Article ID: CBB885135788

Breakdown in the Smart City: Exploring Workarounds with Urban-sensing Practices and Technologies (2019)

unapi

Houston, Lara (Author)
Gabrys, Jennifer (Author)
Pritchard, Helen (Author)


Science, Technology and Human Values
Volume: 44
Issue: 5
Pages: 843-870


Publication Date: 2019
Edition Details: Special Issue: Sensors and Sensing Practices
Language: English

Smart cities are now an established area of technological development and theoretical inquiry. Research on smart cities spans from investigations into its technological infrastructures and design scenarios, to critiques of its proposals for citizenship and sustainability. This article builds on this growing field, while at the same time accounting for expanded urban-sensing practices that take hold through citizen-sensing technologies. Detailing practice-based and participatory research that developed urban-sensing technologies for use in Southeast London, this article considers how the smart city as a large-scale and monolithic version of urban systems breaks down in practice to reveal much different concretizations of sensors, cities, and people. By working through the specific instances where sensor technologies required inventive workarounds to be setup and continue to operate, as well as moments of breakdown and maintenance where sensors required fixes or adjustments, this article argues that urban sensing can produce much different encounters with urban technologies through lived experiences. Rather than propose a “grassroots” approach to the smart city, however, this article instead suggests that the smart city as a figure for urban development be contested and even surpassed by attending to workarounds that account more fully for digital urban practices and technologies as they are formed and situated within urban projects and community initiatives.

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Associated with

Article Jennifer Gabrys (2019) Sensors and Sensing Practices: Reworking Experience across Entities, Environments, and Technologies. Science, Technology and Human Values (pp. 723-736). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB885135788/

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Authors & Contributors
James Stewart
Hassan Habibi Gharakheili
Victoria Lush
Louise Amoore
Włodzimierz Gogołek
Hayashi, Yasunori
Concepts
Technoscience; science and technology studies
Computers and computing
Technology and society
Sensors
Cities and towns
Algorithms
Time Periods
21st century
Places
Detroit (Michigan)
London (England)
United States
Europe
Denmark
Australia
Institutions
Cisco Systems, Inc.
National Science Foundation (U.S.)
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