/building, and a god-like capacity to make decisions on your behalf, you’ll get to work on time, buy things seamlessly and arrive home without being accosted by anyone troublesome – all this, while using less energy of course.
The struggle for getting this data to traffic in the public realm, implicit in internet-of-things campaigns simply to ‘make data public’, can, however, lead us away from questioning what data itself is, and why its important. The belief that data necessarily leads to information, which inevitably leads to knowledge, and invariably on to wisdom has its roots in the Enlightenment’s claims for rationality. The implication is that, if we know the universe fully, we can explain it, understand it and control it. Progress, through increased clarity of Truth, underpins these claims since we always have attempted explanations, understandings and controlling of the universe, we simply want to do them better.
Once you have oversight of every possible measurements and a clear perspective on emerging patterns (whether you’re operating at the scale of a building, a neighbourhood, or the city itself), you are free from the constraints of ethics in making your decisions. “It’s not me, it’s the data, which is impartial” you can claim. And therein lies the seduction: there's little need for agency, accountability, or creativity and, in the end, a finite state machine will make the same decisions. Misappropriating the words of Katie Roiphe, author of ‘In Praise of Messy Lives’, discussing raising children, my concern is whether these well-meaning and over-protecting processes actually harm or denature us, rather than benefitting us.
One of the problems is that this approach assumes that the universe and cities built within it contain a finite set of knowable parameters and patterns, and holds that we simply need the appropriate equipment to capture or reveal them all – technology helps us do these things ‘better’. Yet, these justifications of ensuing efficiency, convenience and security, littered throughout smart city marketing materials, worryingly echo justifications of the 60s and 70s for the building of highrises and highways, which in many cases we now regret because of their unexpectedly immense social and environmental costs.
I would argue that, rather than help us do things ‘better’, technology helps us explain, understand and control ‘differently’. It offers us new ways to invent our universe (and the cities built within it), and it’s the ensuing heterogeneity of explanations, understandings and attempts to control (as well as the heterogeneity of goals implied) that is essential for any sustainable model of city-building.
The Enlightenment gives us clues on how to achieve this. Apart from renewing interest in the concept of a ‘public’ and a ‘public realm’, it also highlighted the importance of Grub Street, a somewhat scrappy area of London which inspired impoverished hacks, poets, pamphleteers and libellists to publish, often illegally, texts that were irreverent towards authority. In many senses Grub Street hacks, in mocking their leaders, helped foster the revolutionary spirit that exposed flaws in d'Alembert’s contrasting of the "truly enlightened public" to "the blind and noisy multitude".
So, in “Grub City”, I imagine anybody and everybody being part of the measurement process, not simply acting as subjects of the measurements or passive receivers of the wisdom contained therein. In Grub City, it’s more important to do a lot of measuring than it is to have a lot of data – it’s through the processes of measurement itself that we actually construct understandings of our environment; that we build up intuitions about how we may affect it; and through which we are encouraged to question the standards of evidence proffered by others. In Grub City, we mock the rationalising, homogenising attempts of our managers.
What we decide to measure, how we decide to measure, and why we decide to measure – these questions are vital for smart citizens in Grub City, and what matters is that these processes take place in the public realm. Matthew Fuller and I have argued elsewhere that ‘rubbish is the root of virtuosity’ and that ‘the more granularity an instrument offers the more capable it is of proficient as distinct from perfunctory performance’. Similarly, Grub City would be inhabited by people crafting and performing data ‘badly’, for the same reasons that the beauty of a cello as an instrument resides within its capacity also to create excruciating sounds – because that enables creative diversity and invention, unexpected and unplanned by its fabricators.
We cannot build sustainable urban environments, and handle their ‘super wicked problems’, through reductivist approaches to data. Grub City is where I expect citizens to rewrite the explanations, understandings and attempts to control of their city managers. I see this as inevitable, and the ultimate human act: to invent new parameters in the public realm. We will see contradictions, for even collaboration does not need consensus and, no matter what attempts are made to impose order and predictability on cities of the near future, a messiness will inevitably arise. Long live Grub City!
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